The mythic side of London

The London Underground may lead to more places than those found on the brightly colored map on display in every Tube station.  The evocative names of each stop may mean more than just a place for weary travelers to get on and off a mere train.  What if the Underground was the entrance to an entire world underneath the great city, a world existing beside the London currently polished and glittering for the Royal Wedding?

The City of London is too intriguing a character, and has too long an colorful a history, not to  have been used more than once in this marvelous fashion.  Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere is a magical view of London Below, a world that co-exists invisibly below and around London Above, our London.  The differences between our London and London Below can be stark, brutal and even horrific.   There is a terrible beauty in the world Below, but also terrible danger.  There be monsters, monsters that take your sanity, your soul, or just steal your heart.

One man, Richard Mayhew, is the reader’s entree into London Below.  It is significant that he finds the invisible world through an act of charity–he rescues an injured young woman that he believes is a street person.  By saving her, he disappears from his life as a corporate drone, into desperate danger, running for his life. Knightsbridge Station becomes a Knight’s Bridge guarded by an actual Knight that he must battle, and there is a deadly Beast under London that must be defeated.  In the end, he saves the girl, but at what cost?  He can have his old life back, but he may have discovered too much about himself to ever want it back.

The Nightside provides a different view of a London, and is also reached by Tube stops not generally known.  Simon R. Green’s series, beginning with Something from the Nightside.  The Nightside is a place where it is always 3 am, where dreams come true and nightmares come alive.  Every sin and every form of degradation is for sale.  Gods and monsters walk side by side, and incursions from other times and other dimensions are common.  The Nightside is “Not a Nice Place”, and Green’s protagonist, John Taylor, would never claim to be a “Nice Person”.  But Taylor does what is necessary to keep the Nightside from going completely to hell.  Because the Nightside is meant to be a place where neither Heaven nor Hell has dominion.  Although sometimes it’s a pretty near thing.

Neverwhere has a lyrical feel to it, in spite of the  horrors that Richard Mayhew goes through.  There is beauty there.  At the end, we understand why he makes the choice he does.  It’s the choice we want him to  make, even though  he could be content otherwise.

The Nightside is not beautiful.  It is intentionally dark and gritty.  John Taylor is one of the snarkiest anti-heroes you’ll ever read.  He’s funny, but it is gallows humor of the extreme variety.  John Taylor does what is needed, whether anyone agrees with him or not.  They just better get out of his way if they know what’s good for them.

Snowball careening downhill–look out below!

In the April 27 Industry News from Publisher’s Weekly, Amazon reported that sales in their ebook division jumped 63% in the first quarter of 2011.  That was pretty much their good news.   Their bad news, underlaying a certain amount of spin, was that even though revenues were up across the board, their actual income was down.  What’s up with that?  Amazon is investing in even more technology and more infrastructure to meet ever-increasing demands.

According to the report, Kindle owners are larger-volume ebook buyers than non-Kindle owners.  That can’t be a surprise, considering that Kindle owners are locked into purchasing ebooks from Amazon.  This is a marketing strategy that is older than dirt, after all.  The earlier version went something like this: “the razor is cheap, it’s the blades that are expensive.”  The new, cheaper advertising-supported Kindle is being released early in order to take even greater advantage of this.

Amazon’s recent announcement that they will provide Kindle format ebooks via Overdrive is also part of this strategy.  Up until this week, Kindle owners couldn’t borrow ebooks from their libraries.  Now, they know they will soon be able to, for an admittedly undefined value of soon.  This eliminates a clear advantage that Barnes and Noble’s Nook had.  However, to recap the latest round of the ereader wars, B&N just announced a major upgrade to the color Nook that pushes it way above just an ereader.  The review of the new color Nook in this morning’s USA Today shows that the new Color Nook is more of a baby Android powered iPad than just an ereader.

But back to the point about Kindles, what this means is, more reasons for people to buy Kindles or fewer reasons for people not to buy Kindles, so, more Kindles out there.  And Kindle owners buy more ebooks from Amazon than non-Kindle owners, however else they might get their ebooks.  The announcement about the Amazon/Overdrive deal got an amazing amount of press for something relating to libraries, but it was all related to the fact that the name “Amazon” was in it.  Amazon got a lot of mindshare out of something that will probably cost them next to nothing.

