Rupert & Me

Who wants free stuff????

Tomorrow, Saturday the 6th from Midnight to Midnight, we’ll be running a contest on the Rupert and Me Facebook Page. First, if you haven’t already, go become a fan. Do it right now! I’ll wait.

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Are you back? Good. Okay, this week we’re giving away one of two books: Reflections of the Pink Elephant or Explorers of the Unknown. These are printed, 1st edition copies, not ebooks. Now that you’re a fan, I want you to pick the book you’d like to get. Then post name of the novel, and it’s Amazon link, on your Facebook status. Then, on Rupert’s Facebook page, let me know that you’ve posted.  On Sunday I’ll take all the entered names and the order in which they were entered and plug them  into a magical randomizer at random.org. The winner will get their chosen book, signed and personalized by yours truly. If you don’t win this week, fret not, ’cause we’ll have another contest next week!

You’re probably not aware of this but there’s a war going on. You see, like the music industry before it, the print industry is going through some painful changes.

Ebooks have been around for a while. And there have been many ebook readers over the years as well. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the ebook reader began to be legitimatized with the Sony eReader in 2006. It helped that Sony launched with it’s own ebook store. Unfortunately, the ebook prices were the same as the physical book prices. Why buy a digital file if I can buy the physical thing for the same price? There was just no real incentive.

Then Amazon got in on it. The Kindle came out almost a year later. Technically speaking, it wasn’t really any different than the Sony eReader. Reading a book is fairly simple, there’s not many different ways it can revolutionize the concept. But what Amazon had that Sony didn’t was competitive pricing. NYT Bestsellers were listed at $9.99. Yes, there were still a few books that slipped through with hardback pricing, but more often than not, it was $9.99 or less. Plus, Amazon’s DTP problem was very self-publisher friendly.

A few weeks ago Amazon announced an initiative in which all Kindle books wouldn’t be priced higher than $9.99 and there would be higher royalty rates. This caused rumblings within the publishing community and with the arrival of Apple’s iPad it’s turned into an all out war.

At first glance it appears that Apple’s going to be imposing less stringent guidelines for book pricing in their iBook Store. This means publishers can charge whatever they want for their book(which, in all fairness, is their right as publishers). So now the publishers are turning to Amazon and telling them they don’t like their $9.99 model. Amazon responded by pulling an entire publishers catalog(books both digital and print) from theirsite. For about a week you couldn’t buy anything published by MacMillian Books. MacMillian publishes these imprints:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FSG Hardcovers

FSG Paperbacks

Hill & Wang

Faber & Faber

First Second

Henry Holt & Co.

Henry Holt Hardcovers

Henry Holt Paperbacks

Metropolitan Books

Times Books

Macmillan Audio

Behind the Wheel

Nature Publishing Group

Palgrave Macmillan

Picador

Quick and Dirty Tips

Scientific American

St. Martin’s Press

Minotaur Books

Thomas Dunne Books

Tor/Forge

Tor Books

Forge Books

Orb Books

Tor/Seven Seas

Bedford, Freeman and Worth

Bedford/St. Martin’s

W.H. Freeman

Worth Publishers

BFW High School

iclicker

Hayden-McNeil

Palgrave Macmillan

Trade Books For Courses

FSG Books for Young Readers

Feiwel & Friends

Holt Books for Young Readers

Kingfisher

Roaring Brook

Priddy Books

Starscape/Tor Teen

Square Fish

Young Listeners

Macmillan Kids

That’s a lot of books. And, like the publishers, Amazon is well within their right to have done this. They are a private business and if they don’t want to do business with you they don’t have to.

Ultimately, though, Amazon caved and told MacMillian they could price their ebooks at whatever they want.

Now the other publishers have seen that  Amazon won’t hold too strongly to their convictions and they’re expressing their displeasure over Amazon’s new pricing model.

As an author and a reader, I like the idea of low prices for ebooks. It doesn’t make sense to spend $15 on a digital file when I can go spend $15 on the same product in physical form. In fact, I think $9.99 is still a little too much, but it’s better than the alternative. Personally, I think ebooks should max out at paperback prices. $5.99 or less. That seems reasonable to me.

