In which this website would be in fifth grade now, if it were human.
GOBLINBOX.COM is nine years old today.
It’s been on at least seven different servers. It’s been hand-coded, it’s been run on Movabletype and WordPress. It’s had ten different forums. There have been as many as eight different databases at a time. There have been innumerable themes and color schemes and layouts.
It has suffered multiple crashes and some pretty significant data loss. There are sub-folders filled with broken image galleries. I’ve been asked to remove material a half a dozen times by both friends and employers. It’s been hacked twice, it’s been served take-down orders thrice, and it nearly got me sued once.
At its peak, it was getting ten thousand unique hits each month (now it gets about 2k), was spidered, indexed, and botted within an inch of its life, and it used upwards of 90% of the server’s total bandwidth.
It has been the cause of my learning FrontPage, HTML, Dreamweaver, graphic design and slicing, CSS, DNS, PHP, server security, MySQL, legal crap, and a lot of social crap.
I’ve written here about tech, work, sci-fi, gadgets, books, media, death, sex, miscarriage, love, divorce, travel, loss, weather, panic and anxiety, surgery, spirituality, film photography, knitting, and music – and there are even some pretty good recipes.
I’ve learned that some people will bitch at me for writing about them, and that other people will bitch at me for not writing about them. I’ve learned that there’s an awful lot of stuff I can’t write about, but that I can still somehow manage to convey what I need to convey.
Friends and family keep up with me through this website. I’ve made lots of new friends through this website. Some of them are old friends now, some of them dropped off the Internet, some of them I now know in real life.
Many of the blogs I’ve followed over the years are gone now. People are always announcing sabbaticals, or deleting their sites, or drifting away quietly. I’ve never announced a break, and never even felt the desire to do so. I love this website, and I really mean it when I say Here’s to another nine years!
When I’ve needed it most, I’ve received tremendous love and support here, and I truly cherish that. Thank you, all who come to visit, each and every one of you, old or new. I mean it. Even if you don’t comment.
If you want, you can take a trip with me down memory lane and look at the Internet archive entries. Remember when the site was orange? When it was purple? Those crazy Xmas themes I used to build? Hah!
GOBLINBOX.COM is nine years old today. Nine! Nine.
Tags: goblinbox's birthday
In which I flail around a bit more because apparently I’m a bit of a moron.
When you’re fourteen, you go to high school. That’s just what you do; everybody knows this. When you’re eighteen, you go to college. After college, you go to work and strive to pay off your student loans.
Eventually, you meet someone and form an alliance that involves bodily fluids at the least, and generally laundry and motor vehicle titles as well.
If you’re a breeder, you then proceed to breed. The expectation is so pervasive that you probably take a few stabs at it even if you don’t really want to. It’s just what you do.
After that it’s less clear what’s supposed to happen, or when, until the age of 65, at which point you’re supposed to be able to stop working. Beyond accumulating objects and thickening dramatically about the middle, there really isn’t a very clear action plan for people between, say, 30 and 65.
Hi! My name is Mush, I’m 41, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing!
I’m freaking out because I’m divorced with debt and no assets, and I have no job, no savings, no retirement fund, no car, no belongings, and no health insurance. A quick look at my UI paperwork confirms that I am mere months away from becoming a financial burden on my family/society. I have a lot of debt. I have no great skills or talents beyond a quick mind and a decent singing voice, and neither of those things have ever particularly made me much money.
I guess I’m supposed to be working a day job, engaging in hobbies on the side, and saving money for my old age. Sadly, I am not particularly good at this, and require many and varied vacations to keep me sane.
I am of a generation that thinks it should be happy more than responsible.
Right now, I’m having a crisis. I’m wondering if I should move so that I can find a day job… except that I don’t really want to move. Hell, I don’t even really want a day job – I want income. I have friends who fill my head with talk about doing music for a living. I have the idea that maybe I’m not finding a day job because it’s time for me to make money some other way. I have years and years of exposure to alternative ways of thinking that tell me sometimes it’s important to follow happiness rather than logic. I also live in a culture full of self-indulgent fuck-ups, so I have to consider that maybe the happiness-before-all-else approach lacks depth and creates debt. I also have a heart full of doubts about the kind of person I actually am because it seems to me that if I were the kind of person who lived in the city and gigged a lot, I’d already be doing that and clearly I’m not. I haven’t lived in a city for a looooong time. Honesty compels me to admit that I want to think of myself as a city girl, but I am not, in actual point of fact, able to call myself a city girl. Anyway, blah blah blah, I need to figure out if I’m going to stay here or go somewhere else, and to that end here are some bullet points, because who doesn’t love bullet points?
