Ursula K. Le Guin: “I keep Asking You Not to Buy Books from Amazon”

[cadele]

Well, it's the BS stores I feel for. They must be sobbing their little hearts out about now...

[bgalbrecht]

I read the rant linked in one of the replies, and my personal opinion is that Ms. Le Guin, for all her history of working within it, doesn't understand the publishing industry and better than I do. While Amazon certainly influences the best seller lists, it doesn't control them. If the publishers are actually dropping books from being in print because of "marginal sales", it's probably a combination of the tax laws (which changed in the 80s to consider unsold books taxable inventory) and pressure on the publishers to have higher margins (which generally means concentrate on the big print run best sellers, and move on to the next one, and hype, hype, hype). Two of those Big Publishing Houses (or maybe 1.5, since the Random Penguin is only about 50% owned by Bertelsmann) are actually private German companies, so it's not clear exactly what their margin pressures are. In general, I think when an industry merges into market oligarchy, especially with a lot of leveraged debt, there's no choice but to seek higher margins because of the debt. And it doesn't help that between incompetently run bookstores chains, publishers using anti-piracy measures that guaranteed Amazon's ebook dominance, we now basically have a market oligarchy with a monopsony (single dominant buyer). I don't see this is going to change any time soon unless the publishers force Amazon to switch to a platform neutral ebook format and the publishers start supporting bookstores by giving them discounts comparable to what Amazon and the chains get.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

...

to the current glut of "first novel of a planned trilogy" ..... What is the attraction between literature & threes?

The rhythm of Story itself. Act One, Act Two, Act Three.

Graham

[murg]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

What is the attraction between literature & threes?

Most authors can't count to four?

Most agents can't count to four?

Most publishers can't count to four?

Take your pick...

[Barcey]

Originally Posted by murg

Most authors can't count to four?

Most agents can't count to four?

Most publishers can't count to four?

Take your pick...

Well what do you call it after a trilogy? Qualogy? Quadlogy? Quinlogy?

I'm surprised they don't jump straight to sexlogy but people would get that confused with tree huggers.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Barcey

Well what do you call it after a trilogy? Qualogy? Quadlogy? Quinlogy?

Quadrilogy, Quintology, Sextet, Septième, Octet...

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Barcey

Well what do you call it after a trilogy?

Milking.

[frahse]

Perhaps the "lady author's" age is showing.

Next she might say that large libraries are stupid and evil because all those books can't all be "great" works.

And then of course we must have select committees of important people to pick the few books we should read and Orwell's "rough men" to prevent foolish people from reading the wrong "kind."

[susan_cassidy]

Who's to say what constitutes "literature"? Pretty snobbish for a sci-fi writer, especially when many people don't consider sci-fi to be literature. Almost all the books I read are either mysteries or sci-fi, so I'm less of a person or something? How incredibly prejudiced of her.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

Almost all the books I read are either mysteries or sci-fi, so I'm less of a person or something?

In the rant under discussion, Ms. Le Guin failed to name a single book among those she dislikes. Has she slammed books you like in the past?

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

How incredibly prejudiced of her.

Why? Because she's against a big corporation known for poor working conditions, harming small businesses, and outsourcing its labor to body shops? Or it is because there are some unnamed bestsellers she doesn't like? Or something else?

As for prejudice, I'm surprised to read such a charge right after after a post (#38) beginning with an idea not totally friendly towards a human grouping that, at age 60, I've recently entered.

P.S. Do not interpret this as agreement with Le Guin. Without knowing the titles she's against, it's hard for me to agree or disagree. Also, I like evidence, and in her article, I am missing it. She seems to be saying that Amazon is bad for the backlist. While Amazon's enormous selection argues against that idea, it still could be true. But I don't know why I should think it.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Why? Because she's against a big corporation known for poor working conditions, harming small businesses, and outsourcing its labor to body shops?

Where on earth did you get the impression she felt that way from her article?! Thought you were all about "the facts."

My only quarrel with Amazon is when it comes to how they market books and how they use their success in marketing to control not only bookselling, but book publication: what we write and what we read.

That other stuff's all you (and other misguided individuals).