Of course, the publishing industry is very reluctant to enter the digital age and honestly, I don’t know why. It’s cheaper to produce an ebook than it is to produce a printed book. At the very least this should appeal to them, but it doesn’t. Or maybe it does and that’s why they want to keep charging so much: more profits on higher profit margins. So, they’re just being greedy?

Or maybe they just don’t like change.

And now authors are getting into the fight, reminding everyone that they’re the real victims here. I hate it when people play the victim card. Here’s my problem with this: in this day and age you don’t have to be beholden to a publisher anymore. There are too many people out there writing books, making comics and making money and none of them are tied to a publisher. Authors don’t like it when their publisher fights with a distributor? Then stop working with the publisher. Learn how to market yourself, hire an editor and self-publish. It gets easier to do every day. I know we’d all like to live in the perfect world where all we have to do is worry about writing and not the business of writing. But it’s not a perfect world. Stop whining and get off your lazy butt. It’s not going to kill you to have to format your own book for a change.

Of course, there is the question of whether or not Apple’s iBook Store is going to be self publisher friendly. iTunes certainly isn’t. As I understand it if you’re an independent musician you can’t get into iTunes. Am I wrong on this?

It does seem to be a bit of a quandary. What’s going to happen, I wonder? Are the old school big time publishers going to win out and maintain their ironclad grip on the publishing industry? Or will they slowly die off, kicking and screaming the whole way, but ultimately leaving the industry open for people like me?

And speaking of me…

While everyone else’s ebook prices may skyrocket back up, mine are still under $3. You can get them for your Kindle, your iPhone/iPod Touch/maybe even iPad and everything else in-between.

So, it’s finally here. The mythical Apple tablet is no longer a myth, it is a reality. The iPad. I think I may squealed with glee during the entire presentation.

My netbook is already sold. I had it on eBay mere moments after the presentation had ended. My wife’s already trying to convince me to sell my Kindle. Which I just might…

To be fair, I have not actually held the iPad with my own two hands, yet(anyone know when Apple stores are going to be getting demo units?). But based on everything I’ve read and seen it is indeed everything that I have always hoped for in a tablet.

My only two criticisms of the device(again, haven’t actually held it so I may end up with more or less) is the lack of USB ports and it’s square-ish design. Both of which are understandable design choices(magazines, books and comics aren’t made in widescreen and there are plenty of apps to transfer data wirelessly on and off the iPod/ Touch/iPhone/iPad OS).

You have to understand, I want a digital world. I want to be able to get my comics and books digitally. They take up less space and, usually, are a lot cheaper. And I want to have one device for that. My iPhone is not an e-reader or even a multimedia device. Yes, you can listen to music and podcasts on it comfortably(and, for sure, I dumped my iPod shortly after getting my iPhone), but I don’t want to watch a movie or read a book on that tiny screen. Conversely, the iPhone is a great productivity device and I love being able to have the internet at my fingertips whenever I need it. Which is why I won’t need my iPad to come with a 3G radio.

With an iPad I can keep my entire library on a single hard drive. I can comfortably and casually surf the web from my couch or bed. But then, I could have done that with my iPhone. No, for me, the iPad is all about the reading experience and maybe the viewing experience if my wife wants to watch some girly movie and I want to watch Bad Boys 2).

Yes, the pricing program for the iBook Store looks iffy($12.99 to $14.99) but let us not forget that every app that runs on the iPhone runs on the iPad. Which means your Kindle app will run on the iPad. And that means you still have access to Amazon’s competitively  priced library of books.

If I was a college student, I’d be all over this. Assuming, of course, the digital textbooks are considerably cheaper than their physical counterparts. But can you imagine carrying around the iPad, which only weighs 1.5 pounds, vs. five or six college textbooks that weigh much, much more than that?

