[Worldwalker]

This is one of those mornings, and to make matters worse, I can't even do anything because I can't stop coughing. Yeah, the fun part of living in the south: things are blooming already, and I'm allergic to one of them. *cough* So, with nothing better to do until this coughing settles down, I started looking into this book.

For starters, I decided to find it on WordClay. While their search function remains broken, and the author is too Important (yes, the caps are used ironically) to actually provide a link to the book, the Google-fu is strong enough in this one to find the thing. (in the process, I also found out that WordClay is owned by the same people as AuthorHouse, who are ... um ... not the good kind of vanity press) But, in any event, I tracked down the book and took a look at the blurb for Alm's book.

The first thing that hit me? It's a pbook. I don't know why the ad is here, because it comes on dead trees. There is no ebook listed for it. That's why the ad lists no devices and no DRM status -- the book is paper only. The line "...is now available in print" is not just a cut-and-paste error; it is now available in print.

The original page Google hit was actually a search results page listing 10 books. Before I looked at the specific book, I compared prices among them all. One (13 Essential Steps for Evaluating a Franchise Opportunity) sells for more than the book in question: $29.99 as opposed to $20.17. That is to be expected, since it's a non-fiction book with a fairly small target market, and proposes to make money for that market. If you're going to make a million bucks off a franchise, thirty bucks for a book is trivial. The other eight are fiction, poetry, spiritual, and one I can't make head nor tail of. Their prices range from $8.92 to $14.00. So this book is 44% more expensive than the next most expensive book in the same results (which, given the state of WordClay's search engine, is the best we're going to get for a random sample right now) and 78% more expensive than the average.

For $20+, I could buy three ebooks from Baen that I know I'll like, or a whole series from Tim Myers' backlist on Smashwords, or a book at full price (or several on sale) at O'Reilly, or a lot of other things I want more than some random book by some random author who won't even tell me what it's all about, and just tells me what I supposedly think, and gets it wrong.

Then there's the formatting issue. Here's how it looks in the search results (boldface mine):

Westside Story meets Romeo & Juliet in the 21st Century. $0$0Hi my name is Angela. My bff name is Karen and we live in the Hills area. Just in case you don’t know; that’s the rich area of Chicago.$0We book details

The "book details" link goes to this:

Westside Story meets Romeo & Juliet in the 21st Century. $0 $0 Hi my name is Angela. My bff name is Karen and we live in the Hills area. Just in case you don’t know; that’s the rich area of Chicago.$0 We like to shop and go into the city to visit the lake front; you know do girl stuff. Well anyway we were doing our usual shopping and girl thing in the city when, guess what: OMfreakingG we got caught in the middle of a gang fight.$0 Can you say freak the hell out? Yup that’s what we did. We were so scared. I mean there were shots being fired, people being beaten up and to top it all off, we were stuck underground in the subway. OH MY GOD! We had no way out.$0 Anyway, suddenly there was a blast of sirens from above. And people really started freaking out. I mean it was really crazy and it was really wild. Me and my friend Karen; yup my bff we got separated and we didn’t know what was happening.$0 That’s when I felt someone grabbed me, but I didn’t know who. It was dark. I mean REALLY dark. Next thing I knew I was being pulled; oops I mean dragged up the other end of the subway and out to a side street located in the Printer’s Row area of Chicago. That’s when it hit me: Holy Shit… I’ve just been kidnapped by one of the gangs.$0 Yup that’s when I met him. OMG I HATE him… He is so arrogant and a know it all. Well it’s a long story and I really don’t have the time to give you the details, but you can read all about it.$0 $0 $0 **** Includes the highly anticipated BONUS alternate ending. A must read ^__^

I think the last of those is an attempt at cuteness. All the rest of the bolded strings, though, are some sort of formatting issue. The other books for sale don't have them (admittedly one doesn't have anything). This is a potential buyer's first impression of the book for sale, and it's got random characters stuck in it. I tried another browser -- it's not me, it's the blurb. It's that way. Alm apparently didn't think this was important enough to fix, or just couldn't be bothered. There are also punctuation errors in the blurb, which are another turn-off for me. Spelling and punctuation are the easy parts of writing; if someone can't get the easy parts right, what are they going to do with the hard parts?

So, anyway, when it's finally run down, this whole ad is for an overpriced pbook from a highly dubious vanity press and with significant errors in its listing. I set off my cough again by laughing, because the author is defending an ad that doesn't even belong on MobileRead in the first place!

Alm, this is MobileRead. It's a forum that's for and about ebooks. That's electronic books. The kind you can read on a Kindle. Not the kind printed on paper.