Comics piracy

Comix
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Tom Spurgeon on whether comics publishers should look at piracy for online pointers:

Two huge on-line manga stories may clinch this CCI as the Year Of Digital Comics Announcements. Viz launched its Viz Manga site, I believe in conjunction with an anniversary party; a group of Japanese publishers discussed their JManga effort at a panel devoted to same. I have no idea if either of these ventures will be successful. Strangely, you can make a case either way based on the thriving on-line piracy of such material. On the one hand, piracy has shown that consumers will indeed process this material on-line; on the other hand, paying for such material on-line as is the case with at least the Viz effort is an entirely different process. Heck, you can even make the case that piracy will have little to do with either effort, and I bet those involved will even make that case so as to duck the issue entirely.

And they would be right. The only thing comic book piracy proves is that people are willing to read comics on the screen, which we knew anyway. Apart from that I don’t think piracy proves one or another that going digital will be succesful or not for any given comics publisher. Certainly much less so than e.g. music piracy showed the way for legal downloads. The piracy scene is fairly hardcore & packratty, relatively small compared to other forms of piracy and getting pirated comics requires a moderate bit of technological skill in that you have to be able to deal with bit torrents or Usenet and know how to deal with *.cbr/cbz files. Hard as it may seem, the people involved, pirates and downloaders both are genuine comics fans, probably buying comics as well as downloading them. It’s not clear that this is the kind of audience publishers should try to reach when it’s almost as limited as the core comics audience anyway.

What comics publishers should try to do is to reach the much bigger audience that quite likes comics, but not enough to bother going to comics shops. Comics need to be available easily, cheaply and of interest to mainstream audiences. Worrying about piracy doesn’t help.

Bringing back the midlist

books and books review, science fiction
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Last week I wrote about the new Gollancz ebooks gateway which will launch “this autumn”. A week later and we’re slowly getting to see which authors will have books on this service, as they start to mention it on their blogs.

One of the authors I’m most excited about, who most unfairly has been out of prints for years, is Pat Cadigan:

It’s been busy around here but, yes, in case you haven’t heard me turning handsprings from wherever you are, Orion/Gollancz is bringing all of my work back into print. Synners is going to be in the SF Masterworks series and Mindplayers, Fools, and Tea From An Empty Cup will be published in a single omnibus volume. My collections Patterns and Dirty Work will be ebooks.

And all will be part of Orion’s SF Gateway program.

also back in print, Nicola Griffith’s first two science fiction novels:

Ammonite appeared in early 1993 (from Ballantine/Del Rey in the US and HarperCollins/Grafton in the UK). It won some awards. Slow River followed two years later (ditto). And ditto. But the books still went out of print in the UK. (That’s the UK publishing reality. It’s different in the US. Here both books here have been through a zillion printings and still sell steadily, if not spectacularly, in print and digital editions.)

So it’s wonderful to be able to announce that I’ll finally be a Gollancz author–back where I started all those years ago. Repeat Yodel of Triumph, add Nod of Satisfaction, and follow, as always, with beer.

I was already interested in seeing what Gollancz was up to ebookwise, but these two announcements make it much more likely that’ll will buy books through them. Much will still depend on price, easy of buying and the absence of intrusive DRM on the books. The price needs to be roughly in the range of what I would spend on secondhand paperbacks or it wouldn’t be worthwhile to me, though I am willing to pay a bit more for the convenience of buying online, certainly for authors like Nicola Griffith and Pat Cadigan.

As Pat Cadigan noted in her post, twenty-thirty years ago it was normal for most of science fiction’s back cataloque to be in print and easily available. In the last decades this backlist has been steadily eroded as it no longer made commercial sense to keep most authors in print. Epublishing changes this equation: once an ebook is created, selling more of them doesn’t cost more unlike with physical books, where new print runs are usually too expensive for moderately profitable books. The Gollancz intiative helps to re-establish the backlist, another good reason to support it.

(Edited to erase an incredibly stupid brainfart; see comments.)

Life abides

Natural World, posts interesting only to me
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office plant in bloom

In a shocking development that has to be symbolic of something, the horribly ugly chosen because it’s hardy and can handle neglect office plant located next to my desk has actually flowered, which is the first time I’ve ever seen one of them do that. You don’t expect this from this sort of plant, which as well could’ve been plastic for all anybody cared, but there it is, spreading a lavender sort of scent reminiscent of the better sort of public conviences. Doesn’t do my headache any good.

Did remind me of a short story in one of thos Gardner Dozois Year’s Best Science Fiction bricks, about a team of biologists specialising in finding thought to be extinct plant species and such in office gardens and such. Nothing else remains from that story, but that stuck with me.