I should stay here because:
- I can afford to pay off my debt and travel. Well, when I have a job, that is.
- I’m in a good band, with good gigs lined up. I’m gaining recognition.
- I have friends, family, community.
- As the childless spinster in the family, it’s basically my duty to be here for G’ma.
- There’s no good reason to throw out the life I just spent the last three years building.
I should move away because:
- There’s no work here.
- There is greater chance of doing more music in a major metro area.
- Challenge. Pace. Exposure. Art! Culture!
- The life I’ve built here is common and can be duplicated pretty much anywhere, really.
I think that I don’t want to move away, but I can’t tell if I sincerely don’t want to move away or if I’ve convinced myself of the overwhelming difficulty of doing so and/or the likelihood of my failing to accomplish anything but abject poverty and fatigue.
In other words, am I failing to appreciate what I’ve got here? Am I romanticizing city life?
Yes, and yes. I’m playing four blues festivals this summer, and I’m meeting lots of great players as I get around more. I can get any old job if I have to, and it’s not like I’ve ever really been career-oriented anyway – if I was, I’d have a better skill set by now.
In the city I’d be bitching about loneliness, commute times, and constant poverty. Cities are fun when you vacation there; when you live there it’s high rent, late busses, and so much social churn that it takes a great deal of time and effort to meet the right people. You’re working 40 hours a week just to cover rent and utilities and your fucking debt settlement program, and you find that every week you’re a little more tired and a little less likely to go out and meet musicians. (When I lived in San Francisco, everyone I did meet, on those rare occasions when I had the energy to go out, was just trying to save up enough money to move away.) If you lack discipline, you end up buying all that cute shit you see all over the place to pad your nest with, and you never take another vacation again. Five years later, you still have no equity, no savings, and you could have stayed in your grandmother’s attic for $150 a month and at least gotten to play some blues festivals. Your boyfriend is still a stoner because all of your boyfriends are stoners, you’re like a goddamned stoner magnet, and don’t forget that wherever you go there you are.
Or maybe not. Maybe you move to the city, get a job, meet awesome people, and have a gig in a couple of months. Maybe you’re so engaged and challenged and invigorated that you don’t actually just hole up in your apartment when you’re not doing your day job, maybe you finally blossom because you have access to the things you need. Maybe you finally meet a nice vegetarian Hindu boy, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Maybe it’s rural and small town living that makes you so weird, and your gut desire to get back into the city is a real impulse and not a daydream and it’s just a goddamned shame that it’s taken you this long to even be able to seriously consider it.
Being alone means that nothing keeps me anywhere; I could try anything I wanted.
Of course, there’s the question of where. Portland? Seattle? Chicago? DC? New York? And the question of how much: I don’t have any savings right now. I could probably move to Portland on a couple hundred bucks. New York would require, what, fifteen hundred minimum? Not to mention that not all cities are created equal; after you’ve been to Chicago and New York, most left coast cities barely qualify for the description.
Except I don’t think I want to move. I want to go on an extended vacation, but I can’t afford to because I don’t have a goddamned job.
And then there are the things I know about myself: I’m not particularly driven. When I have the time, space, and resources to do stuff, I don’t do it. One can only blame lack of stimulation so much before she has to admit she’s fucking lazy by nature. Right now I’m not getting my CCNA and I’m not working out and I’m not playing guitar and I’m not writing and I’m not meditating. I didn’t do those things when I was a housewife, I didn’t do those things the last time I was unemployed and had free time, and why would I be any different somewhere else?
But there’s no work here and I need a job! I have bills to pay!
Gawd! I am having such a hard time figuring out what I want to do, and where I want to do it. I couldn’t possibly waffle any more than I am. Why do I have to be such a fucking Libra all the time?!
In which I can stay up all night if I want to, because I have nothing to do during the day.
Yesterday I watched TV and ate a burrito. That was my entire contribution to the world. Srsly.
