Internet

Hello, Hive Mind…

~ Cheryl ~ 24 Comments

It has been suggested to me that a good alternative to Amazon might be The Book Depository. The appear to have an excellent selection of books, and they deliver worldwide (whereas IndieBound is US-only). They say they deliver free, but of course their prices for individual books are slightly higher than Amazon’s because the delivery cost is built in.

Tero, who suggested them, is very happy with their service, so they can obviously cope with shipping to Finland. Does anyone else, particularly small publishers, have any experience of them?

War Continues: No One Dead (Yet)

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The online war between Amazon and Macmillan over Kindle book pricing has continued apace overnight. There was considerable cheering just before I went to bed when Amazon appeared to blink. However, as of writing this post, Macmillan books appear to still be absent from the Amazon US site save for the second hand market. Also the jury is very much out.

Scott Westerfeld has made a brave attempt to explain the economics, and what he says about publishing is pretty much true as I understand it (I always leave room to be corrected by Andrew Wheeler). However, I have enough trouble explaining the electricity industry’s issues with fixed and variable costs to young economics graduates. I really don’t expect the average book buyer to understand why the same book needs to be more expensive when it first comes out than a year down the road. They’ll just see that as gouging the fans.

One of the real problems that Macmillan & co have here is that to most readers an ebook edition that they have had to rent from Amazon (because you can’t own a Kindle edition) is of considerably less perceived value than a nice, solid, beautifully made hardcover edition; and consequently they feel it should cost a lot less. The economics of the industry are of no interest to them. And while us old fogies might have been prepared to wait a year for mass market paperback editions, the “Want it NOW!” Internet generation is not going to wait a few weeks for a Kindle edition, let alone several months. And if they don’t get what they want, when they want it, they will yell and scream about how unfair this is and how the publishers EVIL! and FULL OF FAIL!!!! and no better than [rest of post deleted due to invocation of Godwin’s Law].

And maybe Amazon are right. Maybe releasing a cheap Kindle edition at the same time as the hardcover won’t cannibalize the hardcover market (which only appeals to quaint old fogies like me) and will shift sufficient extra copies to make up for the lack of margin. Maybe they are right.

But actually I think that they are just desperate the establish the Kindle as the industry standard (both for format and use of DRM) before Apple can get up to steam and provide serious competition.

So where as we now? Well, as I said, Amazon posted what has been hailed as a climb down. It includes this interesting comment:

We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.

So, um, Macmillan are a bunch of evil capitalist bullies forcing Amazon to sell ebooks for much more than they are worth in order to line their filthy corporate pockets and pay their greedy authors to take their harems of model girlfriends on expensive, drug-fueled vacations to exclusive holiday resorts on private Caribbean islands. It must be true, just read the comments thread.

The idea that Macmillan is a bad guy because it has a monopoly over selling its own books attracted a great deal of laughter on my Twitter feed last night, and may yet give rise of a #badmonopolies meme. And yet it is a tactic straight out of the Faux News playbook. The rules are very simple. 1) The bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed; and 2) Appeal to your audience’s sense of entitlement. Like I said, read the comments thread. Just don’t be tempted to respond.

As of now, there is no sign of Macmillan books re-appearing for sale on the Amazon site. They may well do in the near future, but I’m guessing that Amazon will be whipping up the mob into deluging them with one star reviews and whatever other expressions of displeasure are currently possible on the site. The war isn’t over.

John Scalzi, who is a much wiser person when it comes to online communication than I am, has published a long analysis of all of the PR mistakes that Amazon has made over the weekend. He’s right too. They could have been a lot cleverer about the whole thing. But it is very clear from their “monopoly” post that they don’t think that they need to be clever. They are taking Glenn Beck as their role model. They don’t care. I have this mental image of the Amazon PR department dancing round a pile of Scalzi novels, sticking their tongues out and chanting, “Loser! Loser! One star reviews for you!”

