Undecipherable

Hubris and Nemesis

 Hubris, from Ancient Greek ὕβρις (húbris) ‘pride, insolence, outrage’) … is extreme or excessive pride or dangerous overconfidence and complacency, often in combination with (or synonymous with) arrogance. Hubris, arrogance, and pretension are related to the need for victory (even if it does not always mean winning) instead of reconciliation, which ‘friendly’ groups might promote.

In ancient Greek religion and myth, Nemesis, from Ancient Greek Νέμεσις (Némesis, lit. ‘Distribution’) … was the goddess who personified retribution for the sin of hubris: arrogance before the gods.

— Wikipedia

Neopatronage is not for everybody

In a Substack post, Brian Niemeier accurately describes the way the publishing industry has changed in recent decades. He argues that the way forward now for the writer (and other artists, if one may so term writers) is to seek what he calls ‘Neopatronage’ – neo in the sense that it differs from the sort of patronage bestowed on artists all the way from antiquity until the emergence of commercial publishing.

Neopatronage seeks financial support directly from the audience rather than through the medium of intermediaries such as publishers, bookshops, record labels, etc., all of which tend to extract more money from the audience than the artists themselves. That is all very fine until you consider the fact that most people are unwilling to pay anything at all because they regard what is on the internet as free. Writers in English must also take into account the steep and accelerating decline in literacy in Britain and north America, our two principal markets.

I am not arguing for a return to the humiliating grind of (a) trying to find an agent who will even look at your book and then (b) hoping some august being will actually stoop to publish it. What’s more, in London and probably New York too, publishers now employ ‘sensitivity readers’, typically young women fresh from indoctrination in a university, whose job it is to comb through the text searching for anything liable to offend anyone, anywhere, particularly the pets of the central banks and, below them, the giant corporations who these days run the largest and most powerful publishing companies.

So even if an author gets to first base in the legacy publishing process, he, or these days, more likely, she, will immediately come up against one of these censorettes and her felt-tip pen. This is after, of course, the text has been deemed generally acceptable by the publishing director.

In my case I would last no more than fifteen minutes of sensitivity reading and the business relationship would be over before it had barely started.

Censorship of what is published online is in its infancy but is due to get worse. Much worse. Amazon already bans political books it considers us too delicate to see. It and most other online marketplaces (e.g. Apple Books, Kobo, Smashwords) have strict rules about publishing the worst filth, which I quite understand and indeed approve of. The world is knee-deep in that as it is.

I am afraid the prospects for authors grow grimmer by the year. I foresee a time when new work is distributed as samizdat and the author receives nothing except social invitations – with luck.

In my own circumstances, this does not bother me. There are far more efficient ways to make money than writing; the vast majority of published writers have waged or salaried employment anyway. They write in the evenings or at weekends or whenever they can. The more enterprising ones get hold of a sinecure in the public sector where nobody much cares what they are doing, and write at ‘work’.

My own exposure to mainstream publishing ended in the early nineties, the last book being first published in 1987; my further dealings with HarperCollins related only to subsidiary rights. In fact, after what Hollywood did to that story I gave up writing altogether in disgust and co-founded a business.

But writing is a disease and I could not keep away. By 2000 I had finished another novel. My agent received generally favourable reports from publishers’ readers but nobody was buying. I hadn’t realised that in the years I had been away the landscape had changed.

Like its predecessor, that novel is a thriller: a commercial decision on my part. I hadn’t much enjoyed some sections of the narrative but felt that I needed to capitalise on the success of the previous book. Indeed, I would rather have written something else. When my agent, expressing puzzlement and regret, eventually abandoned her search, I decided to write what I wanted to write.

That book couldn’t find a publisher either. I continued writing anyway, and as I did so it dawned on me that things had changed. I gradually gave up thinking about legacy publishing and was writing merely as a hobby. This gave me complete artistic freedom, which I love.

Then in 2010 or so, Smashwords, Amazon’s KDP and whatnot started up and I found I could make some pocket-money from my efforts. That is where I am today. I can write whatever I want. Writing, for me, has become largely an exercise in self-realisation. It helps with exploring who I am and my place among my fellows. If other people like reading what I turn out, I am of course very pleased, because part of my motive remains to entertain and perhaps inform others. But it is only a part, and if nobody likes my books that is OK too.