Last night I left the house at 8 o’clock, picked up the Wolf, and went to Barnaby’s for open mic. I spent most of the evening sitting on the couch in the back playing with my iPod, but I did go sing a blues song with a couple of the Feedback boys. My voice isn’t really doing anything cool this week because of The Cold, but it was fun to sit in.
After open mic, the group migrated to Ming Court. People played pool. I read and had a couple of drinks.
After pool, there was poker. We drove to the afterhours party, but it turned into naptime instead. (Seriously. There were three people asleep on the couch. Adorable.) The Wolf and I went to Shari’s and had omelets; as we were finishing up his cell rang: poker was back on.
I didn’t play poker. I took a nap!
I got to bed at five this morning.
Anyway.
Tags: drunken debauchery, night owlery
In which there’s more about my attempt to earn the Lazy Girl Of The World crown!
This is a list of things I have NOT accomplished as of right this very minute:
- laundry
- visiting the WorkSource office
- playing guitar
- building a new template for this site
- contacting Washington eCycle
- taking the old clothes to charity
- cleaning my brother’s truck
- quitting smoking
- ripping Rocky Horror for Lannie
- going to the store for fava beans and lemons
- yoga
- exercise
- starting a diet to lose the pudge I’ve gained since being unemployed
- knitting
- sewing
- studying for the CCNA
- film photography
- making the bed
- taking the dog to the vet for her checkup
You gotta admit, that’s a whole lotta shit not goin’ on.
On the job front, I broke down and crafted a new résumé–one targeting office instead of tech positions–and sent it out a few times.
And The Cold has mellowed from zomg-I’m-getting-walking-pneumonia to a mere cold.
Anyway.
Tags: colds suck, lazy girl
In which there are germs.
I have a rotten chest cold. It sucks. I don’t like it.
I’m also pretty sure that nearly everyone is way cooler than me because goblinbox.com is gonna be nine in two weeks and I still don’t have a book deal.
That is all.
Tags: colds suck
In which it was really exciting there for a minute, but then my hopes were dashed.
I found a job under Tech Support on craigslist. It looked good. I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and clicked the link to apply for it. After I finished the online quiz – five fairly interesting but slightly dated tech questions I answered with the help of my boyfriend, Google – but before I was able to upload my résumé, my netbook halted and I had to reboot. I tried to finish the job application afterward, but the site wouldn’t let me back in nor would it let me start over.
Fast forward a week, and I get the following email:
Your name and email came through on our JobVite system notifying me that you applied for our Solutions Center Engineer position and have passed our initial essay quiz; however, your information is incomplete in our system. If you are still interested in this position can you please complete your profile on our site or send me a copy of your resume?
Oh boy, can I! I get all excited and email my résumé. It’s a telecommuting job; I’d get to work from home. The main company’s in Seattle and I’d have to go there for training, but that’s no biggie. Tech support from home! Talk about an excellent solution to my employment/location issues! Before the day was out I had two phone interviews scheduled for today.
I went and read through the employer’s entire site. I learned they’re solvent and growing and in desperate need of technicians. I even joined their forum and answered a bunch of support queries. For free.
I went to bed early and got up early. By nine o’clock this morning I had dressed, eaten, and even made my bed. I had a mug of tea and I was sitting in front of my computer with my Bluetooth headset on, ready to go.
First thing the caller says is that I need to be in front of a computer, ideally with a headset on, so that I can search for answers. Since I hadn’t been told any of this, I was pretty thrilled with myself for being so insightful. Then he proceeds to start off with a question I don’t know the answer to (“Name at least five ways programs can autostart with Windows, in addition to the Startup folder”), followed by two more (“What does it mean to back up the registry?” and “Are you an expert in msconfig?”) to which I have to answer, “I don’t know,” and “No, I’m currently not.”
There are five ways Windows starts applications? Okay. I didn’t know that. I figured there were two: launch the app at startup, and do not launch the app at startup. I mean, an app’s either in the startup list or it isn’t, right? I told the interviewer that while I was furiously googling “how does Windows launch applications?” and giving great phone (“Typically, when I’m looking something up, I chat with the customer so they don’t have to listen to dead air, but in this context I don’t really have any small talk,” I say. The interviewer says, “We just put them on hold,” which tells me they don’t give a shit about customer service and are probably metric-oriented. Hmm).
