Blog

Tag: literature

  • November 17th, 2012 2:43am

    A Rant about E-Book Pricing

    fishingboatproceeds:

    So the final volume in Ally Condie’s MATCHED trilogy came out today. The last book, REACHED, is a great ending to an excellent series, and I think very highly of both the series and its author.

    All the pre-publication reviews have been great, and the initial Amazon user reviews were awesome, too. But then this afternoon, I noticed the overall rating for the book had dropped from five stars to four entirely because of a single one-star review complaining that the e-book is more expensive than the hardcover on Amazon. (Edit: The review has been deleted.)

    The hardcover of Reached retails for $17.99. The kindle edition retails for $10.99. As you will notice because you are great at math, THE E-BOOK IS FAR CHEAPER THAN THE HARDCOVER.

    But Amazon discounts the price of the hardcover. They discount it so much, in fact, that they LOSE MONEY on every sale of the hardcover. Why do they do this? So that you will buy your hardcover books at Amazon instead of at a bookstore, and then you will get used to buying things from Amazon, and then you will start to buy far more profitable items that are less steeply discounted, like a Mini Tractor for Your Kid or Kim Kardashian’s Perfume or E-BOOKS. Publishers cannot control this discounting.

    So an Amazon user writes a 1-star review of a book they haven’t read to blast the publisher/author for making the hardcover cheaper than the e-book. But in fact neither the author nor the publisher did any such thing. It is not Ally Condie’s fault that Amazon wants to lose money on her books.

    Obviously, if you don’t believe that an e-book is worth $10.99, then you shouldn’t purchase one. But it’s wrong to see pricing as a simple competition between print and e-book.

    In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.

  • November 6th, 2012 10:09am

    I no longer remember the faces of the dead women. There is only Kelly’s face, and that becomes more like Lucy with each passing night. I have bought Kelly clothes similar to those Lucy wore. The nightgown she wears before we couple is very like the shroud in which Lucy was buried. Kelly styles her hair like Lucy’s now. Soon, I hesitate to hope, Kelly will be Lucy.

    — Dr. Jack Seward – (Kim Newman) Anno Dracula (1992)

  • October 31st, 2012 10:09pm

    The noblest name in Allegory’s page,
    The hand that traced inexorable rage;
    A pleasing moralist whose page refined,
    Displays the deepest knowledge of the mind;
    A tender poet of a foreign tongue,
    (Indited in the language that he sung)
    A bard of brilliant but unlicensed page
    At once the shame and glory of our age,
    The prince of harmony and stirling sense,
    The ancient dramatist of eminence,
    The bard that paints imagination’s powers,
    And him whose song revives departed hours,
    Once more an ancient tragic bard recall,
    In boldness of design surpassing all.
    These names when rightly read, a name known
    Which gathers all their glories in its own.

    — Enigma by Edgar Allan Poe

  • October 27th, 2012 1:24pm

    As in sleeping-drink spices
    softly she loosens in the liquid-clear
    mirror her fatigued demeanor;
    and she puts her smile deep inside.

    And she waits while the liquid
    rises from it; then she pours her hair
    into the mirror, and, lifting one
    wondrous shoulder from the evening gown,

    she drinks quietly from her image. She drinks
    what a lover would drink feeling dazed,
    searching it, full of mistrust; and she only

    beckons to her maid when at the bottom
    of her mirror she finds candles, wardrobes,
    and the cloudy dregs of a late hour.

    — “Lady At A Mirror“ by Rainer Maria Rilke

  • October 26th, 2012 11:31pm

    Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

    — Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales (via andredoinel)

  • October 26th, 2012 11:18pm

    We cannot know his legendary head
    with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
    is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
    like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

    gleams in all its power. Otherwise
    the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
    a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
    to that dark center where procreation flared.

    Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
    beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
    and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

    would not, from all the borders of itself,
    burst like a star: for here there is no place
    that does not see you. You must change your life.

    — “Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke

  • October 26th, 2012 6:29pm

    When love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask.

    — Stephen King. “The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower”. (via fuckyeah-unclesteve)

  • October 24th, 2012 2:19pm

    Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

    — Stephen King (via hellanne)