Megatheriums for Breakfast

Yeah, well, I’ve been busy on so many fronts it’s ridiculous. But I’ve still been reading a lot.

Since it’s so long since I wrote about what I have been reading, this can only be the briefest of lists.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Hardcover, my own collection

This historical novel about Thomas Cromwell won the Man Booker Prize last year. I enjoyed it a lot – the historical period is endlessly fascinating (Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey and Anne Boleyn), and in the hands of Mantel, Cromwell comes across as a very sympathetic and interesting character.

But there are some puzzling quirks. The novel is written almost entirely in the present tense, which does lend a sense of immediacy to the work, making it seem less like an historical tome, but also gives it an odd flavor. And Mantel also mostly refers to Cromwell only with the impersonal “he”, which makes for many, many sentences which are deeply ambiguous and which take time to puzzle out (phrases like “He handed him the reins of his horse”).

My biggest puzzle/gripe is the title – “Wolf Hall” is the name of the seat of the Seymour family. Jane Seymour does appear as a character in the novel, but fleetingly, so why use this name as the title for the whole work? And the novel ends with Henry (and Cromwell) about to set off on a precession around the country, to include a visit to Wolf Hall. Bang, end of book. I can only assume that this is really only half a book, that the coming sequel will fill it out and complete it.

Nevertheless, well worth reading.

The Sun Kings by Stuart Clark

Hardcover, my own collection

Interesting enough non-fiction about a British Astronomer who observed and explained a huge solar flare impacting the Earth in the 1800s.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Alison Hoover Bartlett

Hardcover, my own collection

OK but not terrific story about an habitual book thief and the bookseller who tracked him down.

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie

Audiobook on my iPhone

This was the first Rushdie book I’ve read. Slightly weird. Best parts are about the tragic history of Kashmir, obviously deeply felt. But there are some silly plot quirks to do with the supposed one-time American ambassador to India, and one outright totally unbelievable moment. Can you imagine an ex-Ambassador, whose life has been threatened already by terrorists, would be allowed to appoint as his body servant and personal chauffeur, on a whim, a man who has a known record in terrorist activity and the very man whom the Ambassador had cuckolded in India?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

E-book on my iPhone

Not quite as strong as the first two books in the Millenium trilogy, but still a really good read.

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

Hardcover, my own collection

Another in Card’s long series about Ender Wiggins and his associates. This one links the story from the close of the Bugger Wars and Ender’s role as Speaker for the Dead. Good stuff, if not fantastic. But the Ender canon is all so really good that it’s hardly surprising that these later additions and fill-ins aren’t knock-outs. But they do usefully expand the picture.

The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G.Wells

E-book on my iPhone

Well worth re-reading. Timeless works. I’m currently re-reading The Invisible Man, also as a (free) e-book.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

Audiobook on my iPhone

Really gripping thriller. I can see why it was turned into a movie, as the writing is cinematic throughout. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’ll be looking for other books by this author.

Larklight by Phillip Reeve

Hardcover, my own collection

Fun science fiction for younger readers. By the same author who wrote the Mortal Engines series, but much less grim. In fact, designed to amuse and entertain.

The conceit of the books is that Isaac Newton, through his alchemical researches combined with his study of gravity, invented space travel in the late 1700s. So these books are set in the Victorian Era of this alternate history, with the British Empire reaching out into the Solar System, which is populated by a wide variety of creatures and intelligent species. Even the vacuum of space isn’t a vacuum in this alternate world, but ‘the aether’ which is partly breathable.

A lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to reading the sequels.

Currently Reading

I’m currently re-reading, or rather re-listening to The Song of Fire and Ice by George R R Martin, having given up on waiting for Martin to finish the next book in the series.

Also reading:

• The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (paperback)
• The Invisible Man by H.G.Wells (e-book)

And I have a bunch of other e-books lined up waiting for the arrival of my iPad.

The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
– Oscar Wilde

This is a meditation on the price of things in general; but in particular, the price of digital things such as software, games, music and e-books.