I’m not a registry jock; I’ve spent ten years working for ISPs telling people to take their virus-infested shit someplace else for removal. I’m in my own computer’s registry maybe twice a year, and in customers’ registries, like, six times in the entire past decade. Pretty much every employer I’ve ever had has considered registry edits to be a liability nightmare and consequently I haven’t learned much on the topic.
I tell the interviewer all this, admit that I don’t believe that I understand the gist of his last question, and then qualify that I can learn whatever I need to know pretty much right away. He brusquely tells me that I can’t. “There’s a three-day training for this position, and it presupposes a deep knowledge of registry issues,” he says. “To remove viruses that are so new AV apps aren’t defending against them, you need to understand how programs start with Windows and cut them out surgically.”
Ah. It’s a full-time virus removal job. Yuck.
While the job description does say, “Troubleshooting Windows XP platform to registry level,” it doesn’t emphasize that quite enough, IMO: there’s a bunch of other stuff on there that I’m actually really good at. I think it should say, “We do massive quantities of zero-day virus removal and we need registry phreaks. Your apprehension of TCP/IP is pretty much irrelevant to us because people call their ISPs for that shit.”
The interviewer somehow managed to make me feel stupid – I’m not! I p0wn support! – when he said, “Well, we really need people who actually know how Windows works, so I see no reason to continue this evaluation. I thank you for your time–”
“Your job description,” I interrupted, “says that you’re looking for responsible phone techs with networking skills and the ability to set up and troubleshoot LANs and peripherals. But what I’m hearing now is that you actually just do remote virus removal all day? Is this correct?” He affirms. I really don’t want to remove viruses for a living, but I’d been really excited yesterday and now I feel uncomfortable and belittled. He starts to conclude the conversation again. I interrupt again and invite him to have a nice day. The interview terminates.
Oh, well. At least I don’t have to remove fucking viruses.
Tags: I need a job
In which I somehow manage to fill my days but I don’t feel like I’m actually doing anything.
Just a few rando things before the video:
- My netbook is all better after the rebuild. Yay!
- I sorta-kinda have a boyfriend, but we never see each other because we both gig, he’s on a pretty committed night schedule, and neither of us can entertain in our places of residence.
- I’ve gotten a response from a job application! Unfortunately, it’s for a part-time support job on the other side of the state and it only pays about a buck an hour over minimum wage.
- I ran out of business cards for my rockstar persona, so I ordered more today. I figured I needed them, since I’ll be doing about five blues festivals with Coyote Kings this summer. VERY EXCITING!
- G’ma won’t stop buying Purina; it’s cheap and I think she objects to paying twice as much for dog food. I object to Purina because it’s essentially non-digestible (the “crude protein” on the label is ground up non-food animal parts) and does weird things having to do with elimination to my dog that you really don’t want to hear about. I am now buying Iams myself and leaving it lying around in an effort to keep Bindu’s colon from falling out of her ass. (Yes, I fed and bought food for my own dog for over a decade; I just don’t get the opportunity to do so any longer.) I did get G’ma to quit giving Bindu canned food every damned day, though!
- I had my acrylic nails removed last week, for two reasons: I feel guilty paying for fills when I’m unemployed, and I wanted to maybe play a little guitar. My nailbeds still feel REALLY WEIRD.
- You should check out this picture of my breakfast.
Okay, since you’ve all been such good boys and girls, now we can watch some television!
Last Saturday, I played with the Coyote Kings at the Ice Harbor brew pub in Kennewick, WA. Below is some footage from the third set of a song Rob wrote for me to sing, called “You Don’t Like (What’s Goin’ On)”:
I sound all right, for a pudgy Irish chick, don’t you think?
Tags: I'm a rockstar
In which it’s that time of year again!
About every year, Windows gets reinstalled on my personal computer.
This is not because I enjoy reinstalling Windows, oh no. It’s because it shits the bed about every twelve months and has to be reinstalled.
My darling Eee PC 900HA (my baby, my littlest, my daily driver) started hanging ultra mega hard* about a week ago, and for various reasons – namely drunkenness and debauchery, plus a lot of gigging – I didn’t get it fixed right away.
My brother took a look at it and agreed with me that the issue wasn’t, in fact, hardware failure (it’s so great to have a geek next door!) which was lovely because of course the thing’s a month out of warranty.