It’s also clear from the sheer numbers that ebook buyers actually buy more books than print book buyers.  No surprise there.  If you are sitting in an airport, shopping for ebooks before your flight, guessing what you’ll like, there is a certain amount of glee at the sheer ease of purchasing without having to think of carrying the things.  There are other factors.  Ebooks are still generally cheaper than hardcovers, Michael Connelly notwithstanding.  There is also the instant gratification factor that simply can’t be underestimated.

What does this mean for libraries?  Just Amazon saying that Kindle users would be able to borrow ebooks from libraries generated huge press, even without specifics.  Demand for ebooks, which is already huge, is going to skyrocket.  The amount of general interest press that covered the Amazon announcement showed that ebooks and ereaders have reached well beyond techies and young people and whatever early adopter market people might have thought and spread well into general users everywhere.  For anyone who doubts this, next time you travel, while you are at the airport waiting for your flight, just look around at the number of people reading on ereaders or iPads vs. “dead tree” books.  The percentage will be 1/3 or more.

Many public libraries have the collection philosophy “give ’em what they want”.  It is due to that philosophy that we have invested heavily in best selling fiction, and moved as deeply as we have into AV material.  But ebooks seem like a whole new ball game in some ways.  Especially since we are trying to divide a budget pie that is shrinking into an increasing number of pieces, and ebooks are just another piece.  The same title is now demanded in print, large print, audiobook, ebook, and eaudio, and multiple copies of each.  Meanwhile the demands for DVDs, music and children’s material certainly have not gone away.  Because ebooks are new, it can seem simplest not to invest, or not to invest a lot, to say that there isn’t enough demand in the community, or that the library can’t afford it. Or that people still want print books, not ebooks.  But if you build a good ebook collection, they will come.  It takes time and money.  Unfortunately, those are the two commodities no library seems to have enough of these days.

However, the demand for ebooks is like the proverbial snowball rolling down the hill and picking up speed, as well as rocks and twigs, as it rolls down.  If your library has that philosophy of “give ’em what they want”, then ebooks are looking more and more like what a significant segment of the public wants. The trick will be smoothing the rocks and twigs out of that snowball as we give it to them.

House hunting is not for sissies

Galen and I have moved 4 times in last 10 years.  This move will be our fifth.  And for anyone at the Evergreen Users Conference who has already heard a part of this saga, apologies in advance for the deja vu.  I’ll try to be funnier.

We have moved from Chicago to Anchorage to Tallahasse to Chicago to Gainesville and now, to Atlanta.  We keep saying this is an adventure.  Well, one classic definition of adventure usually involves something horrible and nasty happening to someone else, either long ago, far away, or both.  But it is an adventure.  The bad parts always make a great story–later.  Sometimes much, much later.

When you move to or from Alaska, you move by weight, not by volume.  I know it sounds like a bag of potato chips, but it’s true.  This is how I know we have nearly two tons of books, and we really need to get rid of some.  This is also how we decided, firmly and forever, that we hire movers to pack us.  Leaving Chicago, the first time out, we had a third floor walk up apartment.  Those movers earned their pay, getting all those books down those stairs.  The apartment was great, but getting stuff in and out was painful.

Anchorage was fantastic, but we learned a couple of lessons about living spaces that we’ve retained.  We really need a bath and a half if we can afford them.  And we learned not to share living space if we can afford not to.  The house was a two-flat, where the owner had split the house himself.  We lived on the main floor, and he and his wife lived below us.  They ran their dogs in the backyard.  The dogs served as an early warning system for the moose who used to come up from the creek, so we knew when to look out back to see the moose.  Very cool.  What was not cool was that we could hear their marriage break up.  Not doing that again.  When we moved out, we found boxes in the garage that we hadn’t unpacked from Chicago.  We mostly threw that stuff out, except for the huge jar of coins–that we went to dinner on.  We figured that if we hadn’t needed it in two and a half years, we didn’t.  We also learned that it’s a bad idea for us to have storage we can’t see.  We forget about it, and then it has babies or something.

