death of books

TRX
May 5, 2012
55:
> When books are permanently and
> equally available across time and
> space

Something I wrote five or six gears ago, which might be appropriate: "I saw the Epic of Gilgamesh going by on alt.binaries.audiobooks. Just this morning I was reading an archeology book telling how a single schoolteacher in England managed to decode Akkadian cuneiform writing, and spent his nights deciphering the story... only to find the last tablets were missing. So he managed to organize an expedition to the diggings in Persia, and actually found the missing tablets. And so we have the story of Gilgamesh.

The Akkadians predated the Egyptians; the epic was written somewhere around five thousand years ago, at the dawn of known human civilization. [...]

Five thousand years. Close enough to forever... using technology they could not have imagined, I can pluck it from the networked aether, and have the voices of the djinni read it to me.

And who claims there is no such thing as progress?"

TRX
May 5, 2012
58:
> But how can you market hard core SF?

Just put it out there, we'll find it. I *liked* EE Smith's Skylark stuff, and John Campbell's "Arcot, Wade, & Morey" books, and Harry Stine's "Star Driver."

But there never was much of that to start with, it's much simpler to write about feeeeelings, oh-woe-woe, feeeeleeengs...

Stuff your socially-relevant stories with their dysfunctional characters. You can have those in any genre. Now, something like Eric Frank Russell's "Sinister Barrier" from 1939...

TRX
May 5, 2012
62:
> reference lists

There's a book on the design of internal combustion engines that has reached near-cult status, now being used as a major reference work as well as a university text. It's widely accepted without criticism as the Final Word for its subject.

The guy who wrote it was a university professor, and likely used grad students to do the scut work. But his name is on the cover, so it's his responsibility that *many* of the references he's using to make various points actually say something different, or occasionally the opposite, of what he implies in the text.

Fortunately, the references are extensive, and I've managed to track many of them down, as in "locate some place that has a copy, then pay their reference librarian to make a copy and mail it to me."

I'm starting to see a lot of younger engineers who simply aren't interested any any material they can't access via a web browser. Which limits their resources more than they understand...

TRX
May 5, 2012
84:
> I am quite tired of walking into
> bookstores,

I don't know what the attrition rate of bookstores is, but where I live and in five (5) nearby cities, the count is zero. None. Even the wire racks are gone from the grocery and convenience stores in most places.

Any business model that relies on "first find a book store" has some problems.

> looking at the new items, and
> realizing that 8/10 of them are
> simply awful. (or, at least, not to
> my taste)

The last store, when it went away, was carrying the same "best sellers" you could get at Wal-Mart, lots of travel and cook books, and on the SF shelf, mostly shared-fantasy-world, swords and dragons, and reprints of old out of copyright Edgar Rice Burroughs. Back then, there were still shelves of "How To Run Your Pirate Copy of INSERT BLANK" computer books filling a few shelves.

The bulk of the customers, or at least people hanging around the stores, always seemed to be slightly damp young women with long dresses and elderly women with elaborate hairstyles.

Any book that had a cat on the cover always seemed to get premium placement, though.

Anyway, their demise always seemed to be more due to refusing to carry anything a potential customer wanted to buy than anything else. By the time the last one died I was only going by once a year or so, if I got caught somewhere without a book in the car and it was lunchtime. Given a choice between a book and a fork, I'd take the book...

TRX
May 5, 2012
86:
Even assuming that deliberate or malicious corruption of your tags doesn't take place, how many recommendations are you willing to accept from some reviewer/bot before you can tell how closely his opinions match your own?

Heck, we already have a curated tag list. The New York Times has been rating books since forever. And their list provides a perfect example of what I just mentioned.

I've known some people for decades, and their recommendations for a good book (and one they've read all the way through, not just the blurb and a dozen pages) is no better than 50%.

I can do better much than that with the cover blurbs.

TRX
May 6, 2012
157:
Many SF authors belong to the sfwa.

I expect many authors expect to make money writing books.

Go to the sfwa web site.

Look for a link to where you can buy books from sfwa members, or links to their books at their publishers, or even Amazon or walmart-com.

I'm not seeing any likely-looking links there.

I didn't bother tracking down groups representing crime, romance, western, or other genre authors, but "buy our books!" is one of the things I'd *expect* to see there. If it's not coming down to "buy our books!" somewhere along the way, why bother?

TRX
May 6, 2012
158:
@132:
Have you watched Battlestar Galactica (the reboot)?
---
It looked like they taped the camera to a basketball, gave it to a former Harlem Globetrotter with cerebral palsy, and let some autistic crack monkey loose with the special defects on what came out.

Fortunately, I was able to kill it before barfing.

Perhaps someday someone will code a "software Steadicam" I can pipe .avi files through. Until then, much of the visual media of the last ten or fifteen years isn't something I can watch.

TRX
May 6, 2012
159:
> In some ways the novella is a good
> analogy, because it can't have
> everything in it that a novel can.

"I'm sorry I wrote you a long letter, because I didn't have time to write you a short one."

With a megabyte or more of bloat room, there's no reason for tight prose, so I keep encountering books that just flail around drowning in their own words.