Thanks for the link to my post on the Belle Isle Ice Tree and enjoy your visit on Saturday. I posted some new pictures of the tree from this week on Detroit Moxie: http://www.detroitmoxie.com/home/2010/2/5/the-belle-isle-ice-tree-is-blue.html

He’s looking quite pretty in blue.

When I heard that Amazon was trying to keep a $10 floor on ebooks the first thought that popped into my head was “how much of that goes to the author?” If hard cover royalties run 12-14% and paperback royalties run 6-8%, then ebook sales probably run 4-6%. Which means that for ebook sale the author is getting less than a dollar in royalties. When I suggested that ebooks should be priced at $2, with a dollar going straight to the author, I was actually proposing a RAISE for the author. I do want to see authors make a decent living from their work. Some of my best friends are authors. I wasn’t trying to make athors live in poverty, I was trying to say that most of them already do.

I find myself wondering if there are analogies in those bloggers who find ways of turning their blogs into books, or even movies – there is clearly a market for those things, despite the content being available for free on the internet (heck, hit rates are what the author can use to demonstrate that there’s a market for the book!). So I don’t know if it’s books vs. internet copies, free content vs. paid content, so much as some people can make a living writing free stuff, and some (most) people can’t. Given that a generation or two before, that equation was some people can make a living with published books, and most people don’t manage that, I’m not sure that anything’s really changed, except audiences’ greater access to the mediocre and uninspired stuff that in previous decades would have manifested in hand-bound, hand-typed junk taking up space in random people’s attics.

And aside from that, we learned on her show that the woman who runs the New Orleans restaurant Dooky Chase was helped (in part) to re-open her famous establishment after hurricane Katrina by ‘folks from Fort Wayne, Indiana’.

Who dat, indeed!

edit: well – a quiet realization (not to say epiphany) for me, regarding aging, is that a sort of prideful intransigence begins to take hold. If the whole damned world insists on transforming printed pages into electronic Kindling, STILL I’ll never, ever own or use one.

I insist that my books have pages and dust and maybe the odd note or author’s inscription or long-lost coupon or event program (used as a bookmark) within them. And I want foot notes and end notes and marginalia; and even if I hate the font or the pagination, it must be THE font or pagination that the publisher committed to.

And no damned book of mine will ever depend on a battery

For poets that’s pretty much the situation as it stands. But that’s because most people don’t read poems anymore. I’m not sure but that won’t become the norm for serious writers in the future. There are a shocking number of people, my sister, alas, is one, who appears to have never read a book she wasn’t required to. The issue isn’t, really, whether people are stealing book off the internet for free, but that people aren’t reading like they used to. We may be the last literate generation.

Nancy wrote: “If you can’t find any­thing decent to read in a few more years, don’t blame the writ­ers. They’ll be too busy wait­ing tables.”

A couple years back I had an interesting conversation with a woman about romance fiction. Apparently there is a large on-line market in amateur romance fiction. Some authors I was told actually had large following so much so that tradition paper book publishers had made it a rule that they would not at any manuscripts from someone who had published on-line. Since I don’t read romance fiction or explore on-line fiction I don’t know how much of this is true. But it has the scent of credibility because I’d seen stuff like this in SF fandom 15-20 years ago. There are a lot of people who want to be writers. So they start by writing fan fiction. Some many, in time, actually go on to be a book published author. As long as they are people who enjoy reading stories there will be people writing stories.

But I’ve riding my hobby horse long enough. Hey, everybody, Boingboing,com is all upset because Miley Cyrus’s younger sister is appearing in some scandalous children’s lingerie photos. Child Porn! Child Porn! OMGTHECHILDREN!