When we moved from Anchorage to Tallahassee, we flew out of Anchorage with the cats, our suitcases, and nothing else.  We sold our car on the way out of Alaska because it cost 6 car payments to ship, and it just wasn’t worth it.  We hadn’t made a trip down to find a place, because there just wasn’t time.  Our stuff was six weeks behind us.  We stayed at a pet-friendly hotel, bought a car, and found a house to rent.  Then we camped out in our new house and waited for our stuff to arrive.  And waited.  And waited.  After a while, we got to like the minimalist lifestyle and were kind of hoping that the stuff would get permanently lost.

The second time around in Chicago we rented a coachhouse.  If you are not familiar with older city architorture, a coachhouse is what you get if you convert the garage into rental property.  So we had a little house behind the house.  What we didn’t have was a washer and dryer.  We shared with the house, which was a three-flat.  Four households sharing one washer and dryer does not happiness make.  So we’re not doing that again either.  But we love Chicago and miss the city.  Any chance to go back and visit is a good one.

In Gainesville we have a huge barn of a house.  We have more space than we need, because we rented the house to hold the books, and we still haven’t unpacked the end of the alphabet.  In, again, two point five years.

I spent a day and a half with an agent going around the northeast Atlanta suburbs searching for a 3 plus bedroom house with at least 1.5 baths that would willingly take us plus four cats.  The cats are usually the deal-breaker.  People don’t mind renting to two adults, even with two cats, but any number past two cats makes some landlords think we’ve lost our minds.  Which is possible, but that ship has already sailed.

House hunting is hard work, even if you are just renting.  I was dragged all over the place.  Half the houses that appeared to be available, were already under contract.  People didn’t call back.  Some looked okay in the picture, but were not okay in the “flesh”.  And it takes time, time, time.  Every place that didn’t pan out, I kept thinking “why isn’t this process more efficient”, but there’s no substitute for looking for yourself.  And, Murphy’s Law is in full force.  The house we made an offer on is the first one I looked at.  But I wouldn’t have known it was the best if I hadn’t seen second best, not to mention tenth best, which had the driveway leading up to Hades, and mustard yellow kitchen cabinets.

Voting for the Hugos

The Hugo nominations were officially posted on Sunday by Renovation, the 69th Annual World Science Fiction Convention.  Worldcon will be be held this coming August in Reno, Nevada, and the winners will be announced in a rather posh and occasionally hilarious ceremony on August 20.

I get to vote on the Hugos.  It’s easy.  All you have to do is buy an attending or supporting membership in that year’s Worldcon.  I usually just support, but this year, we’re planning to go.  And next year, since it will again be in one of our previous and much beloved homes, Chicago.

But back to the nominees.  They reflect the popularity and tastes of the folks who read, write, watch and publish science fiction and fantasy.  There are categories for everything.  Best novel, best short story, best film, best dramatic presentation (short form) which basically means a TV episode, best graphic novel, etc., etc., etc.  You get the idea.  But to be an informed voter, it’s important to read, or watch the thing nominated.  In other words, my TBR pile just got bigger, along with my to be viewed (TBV, I guess) list.

hundred thousand kingdoms coverI have only read one, yikes, one, of the nominated novels.  The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin.  It was one of those absolutely fabulous first novels, where you can’t believe it’s someone’s first novel.  It is also a coming-of-age story, and about the power of belief.  It may share some common points with Neil Gaiman’s American Gods when it comes to whether or not a deity that anyone has once believed in can ever truly be extinguished.

I have Connie Willis’ Blackout/All Clear on my iPad, but haven’t gotten around to it/them yet.  It/them have now risen several dozen rungs on the TBR ladder.  Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold is one that I had been thinking about.  I read the earlier books in her Miles Vorkosigan space opera series.  I loved the first two books, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, but there, Cordelia was the main character rather than Miles.  Now that Miles has grown into himself, he may be more sympathetic for me.  I’ll have to see.

There are also a lot of categories for shorter works.  Novellas, novellettes and short stories in particular.  One of the great things about this process is that if you are eligible to vote, all the  shorter stuff is made available to you online.  Sort of like the Academy voters getting free DVDs of all the movies.

In addition to the books, there are five movies, and five TV episodes.  Three of the TV episodes are from Doctor Who.  I’ve seen all three, and I don’t mind the excuse to watch them again.  But the title I’m most interested in is nominated in the Related Works category.  It’s titled Chicks Dig Time Lords, A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It. I think only something like the Hugos would be so willing to nominate such a lighthearted look at the genre for a major award.  Besides, chicks really do dig Time Lords.  And I have the DVD collection to prove it.