And, sure, maybe the iPad isn’t quite living up to it’s potential just yet. But this is how Apple works. This is how Apple makes money. They introduce the base model and then upgrade it over time. Don’t like the way the iPad is right now? Wait a year. By then the 16GB model will have gone the way of the 4GB iPhone. The iPad will be up to 128GB and might even have a camera. Wait another year and you’ll probably get  multitasking and two models: 9.7 inch and another one, slightly bigger. That’s how Apple works. We all know this by now. We’ve been through this all before.

But I think we’re missing the most important thing here, people. Steve Jobs is a trekkie! Look at it: the iPhone is basically a combination of a communicator and a tricorder. And the iPad? Star Trek: TNG had the PADD 23 years ago!

iPad. PADD. Coincidence? I think not.

So, I finally saw Avatar. And I have to say, for a movie that was supposed to be so technically awesome, in it’s presentation it fell kind of flat for me(is there a pun in that because it’s 3D?).

First, a disclaimer. Aside from the T2 ride at MGM Studios, this was my first experience with a 3D film. Based on this experience I am unlikely to ever watch anything 3D movie again.

In my entire life.

Even with a gun to my head.

Even if you paid me a million dollars.

Okay, maybe if you paid me a million dollars. But it would have to be paid up front and in cash.

I don’t know if it was the projector or maybe I had unreasonably high expectations because everyone has raved about the way the film looks in 3D, but I thought it sucked. There was nothing that I saw that required this movie to be 3D. In fact, I found the poor 3D experience and the stupid 3D glasses so distracting I’m not sure how I feel about the film.

I think I might have liked the film. It certainly sounded like something I would have liked, having now heard the film three separate times(once during a view of It’s Complicated, once during a viewing of Did You Hear About the Morgans? And once during Avatar itself. Dang, they cranked up the volume on this film). And maybe had I seen it on a regular theater screen I could given you a better review. But I’m sorry, I cannot get past how much the 3D sucked. Sorry.

All I heard about was how James Cameron built all this new technology, designed this great film specifically for 3D and when I get to actually see it, it’s an underwhelming “meh.”

There was a scene at the beginning of the film where everyone’s waking up from their space voyage and floating around in zero gravity. It was a scene that I think would have looked pretty awesome if I could have actually seen it!

At some point in time I will watch Avatar again. And I will watch it on a regular screen and, hopefully, at that point I will be able to give an honest review of it.

All that being said. I did like it better than Aliens and the first two Terminator movies.

Gonna party like it’s my birthday!

Gonna party like it’s my birthday!

Gonna party like it’s my birthday!

I say this because it is my birthday today and I am going to party. I’ve got my action figures set up on the dining room table right now. Woot! As the kids these days say. Or something like that. I don’t know. What are the kids saying today?

So, I’m 27 years old today. I feel like I should be older. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe it has something to do with being married. Maybe it has something to do with having my own business. Maybe it has something to do with my wife and I trying to buy our first house together(BTW, on our fourth house to bid on. Any prayers in support of us getting this one would be greatly appreciated). Or maybe it’s because I have a single, solitary gray hair in my beard. One gray hair. What’s up with that? I’m not opposed to have gray hairs. But, come on. Just one? It just of looks ridiculous. I should have at least two.

I shall be honoring my time honored tradition of not doing any work today. It’s a fine tradition that I put into effect shortly after I moved out of my parents house seven years ago. Plus, this year I can do it and not use up any vacation time or sick time(not that I ever used sick time when I wasn’t sick and neither should you, kids! Lying is bad!). In fact, this column was written over the weekend just so that I didn’t have to worry about it today. And, as you can see in today’s comic, I didn’t even draw that.

I’ll be celebrating with my wonderful wife, her sister, brother-in-all, and two nieces. There will be dinner, cake and gifts. The rest of the day will probably be spent doing nothing and/or reading. Because I loves me some reading and it’s my birthday.

Of course, I won’t be doing much of anything tomorrow either, as I will be glued to my computer screen waiting to see if Apple finally releases its tablet. It’s a good thing I have such an awesome boss who doesn’t mind if I slack off every now and then.

Feel free to leave me birthday wishes in the comments or even become a fan of Rupert & Me on Facebook.