May book log

[julesjones]

Ebooks in May:

Finished reading the third and fourth books in the Time Traders series by Andre Norton, having read the first two books and started the third in April. All four books are out of copyright and available as legal free downloads on Project Gutenberg and mirrors. This is the complete set of the original series written in the 50s and 60, although some co-authored books were added many years later.

Andre Norton -- The Gifts of Asti. Short story available from Project Gutenberg, briefly reviewed here.

Elizabeth Bear -- Shoggoths in Bloom. Novelette which I received as part of the Hugo Voters Packet, a collection of electronic editions of many of the works nominated for the Hugo Awards, made available to voting members of this year's Worldcon. It's also available as a free download at Bear's website. Hard to review without giving away too much about it. It's a moral fable riffing off Lovecraft. I admire the technical skill, and liked the story, but found myself feeling a little colder about it than I might have expected given the skill and subject matter. I think this is at least in part because I'm not into Lovecraft -- it's sufficiently well executed that I'm not excluded from the story, but I'm sure there's stuff I'm simply not getting. I'm also Not American, and I think this does have some influence when it comes to a visceral reaction to some of the subject matter.


Print books read in May:

Only one completed. Wandered into the remainder bookshop, and wandered out again with the hardback of the latest Dalziel and Pascoe novel, "A Cure For All Diseases" which I *had* been leaving until it came out in paperback because I hadn't expected to find time to read it. Sat down and read it that weekend, with much enjoyment.

Started a re-read of "Unnatural Causes", the third book in the Dalgliesh series by PD James.



I usually put links to Amazon on my book log, for the benefit of people who think, "I'd like to read that." I am now torn on this. Amazon have annoyed me once too often, and I really don't want to give them any more custom than I can help. On the other hand, I have always tried to offer multiple sources for stuff I pimp, especially when I've been doing some price comparison, and as far as I can tell nobody has ever bought something through any of the other links other than one episode of buying DVDs from Play, while I get one or two sales a month through Amazon. They also have the click-through stats available, so I can see how many people found the link interesting enough to visit, and I can see that a fair number of people do find the links worthwhile even if they don't buy anything. At ten or twenty quid a year I'm not doing it for the money, but it is nice to know whether people find the links useful. So no direct links this month, but I'm going to have to think about this a bit harder.

Comments

[miladyinsanity.livejournal.com]

FWIW, I figure people have their favorite booksellers, and they'll go look them up there anyway?

[julesjones]

Direct links do make it easier for people, particularly the ones who might go to Amazon to check out other reviews and then go and buy the book somewhere else. The other thing is that I can see from the click-through stats what sort of stuff particularly interests people -- for example, my posts about special offer prices on DVDs seem to be something that a lot of people actually use, so I've kept on doing them when I see something likely to be of interest to my flist.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

All four books are out of copyright

As she only died a handful of years ago, this is presumably due to some quirk of US copyright law that hasn't been rectified yet? (Says he who wallows in the luxury of Europe, where everything is copyright for 70 years after the author's death...)

[julesjones]

It's a hangover from the days when in the US you had to renew the copyright every so often, and many authors/publishers didn't bother if the book was out of print and thought likely to remain so. If the copyright had lapsed under those rules, it wasn't regained when they changed the rules, though copyrights which had been maintained were included in the change to the "author life plus x" rules. More details here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Copyright

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Foolish of me: I remember those days - hell, I was publishing in those days! - but I had assumed that recent changes would encompass earlier works, in the way that the upgrade from 50 to 70 years in Europe did, so that eg Kipling passed from in-copyright to out-of-copyright to in-copyright-again.

I still find it hard to credit that any system ever let books pass out of copyright in the author's lifetime; let alone that the authors concerned might still be living today. Lawks...

[julesjones]

I have mixed feelings on the whole thing -- not least because there are examples of the heirs and claimants making it impossible for any publisher to keep a book in print, and Norton is one of the cases where your choice is essentially second-hand or the few titles that escaped the copyright net.

In her case it's a quarrel between various people as to who gets what control over the literary rights. In others it's because heirs have inflated ideas about what the rights are worth, and demand bestseller advances and/or levels of creative control for small press or mid-list work. And that's before we get on to the cases where the heirs disapprove of the author and zir works, and find the warm glow of spite from effectively destroying the work more appealing than the prospect of making money from allowing continued publication.