The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Snort, you know, in my line, I see metadata from writers, publishers, every. single. day and sometimes, you just GOTTA wonder. It's like there is a short-circuit directly from the keyboard to the noggin.

Hitch

I seem to remember a while back a lot of books from Amazon had comments that looked as if the author had decided banging their head on the keyboard was a good idea.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I seem to remember a while back a lot of books from Amazon had comments that looked as if the author had decided banging their head on the keyboard was a good idea.

I came across one of those

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...&postcount=857

[ownedbycats]

Today's episode of 'odd embeded metadata' (maybe I should make a thread for these?):

"Murder on the Intergalactic Railway: A Ritchie and Fitz Sci-Fi Murder Mystery (The Ritchie and Fitz Sci-Fi Murder Mystery Series Book 1)"

A bit redundant there!

[Quoth]

Amazon titles on website and file names now seem to include about 1/3rd of the Blurb. Crazy. In the metadata too.

[ownedbycats]

So the author of a fanfic I enjoy decided to pull it down to rewrite it into a novel. I know they're well within their rights to do so, but I find myself a bit...irritated? (I'm being unreasonable, I know.)

Also, I'm not sure how well an author can take a story written in an established universe and just... write everything about that entire universe out of it. (There's probably some comment about that one famous novel to be made here.)

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

...I'm not sure how well an author can take a story written in an established universe and just... write everything about that entire universe out of it. (There's probably some comment about that one famous novel to be made here.)

Just to give another, less famous example: Dennis McKiernan. He wrote a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. It was good enough that a publisher showed interest. When the Tolkien estate passed, he changed it to his own imaginary world Mithgar and published the books as The Silver Call.

Unfortunately since it was always intended as a sequel, it also required him to write a prequel which was by necessity, similar to The Lord of the Rings and he did hear about it. The Iron Tower.

It's a shame the new self-published covers are so awful.

[Quoth]

Search on Amazon UK market place for ebooks and Amazon USA for ebooks is now so bad that putting amazon site, title and author into Duck Duck Go works far far better.

They have now also disabled purchases of ebooks for a Kindle on Amazon US if they decide it's not on a US Residential Address.

Irish Kindle users can elect to purchase on US site in Dollars, instead of UK site in Sterling, but it seems an illusion. Books vanish from USA site when you log in. The price seems mostly the same, but not always. The vanishing books, if on ebooks.com, will become unavailable if you try to buy there.(1, 2)

But UK order by Price may be using US prices as it's often wrong?

Search by author or Series on UK seems to return the USA results so you can't find books with a UK title differing from USA unless you look up the UK title elsewhere.

It's broken.

1)
So other evils for digital sales are IP Geolocation. People travel and it can be defeated by a a VPN.

2)
The crazy world of demarcated territories and digital rights by territory. Other goods too. It's a kind of cartel and outdated by 70 years. For English it was the agreed carve up of the world between USA and UK companies. Even done with batteries.
Makers like UK Burberry won a court action to prevent an Irish company importing from USA. All duties & VAT paid. Real goods, not counterfeit. Levi Strauss (USA) have also won such cases.
Yet the goods in many cases are made in a 3rd country. It's an imperialist & Colonial attitude to world retail and consumers.

It's time that any one anywhere should be able to buy any ebook, even almost anonymously if legitimately paid for. It seems worst for English. But I suspect issues with Spanish, French and Portuguese ebooks.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Search on Amazon UK market place for ebooks and Amazon USA for ebooks is now so bad that putting amazon site, title and author into Duck Duck Go works far far better.

That hasn't at all been my experience. I just went and searched Harry Bosch and Michael Connelly's books came up.

I searched for Frank Herbert Under Pressure and Amazon returned The Dragon in the Sea, which is the title the book has been published under for the last few years. Amazon's search is pretty good at author/title.

The new author page sucks and sorting by price has never seemed to work well. But title/author results, no complaints.

So other evils for digital sales are IP Geolocation. People travel and it can be defeated by a a VPN.

It's time that any one anywhere should be able to buy any ebook, even almost anonymously if legitimately paid for. It seems worst for English. But I suspect issues with Spanish, French and Portuguese ebooks.

Yeah, you won't get much argument from me there.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

That hasn't at all been my experience..

Which marketplace? I'm suspecting the UK marketplace is poorly using US Amazon resources.
On UK "Is Underground" and "Dangerous Games" come up both via Joan Aiken and "Wolves of Willoughby Chase", but are unavailable. But if you search for Is you find it eventually, also Limbo Lodge and they can be bought. They are not on the UK site Author page, nor UK site list of titles in Series. Both those only list the US version of title name.
Is (UK & Ireland) = Is Underground (US)
Limbo Lodge (UK & Ireland) = Dangerous Games (USA)

UK (yesterday) still had the older better Author page, but content frequently is missing either actual title entirely, or a cheaper edition. A few older titles have maybe two publishers with legitimate rights. Also some times books with a matching title but a completely different work by a different author is in the Author page.

Sometimes Wikipedia is better than Goodreads or Amazon to find the titles for a Series for UK & Ireland.

Certainly Duck Duck Go works better to find ebooks on Amazon UK than Amazon now.

Applies to other products too. Amazon search polluted by unrelated sponsored products and may not list something at all in search that's actually there! You find it with Duck Duck Go outside Amazon.


Also putting an author into search on Kindle Shop finds loads of unrelated titles and authors always. You've to scroll and click through pages.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by Quoth

They have now also disabled purchases of ebooks for a Kindle on Amazon US if they decide it's not on a US Residential Address.

Combine this and books not being sold in certain regions and I won't be surprised when people who were willing to pay for the book turn to piracy.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

So the author of a fanfic I enjoy decided to pull it down to rewrite it into a novel. I know they're well within their rights to do so, but I find myself a bit...irritated? (I'm being unreasonable, I know.)

Also, I'm not sure how well an author can take a story written in an established universe and just... write everything about that entire universe out of it. (There's probably some comment about that one famous novel to be made here.)

50 Shades of Grey starting out as a Twilight fanfic.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

50 Shades of Grey starting out as a Twilight fanfic.

Did you read the last line

[hildea]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Did you read the last line

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

So the author of a fanfic I enjoy decided to pull it down to rewrite it into a novel. I know they're well within their rights to do so, but I find myself a bit...irritated? (I'm being unreasonable, I know.)

Also, I'm not sure how well an author can take a story written in an established universe and just... write everything about that entire universe out of it. (There's probably some comment about that one famous novel to be made here.)

I've read one novel (not that one) that's quite good, and from what I've heard started as fanfic. I can recognize some of the characters from the film it's based on, not just the protagonists, but several secondary characters as well, but the book works fine on its own. I guess it helps that it started as an AU (alternate universe, for those who don't read fanfic, in other words the story uses the characters, but not the setting -- so for instance a super hero may be a hockey player, and another super hero might work in a smoothie shop and struggle with his student loans).

I've also read a few original works which were published for free first, just like fanfic is, and then was rewritten and published commercially. I enjoyed seeing the change between the two versions, and liked being able to pay the author for their work There's an article about one of them here. (It's Winter's Orbit by Everina Maxwell, a space opera with romance and political intrigue.)

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Quoth

...They are not on the UK site Author page, nor UK site list of titles in Series.

That is sometimes a problem on the Amazon US website, especially with smaller authors. Even when the author uses the same version of their name, no middle initial, no Jon vs. Jonathan. Same author list on three books, but you click the author's page and only two are shown.

[ownedbycats]

My cat decided to show her displeasure at the scratching post by getting into a box of my paper books.