Fanatical Pupil

I just made it up:

A novel is just a song without a chorus.

Evidently a very old and very large publisher of mass market paperback books is moving entirely to eBooks. I’ve never heard of Dorchester Publishing, but they have an extensive list of authors.

ReadWriteWeb asks:

The e-book format has inherent multimedia possibilities: trailers, background and reference materials, interviews, actors reciting the poems the book contains. But will these ultimately be considered enrichment of the text or just distractions from it? Perhaps these sorts of experiments will go the way of Flash splash pages and manically hyperlinked documents. In the end, the portability may be the fulcrum, the only fulcrum. Are e-books simply the paperbacks of the future, the cheapest way to publish the cheapest books for the largest number of readers?

I tend to think the last question is the most important as well as most easily answered. Sure, there will be books with ancillary bonus features, but I think people will view that kind of content as they do the bonus material that accompanies some DVDs. There will be some opportunity for authors like Mark Danielewski to take advantage of these feature in avant guard ways. But mostly, eBooks will be cheap, light, and easy to buy, just like mass market paperbacks are now.

From Charlie Stross’ blog: Why books are the length they are. An interesting read on why the coming ebook revolution will set authors free – provided that it happens soon enough that people actually still read things besides blogs and status updates.

Hope for the Hopeless. Or Clueless.

Jim Macdonald posted a letter from Publish America over on the Making Light blog. According to this letter, authors “published” by Publish America can now have up to 5 copies of their book sent to Random House (for the mere cost of 10 copies of the author’s book).

For those who might actually think this sounds like a good idea, here’s another idea you can do at much lower cost: Finish your novel, order a copy from a POD (Print On Demand) company, and mail it to Random House yourself. A brief check tells me that it would cost $7 to print a 200 page book on Lulu. Add another $3 to mail it yourself, and another $3 to mail it to Random House for a total of $13.

The cheapest sci-fi book I see on Publish America is $12.95. If you order 10 books (the minimum order to get the extra copies sent to Random House) at 50% off (they provide a coupon code) + $1.99 shipping per book, that’s $64.75 + $19.90 = $84.65.

Do-it-yourselfers save about $70 and probably have the same chance to get their book published by Random House as the PA authors.

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The Good: Amazing prose that seamlessly shifts between characters creating a distinct flavor for each whether in first-person or third. The setup of with the self-declared unreliable narrator adds a more experimental feel to it, while also adding some additional intrigue. The excellent prose is also used to make info dumps interesting, and while these dumps are helpful, they’re delayed and spaced out in a very professional, clearly thought-out manner. The writing alone in this book makes me want to read Banks’ “space-operatic” works (Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games to start with).

The Bad: Banks is guilty of proselytizing for a few causes at points during the book, the most obvious of which is the use of torture as an interrogation technique. Honestly, I could have done without pretty much the whole Philosopher character in the book (the who does the torturing). I realize he is important in a few places, but for the number of pages dedicated to him and his background, I feel like there should have been more tie-in with the book rather than just serving as a platform to say that torture is bad. But then, I’m one of those people who doesn’t really like to examine society through the lens of a future world and would rather read and write adventure (or perhaps “pulp”) style fiction.

A Final Note (on my review in general): I am not going to review books that I feel are just mediocre or otherwise not worth reading. You can feel confident that if you see a book review here, it will be because I feel the book is worth your time to read (and this comes from a self-proclaimed slow – although actually fairly average – reader). I may consider reviewing a book that I had to put down in order to warn people away from wasting their time. But there’s enough negative media in the world already, that my goals is to focus on the good books and leave others to tell you what not to read.