Tag Archives: books

Dog fight

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We all want to side with the underdog. When there’s a clash of overdog vs uberdog I suppose the overdog’s position is still relatively under, so that’s why I say “excelsior!” to Macmillan and “ha ha” to Amazon.

In the space of 48 hours Macmillan and Amazon went from minor border skirmishes to all-out war, declared by Amazon and lost by same a short while later. Ultimately it all came down to Amazon’s vastly inflated idea of its rightful place in the affairs of man, finally clashing with a publisher big enough to say “no”. Amazon tried to impose terms on Macmillan, Macmillan weren’t having it and so Amazon withdrew its listings for every single Macmillan title.

Macmillan controls a lot of imprints. Suddenly, with no warning or reason given, a very large part of the global book supply was unavailable through the world’s largest book supplier.

To save you crawling all over the interwebs for further details, Charles Stross has written a useful guide to the battlefield: Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight.

If you’re more a bottom line sort of person, John Scalzi has written an entertaining analysis of Amazon’s kamikaze strategy: All the Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed This Weekend.

As you may have gathered by now, Amazon lost.

I’m not published by Macmillan or any of its imprints: other than general principle, I have no declarable interest in this. But I am still smarting, nearly 10 years later, from the punitive discounts Amazon imposed on Big Engine in return for the privilege of receiving a basic competent service from them: one that listed my titles accurately, didn’t unilaterally declare them out of print and so on. Now I feel those wounds healing. A little.

A mostly mainstream year

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The figures are in. Actually they’ve been in since January 1 but I’ve only just got round to processing them. Of the books read in 2009, with 2008’s figures in brackets:

  • Total: 54 (53)
  • Science fiction /fantasy: 19 (30)
  • Translated from Swedish: 1 (4)
  • (Auto)biography/fact: 9 (5)
  • Crime: 3 (3)
  • Gave up: 1 (2)

A mere 19 science fiction or fantasy! That’s even counting ones like Boom! by Mark Haddon which is technically of that genre but not entirely serious – but not, though, counting No Highway by Nevil Shute, which for the most part is an enjoyable and prescient progenitor of the techno-thriller genre punctured at the end by a séance providing the denouement. I got the feeling Shute ran out of ideas: “The vital clue is lying in the middle of the Canadian wilderness and our hero needs to find it – how I can get it to him?”

But anyway. 19 out of 53. 36%! That must be the lowest quite literally for decades. A marked increase in factual reading, though. Other people’s lives can be interesting. I also note that I managed an entire year without reading a single thing by Terry Pratchett, which has been unheard of since I first discovered the man. That would have changed if anyone had got the hint and given me Unseen Academicals for Christmas. (Gosh, I have a birthday in February, what could people possibly give me? [Bonusbarn muses: “You probably don’t want anything pirated, do you?”]).

And because I know you’re dying to ask, the 54 are:

  • The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Resurrection Men, Ian Rankin
  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Strange Itineraries, Tim Powers
  • Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
  • Blind Faith, Colin Harvey
  • The Business, Iain Banks
  • Nice Work, David Lodge
  • Varjak Paw, S.F. Said
  • The Bookseller of Kabul, Åsne Seierstad
  • Stealing Water – A Secret Life in an African City, Tim Ecott
  • The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, on Tour: Aged Far Too Much to Be Put on the Front Cover of a Book, Adrian Plass
  • Changeling, Mike Oldfield
  • The Oz Suite, Gerard Houarner
  • The Stress of her Regard, Tim Powers
  • The Second Rumpole Omnibus, John Mortimer
  • The Odessa File, Frederick Forsyth
  • The Day of the Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
  • The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross
  • Principles of Angels, Jaine Fenn
  • The Prefect, Alastair Reynolds
  • Where Eagles Dare, Alistair Maclean
  • Moab is my Washpot, Stephen Fry
  • Life of Pi, Yann Martel
  • Dead and Alive, Hammond Innes
  • The Inferior, Peadar Ó Guilín
  • The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett
  • Future Bristol, Colin Harvey
  • Icehenge, Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Endymion Spring, Matthew Skelton
  • Microserfs, Douglas Coupland
  • The Ghost, Robert Harris
  • Boom!, Mark Haddon
  • The Owl Service, Alan Garner
  • Jason, J. M. Marks
  • Elidor, Alan Garner
  • Sirius, Olaf Stapledon
  • Odd John, Olaf Stapledon
  • The Last Templar, Michael Jecks
  • Miracles of Life, J.G. Ballard
  • No Highway, Nevil Shute
  • deadkidsongs, Toby Litt
  • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • A Parliamentary Affair, Edwina Currie
  • Fighter Boys, Patrick Bishop
  • The Storm Prophet, Hector Macdonald
  • Pompeii, Robert Harris
  • John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace, Jonathan Aitken
  • Christianity Explored, Rico Tice & Barry Cooper
  • The Sorcerer’s Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England, Alec Ryrie
  • The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne
  • A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon
  • William Wilberforce, William Hague
  • Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson

And life was too short to read Master of Hawks by Linda E. Bushyager.

Disposing of books is a serious matter

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It isn’t just one of your everyday games.

I give away a lot more books than I used to. Marriage and the essential storage limitations of a two-bed flat made me bite the bullet, and anyway, if I really can’t see myself reading it again – or at least not for another 20 years or so, in which case I might as well just buy a new one – then it’s my duty to release the poor thing back into the wild. So, every couple of weeks sees two or three books sedated, put into a bag and carried up the road to a handy charity shop.

Generally we give our books to Helen & Douglas house, which is both a good cause and local. Best of all, it has a darned good secondhand books section – an alcove the size of a small room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on either side. As the book section of far too many charity shops is essentially a small shelf between the Menswear and Broken Toys sections, I judge our books have the best chance here of finding a new home.

But! Yesterday’s giveaway selection posed a conundrum. Included in it were a book on edible plants in Alaska, and Master of Hawks by Linda E. Bushyager. The former is left over from research for some hack writing. The latter I read because the author is our vicar’s aunt and the black sheep of the family. “Dark,” he says – well, darkly. I wanted to research whether she really is channelling the dark forces in an effort to oust Christ and place the Evil One on the throne of the universe, or whether she is in fact just a really quite differently good writer. As I couldn’t get past about the third chapter, I incline towards the latter. (If it’s the former then the fact of the latter makes it a really bad own goal for the forces of darkness.)

One of those titles has a distinctly limited interest and is unlikely to find an avid reader in Abingdon through Helen & Douglas. The other I had to buy from a specialist online reseller who handles these rare and OOP titles. So, H&D wouldn’t really do it justice either.

Oxfam on the other hand, I gather, have a burgeoning secondhand book business nationwide and so I thought might also have a bibliographic mechanism capable of giving these books their due. So, those two went to Oxfam.

That did however give me further pause for thought, because I learnt of Oxfam’s burgeoning secondhand book business nationwide from this article in the New York Times about the tribulations of a secondhand bookshop in Salisbury. I’ve no idea why the affairs of a bookshop in a provincial English city should attract the attention of the New York Times, but it happened. The contention of the article is that Oxfam is actively putting secondhand bookshops out of business, quite possibly as a deliberate strategy. Which would be a real shame, not to mention a cultural crime. So, was I indeed aiding and abetting the forces of darkness?

It’s a minefield, I tell you.

I went with Oxfam (a) because we don’t have a secondhand bookshop in Abingdon anyway, and (b) as an Oxfamite fairly points out in the article, “if someone’s business model is so marginal that an Oxfam shop opening nearby decimates it, then we are not the problem.”

I am not remotely obsessive about this.