It goes without saying we always want to pay as little as possible for whatever we buy. Ideally, we would like everything to be free. But in the real world – at least in the real, non-digital world – we acknowledge that things must have a cost. We still prefer to pay as little as we need to, but we are usually prepared to pay more than the minimum in order to obtain a desired level of quality or value. For example, rotten tomatoes may be selling at 50c for a 5-kilo bag; but we would rather pay more, if we can afford it, to get good quality tomatoes.

In the non-digital world, it costs the farmer something to plant and raise tomatoes, to pick them, and to transport them to the shops. The shops have other costs such as the cost of labor, electricity, rental, the costs of marketing, and so on. These are real costs borne by real people.

All of this means that we basically accept that we have to pay a reasonable price for our tomatoes.

In the equally real, but digital world, the same logic ought to apply to our buying behavior, but there’s an important fact which puts a significant spin on it: the costs of duplication and of distribution of digital items are essentially zero.

Note that I specifically do not say that the costs of production are zero in the digital world. That is far, far from being the case.

The developer who writes a shareware program; the artist who paints a beautiful digital wallpaper; the musician who records a song; the author who writes a book; all supply their labor at the cost of their time, and they also have other significant costs such as equipment, Internet access and electricity. These too are real costs borne by real people.

The big difference between these creators and the farmer is that supply of the digital items they produce is infinite. The cost of duplication is essentially zero, and so is the cost of distribution. A million copies of a song – once it has been created – can be made for the same cost as making one copy, and distributed for essentially no cost to a million computers.

Some people have considered these latter facts to justify paying nothing for such items. But this is clearly unrealistic and unsustainable. The copying and distribution costs may be zero, but the cost of production is not. Some creators may be in a position to donate their labor and subsidize their own costs in order to make their creations available for free; but it is hard to imagine a culture in which this is the norm, unless creators are fully supported by the State (not a healthy situation).

So, sellers must set a price on their digital items. The question is – and this is really the point of this meditation – what is a fair price to set?

E-book prices are in the news because of the recent contretemps between Macmillan and Amazon, with Macmillan winning the battle (but probably not the war) to push up the price of some Kindle books to $14.95. So let’s look at e-books.

I have seen all sorts of calculations on the Internet about what the price of e-books should be. I have even done a few calculations myself, based on reasonable assumptions about the flat costs (the flag-fall, if you like) of producing a book, together with the variable costs (the costs per book sold). Given an accurate estimation of these sets of costs, the only variables which remain in determining whether a book is profitable are the retail price of the book, and the number of copies which are sold.

Anyway, here are two sets of figures based largely on guesswork, but not too far from reality, I think. In each case I have used Goal Seek in Excel to come up with the number of copies which need to be sold to ensure a 5% return to the publisher. In the case of the e-book, I have allowed a small percentage for duplication and distribution (rather than making them zero).

Unless I’m completely out in my estimates* (perhaps in the percentage that the online retailer will take), it seems to me that an ebook should become profitable at a smaller number of copies sold, even at a much lower retail price point than the physical book. And once you have paid for the flat costs, the low per-sale variable costs of e-books mean that you rapidly start to make a lot of money once you are past the break-even point.

The number of copies sold depends enormously on the elasticity of demand. If you halve the price of a book, will you sell twice as many copies? Perhaps not quite. But it does seem reasonable to suggest that you will certainly sell more copies if you discount the price.

But in the current commercial world, publishers seem to be pricing ebooks at ridiculously high prices. For example I just bought Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, the current Man Booker Prize winner. I bought it from Amazon in hardcover. It’s a beautifully produced book, really nice to hold and to look at. A Kindle version is a sad, ephemeral thing in comparison – it’s only advantage at all over the hardcover is that it is more portable. Yet have a look at the Amazon page below, and note the comparative pricing. $15.79 for the hardcover, but $21.10 for the Kindle version.

When an e-book costs far more than the hardcover version, something is badly wrong. More to the point, who in their right mind would buy the e-book version of Wolf Hall at that price, when they can buy a ‘real’ book for less?

If $15.79 is a fair price for the hardcover, you cannot convince me that $21.10 for an electronic version is a fair price point. That price has been determined not by the economics of the situation (because a lower price for the Kindle version would mean the e-book sold well, maximizing profit and return to the author) but by the publisher’s misguided sense of the value of their work.

The digital economy has some way to go yet before it works properly.

* Feel free to correct my assumptions!