Jul 6 2010

Tuesday Midday Links: July Freebies and Deals

By Jane • Publishing News •

Samhain’s July Freebies are as follows:

  • 7/1/2010 to 7/14/2010: Out of Bounds by T.A. Chase
  • 7/15/2010 to 7/28/2010: All Tied Up by Cathryn Fox

Other Freebies to check out:

You can always check out Amazon’s Limited promotional freebies list. It’s dominated by the Harlequin freebies but there are generally new ones every other week or so.

From Hachette.  Â This promotional pricing should be at most etailers.

  • TAMED BY A LAIRD by Amanda Scott. Regularly priced at 6.99, now 1.99 for July.
  • BORDER MOONLIGHT by Amanda Scott. Regularly priced at 6.99, now 1.99 for July.

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From reader, Â Gianisa, comes the following warning regarding nook books and the Mac OS update:

The new Mac OS X updates kill the B&N Ereader software.  Â This wouldn’t be a problem except that recently B&N set up their Ebooks so that they can only be read by the proprietary B&N Ereader.  Â If your operating system is any version of 10.5, then the B&N Ereader simply won’t open any of the Ebooks.  Â The epub format (the book file ends in .epub) does not display content at all in the B&N Ereader.  Â If it does open, it simply says “Page 0″ and there is nothing else.

Note that B&N will NOT give you a refund if you download an Ebook, but of course you need to download the Ebook to find the problem with their software.  Â They know about the problem but they are not announcing it.  Â I spent about 15 minutes digging around their website before I found any information about this at all, and that was in the technical support forums where there were several people talking about the exact same problem.

There are several threads about this problem:

http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/BN-eReader-Software-QA-Support/Ereader-problems-with-Mac-Computer/m-p/551574#U551574

http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/BN-eReader-Software-QA-Support/Purchased-book-is-blank/m-p/544137#U544137

The only solution that I have found is to call up their customer service line and talk to somebody until they agree to send you a copy of the ebook in .pdb format instead of .epub.  Â Also note that the customer service guy I talked to told me that it would take more than 24 hours to get the copy to me in my email and it’s been 2 days and I haven’t received it yet.  Â I have been emailing with the customer service people and they have told me that they can’t handle it over email and I need to call in person (good thing I already did that).  Â I told the customer service people, if I walked into a B&N store and bought and book and walked outside and found that it was 300 blank pages, I would be able to walk back inside and return it.  Â But they do not allow the same for Ebooks.

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Rebbie Macintyre summarizes advice that Donald Maass (agent) gave on making the dark protagonist appealing to the reader.  Â It sounded similar to Barry Eisler’s post about the difficult protagonist.  Â Essentially, you have to make some part of the dark/difficult protagonist heroic, either by self awareness or by making everyone around the protag “worse”.  Â Or a combination.

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Woot.com is a discount site which hosts one sale per day.  Â Woot was purchased by Amazon last week and the next day, to celebrate the sale, Woot’ed Amazon Kindles at $149.99.  Â In nine hours, Woot sold nearly 5000 Kindles.  Â This led to an AP article about the Woot sale to Amazon.  Â The AP used content from the Woot blog but didn’t ask for permission.  Â Why is this a big deal?  Â Because the AP instituted a new policy charging bloggers for use of any article (free use doesn’t exist in AP’s mind). Woot gently points out AP’s total hypocrisy:

Just to be fair about this, we've used your Â very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we've figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. But, hey. We're all friends here. And invoicing is Â such a hassle in today's paperless society, are we right? How about this: instead of cutting us a check for the web content you liberated from our site, all you'll need to do is show us your email receipt from today's two pack of Sennheiser Â MX400 Â In-Ear Headphones, and we'll call it even.

Woot, if I didn’t love you already, this would make me more amorous  Â than a virgin in an HP novel.

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Slate columnist Jan Swafford says that ebooks can never replace “real books” which, as Robin pointed out, begs the question whether authors who use solely the computer for drafting and redrafting can be deemed real authors.  Â Swafford uses Marshall McLuhan as the basis for the thesis that editing on paper will always be superior to editing on screen and thus real books have some kind of superiority.

Reader LisaCharlotte shared this article with me.  Â I think Swafford is correct that digital consumption is probably different than paper consumption but I’m unsure whether the latter is superior.

The best form of proofreading isn’t based on paper, though, it’s based on pure human effort.  Â When I was in law review, every article was edited more than once by more than one person.  Â Final proofing was done in a two person team.  Â One person would read aloud, using knocks on the table to denote punctuation and so forth.  Â The other person would read along silently, ensuring that what was read aloud matched the content on the page.  Â This type of proofing doesn’t require a printed out copy.  Â It just requires a readable copy. Oral reading of piece can help the editing process quite a bit.

My point is that editing, proofing, consumption of text is variable and may be very dependent on how the writer/editor/etc has been trained.

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