DeBunking Archives | Page 2 of 17

Watch as the Legacy Publishing Industry Invents a New Myth (Why Fiction Sales Are Down)

18 November, 20187 January, 2019DeBunkingLeave a comment

Remember a few weeks back when I mocked Publishers Weekly for using AAP revenue stats to ask the question why fiction sales were down? (It was...

A Million Indie Titles Were Published Last Year, and Other Nonsense

12 October, 201812 October, 2018DeBunking6 Comments

There are two frequently repeated misconceptions about the ebook market that continue to be repeated no matter how often they are debunked. The first is that...

How to Misuse Stats and Cite Bogus Projections, and Make the Publishing Industry Love You

24 August, 201827 August, 2018DeBunking12 Comments

Another one of those “ebooks didn’t kill print” is being passed around again, and this one is far worse than the dreck we have been seeing...

Millennial Reading Habits Have Changed the Definition of a Classic , and Other Lazy Writing

13 August, 201813 August, 2018Book Culture, DeBunking13 Comments

Millennial-bashing is popular among the media, and this is a problem not just because it’s lazy writing but also because sometimes it distracts from what is...

Republican Congressional Candidate Shamed for Allegedly Writing Bigfoot Erotica

30 July, 201830 July, 2018DeBunking6 Comments

The 2018 election cycle has taken a turn for the obnoxious. There’s a story going around that the candidate for a Congressional district in central Virginia...

Forbes Deleted That Ridiculous Anti-Library Piece

24 July, 201824 July, 2018DeBunking, Libraries3 Comments

On Saturday Forbes published a poorly-researched, badly-argued piece that failed to convince anyone that Amazon Books stores should replace public libraries. According to Quartz, the piece...

Updated: Amazon Books Should Replace Local Libraries, and Other Publisher-Serving “Solutions”

22 July, 201825 June, 2020DeBunking, Libraries14 Comments

Do you know how companies sometimes like to buy editorials that support their position (I see this a lot in the WSJ), or even go so...

Amazon Claims to Accurately Measure Pages Read in Kindle Unlimited, Neglects to Mention There’s no Standard Page Size

19 June, 201819 June, 2018DeBunking, Kindle7 Comments

Earlier this week Amazon released a statement tangential to the ongoing problem of cheating in Kindle Unlimited, but as with many of Amazon’s statements the bigger story...

Authors, Don’t Be Taken in by the Blockchain/Bitcoin Hype

4 June, 201825 June, 2018DeBunking, Self-Pub7 Comments

If you have been following tech news then you’ve probably heard the term blockchain mentioned more than once. This word is rarely explained in non-technical terms,...

Cockygate: Faleena Hopkins Has Registered a Trademark on Cocky, and is Using it to Threaten Other Romance Authors

5 May, 20186 May, 2018DeBunking, Lawsuit, Self-Pub84 Comments

Trademark bullying is a pox on industries ranging from breweries to whatever over-priced junk Monster Cable is making this week. A trademark bully’s ostensible goal is...

Amazon to Spend a Billion Dollars to License “The Three-Body Problem”?

28 March, 201826 July, 2018Amazon, DeBunking, Rumors9 Comments

The Three-Body Problem is one of those books that many people have heard of but few have read. Originally published in Chinese, the English translation of...

Major UK Booksellers Throw Up Their Hands When Accused of Selling Far-Right Titles

21 March, 201821 March, 2018Amazon, DeBunking5 Comments

Remember last year when everyone wrung their hands over Amazon selling Holocaust denial books and completely ignored the fact that you could find those same books...

If eReaders Are Dead Then So Are Film Cameras. And Horse Riding. And Fountain Pens. And Digital Cameras. And Lots of Other Stuff

27 February, 201827 February, 2018DeBunking, e-Reading Hardware11 Comments

Last week Tom’s Hardware published a piece which used flawed assumptions to ask whether the ereader was dead: Yes, reading now is a little bit different...

Updated: eBooks are a Stupid Product, and Other Blinkered Ramblings

19 February, 201820 February, 2018DeBunking, Publishing31 Comments

Lagardère Publishing CEO Arnaud Nourry gave an interview to Scroll.in this weekend that showed both that he was remarkably ignorant about his products as well as how...

Edmonton Airport Wastes Money on a Short Story Printer

16 January, 201816 January, 2018DeBunking, e-Reading Hardware4 Comments

So the latest hot and trendy bookish gimmick is a receipt printer that has been gussied up as a “vending machine” that prints short stories. This...