I could only tweet from my phone because my iPod Touch battery died since I couldn’t plug it into the netbook. My Twitter, blog, and Facebook presence suffered mightily, and don’t even get me started on my lack of coherent job search. I also failed to help a friend’s friend with his computer shopping, missed a bunch of FB memes of varying hilarity, am way behind on my email, and didn’t manage to properly thank PJ for the unexpected parcel full of wool yarn and bath salts.
My Internet withdrawal finally got to the part with the DTs and drooling, so today I borrowed from my brother, who is awesome, a giant external hard drive and his laptop.
Right now I’m backing up my data onto the external drive while I apply for about six jobs via the laptop. (I’m afraid that one of the “jobs” was a bogus phishing attempt and I gave them my fucking email address and phone number before I figured it out. Creeps! A pox on their houses!)
When the backup completes I’ll wipe the Eee PC clean, format it, partition it, install Windows, download service packs, download updates, install applications, and then transfer my data back onto it. And then? Then I’ll have normal, regular, working, non-crashing, non-OMFG-THIS-IS-SO-PISSING-ME-OFF! access to the Internet, yea verily, and it shall Be Good!
*Geeky Details: I installed .NET the day before the issue became apparent; not sure if that’s related. Netbook booted up fine, boot booster was running, all good. Windows loaded, apps loaded. Used the thing and it would just… hang. No drive activity at all. Forever, until hard-booted. Uptime varied from a few minutes to half an hour. I checked my tools and it seemed there was a lot of services.exe activity, but there was also more ‘net activity than I’d normally expect. Virus? Full scans found no viruses or rootkits. After each hang, it would reboot as if it hadn’t been turned off improperly (save once, the second time, when scandisk told me it had had to repair a bunch of kernel files). If I turned it on and didn’t launch any applications, it would run almost indefinitely, but all the apps I ran – Firefix, iTunes, Calibre, even Process Explorer – would cause it to just seize up. It hasn’t seized once during the hour-plus process of copying files to the external drive. A registry cleaner app told me my registry was a hot tranny mess. I blame Canada.
In which I drop by briefly on my way to a gig.
The co-op finally emailed Friday afternoon: they thanked me but declined, deciding instead to hire from within.
I am having a full-on romance, complete with poetry and chocolates and necking and stuff. It’s awesome. We’re apart this weekend, though, because we’re both gigging in different towns.
The only work interest I’ve gotten appears to be a recruiter for a 3rd tier support gig. The pay sounds too high to be legit, though, so I suspect it’s crap.
Windows Update killed my netbook; a system restore seems to have solved the problem.
Played the Parkade in Kennewick last night; fun little bar. Tonight we’re at Dax’s in Richland.
Oh, I really need to be in the shower about five minutes ago! Ciao!
In which there’s no new job, but there is a new beau.
The co-op hasn’t called.
My last contact with them was on January 19th; it’s been nearly three weeks. If they were going to hire me, they’d have done so by now.
I’ve been applying for three jobs every week just like I’m supposed to, and I haven’t even gotten a call back. The most encouragement I’ve gotten is the occasional automated “Thank you for your interest” email.
There’s no work in my industry. I’m either going to have to get a secretarial job or move away. Period.
There is some work in the Tricities, but I am not driving two hours a day for work; I utterly and unashamedly lack the commute gene. I’m not interested in moving to the Tricities, either, because the whole point of living around here is family and free rent while I finish paying off my debt settlement program. Living in Pasco would be not only silly, but counter-productive.
I don’t want a bookkeeping job, I don’t want to make nine bucks an hour, and I literally have no office-appropriate clothes. None.
So, yeah: this is beginning to suck.
~+~+~
But then there’s the bass player. (He’s actually more of a guitar player/songwriter, apparently, but I usually see him playing bass.) He’s six feet and change, has long black hair, and wears an AC/DC hat most of the time. I can’t remember how to spell the name of his tribe, but he’s Native (yes, this means virtually no body hair!) and he’s more or less from Alaska though he hasn’t been there in years.
I’ve known him socially for a couple of years, sat in with his band a few times. His number’s been in my phone for the past year; he texts when they’re playing somewhere.