The primary message that the Amazon post sends to me is one of contempt. Contempt for the publishers who supply them with the products they sell. Contempt for the authors who create that product. And most of all contempt for their customers whom they believe are too stupid to see that they are being manipulated. And that suggests to me, boring old fogey that I am, that they are not a company that I want to continue doing business with.

So, one of my jobs today will be to sign up for the IndieBound affiliate scheme and see what’s involved in making the switch. Hopefully it will be OK, though I’m already a little unhappy with them. I dislike having to sign up for a scheme before I can find out how the technology works. And I note that while they are admirably insistent that they don’t want to be linked to by sites that encourage discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age, they make no mention whatsoever of encouraging discrimination on the grounds of gender identity. Maybe they are hoping to get links from The Guardian.

The Amazon Thing

~ Cheryl ~ 23 Comments

Remember this logo?

Amazon Fail

That was a dispute about bigotry. It was a dispute about Amazon restricting access to books based on their content, and the private lives of the people who wrote them.

The current dispute is in some ways very different. It is an economic dispute between a retailer and a wholesaler. But it affects readers and writers all the same, and the fact that it can happen at all is worrying.

On the face of it, it doesn’t actually make much difference. If I want to buy a John Scalzi book there are plenty of places I can do so. I don’t have to go to Amazon. For Scalzi and his fellow authors it is somewhat more annoying. They won’t lose sales to existing fans, but they will lose sales from casual browsers who are looking for “a book” on Amazon. For the staff at Tor and other Macmillan-owned imprints it is very serious indeed, because it is going to mean a major hole in their company revenue. I’m not surprised that they are unhappy, though maybe they should be more angry with their management than with Amazon, because it is a fight I don’t think Macmillan can win.

What I guess Macmillan’s management was banking on is that there would be general outrage around teh intrawebs, just like there was over the LGBT issue and the removal of 1984 from Kindles. But in both of those cases it was clearly a dispute between Amazon and the consumer. Consumers were outraged, and said so. In this case Amazon has the consumers on their side. All they have to do is say, “you deserve ebooks for $9.99 or less,” and the masses will be out on the streets yelling, “vive la révolution!” Authors can complain all they like, but mostly what they’ll get in return is, “string the greedy bastards up from the lamp posts.” Because, just as “everyone knows” that Kevin and I have made a fortune from running Worldcon, “everyone knows” that once you are a published author your life is one long stream of expensive apartments, beach houses, private jets, cocaine and movie star girlfriends.

So what’s actually going on here?

Well, Amazon are in the retail business. They started out selling books, but now they sell lots of other things, and it can’t have escaped their notice that selling music is a darn sight easier than selling books. No warehouse, no logistics, all you need is a web site. Books could be sold that way too, and Amazon could make a lot more money, if only the damn book buyers would play ball. Unfortunately for Amazon, us book buyers have an irrational attachment to piles of paper. We say stupid things like, “it is easier on my eyes,” or even, “but I like the look of a shelf full of books.” So they need to persuade us to buy books electronically. One of the ways they can do that is by cutting the price.

With this in mind, Amazon says to the publishers, “we want to sell ebooks really cheap so that sales of ebooks, and incidentally our ebook reader, take off.” Macmillan says, “we’d rather maximize our revenue from ebooks than subsidize your hardware business.” And Amazon says, “Gee but that’s a nice little publishing business you have there, it would be sad if it were to accidentally get, you know, broken…”

There are two rather worrying things about this. The first is that a single retailer has become so dominant that it is able to bully a large, multi-national publisher in this way. That sort of market dominance is dangerous in any business. The second is the speed and efficiency with which Amazon can move against an opponent. As I said at the beginning, this is an economic dispute between two businesses, but exactly the same technology would be deployed against a new opponent for entirely different reasons (and indeed may have been already if you prefer not to believe Amazon’s protestations about a programmer error).