Geeks amazing traveling circus

Yesterday, we packed up for a week’s trip to Atlanta to look for a house to rent.  This was a driving trip, and we’re here for a week.  Two geeks, one car, and a week away from all our toys.

Computers and parts pictureAfter we loaded up the car, I realized that we had packed more technological gimcrackery than we had clothes.  This says something about what we now define as the necessities of modern life,  and certainly that neither of us are exactly fashion plates.

Besides this blog, I am also working on a proposal to do a collection development workshop.  For serious work, I need a real computer, not just my iPad.  So, that’s one laptop.  Galen has his laptop, since he’s here to attend and present at the Evergreen Conference, and his MacBook is his work computer.  That’s two laptops.  I have a mouse, resting on a PLA in Portland (2010) mousepad that I’ve been traveling with since 2008.

But I still have my iPad.  I need my iPad for reading.  It’s my library away from home.  And, Galen also has an iPad with his traveling library.  That’s two iPads.  He has an iPhone, for work.  I have an iPod, for audiobooks.  I also have an old cellphone, because I’m not going to invest in an iPhone at this point until we move.  So five mobile devices of some sort.

Two digital cameras, his and hers.  We have to strive not to abandon either of them in the hotel room as we leave.  At least one of Galen’s prior digital cameras met its fate this way.

And all of the power cords these beasts require.  Which tangled up in my briefcase and committed spaghetti on the way up.  At least this particular hotel room has enough power outlets.  The room at the PLA conference in Portland didn’t, and I had to buy a power strip before dinner.  The toys ate before we did!

We can’t be the only people who travel this way.  It will be geek nirvana (nerdvana) when its possible to request a hotel room with a double-facing desk with two chairs and six outlets at table height.  Come to think of it, is six power outlets even enough?

Double deja vu

In the middle of the first chapter of Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane, I kept thinking “I’ve played this book”.  Not “I’ve read this book”, but “I’ve played this book”, as in there’s a game just like this.  And there is.  The beginning of the book is from the perspective of a player in an extremely immersive massively multiplayer online world that is so detailed that at first the reader doesn’t realize that the perspective is inside a game.  Then, he steps back into “real” life, and you realize he was playing his character, and this book is about the game.

Several years ago, I played a series of video games that mimicked both a massively multiplayer online world and the player’s online chat experience during the game as it invaded reality.  I really thought I was reading dot Hack, which was the game in question.  It would have made a pretty good novel.  But Omnitopia only started out the same as the game.

Omnitopia Dawn, dot Hack, and also, surprisingly, Fantasy in Death by J.D. Robb, all have an element in common, that of using video gaming worlds to affect the so-called “real” world.  But J.D. Robb uses the next step in virtual reality as a murder weapon.  In dot Hack, the theme is mind control.  But Omnitopia Dawn is much more deeply layered.  The company behind the game is intended as a jab at high tech companies with their own internal geek culture, like Apple, Google, and even Microsoft back in the day.

But in Omnitopia Dawn, the real world is going to be affected in real ways, not virtual ones.  Real competitors of the corporation behind Omnitopia plan to use the launch of the next upgrade to launch a very real attack on Omnitopia’s servers using very real viruses, denial of service attacks and other tools that read like natural progressions from today’s headlines.  And the intent behind these attacks is to steal very real money from the company, and if possible to drive Omnitopia out of business, so that its competitors win.

Under the fantasy layer, and the business layer, there is a science fiction layer.  Omnitopia’s server network is vast and its founder has programmed it with its own individual persona and artificial intelligence.  The new upgrade to the system has caused something unexpected to happen to that artificial intelligence.  It has, like so many systems before it, become self-aware.  And in the attack launched by Omnitopia’s enemies, it starts to defend itself.

The first self-aware machine I remember reading about was Mike in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.  Not all of Heinlein’s adult works wear well because some of his attitudes about women (among other things) were very definitely of his time and not ours.  But I still remember the character of Mike very fondly.  Mike named himself for Mycroft Holmes.  But Mike was the computer that ran all the systems on the moon, and eventually accreted enough memory, inputs, data, whatever to become sentient.  Two things about Mike stuck with me.  His friend, Manny, teaching him about humor and jokes, the difference between funny once and funny always, and that Mike doesn’t live to see the revolution he brings about.

