I don’t just host this week’s episode of Supernatural Investigator on Vision TV — I also do the voice-over narration throughout the episode.
Tonight’s topic: Mayan crystal skulls. It airs at 10:30 p.m. Eastern time / 7:30 p.m. Pacific.
Pictured: Robert J. Sawyer and the extinct species known as the newspaper book-review section editor
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
This is my 19th novel — a number that frankly astonishes me. :)
I’m going to reward myself by watching another episode of Battlestar Galactica on DVD tonight …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Publishers Weekly has given Wake a “starred review,” their highest distinction: starred reviews denote books of exceptional merit. The review, which appears in the February 23, 2009, edition, says in part:
The wildly thought-provoking first installment of Sawyer’s WWW trilogy explores the origins and emergence of consciousness. The thematic diversity — and profundity — makes this one of Sawyer’s strongest works to date.
As my character Caitlin would say, “Sweet!”
(This is my second consecutive starred review in PW; they also gave a star to Rollback.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Woot! eReader, my favourite ebook application — recently released for the iPhone — is now in beta for the BlackBerry Storm. Now, if they’d just get a version for an e-ink reader to market …
eReader has a fair and livable DRM scheme tied to the user, rather than the user’s hardware (unlike Mobipocket), and is much less wonky/buggy than Mobipocket (which still can’t reliably do something as simple as paging backward through a file).
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
There’s a mini writing retreat going on at Chez Sawyer right now, and it’s all about sequels. Hayden Trenholm is here, visiting from Ottawa, and he’s working on his laptop at my kitchen table, sprinting towards the end of his revisions on Steel Whispers, the terrific sequel to his hard-boiled SF novel Defining Diana from Bundoran Press. His deadline is eight days away, on March 1.
And I’m doing a final top-down polish on Watch, the sequel to Wake — and my deadline is (gak!) 72 hours away …
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
It’s complicated (sigh). I always intended the title to be one word, Flashforward, since it’s a play on the word flashback, which is a single word.
But when designing the book cover, Tor’s art department split it into two words on the cover and the spine (without anyone asking me if it was okay), but left it as one on the back cover, and the interior designer left it as one everywhere, too.
David S. Goyer, Brannon Braga and I all discussed this in L.A. back in 2007, and all agreed that the title should be one word logically, but people keep referencing it as two words, because that’s what they see on the book cover, and that ended up being the spelling used for the TV series title.
I’ve given up the fight: I’m now referring to my book as Flash Forward — two words. But it really was a decison the author, not the art department, should have made.
(For Pete’s sake, “Flashforward” as as single word is only one letter longer than “Calculating” and just two letters longer than “Frameshift,” both of which they managed to fit on a single line on other covers of mine …)
More about the novel formerly known as Flashforward is here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Over at Locus Online, Mark Kelly has updated the indispensable Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards with results through the end of 2008 (and he’s also given it a very attractive facelift).
Here’s the entry on me.
And nice to see here that I’m in 8th place overall for total award wins in the history of the field, and am in the top 30 overall in total number of nominations.
(And, cough, cough, if you do the math, you’ll see that I have the highest ratio of nominations to wins, at 36%, of anyone in the top 30 [that is, 36% of the time when I’m nominated, I win].)
And, why, yes, my mother is a statistician. How could you tell? ;)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Carolyn and I aren’t down there yet — I’ve got a novel to finish that’s due on Monday — but we are going down in 12 days to watch them film the big scene in which the main character discovers that this crazy planet full of apes was Earth all along, and —
Well, actually, no — and I can’t tell you what is being filmed (shh! no spoilers!). But it’s all very, very cool … ;)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I have a great fondness for Greece: I love its history, and visited the country in 1978, and, of course, the central symbolism of my first novel, Golden Fleece, is drawn from Greek myth, and the plight of Theodosios Procopides in Flash Forward is a riff on classic Greek tragedy.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The American Heritage English Dictionary says it’s two words: “light bulb.”
Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary says it’s two words: “light bulb.”
But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary says it’s one word: “lightbulb.”