Personally I don’t have a huge stake in this. Despite what “everyone knows”, I don’t make a fortune out of Amazon. My income from Amazon links is around $10/month. I’d have no qualms about losing that. But I don’t have Amazon links on my sites to make money for myself, I have them there to encourage you lot to buy books. The best way to do that is to point you at Amazon. That’s true because they are a better book seller than anyone else. In my experience, they have what I want in stock, at a better price, and they deliver promptly without mistakes. (I note that I’m talking about Amazon US here, I gather from other people that Amazon UK is nowhere near as efficient.) Also Amazon’s affiliate program is more friendly and easier to use than anything else I have looked it.

I’m not a big fan of monopolies (state or private) and I prefer to see them broken down if possible. Therefore I would like to see Amazon have some decent competition in online bookselling. That’s especially true because Amazon appears to be wedded to the ambition to transform bookselling so that customers only ever rent books, they can never own them. I’d be happy to switch to using a different online store if I thought that they would provide as good a service, and be as easy for me to deal with, as Amazon are. It can’t be rocket science, surely?

The Perils of Re-Tweets

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Earlier today John Joseph Adams tweeted about The Windup Girl being featured in the io9 book club. I re-tweeted this, because it is a good book and I’d like to see people able to read it (it is only out in hardback right now). JJA also happened to say that the book was the “SF novel of the year”.

Anyway, people are kindly re-tweeting this information around, and some of them are stripping out the other attributions and just leaving me. So now it is me that is apparently saying that The Windup Girl is the “SF novel of the year.” And you know, it might be, but there will be four other books on my Hugo ballot as well. Twitter, however, has me quoted.

I don’t really mind this too much, but such things can be a problem. Not so long ago I said something fairly innocuous on Twitter and found it being RT’d, subtly altered, by a bunch of Islamophobes. So if you see someone being quoted on Twitter, try to check out the original tweet.

FGW Incompetence Gets Worse

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I have now had two separate “customer support” people from First Great Western write me condescending messages explaining that an error message of “URL is syntactically invalid” must be my fault for entering my credit card details incorrectly.

Sadly I am fairly sure that if I had submitted exactly the same bug report using a male name I would have got a lot more respect.

Web Site Incompetence

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

Last night I did some bookings for my trip to P-Con (GoH, the very wonderful Nick Harkaway). I had no trouble at all with booking the flight and hotel. They were both with Irish companies. The train ticket, on the other hand… I didn’t get that far as I had another train ticket to buy and the FGW web site crashed on me.

Why is it that UK companies* are so utterly incompetent when it comes to web sites? It has got to the stage where I dread using a web site if the company that created it is based in the UK. I can cope with the usual annoyances of only being able to use Internet Explorer and only being able to use credit cards registered in the UK, but I do at least expect the site to work. I do not expect it to give me an error message of “URL not syntactically valid” and have no means of recovery from that error.

And if that isn’t bad enough, I expect that when I report such an error I get treated seriously. I do not expect to be told that the problem was probably my fault for failing to enter my credit card billing address properly. It is entirely possible that I might have done so, but any competent web site will deal with that by producing an error message tell you what you have done wrong, and allowing you to correct the mistake. It should not produce a message understandable only by web programmers and then leave you with a blank screen.

So, First Great Western, your web site is crap, and your customer support is crap. Unfortunately you are the only option I have if I want to travel by train. I guess I will have to walk down to the station and buy my tickets there.

* Exception here for Sainsbury’s whose web site worked fine. OTOH, I am seriously considering changing banks because I’m so concerned about the RBS web site.

How Technology Should Work

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

A few months ago one of my laptops suffered a terminal dysfunction of its screen – it looked like the backlighting had failed. As I don’t have an external monitor here in Darkest Somerset I wasn’t able to test that theory immediately, and I decided not to buy a monitor until I was sure I had diagnosed the problem.

Then I went to Calfornia for a few weeks, bought Kevin a Wii for Christmas, and fell in love. There was no way I was going to be able to wait until my next planned US trip in March 2010 before my next Wii fix. So I bought one. And because there is only one functional TV in the house, which is my mother’s primary source of entertainment when it is too cold to go into the garden, I needed a screen.