Not too long ago we started texting each other a lot. I don’t remember why; it just happened. Thank yous, jokes, anything-happening-tonight questions, that sort of thing. Then I went to one of his gigs with Curt & Shelley, and he and I talked between sets. Then there was more texting, and a week or two later we ended up in the same room and started talking again. We went to the Green; he kissed me apropos of nothing. Then there was an after hours and he caught a ride with me in the truck…
In the past six days, we’ve spent about seventeen hours making out while parked in his driveway. (For various reasons neither of us can bring people home, so we’re just parking like teenagers.) It’s been epic and awesome and consuming and fantastic, and since I’ve been so busy staying up all night and sleeping all day I’ve been in total denial about the fact that the co-op hasn’t been calling. Yay!
The other morning, moments before dawn, we unclinched to smoke. The windows were fogged. My Zippo wouldn’t light. His Zippos wouldn’t light, and neither would the Bic until we opened a window. Suddenly they all worked. (I have no idea why we had five lighters between us, but it made for excellent testing.) Science! I’m still trying to determine why, if there wasn’t enough oxygen to light a lighter, I didn’t just go ahead and pass out. Maybe it was a pressure or humidity thing? Either way, it was profoundly amusing at the time. “We broke fire! The entire concept of fire, we’ve BROKEN it! NO ONE MAKES OUT LIKE WE DO!”
He explained about his last breakup. I explained that I just don’t want anybody to want anything from me. He said he wasn’t even remotely interested in meeting anybody. I told him I wanted a relationship like I want an ice pick in my eye socket. He told me how his relationships end. I told him how mine end. He squinted at me and asked me if I was going to dump him. I squinted back and said I had no way of knowing that. He hugged me and told me that he’d teach me to play Russian backgammon. I said Russian backgammon could very easily be the secret to longevity.
He introduced me to most of his friends and the entire Feedback entourage. I told my friends about him. He came to my gig last Saturday. I met his mom. We’ve been holding hands in public.
Which means I have a fucking BOYFRIEND, people. Me. The one who totally did not want a boyfriend? Yeah.
I’d probably be pissed off about it if it weren’t so freakin’ awesome.
In which I share a brief list of my recent activities.
Sunday night I set my alarm for 8 o’clock because I believe that I need to start getting my sleep cycle back to normal grown-up hours. Monday I got up at 8:30, which is much better than 2 o’clock, and drank a very large cup of coffee to keep myself that way.
With all that daylight I accomplished bathing, walking, visiting the post office, returning social phone calls, and filing my taxes. I read the NYT, finished a book, and started two more.
I bought tofu at the store and made an awesome Japanese curry and ate it over noodles, then I did the dishes.
I installed Python 2.6 and IDLE and worked through several pages of an online Python tutorial.
In the evening, The Three Js blew up my phone with texts so I caved to peer pressure and went and played Wii bowling with them at the PnE (Jules has decided we must henceforth call it “the Peony”). My Wii bowling is exactly like my IRL bowling, which is sort of disturbing, really.
The Three J’s took off around eleven and I ended up hanging out with some musicians I know. We went to The Green, and then to three different after-hours parties (only one of which existed), and after that, well, I may have unexpectedly spent three entire hours making out while parked in a driveway like a sixteen-year-old and not gotten home until dawn. Oops.
It was freakin’ awesome, btw.
I slept from 7 until about noon. I’m so tired my brain is literally buzzing.
There may or may not be a dinner party with The Three Js this evening. If not, there’s a birthday party at the PnE, or I might just pass out, except I really want to be on a normal schedule.
Unemployment is kicking my arse.
In which publishers and sellers alike seem to be on the verge of losing their minds.
First off, let me just say that I’ve been reading ebooks since 1994. They’re not new. This whole ebook thing has been coming for a long, long time, and I can’t figure out why the big book publishers can’t figure out how to monetize ebooks without acting like morons.
Second off, I’ve been buying ebooks for a long time too, and I’ve read a lot of ebooks on a lot of platforms. Those are my creds as an ebook reader, so I kinda know what I’m talking about here, from a customer’s point of view. Seriously, I only know one person who has been reading ebooks as long as I have (this means you, NLW).
Third off, what the fuck is going on over at Amazon? They’ve pulled literally every Macmillan title due to some kind of “pricing dispute.” Apparently, Macmillan, after learning that the Apple ebook store will let them charge more than $9.99 per title, has decided that Amazon should do the same. Since Amazon sells virtually all of its ebooks at the $9.99 pricepoint, they pulled the Macmillan titles! (My beloved Tor is a Macmillan imprint, BTW.) It’s a freakin’ mess, and you know who’s getting hurt?
