Monday Morning Coffee – 11 November 2019
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
- Did you know there’s an open eReader project?
- The LA Times interviewed Amazon’s newest big name author, Dean Koontz.
- David Wogahn has a few words to say about Bowker’s latest ISBN report.
- Data Guy will be speaking at The Bookseller’s conference in a few weeks. BTW, last year I unmasked Data Guy as Bookstat CEO Paul Abbassi.
- Florida Man is pressuring Hachette to reveal the identity of a whistle-blowing author.
- A crime author wonders why he even had to say that he didn’t condone his character’s actions.
- The EFF believes publishers should be making ebook licensing terms better, not worse.
- SCOTUSblog digs into the opening arguments of a piracy lawsuit filed against the state of North Carolina. The WSJ has more details.
- LitHub explains why you should pre-order books from indie bookstores.
- An editor with McSweeney’s shares some of the responses he’s gotten to rejection letters.
- Scrivener’s Error debunked Sargent’s latest claims about library ebook sales.
Comments
Disgusting Dude November 11, 2019 um 6:31 am
The decline in growth of self-publishing *titles* makes sense: with reversion now off the table at the big publishers, the number of tradpub backlist going self-pub is waiting for the copyright pullbacks to clear. That leaves, for the moment, growth to be driven by all-new content bothby tradpub refugees and newcomers forgoing tradpub.
Note that the decline is in rate of growth, not total number of releases extant.
That number is still snowballing.
Will Entrekin November 11, 2019 um 9:44 am
"LitHub explains why you should pre-order books from indie bookstores."
I’d much rather support indie authors through Amazon than the colluding corporate publishers through privately owned bookstores.
Peter Winkler November 12, 2019 um 8:27 pm
Your last sentence implies that you invariably avoid purchasing traditionally published books from any bookseller simply to deprive the traditional publisher of a minuscule profit at the expense of the author. The traditional publisher marches on but the author, who deserves the small royalty the sale generates, is the victim of your anti-corporate reflex.
Alexander Inglis November 18, 2019 um 12:19 pm
The article on an Open E-reader project is curious. Why is this needed? Current iterations of Kobos and Kindles serve their respective customers well. We have watched, in slow motion horror, a dozen off-brand e-reader companies flail and died over the past decade — there is no credible market for 3rd party devices (not counting all purpose tablets).
The author cites "Orwellian" tactics of the major players tracking everything you read. In Amazon’s case, that’s a product benefit; hardly Orwellian. I’m not clear on how much Kobo leverages that info.
Then the kicker: the device only supports DRM-free files.
You know what would be helpful? A device which loads commercial titles from one of the majors and multi-format DRM-free user files DIRECTLY from a user cloud service like Dropbox. Oh wait: Kobo sells one like that. It’s called Forma model.