I will not seek Neopatronage. It takes too much effort for too little reward.

Besides, I have inherited the unbecoming and groundless pride of the Irish, overcoming which is proving intractably difficult, even with the help of my keyboard.

AI generated novels

An interesting take. I hope he’s right.

The Kindle Own-goal

Back in February, though I was unaware of it at the time, Amazon changed the rules as regards backing up one’s Kindle ‘purchases’. Before the 26th of that month, it seems that you could keep a permanent copy of such ebooks by plugging your Kindle ereader into a computer running appropriate software. Amazon has now stopped that.

The new policy brought to general notice the fact that when you ‘buy’ an ebook at the Kindle store, you do not own it. You license it: what you are ‘buying’ is the licence, not the ebook.

Amazon’s terms give it complete control over the copy of the Kindle ebook on your device, at least when your device is connected to the internet. Amazon can alter and even delete it without your consent.

When changes are made to the master copy on its servers, those changes may be incorporated in the copy on your device; they will certainly be incorporated in any fresh copy of that title you download. Mostly such changes will be trivial and harmless, such as the correction of typos, but what of words and sentiments that suddenly become not just unfashionable but forbidden? The potential for bowdlerising ‘your’ ebook is there.

As for deletion, the infamous and ironic example is the mass deletion of Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. Amazon was successfully sued:

Shortly after the incident, Amazon apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again. People who had downloaded the e-books, who were already refunded after the deletion, were offered their e-books back along with their notes, or they could take a $30 gift certificate instead.

In the settlement, Amazon promises never to repeat its actions, under a few conditions. The retailer will still wipe an e-book if a court or regulatory body orders it, if doing so is necessary to protect consumers from malicious code, if the consumer agrees for any reason to have the e-book removed, or if the consumer fails to pay (for instance, if the credit card issuer doesn’t remit payment).

So, the answer is still “no,” you don’t own the digital books you download. Though I can understand the reasoning behind some of the exceptions Amazon lays out, Amazon still maintains control over your e-books. It is not the same as having a book all to yourself once you leave the bookstore.

Amazon is not alone in retaining control of downloaded ebooks. Any company, such as Apple or Kobo, that runs an ebook market and applies digital rights management (DRM) software to its ebooks is in much the same position.

The chorus of complaint that preceded and greeted Amazon’s decision in February has led to large numbers of people reconsidering their relationship with the Kindle store. Many are opting to ditch their Kindle, buy another ereader, and escape Amazon’s walled garden altogether. Others are vowing to keep their Kindles in airplane mode and sideload DRM-free ebooks downloaded from other sources.

The position of writers in all this is difficult. The Kindle store is far and away the biggest market for ebooks and no writer can afford to ignore it. Some writers sign up to an exclusivity deal which prevents them from selling copies elsewhere, even from their own websites; in return they receive extra love from the algorithms resulting in greater visibility in the Kindle store.

I have never agreed with that, feeling, first, that readers have a right to look elsewhere for my stuff and, secondly, that it is an unhealthy development and increases Amazon’s domination of the book market yet further. Books are a special sort of commodity and any restriction on their widest possible dispersal is illiberal and just plain wrong.

Despite my uncomfortable feelings about the Kindle store, I will go on offering my work there (unless Amazon decides to cancel my account). Not everybody will object to its terms of trade, and it provides me with a modest income. However, I would recommend getting my ebooks from Smashwords instead. The price is the same: currently a majestic 99¢ for every title. Smashwords does not use DRM. Once you have bought (yes, bought) an ebook there, it is yours to do with as you choose. You can even duplicate it for your friends if you are OK with ripping off authors!

If you own a Kindle there is no need to get rid of it. Just put it into airplane mode and leave it there, then sideload any new content. Make sure the ebook is in a Kindle format; the most compatible is mobi. If it is in epub format you will need to convert it, a trivial operation you can perform with calibre (cross-platform) or Amazon’s own Kindle Previewer (PC and Mac only).

If you wish to change the formatting of your ebook, make sure it’s in epub format and load it into Sigil. A brief introduction to that is here.

This may also be of interest to more technically-minded Kindle owners.

 

Bookbinding then and now

 

This is how books were made when the contents were seen as precious and worthy of handing down to succeeding generations. The process is obviously expensive, and is now mostly the domain of restorers and hobbyists rather than publishers.