When a book is being copyedited, the copyeditor must specify which dictionary he or she is conforming to, unless (a) the publisher specifies one, or (b) the author specifies one. But regardless of who chooses it, all spellings in a given book are supposed to conform to a single dictionary’s usage (and, yes, I know: Emerson was probably right when he said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”).
I always specify in my notes to the copyeditor the one I’m using, and when I was at Tor I got into the habit of specifying Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (first the 10th edition, now the 11th, known in the trade as Web 10 and Web 11 respectively), which was that publisher’s preference, and I’ve carried that over to the WWW trilogy.
And so in Watch, the one and only reference to an incandescent lighting device is going to be spelled as a single word (even though it looks wrong to me). But, man, you’d think we’d have no ambiguity about such a common term at this late date!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Quill & Quire Online just reported:
The Harper Tories have promised to maintain existing funding levels for the country’s magazine industry ($75.5-million annually), but guidelines announced this week for the new Canada Periodical Fund could put Canada’s small-run literary magazines in jeopardy.
The new Canadian Heritage-run program merges two other federal funding bodies – the Canada Magazine Fund and the Publications Assistance Program – in an effort to streamline operations and tie support of the periodical sector to “the reading choices of Canadians.” This new system won’t become a reality until at least 2010, but when it does, funds will be allocated using a formula based on paid circulation, and magazines with less then 5,000 annual subscribers will be shut out altogether.
(For my non-Canadian readers, Harper is Stephen Harper, Canada’s current prime minister; the Tories are the ruling, but minority, Conservative party.)
What a typically conservative approach: let’s give the money to those who need it least.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
As I mentioned before, my Hugo Award-nominated Rollback is currently the “One Book, One Brant” reading choice for all of Brant county in Ontario. The Paris Star has a nice article about that in the current edition, which you can read here.
Pictured: Kelly Dinsmore, Mayor Rod Eddy, and Sharon Briggs reading the hardcover of Rollback (click for slightly larger version; photo by Casandra Bellefeuille)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
At what point in your creative process did you decide that Wake et al., would be a trilogy? And was it the same point for your first trilogy (or 2nd) or was the first one more of the publisher’s choice (as in “this is too long to publish as a single novel; let’s break it up into a trilogy”)?
Has your plotting evolved over time to be more aware of this sort of thing?
My answer is might be of interest to other writers, so I’m sharing it here:
I’ve sold twenty novels, and almost half of them — nine books — are parts of trilogies:
The Quintaglio Ascension: Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, Foreigner.
The Neanderthal Parallax: Hominids, Humans, Hybrids
WWW: Wake, Watch, and Wonder.
(As it happens, right now, I’m in the final few hours of polishing Watch before submitting it to my publishers; it’s due on Monday.)
Each of these trilogies had a different genesis.
I wrote Far-Seer as a standalone — no intention of doing a series (I’d even killed off the main character in the last chapter).
When it was done, my agent said let’s try to sell a sequel, and we did (as with the first episode of Hill Street Blues, where Hill and Renko were gunned down in cold blood, my character’s fatal wounds suddenly became merely serious injuries, although I, at least, had the luxury or rewriting the ending so it was apparent that he’d lived).
And then the publisher decided to ask me for another sequel after the first two were done. But after that, I wanted to write something very different (With humans! On Earth! In the near future!), and so I wrote The Terminal Experiment instead of continuing the series (which I think ended at a fine point, anyway).
For the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, it was actually my then-British publisher who said the only things selling in the UK were trilogies or on-going series, and so my next project should be a trilogy; otherwise, Hominids would have been a standalone. The original working title for the standalone book would, in fact, have been Neanderthal Parallax.)
After I turned in the third book, Hybrids, my editor, David G. Hartwell, said I could go on writing Neanderthal books as long as I wanted to — but I wanted very much to do something different at that point. (For more on this, see my essay Commiting Trilogy: The Origins of “The Neanderthal Parallax”.)
For the WWW trilogy, I actually sold it as a standalone (called Webmind) to Tor, and after struggling with it for over a year found I just couldn’t do it as a single book; the idea was too big.