There was a long moment at the end of Omnitopia Dawn where I was afraid I was reading about Mike again.

Book Mooch is not my mother

The admins at Book Mooch are concerned about the amount of work it takes to give 300 books away to people who really, really want them.  So, allegedly out of concern for me, they deleted the half of my inventory that no one had claimed yet. 

What does this say?  First, that in less than 36 hours, 150 books had been snapped up by eager readers around the country.  Many of the books I was willing to mooch had huge wish lists, 50+ people in many cases.  The requests started coming almost instantly.

trunk of packagesYes, this does take a lot of work.  I packed up 140 books in the end, after I decided not to ship international.  I answered everyone.  I made a couple of newbie mistakes.  I started entering titles on Tuesday, and the last books will go to the post office tomorrow.  The local post office wants me to call ahead before I show up again, so they can lay on more staff to handle the workload.

I spent my time, and also invested some money, to send books to people who actually want those specific books.  It would have been easier, faster and way, way less expensive for me to just drop the books off at my local library.  But I thought this would be a good thing.  And some of the people who have packages on the way have already written back saying that they are looking forward to getting the books.

But the admins at Book Mooch got worried.  They explained that they were uneasy about the amount of work I was taking on, sending out so many books at once.  I asked to have the inventory restored, explaining that I was sending books out, and that I was trying to dispose of a significant collection before moving.  Again, they expressed their anxiety about my workload, and that they would check back in two weeks, to see about putting my remaining inventory back up.

If there is concern that a new account is adding too many books, and won’t deliver, just say so.  Better yet, limit new accounts until a defined number of deliveries have been confirmed. 

Apprehension about business and service levels are Book Mooch’s legitimate concerns.  If they had an issue, they could have raised it honestly.  They didn’t.  Instead, they sounded like my mother, talking about chores, and I mean that literally. I already have a mother.

I didn’t see this as a chore.  I saw it as giving books to people who wanted them.  But if it’s a chore, it’s one that I don’t have to do.  The local Friends of the Library can always sell my books at their next sale.

OverDrive and Amazon and Kindles

People who have Amazon Kindles will finally be able to borrow ebooks from their local library.  This is a good thing for user service, whatver questions librarians may have about the forces that are moving behind the scenes on this one.

Why do I say this is a good thing for user service?  Saying yes beats this scenario–excited patron calls up, because they just purchased a new Kindle and they want to borrow ebooks from their local library.  The staff has to tell them that the library doesn’t have anything for them, and has no way of knowing if they ever will.  Patron is generally upset, because, well, they just bought this new toy and want to use it.  Patrons do not want to understand about formats, they don’t care about Amazon’s lock-in on its consumers (if they did, they wouldn’t have bought a Kindle in the first place), and they pay taxes in the community and they feel entitled to the services they paid for.  If ebooks are available for other people, they should be available for everyone.  There is no survivable way to explain to a taxpayer that they should have done their research first.  For front-end service, this solves a major problem.

But all the questions about exactly how this is going to work are still open.  Based on OverDrive’s own blogpost/press release, they are going to simply make any ebook currently available to libraries available in Kindle format in addition to the current formats.  Whether this means both PDF and ePUB or just ePUB remains to be seen.  The OverDrive blog is very clear that there will not be anything available that isn’t available now, so Simon & Schuster and Macmillan are not coming to the library table, and the 26 lending limit for Harper Collins titles will still be crosses that libraries have to bear.  Or, to put it another way, #HCOD is alive and well, and it has been joined by #AZOD.

There is an awful lot that we still don’t know about this deal.  Just because there is no “up front” cost to libraries to add the Kindle format ebooks, doesn’t mean this won’t somehow figure into OverDrive’s platform fee.  And it probably has to.  And it’s worth it to be able to say “yes” to all those patrons instead of “no”.  But many libraries would prefer to see the price tag openly, and opt in or out accordingly. 