[basschick]

low brow reading isn't something new, and it certainly isn't primarily sold by amazon.

penny dreadfuls and other adventure type books from days gone by weren't exactly shakespeare, not that i'm sure that shakespeare was considered the shakespeare of his time.

besides, a lot of people i know don't read at all. anything that gets them to read? i'm all for it. my granddaughter hasn't read a book in years - she texts, watches TV and takes selfies, but says reading is boring. i'd rather she started reading so-called crap than that she didn't read at all.

in the sixties, they said comic books were crap that would rot your mind. i loved comic books as much as i loved reading the oz books, prydain books and a variety of other books when i was 5 to 11 years old. all of them contributed to my lifelong love of reading. maybe too much of anything is bad for you - i'm not exactly the poster child for moderation. but eating a jumbo jack once in a while won't hurt you, and i bet it'll even taste good. i'm sure the same could be applied to books.

Originally Posted by Turtle91

hmmm... without becoming offended...and actually listening (reading?) to what she said...it does make a certain sense.

I dare anyone to argue that there is NOT a lot of crap being peddled at these self published sellers - Amazon being a huge one. And, no, I'm not saying there isn't good stuff too...but one apple amidst a crate of candy bars doesn't belie the point she makes.

Yes, any reading is good reading: when you are trying to teach a child to read...and to love reading. But an adult reading the equivalent of "The rat sat on my hat", and thinking that what they read is true literature....well, come on.... and no, she is not talking about whether someone ENJOYS what they read...she specifically made the point that people become accustomed to the low standard and think that is what it should be. I do believe people ENJOY eating junk food...kinda hard not to with all the chemicals and drugs added to it to make you THINK it tastes good...(but that's another subject).

There is definitely something to be said for the days when publishers would filter what they published...what came out of the other end of that process had a much better chance of being a higher quality of work...and worth the money spent on it. Yes, there were rejected books that later became best sellers - and any number of other examples someone could point to...but generally speaking, the process kept the standards much higher than the depths to which they've fallen recently.

Cheers,

[gmw]

There's only one thing I don't get about Ursula K. Le Guin's article: Why decry Amazon in particular? Doesn't every bookstore - B&M or online - do exactly the same thing? Walk into, or click into, any book store, and what fills the visual space? Whatever books are currently being pushed as "best sellers".

As far as I can tell the only reason for singling out Amazon is that they have a stake in publishing, as well as selling, and yet there doesn't seem to be anything in her blog that identifies how Amazon's publishing arm impacts the big seller push. As far as I can tell, she could be criticising any person that buys off the front shelves of a B&M store.

There also seem to be some inherent contradictions in the blog article. It appears to be denigrating the best seller machine, but goes on to suggest that it was exactly this mechanism that publishers once used to fund the publication of untried authors. She complains that the BS machine is inherently transient and comments that "But you can't buy and read a book that hasn't been kept in print." And yet a publisher like Amazon can ensure that this never happens.

One might also comment that it was exactly the transient nature of the BS machine that allowed new work to become visible. If there is any complaint to be had of modern book selling, it is that there is no longer any limit to what you might choose to buy, whether it was published yesterday or a hundred years ago. With such a huge and ever growing expanse of books available, how are we ever to choose one from the deluge?

The penultimate paragraph "As a book dealer and publisher, Amazon wants no competitors, admits no responsibilities, and takes no risks." appears to be, perhaps, the essence of her complaint. But the way I see it, one of the reasons why Amazon has been such a success is that traditional publishers have applied exactly these rules to their own business. Traditional publishers could have done much more to embrace the technology and use it to everyone's advantage, instead they have left that to Amazon and others.

[murg]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Why? Because she's against a big corporation known for poor working conditions, harming small businesses, and outsourcing its labor to body shops?

Are you talking about the publishers here?

[crich70]

Originally Posted by frahse

Perhaps the "lady author's" age is showing.

Next she might say that large libraries are stupid and evil because all those books can't all be "great" works.

And then of course we must have select committees of important people to pick the few books we should read and Orwell's "rough men" to prevent foolish people from reading the wrong "kind."

Or hire Bradbury's "firemen" to deal with the problem. Of course tell people that (book title) is forbidden and everyone flocks to read that book.