So I had a meeting with David G. Hartwell (my editor) and Tom Doherty (Tor’s publisher) and told them that, and said I’d like to fulfill the contract instead with a new standalone, and wrote Rollback instead. I then re-envisioned Webmind as a trilogy (writing an outline for it that now bears very little resemblance to what I’m actually doing — I really hate doing outlines).
If I had my druthers, I’d never write sequels or trilogies — at least not one book after another; I much prefer writing standalones. But sometimes that’s not what the market wants, and sometimes the idea can’t be handled properly in a single book.
On the other hand, part of what I hate about trilogies is working back-to-back on the same project for years: I take a year or so to write a book, and spending three years in a row on any set of characters is enough.
But to my surprise I was recently asked by David Hartwell if I’d consider writing more Quintaglio books (and I might), and I would indeed like to write more about the Neanderthals at some point.
So, who knows about the future? (Answer, according to the Lawgiver in the last Planet of the Apes movie: “Perhaps only the dead.” But I digress …)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Snoot Entertainment in L.A. — the company that has my hard-boiled SF novella “Identity Theft” under option — has a 3D CGI SF film called Battle for Terra coming up, and the trailer just hit Moviefone today. Check it out!
(Identity Theft will be live action; proudcer Jessica Wu reports that they’re working on concept art for it now.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
OMG. So, with one of the Chapters gift cards I got for Christmas, I bought Quark — the complete series — on DVD. This science-fiction sitcom from 1978 was created by Buck Henry and starred Richard Benjamin. I fondly remembered it, but …
Wow, is it ever crappy. Obvious, dumb jokes; intrusive laugh track; terrible sets. Holy cow. Television has come a looooong way in 30 years! I’ve seen way better student films or YouTube videos — and this was a major network series!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… they cut the check! I received today the big purchase-price payment from ABC for the TV rights to my novel Flash Forward. Woot!
Filming of the series pilot begins in four days, on Saturday, February 21. Carolyn and I have booked our flights to L.A., and will be going down to watch part of it.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I’ve often taught science-fiction writing in week-long courses at the Banff Centre in the ski-resort town of Banff, Alberta. I’m sure my students remember The Banff Book & Art Den — the one bookstore in Banff — as fondly as I do.
Quill & Quire is reporting that the store closed its doors for good last week … another great independent gone, but, interestingly, not because of direct in-the-same town competition from a big chain (although, of course, as a resort town, lots of its business was from people who were just passing through and did have options to shop elsewhere). It was a beautiful store, on multiple levels, with lovely, polished hardwood floors. I’ll miss it.
(And Calgary — the nearest big city — lost one of its great booksellers recently, too.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
No, it’s not a scam — it’s the Canadian government’s annual kickback to Canadian writers to compensate them for their lost royalties on copies of their books circulated in libraries.
Just about every Western country except the United States has such a scheme. I’ve got so many books, I easily get the maximum payout each year (which this year was $2,800), but authors with smaller oeuvres can still count on getting something.
If you’re a Canadian author, and you haven’t yet registered your books, now is the time. You’ve already missed out on payment for 2008, but registration for 2009 is on right now, and only goes until May 1.
Official details are here, a lengthy blog post by me from three years ago on this topic is here, and a now-dated article I wrote about this system — called The Public Lending Right — is here (the biggest change in the system between what I described in that 1992 article and how it works today is back then they surveyed ten randomly chosen libraries, and now they survey seven).
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Over on Facebook, there’s a meme going around about posting “25 Random Things” about yourself, and tagging 25 other people to do the same. I didn’t tag anyone else, but here’s the list I posted today:
1. I am, by birth, a dual US-Canadian citizen.
2. My childhood imaginary friend wasn’t a person or an animal. It was a magic hook that descended down from the sky on an infinitely long string.
3. I was in a car accident when I was 10. I don’t drive. The two facts are connected.
4. My nickname, until I was 10, was Robin. I kind of regret that I rebelled against it; I think Robin Sawyer is a cool name for a writer. No one calls me Bob, but a few close friends call me either RJ, Robbie, or The Robman.