All the press releases agree that users will be able to retain their margin notes from one checkout to another, but none say how that will work.  It sounds like patron data is being retained, but by whom?  By Amazon?  Is that opt-in or opt-out, or is there any option at all?  OverDrive says that “users’ confidential information will be protected”, but who is deciding what is confidential, and who is doing the protecting?

Also, when is this actually going to happen?  Library users who have Kindles have probably been calling their local libraries all day.  Saying “soon” will only hold them for so long. 

Has anyone else noticed that this announcement came very hard on the heels of the announcement about Recorded Books moving their digital audio to Ingram?  And that was on top of the Ingram/OCLC announcement about making ebooks available to ILL through Ingram.  Wouldn’t it be great if a second player with good contacts in the industry challenged OverDrive for their monopoly?

Why I’m willing to pay for ebooks

Please don’t get me wrong, I like to get things for free as much as the next person.  But the word free has multiple meanings.  Free as in kittens, or free as in beer being two well-known examples.  Free kittens usually have long-term ancillary costs, such as food, vet bills, love, grief, scratched furniture, frayed electrical cords, aggravation, additional rent or security deposits, etc., etc., etc.  I am intimately familiar with this particular definition of “free”.  Free beer is free, unless you buy the next round.  But beer, well, someone gives you a beer, you drink it, it’s over.

Should ebooks be free because there are no costs to print, warehouse and transport them?  Ebooks don’t require a physical bookstore with rent and light bills and heating and A/C to sell them.  So they should be free, right?

What goes into the creation of a book?  Not the container, the content.  The book has to be written.  That’s a creative process on the part of the writer, or writers.  Whether the book is printed or electronic, the actual creation doesn’t change for the creator.  They have to invest time in that creation, whether it’s invention, research, or a combination of the two.  If the reading public desires more, the authors need to be compensated for their time, otherwise, they will have to find a different way to make a living.  There are people who write their first book, or first couple of books, in their spare time from a day job that pays the bills.  But they write a lot fewer books than folks whose full time job is writing.

There are other parts of the process that would still need to go on, even in an all ebook world.  Editing is important!  Editing doesn’t have anything to do with whether a book is print or electronic, it has to do with making a book better.  Everyone who reads a popular authors’ work over time can tell exactly when that author stopped being edited.  The books get longer, and they are less “tight” and not quite as good.  I call it “describing the wallpaper”.

Crystal Dragon coverDragon Variation coverBooks sell better with covers.  Library books circulate better with covers.  Ebooks will probably sell better with good cover art.  A quote from science fiction editor Lou Anders in the January issue of Locus Magazine probably said it best. “I won’t buy a book with a crappy cover, and I am finding I won’t buy an e-book with one either.  E-books need to have compelling cover art…”   A picture really is worth a thousand words.  While there is a print edition, the print cover is used to sell the ebook.  When there is no print edition, the publisher has to create cover art.  Good cover art sells books.  Cover art is produced by artists, who are also creators who need to get paid for their work.

One of the things that has turned into a brave new world for everyone is promoting books, especially works by new authors.  How does anyone decide to spend money on someone they’ve never heard of?  It turns out that people are browsing “bricks and mortar” bookstores but buying ebooks.  We look, we touch, we click.  It turns out that Barnes and Noble had a really great idea when they allowed Nook users to browse the entire bn.com while they were inside a B&N store, just like you can sit and read any book on the shelf, as long as you don’t leave the store.  Sampling is good.

Books sell a lot by word of mouth.  I like a book, I tell everyone I know.  Blogs and lists and Facebook multiply that effect.  But how to get that ball rolling?  Different channels of promotion have been created.  Publishers need people to work those channels.  It’s an investment in keeping the company in business, so that it can, in turn, discover new writers, and promote them, which feeds my addiction to reading.

But I expect to pay less for an ebook than a hardcover, and so do most people.  Instinctually, the fact that there is no thing that I can hold, no physical piece that has to be toted and shipped and stacked and stocked, means that it should cost less than a hardback.  Also, I can re-sell or give a hardback (or paperback) away when I’m done.  An ebook still feels slightly ephemeral.  And Amazon or B&N can take it away without my consent if things go awry, and Amazon has done this in one famous case. (1984 anyone?)  When Michael Connelly’s latest best seller, The Fifth Witness, initially cost more on the Kindle than it did as a hardcover, Amazon users revolted by giving the book one star reviews and vowing to either wait or purchase it in hardcover elsewhere.  The Kindle price has since dropped below the hardcover price.