Of course I only needed a really cheap screen, but these days it is hard to find anything other than an HD-ready flat screen TV. It looked like I was stuck with buying one. So I looked at a small one and noticed, to my delight, a VGA socket. One cable purchase later I had not only a functional Wii but also a functional laptop, provided that I don’t want to use them at the same time. What’s more, as there’s an indoor aerial in the house, I also have a semi-functional television (reception on an indoor aerial here is not that great, but not a disaster either).

I note also that because I have the BBC iPlayer on both the laptop and the Wii I can actually have rather better TV should I want it. My DSL connection isn’t quite fast enough for streaming TV at the moment, but there’s an upgrade available from my ISP at no extra cost. My only concern there is that the new deal has a download limit and I need to check how likely it is I’ll get hit with overage charges, given how much time I spend online, and how bandwidth heavy streaming TV is.

So this is how technology ought to work. One screen, many different purposes. It is nice to see something working properly for once.

The Desperate Quest for Eyeballs

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

There are many reasons why I don’t run Emerald City any more, but one of those that makes me glad of it is that I no longer feel any pressure to be a top-ranked web site in my field. Competition is all very well, but what you think you have to do to be successful can sometimes be ugly. Over the past week I have seen a bunch of editorial decisions that have brought this home to me very clearly. Here they are.

  • The Guardian ran an article on climate change by Sarah Palin;
  • SF Signal published a column by a newbie writer foolish enough to think that she could take down John Scalzi by playing victim politics;
  • The Bilerico Project, a supposed LGBTQ web site, ran a post so transphobic it might as well have been penned by Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson; and
  • The BBC headlined a web post: “Should homosexuals face execution?”

Newspapers such as the Daily Malice do this sort of thing all of the time. They are past masters at evading hate crime legislation by publishing articles that are just subtle enough to evade censure by the authorities (bearing in mind that the UK’s Press Complaints Commission is about as independent of the industry it is supposed to regulate as a glove puppet is of the person with a hand up its arse) but are very clear invitations to the bigoted to foam into paroxysms of hatred and bile. I expect that sort of thing from them, but not from the outlets listed above. So what’s going on?

Pretty clearly it is not editorial policy. The Guardian does not agree with Sarah Palin on climate change. I don’t think anyone at SF Signal believes that John Scalzi is out to prevent young writers from making a career in the business. Nor do I think that anyone on the Bilerico editorial board actually believes that trans people are deluded fools who should have been dealt with more sternly by their parents. And the BBC does not support the death penalty for homosexuality.

What I suspect is happening here is that all four venues have editors who feel under pressure to compete for attention in the blogosphere. They know that controversy is good for boosting your readership numbers, and at some point in the editorial decision-making process common sense goes out of the window and the desperate quest for eyeballs takes over. After all, for a commercial site, the more visitors you get the more advertising revenue you can pull.

The rationale that is always trotted out for this is that the site in question believes in fostering “debate”. Yeah, right. But there’s debate and debate. There’s polite exchange of views, and there’s yelling at each other across the ether. And at some point the whole thing devolves into an analog of bear baiting –- some unfortunate person or group is repeatedly poked with sharp sticks in the hope that it will be goaded into a furious rage and attack its tormentors with extreme violence for the entertainment of the bloodthirsty crowd.

The trouble is that it can be very successful. When the Guardian article went online my Twitter stream quickly filled up with UK people saying things along the lines of, “OMG!!! WTF??? [link]”, so I’m pretty sure the Palin article got some stellar viewing figures, me included because I was dumb enough to click on the link. The other three posts all have huge comment threads. Controversy works.

Up to a point.

