Barry really blew Mike’s mind by inverting the value perception of the print edition in comparison to the digital edition. ?Barry suggested that given the royalty rates, he views the print edition as primarily a promotional tool for increasing sales of the digital edition. ?Further, he believes that authors who receive the favorable royalty rate for digital will be willing to accept a lower royalty on the print edition. This is a complete inversion – in a traditional print deal, an author would get 25% of list, which winds up roughly splitting the take with the publisher after costs come out. ?In the e-book edition, the author gets the 25% of the publisher NET instead.

Contrast that 25% take with the 70% royalty that Amazon pays a self-publisher, and you can understand the concern and frustration that many authors have communicated about the traditional publishing model. ?Barry has taken the next step by not just sidestepping the traditional model, but by working with Amazon to articulate a vision for a new combined print/digital model in which the participants exchange value based on their respective priorities.

We’ll see a lot more about this deal in the news going forward, and I’ll be shocked if Amazon doesn’t continue to show this kind of aggressive creativity as it strives to build the Thomas and Mercer brand.

Actually, I left out some technical books that I spent quite a bit of time in at work.  I was trying to make myself pay attention to the kinds of reading I did.  Also, I was just plain old curious about how many books I read in a year.  I’m sure that there have been years in which I read many more books; there were whole months in which I felt I didn’t read at all, whatever the twitrecord says.  After all, I wrote at least a couple hundred thousand words last year, mostly during the times I would normally have been reading.

The best part of tweeting my reading, though, was how it affected what I chose to read.  Especially at the end of the year, I was making a conscious effort to find books I’d never read before.  I’m sure I never had a year before in which I reread fewer books, or in which I read so many books by authors I’d never read before.  By the end of 2010, I’d resolved to go a year without rereading a single book.

March is almost over, and so far I haven’t even been tempted.  At this point, it feels like I haven’t reread anything in ages; it might be six months already, for all I know.  I’ve got some great stuff lined up to read next:

1. Felix Gilman, The Half-Made World
2. Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
3. Thomas Mullen, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
4. John Locke, Saving Rachel
5. Richard Kadrey, Sandman Slim and Kill the Dead
6. Keith Jeffery, The Secret History of MI6
7. Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
8. Alex Butterworth, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

Dan Wells’s I Don’t Want to Kill You will come out soon, and it will go immediately to the top of the list.  As much as I’m enjoying Half-Made World, Dan Wells’s first two books were among my favorites all year.

Of course, I’ve completely dropped the ball on the reading and tweeting thing, but then, it turns out that Twitter is a totally crap way to keep track of anything – if you try to search for #readin2010 – go ahead – my tweets are now one with the neiges d’antan.

You’d be wise to pick somewhere else to violate the Liskov Substitution Principle, too.

From my experience reading the almost the first half of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I already expect that the best part of the book will be the cover art.  But then, the cover art is fantastic.

h/t Scalzi.

I was totally buying the argument until I listened to the two clips. Then thinking about the clips made me go back over the argument. I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to make isn’t as strong as the point as I initially thought they were trying to make.

First, the clips:

Stipulate, before I say anything else, that the Robert Johnson track was a) probably better recorded in the first place, and b) received tons of TLC in this release due to the magnitude of his legend, TLC that Charlie Patton recordings likely never will.

That said, Charlie Patton’s voice is incredibly eerie and moving, but the guitar work sounds to me relatively minimalist, even allowing for the sound quality. Robert Johnson’s voice is, surprisingly, less distinctive than Charlie Patton’s, but the guitar work to my ear is off the chart by comparison. What is it in his work that the “white British musicians in the ‘60’s” reacted to, the voice, the guitar, or the songwriting? If these two clips were all we had, we’d certainly point to RJ’s guitar work.

But there’s much more than that! On that same RJ compilation, this would count as one of the most conventional tracks to the unacculturated ear. There are several tracks in which the high, quavering timbre of RJ’s voice barely sounds human. Nor is this track an outstanding example of his guitar work, either. 

I wonder, BTW, why if you were picking only one RJ track available on YouTube it wouldn’t be this one :

So the strongest version of the argument that I can accept is that white majority culture has chosen to lionize an Extraordinary Specimen Of Underappreciated Black Minority Culture, rather than the Unique Genius of Black Minority Culture that some “white British musicians” believed him, and that there are other artists worthy of appreciation in their own right, as well as for the insight they can give us into the ESOUBMC.

But then I read back up, and came to this passage…

Why, then, did Robert Johnson, who in Arewa’s view was likely of a piece with an entire genre to African American audiences in the 1920s and 1930s, become known as a genius among musicians comparable to the way Shakespeare is viewed among writers?

The appearance of Shakespeare in this context I find an absolute howler. Is there another artist even widely accounted great who is absolutely known to have appropriated more of his work from other sources? Who also lived cheek by jowl with several other similar artists who helped out here and there in each other’s efforts? Who were quite arguably nearly as good, to the extent that several of them are suspected by some of actually BEING the artist? Who was so much “of a piece with an entire genre” to his contemporary audience that it barely noticed his death?

Rragh.

There are, however, several points you can make about Shakespeare that distinguish him from his contemporaries like Marlowe, Jonson, and occasional collaborator John Ford. Shakespeare wrote transcendent comedy and tragedy alike, which distinguishes him from almost everyone else, ever. [Who else, maybe Kleist? If so, then the question answers itself.]