The authors. Because their BOOKS AREN’T SELLING.
A lot of treeware publishers are doing a terrible job embracing the ebook format. They’re running around carrying on about DRM and sounding like idiot RIAA executives from the 90’s. It’s a mess. They should all go read Eric Flint’s brilliant argument for loss leaders and against DRM, written a decade ago, posted at the Baen Free Library.
Here are some truths:
1. DRM DOES NOT PROTECT YOUR CONTENT! EVER!
2. PIRACY IS NOT THAT BIG OF A GODDAMNED PROBLEM!
3. THE BIGGEST PROBLEM FOR AUTHORS IS EXPOSURE!
1. I have never given anyone an ebook that I have purchased. NEVER. Not once. (Well, maybe once or twice, but if so I don’t remember it.) But if I wanted to give someone an ebook, the file format wouldn’t matter – any secure format can be broken. Back when the iTunes store was still selling music with DRM, all you had to do to break it was burn your songs to disc and then rip them back into your library! Duh! I have software on my computer right now that will break DRM on music, video, and certain ebook formats. Why? Because sometimes I want to use my content on hardware other than the hardware the seller wants me to use it on. Since I PAID FOR IT, I feel completely fine about breaking the DRM for my own ends, just as I feel fine tearing a blank page out of a treeware book to write a note on.
2. I’ve read absurd projections by some publishers; they claim they would lose a huge amount of money if they distributed new book releases in non-secure ebook format. WTF, over? They sound just like the record companies. I can’t believe these people didn’t pay attention to electronic formats in the music industry! Where the hell were they? Yes, some content gets pirated, but so what? It’s free advertisement! A truly heartening percentage of the ebook reading public is made up of moral people who will, if they can, pay for things they’ve enjoyed. Piracy does not “lose” you money. You can’t lose money you never had in the first place.
3. And, as they say so well over at Baen, loss leaders WORK. If you have a trilogy, give the first book away for free in ebook format. It’s cheap because all you have to do is format it once and host it; there are no manufacturing costs involved. You’ll find (if the book doesn’t suck) that the entire trilogy’s sales will increase: win/win for publisher and author.
Hey big publishers, the electronics are coming! You gotta get ready! It used to be a sub-market of weirdos like me with rare hardware, but now we’ve got the Kindle and the iPad and by the end of this decade the ebook format is going to be ubiquitous. You need to figure this out tout de suite. You are going to have to embrace the ebook format. You are going to have to take a smaller cut on electronic books, and you are going to have to change your product release cycle to quit holding ebook versions for ten months and then overcharging for them.
We, your audience, know perfectly well that the cost of producing a treeware book is SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER than the cost of releasing an ebook, and it pisses us off when you set ebook price points at hardcover levels. (I didn’t buy the a particular Guy Gavriel Kay book for over five years because it was nearly thirty bucks. THIRTY BUCKS FOR AN EBOOK? I waited until it came down to proper ebook range before I bought it.) It also pisses us off when we learn that between you and the ebook vendor, authors are making pennies off of ebooks – that’s why we buy them, when we can, directly from the author’s website, or from ebook sellers who are known to pay higher percentages.
With the paper, printing, and shipping out of the equation, all a publisher does is select, edit, and promote. That pretty much makes you an agent, which lowers your take pretty significantly. Which is okay, because the book market is huge. Readers tend to read a lot, and ebook readers will continue to make it easier and easier to read (and buy) a lot of content.
You have got to change.
Please, do it more gracefully than the music industry did, mmm’kay? You need to get ebooks to market alongside the treeware versions, and yes, you have to charge less for them. You have to select industry-standard formats; don’t bring yet another format to the table because there are already dozens. Forget about stupid DRM, too, because it DOESN’T DO ANYTHING BUT ANNOY EVERYONE. Design and implement appropriate sales tracking, so that you can see for yourself that ebooks can actually increase treeware sales. (Look at Cory Doctorow! He releases all his books in ebook format… for free! And he’s a success. Go figure!)
Believe me. This doesn’t have to be scary, and you don’t have to look stupid. Mellow out, there, big fellas. It’ll be okay.
Tags: ebooks