Because then you have to deal with the fallout. As far as I know, the first two instances haven’t caused much in the way of lasting outrage, though I suspect the author of the SF Signal article may be rather sad and sorry as a result. I wouldn’t have exposed a contributor to public ridicule by posting something that inept. Elsewhere, however, the Bilerico article has left much of the trans community with the feeling that Bilerico’s editors view trans people as so much worthless trash to be pilloried at will for the entertainment of the masses; and the BBC has been fighting a damage limitation campaign ever since the news of their post hit Twitter.

Competing for attention on the Internet is never easy, and the closer you get to the top of the heap the harder it becomes. But sometimes editors have to sit back and ask themselves, “Do I really want to run that?” Mistakes are all too easy to make (and I’ve made a fair few in my time). Sometimes controversy isn’t worth the trouble it brings in its wake.

Note also that I have not included any links to the articles in question. One of the best ways we can stop the controversy merchants is to not stoke the feeding frenzy. If you must link to something, link to a post that discusses the original post, not to the post itself. That gives people the opportunity to bail before giving the miscreants in question any further boost to their viewing stats.

Docherty, Scalzi & Hugo

~ Cheryl

I have already posted to SFAW about Vincent Docherty’s long and carefully considered article concerning the eligibility of online publications for various Hugo Award categories. John Scalzi has now picked up on the story, at least in part because he wanted to state that he does not believe that Whatever is a fanzine:

So I wouldn’t put it forward for consideration as a fanzine, and if it were nominated in the category — which to be clear I would consider a long shot anyway — I would decline the nomination.

John’s reasoning is contrary to general fannish orthodoxy. His original point was that he felt that Whatever was not sufficiently about science fiction to be eligible. It has since been pointed out to him that many SF fanzines have very little (or even no) SFnal content, but he still says he would be uncomfortable with a nomination.

Given that John has made this public statement I feel obligated to note that I don’t regard this blog as a fanzine either. Emerald City was always conceived as a fanzine, regardless of how many people still claim that it wasn’t. It was published in issues, had a clear identity and purpose, and was generally magazine-like in its behavior. It even had proof readers (and I continue to be indebted to Anne and Kevin for all of their help). This blog, on the other hand, is not at all magazine-like in its behavior. Granted there are fanzines that are just as much a random collection of the author’s thoughts as this is of mine, but I maintain that they are mostly not very good fanzines, even if individual pieces of writing in them may sparkle magnificently.

John also briefly mentions the possibility of Whatever being a “related work”, and again I am in general agreement with him. Continuing web sites should not appear year-after-year in the ballot, and a blog like Whatever or Cheryl’s Mewsings does not have sufficient identity to be regarded as a “work”. It is possible that something like SFAW might achieve nomination once, but if it does then it should never be so honored again because it is pretty much impossible for a long-running web site to have sufficient new material in any one year to classify as a “new” work. If John (or I) were to produce an annual anthology containing the best of that year, or several years’, blog entries, that might be different, but John has already done that and I have no intention of doing so (because, let’s face it, no one would buy it).

So when you are filling in your Hugo ballots next year, please try to find some new names to put on them. I have a few good suggestions here.

Link Salad for Second Breakfast

~ Cheryl

Kevin and I are both very tired this morning. We have no idea why. However, breakfast and caffeine should fix that. In the meantime, in the great hobbit tradition of Second Breakfast, I offer up a big plate of link salad.

The Economics Of Online Magazines

~ Cheryl

People tend to have very odd ideas about how much money can be made out of SF&F activities. Kevin regularly has to deal with fans who are convinced he makes a fortune out of running conventions. Equally people have assumed that I made lots of money from running Emerald City. It ain’t so, people, especially if you want to pay contributors.

The folks are Crossed Genres do want to pay contributors. Right now they don’t pay very much. I got $10 for my article — less than I spent ordering a couple of paper copies of the magazine. Even so the magazine is currently down $1500 on the year to date. Bart Lieb explains more here, and Kay Holt asks for help with PR here.

It is a good magazine, folks. Please consider giving them some help.