History, for some reason, chose Shakespeare to play the role of the lone genius of his time; it’s probably known to lit majors who exactly was responsible for Shakespeare’s apotheosis, as he was certainly Just Another One of Those Guys both during his life and for some time after his death. Was he that much better than Marlowe? Are Jonson’s comedies all that inferior? Shakespeare certainly wasn’t sui generis, a lone Titan, or better, Zeus the father from whose mighty brow alone Elizabethan drama sprang full-grown. However, there’s a lot in Shakespeare’s work that justifies some level of elevation, particularly given the extent to which we moderns elevate the serious over the comic in general.

Similarly, RJ was not himself sui generis, a lone Zeus from whose mighty brow alone the blues was born. However, he was really fucking good. *

Honestly, the comparison between the Shakespeare and RJ is so much better than the authors seem to note, it’s insight by omission.

SK

*[I could, again, go on. Similarly, Michael Jordan was not himself sui generis; indeed, there were in general nine other guys on the court all the time he was playing, whether he was aware of them or not. However, if you’re really fucking good to a sufficient extent, all the other guys kind of fade away. I mean, if people deified RJ, was it in the belief that no one else was singing and playing the blues? That’s just so asinine that I decline to believe it, and there shouldn’t be any need to inveigh against that misconception. Perhaps any deification was more on the basis of his being RFG?]

I was totally buying the argument until I listened to the two clips. Then thinking about the clips made me go back over the argument. I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to make isn’t as strong as the point as I initially thought they were trying to make.

First, the clips:

Stipulate, before I say anything else, that the Robert Johnson track was a) better recorded in the first place (from many listenings, I wonder: two mikes, voice and guitar? Holding the guitar really high, and leaning over? Or just a really old mike that isn’t directional at all>) and b) received tons of TLC in this release due to the magnitude of his legend, TLC that Charlie Patton recordings likely never will.

That said, Charlie Patton’s voice is incredibly eerie and moving, and the guitar work sounds to me relatively minimalist, even allowing for the sound quality. Robert Johnson’s voice is, amazingly, less distinctive, but the guitar work to my ear is off the chart by comparison. What is it in his work that the “white British musicians in the ‘60’s” reacted to, the voice, the guitar, or the songwriting? If these two clips were all we had, we’d certainly point to RJ’s guitar work.

But there’s much more than that! On that same RJ compilation, this would count as one of the most conventional tracks to the unacculturated ear. There are several tracks in which the high, quavering timbre of RJ’s voice barely sounds human. Nor is this track an outstanding example of his guitar work, either. 

I wonder, BTW, why if you were picking only one RJ track available on YouTube it wouldn’t be this one :

So the strongest version of the argument that I can accept is that white majority culture has chosen to lionize an Extraordinary Specimen Of Underappreciated Black Minority Culture, rather than the Unique Genius of Black Minority Culture that some “white British musicians” believed him, and that there are other artists worthy of appreciation in their own right, as well as for the insight they can give us into the ESOUBMC.

But then I read back up, and came to this passage…

Why, then, did Robert Johnson, who in Arewa’s view was likely of a piece with an entire genre to African American audiences in the 1920s and 1930s, become known as a genius among musicians comparable to the way Shakespeare is viewed among writers?

The appearance of Shakespeare in this context I find an absolute howler. Is there another artist even widely accounted great who is absolutely known to have appropriated more of his work from other sources? Who also lived cheek by jowl with several other similar artists who helped out here and there in each other’s efforts? Who are quite arguably nearly as good, to the extent that several of them are suspected by some of actually BEING Shakespeare? Who was so much “of a piece with an entire genre” to his contemporary audience that it barely noticed his death?

Rragh.

There are, however, several points you can make about Shakespeare that distinguish him from his contemporaries like Marlowe, Jonson, and occasional collaborator John Ford. Shakespeare wrote transcendent comedy and tragedy alike, which distinguishes him from almost everyone else, ever. [Who else, maybe Kleist? If so, then the question answers itself.]

History, for some reason, chose Shakespeare to play the role of the lone genius of his time; it’s probably known to lit majors who exactly was responsible for Shakespeare’s apotheosis, as he was certainly Just Another One of Those Guys both during his life and for some time after his death. Was he that much better than Marlowe? Are Jonson’s comedies all that inferior? Shakespeare certainly wasn’t sui generis, a lone Titan, or better, Zeus the father from whose mighty brow alone Elizabethan drama sprang full-grown. However, there’s a lot in Shakespeare’s work that justifies some level of elevation, particularly given the extent to which we moderns elevate the serious over the comic in general.

Similarly, RJ was not himself sui generis, a lone Zeus from whose mighty brow alone the blues was born. However, he was really fucking good. *

Honestly, the comparison between the Shakespeare and RJ is so much better than the authors seem to note, it’s insight by omission.

SK

*[I could, again, go on. Similarly, Michael Jordan was not himself sui generis; indeed, there were in general nine other guys on the court all the time he was playing, whether he was aware of them or not. However, if you’re really fucking good to a sufficient extent, all the other guys kind of fade away. I mean, if people deified RJ, was it in the belief that no one else was singing and playing the blues? That’s just so asinine that I decline to believe it, and there shouldn’t be any need to inveigh against that misconception. Perhaps any deification was more on the basis of his being RFG?]