I’m willing to pay for the creative process.  I want more books that I want to read, and I expect to pay for that privilege.  One way of voting for which books I want to read more of is with money.  But not an unreasonable amount of money.  If I buy an ebook, I’m not willing to pay for the storage costs of the print book, since I didn’t purchase that and I’m not getting the benefits that go with buying a physical item.

Free ebooks make great teasers.  The freebies exist as introductions to new authors, or series.  They are designed to get me hooked, so that I will then purchase more books by the same author.  It is supposed to be a win-win.  If I don’t like the book, I’ve lost nothing but a little time.  If I like it, I’ll buy more, and the author and publisher win.  But I am willing to pay.

Whither used books?

Over the weekend, the great weeding project of 2011 finally got started.  This is a fairly daunting task, as this is an 1,800 sq. ft house, and there are books in every room except the laundry room.  At least, I’m pretty sure there are no books in the laundry room.  When we moved here, we rented a house this size in order to finally have enough room to shelve all the books.  And, we still didn’t make it past the letter R.

In about a day and a half, Galen and I went through 935 books, shifted over 600, and boxed over 300.  The process temporarily halted at the late, and sometimes great, Robert A. Heinlein. 

Library Thing LogoWe’ve added everything to Library Thing, whether we’ve kept it or not, and tagged it appropriately, hence the statistics.  (If anyone is interested in our process, just ask)  The fascinating thing about the listings has been the automatic suggestions that the collection has generated.  So many of the suggestions are books that we do have, they are just later in the alphabet.  But the others, well, just what I needed, a neat new toy to play with that will generate even more TBRs. 

The question about what to do with the books we have weeded, and why we are weeding them, circles back to the questions about the aftermarket of used books in general.  These are books.  They are still readable, and someone can still get still get lost in them.  But how do we effectively get rid of this many?  And what happens to used book stores and sales in the future, when more and more readers like us read ebooks instead of paper.  The news last week showed that ebooks sold more than print books in February.  We, the reading public, have reached the tipping point.

The Friends of the Library here is having their semi-annual book sale this weekend.  It is a five-day event that will probably bring in over $150,000 for the group.  They are extremely successful, rightfully so, and fund literacy projects in the community in addition to the work they do with the local library.  What happens to groups like this in 3-5 years when readers no longer have book collections to donate?  People will still want books to read, but where will those books come from?  I suspect I am like many ebook readers, in that what I am interested in is the content and not the container.  But I can’t re-sell or donate my used ebooks when I am done with them.  The long term implications of this trend are staggering.

Powells LogoMeanwhile, we have a “metric buttload” of books to get rid of, and it’s growing nightly.  The local used book store will only give cash for hardcovers and trade paperbacks, with a store credit for mass market paperbacks.  While I understand their position, since we are leaving for Atlanta in six weeks, a store credit doesn’t help much.  Powell’s Books in Portland, OR will buy books online based on the ISBN.  Admittedly, Powell’s is also giving a store credit, but the store is online, so it is much easier to spend.  And they now do ebooks through the Google bookstore.  We still haven’t used the credit from last time, but we’re going to do that again. With the addition of the ebook option, the credit won’t last long.

Book Mooch logoI’m also going to try Book Mooch for some of what Powell’s doesn’t take.  This is a service where you get credit for listing your books, and you pay shipping to send the book to the person who wants it, and get credit for that transaction, too.  In return, I can receive books I want from other people, based on my accumulated credit.  A friend recommends this service, so I’m interested in trying it, especially for the long term possibilities.  There are just too many books in the short term to deal with the shipping charges–success might be it’s own punishment!

We will not throw any books away.  Whatever we can’t send to Powell’s or doesn’t look like a candidate to be Mooched will go to the Friends of the Library as soon as they re-open for donations.  It takes them a little while to recuperate after one of their sales extravaganzas.

I thought it would make it easier to pass along some of these books if I just kept a record of what I had read, but it isn’t.  Even reduced by a third, this will still be a big personal library.  And I recognize that some of these books are ones that I won’t pick up again, and that there is someone out there who will enjoy them if I let them go.  But damn, it’s hard.