Facebook Spam

~ Cheryl ~ 8 Comments

I’ve just taken the unusual (for me) step of de-friending someone on Facebook. Why? Because said person has been sending out “suggest you become a fan of” invitations for the same person once a week for over a month. The writer he wants me to become a fan of has a different name, but I suspect it is his pen name. In any case, if someone ignores a fan request once, they are not likely to take you up on it a second time, and absolutely not on the 5th. It just gets annoying. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, sensible marketing.

A Convention Experiment

~ Cheryl ~ 20 Comments

Kevin and I are running the web site for this year’s World Fantasy Con, this gives us an opportunity to experiment a little. We’ve done a couple of simple things that any convention could do, because they require nothing more than WordPress and a few plugins.

The first is the online restaurant guide, complete with Google Maps showing how to find each venue. Here’s the index.

The other, which I have just finished, is a filterable program schedule. It is just a simple blog with an entry for each program item, but I have used categories to allow you to select sub-sets of the data. The program participants are in as tags as well, and on the mobile interface those are selectable too. You can find the schedule here.

The are obvious short-cuts with the schedule. Most obviously I have dated everything in 2008 because WordPress doesn’t allow you to publish something with a date in the future. It would also be good to be able to select a combination of categories – say “readings on Thursday”. But the point is that this required no programming – I just created a new WordPress blog and spent a few hours doing data entry. With a little bit more thought and time, and maybe a custom plugin or two, I could do something a lot better.

Anyway, take a look, especially if you have an iPhone, and tell me what you think.

Rained Out

~ Cheryl

Yesterday was a relatively Internet free day. My DSL was out for the whole day. Because my business is dependent on the Internet I do have a mobile broadband account as backup, so I was able to answer email and the like. I was also able to keep up with Twitter and Facebook via the iPhone, but I wasn’t online all day like I usually am.

Why did this happen? Well, I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure it was because it rained. After all, this happens a lot just after a heavy rain storm. It suggests to me that there’s a fault with the wiring somewhere. And given that it started happening (a couple of years ago) just after some work was done on the telephone pole outside the house I’m pretty sure I know where to look.

The trouble is I can’t get anything done about it. I use Zen for my DSL service because they are very reliable and don’t try to con you with stupid cheap deals that come with lousy uptime and tight limits. However, I know from past experience what will happen if I call their tech support about this. It is an intermittent problem, so I won’t be able to demonstrate it happening. And worse, the tech support man (and I do mean male person here) will detect the stench of girl cooties all over the problem. So he will insist on subjecting me to days of patronizing tests, including insisting that I buy a new router, before he will believe anything I say. And then he will say that it is BT’s problem and he’ll have to pass it over to them.

Why don’t I just go straight to BT? Because the idiots of OfCom have allowed BT to compete in the market for DSL services, so if you have a problem with your DSL and you are not buying from them they will just blame your DSL provider and do nothing.

So instead I use the mobile broadband when I have to, and wait for the wires to dry out. It may be a pain, but it is much less frustrating than trying to get it fixed.

FTC: Some Sense At Last

~ Cheryl

GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan has finally managed to talk some sense about the new FTC regulations, rather than the ridiculous scaremongering of the past few days. Some of the latest post bears quoting:

“If people think that the FTC is going to issue them a citation for $11,000 because they failed to disclose that they got a free box of Pampers,” Cleland says, “that’s not true.”

“We have never brought a case against a consumer endorser and we’ve never brought a case against somebody simply for failure to disclose a material connection,” he explains. “Where we have brought cases, there are other issues involved, not only failing to disclose a material connection but also making other misrepresentations about a product, a serious product like a health product or something like that. We have brought those cases but not against the consumer endorser, we have brought those cases against the advertiser that was behind it.”

So, as I expected, no book reviewer is likely to be subject to massive fines. You can all stop hyperventilating now. (Or alternatively start talking about how the FTC is “obviously lying”, if you prefer.)

The GalleyCat post then goes on to talk about what this will mean for publishers, who are going to have to try to ensure that people they send freebies to do make unreasonable claims for those products.