Until about 1960, sewn binding was the norm for textbooks and those novels falling outside the category of pulp fiction, which was and is issued with ‘perfect binding’, using glue to hold the spine of the book together. Pulp books, typically with paper covers, were regarded as disposable, and if they fell to pieces after a while (which they do, when the glue dries out) nobody would very much care.

A sewn book, especially in hard covers, remains open and can be read hands-free. It has a much longer life than a perfect-bound book; I have handled an original copy of the first volume of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, published in 1590 and still perfectly intact.

In 1935 the founders of Penguin Books decided to adopt perfect binding in order to make books of a better quality affordable. Perfect binding has gradually become more and more widespread, to the detriment of reading, because it is difficult to keep a perfect-bound book open. Various reading-stands and other devices are available, but these are at best a bodge. Perfect binding for a textbook is something of a disaster.

Traditional publishers are in business to make a profit. Perfect binding becomes the norm; typefaces get smaller; the paper is of lower and lower quality; and the books become more expensive. The majority of titles published in paper are failures, financially speaking, so it behoves the publisher to cut corners wherever he can: he depends on a few best-sellers to keep the money rolling in.

One of the reasons I do not issue my novels in paper is that the quality of print-on-demand books is appallingly low. They are produced as cheaply as possible and deliver a horrible reading experience. An ebook is much nicer (and even cheaper), will not fall to pieces, and can be read hands-free. What’s more, the publisher, if he knows his business, can format the content to make it as least as attractive as that of a printed book, the bonus for the reader being that he can alter the typeface, margins and leading to his liking.

If moreover he owns an ereader with a leather cover, all his reading on that device will be of leather-bound books …

Reformatting paragraphs in Project Gutenberg ebooks

I would be the last person to criticise the vast repository of public domain literature at Project Gutenberg. However, some titles there are formatted in a way I don’t much like. Paragraphs may either be block formatted (as in this post) or have white space between each pair of indented paragraphs.

The fix is simple and needs only a modicum of computer skills.

There are two basic file formats for ebooks. The industry standard is epub; the Amazon Kindle uses mobi. (The latter is an older format, but readable by all Kindle devices.) An epub is just a zip file containing text and the instructions for displaying it. The innards of an epub are complicated; luckily we do not have to delve into them too deeply.

If you use a Kindle, there is an extra step involved to convert your newly tweaked epub to mobi (more of which later).

Sigil is a free-to-use application for editing epub files. The left-hand column shows all the files contained in the epub. The middle column shows the editable material (whether the text of the book or the instructions for its display). The right-hand column, when preview mode is selected, shows how the text will look on an ereader; it can also display the Table of Contents.

Click to enlarge

The files we are interested in are in the folders ‘Text’ and ‘Styles’. As one would expect, ‘Text’ contains the text of the book. It is formatted as HTML – a file extracted from this folder will display in any browser, but use only that browser’s defaults for text size, heading style, etc.

The instructions for displaying the text in an ereader reside in the ‘Styles’ folder. The file or files there are in CCS (cascading style sheet) format. We need to edit part of a style sheet in order to modify the appearance of the text.

Having downloaded your epub from Project Gutenberg, load it into Sigil. Open the ‘Text’ folder. Click on one or more of the files there to make its content appear in the Preview window on the right. If the formatting of the paragraphs is not to your taste (in this example, there is extraneous space between them), open the ‘Styles’ folder and find the style sheet which defines the properties of paragraphs – Styles/OEBPS/0.cc in this case.

In HTML, paragraphs are enclosed by the <p> tag. The statement we are looking for is this one:

It causes the text to be indented by 1 em. The ‘em’ is a printer’s measure adopted for CSS; you may find ‘px’ (pixels) used instead. Here the top (‘margin-top’) and bottom of the paragraph are respectively to have an inserted space of 0.25 em. By changing these values to 0em, the extraneous white space between paragraphs will disappear.

The margin property is explained here; you may find ‘margin-top’, ‘margin-right’, ‘margin-bottom’ and ‘margin-left’ abbreviated, as the article explains.

Kindle users will need to convert the epub file to the mobi format. This is easily done with Kindle Previewer (Windows and Mac) or calibre (Windows, Mac, Linux).