You should note that all of the examples of possible unreasonable claims come from non-fiction books. Hogan admits that even silly hyperbole about a work of fiction is unlikely to attract the attention of the FTC. Even if you claimed that reading the latest Neal Stephenson caused you to lose weight because of all the effort needed to carry it around you’d probably be OK.

But there is still an outstanding question as to what is a legitimate review publication and what is a “celebrity endorsement”. The FTC clearly views bloggers as minor celebrities. But does that apply to everything published online? I would argue that Emerald City very clearly presented itself as a book review publication, whereas this blog is equally clearly my personal opinion. I ask that question because many of the people I have seen hyperventilating about the FTC ruling online have been people who run blogs or web sites that are very clearly dedicated primarily to book reviewing.

The people who I think may be covered by this sort of thing are folks like John Scalzi who very clearly are minor celebrities and whose blogs, like mine, are not mostly given over to reviews. But even then, as John mostly talks about fiction, he’s probably OK.

FTC Regulation Causes Blogger Panic

~ Cheryl ~ 9 Comments

The US Federal Trade Commission has finally issued the results of its investigation into advertising through blogging, and perhaps predictably a certain amount of panic has been caused in the blogosphere. People are starting to worry that they may be fined $11,000 if they fail to disclose that a book they reviewed was provided free by the publisher.

The problem with such legislation is that it has enormously broad scope. What the FTC is mainly after is the professional advertising blogger, and the celebrity endorser. There are plenty of companies out there who will pay people for writing blog “reviews” of products. Mostly these products are much more expensive than books. Equally celebrities are showered with free stuff from companies who hope they will like it and say so in public. A private individual writing about a book she got for free is very small fry in comparison.

Furthermore, the FTC is well aware that trying to control blogging is a pointless exercise. Richard Cleland, an FTC staff attorney quoted by Reuters, said:

Principally the requirements are about disclosure. Our concern is less with the individual bloggers (than) with the advertisers who are using the bloggers. [..] On the Internet, everything is whack-a-mole, and that’s why our focus is not going to be on these individual bloggers.

So technically, yes, book reviews are included in these regulations. Practically the FTC is unlikely to come after you. And even if they did, simply stating that you got the book for free is sufficient to cover you.

So why the panic? Well, a lot of web sites run by established media companies, especially those who publish a lot of product reviews, are busy pushing articles about how bloggers could face massive fines. Anyone would think that they wanted to discourage bloggers from writing reviews. I wonder why that might be?

Another Oppressed Minority

~ Cheryl ~ 14 Comments

While I was pleased to see New Scientist publishing a collection of fiction last week, I thought Stan Robinson’s associated attack on the Booker Prize was unlikely to get anywhere. The Woolf anecdote was good, but boosting one genre by attacking another is never going to work. And as the Booker folks explained to Alison Flood, they are dependent on what publishers send them, so they can’t be expected to take all of the blame.

Nevertheless, this being the Internet, is was only a matter of time before someone took exception to what Stan said and decided to play the Victim Politics card. Oh woe, we are oppressed! Us poor LitFic folks need our Booker Prize, because the evil, nasty science fiction folks have their own awards and get all the glory and the money and we have to have our own special award that’s only for us so we can get shiny things too, otherwise it is NOT FAIR!!! (Cue desperate sobbing.) Yes, really, here it is.

Also here’s someone else with an interesting table of how often different prizes get mentioned in the online media, based on searches of Google News.

That in itself is worth considering, though, because it introduces a question about what gets into the Google News search. Locus does, and io9. I’m pretty sure that SFAW doesn’t. What about, say SF Signal?

It turns out that the way to get into Google News is to ask Google if they will list you. They don’t guarantee to do so, but then after the recent HG Wells coverage it seems unlikely that they’d ban us. So, has anyone out there tried to get listed? And if so did it succeed?

BTW, the page for submitting content appears to be broken at the moment, which is why I haven’t done any experimentation.