5. When I was a kid I couldn’t stand pizza. Now it’s my favourite food.
6. My parents wouldn’t let me play with toy guns or watch violent TV shows. The Man from UNCLE was banned in our house.
7. I was blind for six days when I was 12.
8. I was raised a Unitarian, and if I’m in one of those situations where you have to name a religious affiliation, and can’t say “none,” that’s the one I specify.
9. When I was in my early teens, I thought Barbi Benton was the most beautiful woman in the world. [That’s Barbi above.]
10. My very first publication was a letter to the editor in The Toronto Star in praise of Canada’s switch to the metric system. I think I was 14.
11. Until I was 15 or so, I flat-out refused to wear blue jeans, and when bell-bottoms were in fashion, I wouldn’t wear them, either; I was adamant about not conforming.
12. My first girlfriend (whom I started dating when I was 15) is now my sister-in-law. (I married her sister.)
13. Up until my last year of high school, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist; I still love dinosaurs.
14. I was my high-school valedictorian, editor of the high-school newspaper, and was the voice (alternating with a female student) that read the school’s morning announcements in my last year of high school; I loved high school. :)
15. I don’t have my wisdom teeth, but I do have my tonsils.
16. In Grade 11, I wrote an essay for school on “Dramatic Irony in Oedipus Rex,” and got an A+. In second-year university, pressed for time, and studying the same play in English class, I handed in the same essay again, and got a B.
17. I have flat feet.
18. These days, I host the TV series Supernatural Investigator on Vision TV — but even the people at Vision don’t know that in 1983-84, I was one of the six people who were part of The Rosewell Group, the consulting team that spearheaded the creation of Vision TV; it was my first big writing contract, and I spent nine months on it. The leader of the group was the Hon. David MacDonald, who had been Secretary of State under Joe Clark.
19. In the 1980s, I was a team captain in The Canadian Inquisition pub trivia league; recently, the league had a round of questions about me — how cool is that!
20. I had a vasectomy when I turned 40. It was easy and relatively painless.
21. I’ve never really been a fan of major TV or film stars, but I love character actors, especially from the 1970s. My favourites are Darren McGavin and Alan Oppenheimer — I’ll watch them in anything. And I’ve always thought William Shatner is a terrific actor — so there.
22. I am a huge fan of folk singer Pete Seeger (a taste I inherited from my parents); this will become apparent to those who read my next novel, Watch. [That’s Pete Seeger’s Greatest Hits below.]
23. I sponsor a boy in Guatemala through Foster Parents Plan; his name is Victor Hugo (really!), and I have a picture of him on my refrigerator door.
24. Although I love science fiction, many of my favourite movies aren’t SF at all: Casablanca, Judgment at Nuremberg, To Kill a Mockingbird, Born Free, The Candidate, The Paper Chase, and Witness, for instance.
25. I own six Scrabble sets, all different: deluxe rotating, various portable ones, and so on — and yet I’m lucky if I get to play two games a year. Just no time — which is the story of my life!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
An interesting phenomenon has emerged with discussion of ebook readers. You see it over on the iRex discussion forum, and in the hardware-specific topics on Mobileread.com (the Kindle section, the Sony Reader section, and so on), and elsewhere: any criticism of the device (the hardware, the availability of content for it, and so on), is taken as a failing of character on the part of the person making the criticism, with sinister suggestions made about hidden agendas. It actually makes those discussion forums rather less pleasant — and less productive — than they should be.
My own take is this: people invest so much money in these devices (a Sony Reader is around US$300, a Kindle around US$350, an iRex iLiad around US$600) that it was a difficult purchase to make financially and psychologically, and they don’t want anything said after the fact to instill or enhance regret.
Nothing new about this: we saw it for years in Mac / PC wars, we see it now in iPhone / Blackberry debates, and so on.
As long as the hardware is expensive, people will respond emotionally, rather than rationally, to discussions of the device they themselves have sacrificed to buy.
I hope the hardware prices will come way, way down in the next couple of years so that people will comment on and respond to the actual functioning of the device and not their financial/emotional investment in it.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
I had dinner last night with my friend Diane Lacey, who is on the Hugo Awards committee for this year’s Worldcon in Montreal, and she asked that I remind people that the deadline for nominations is drawing near — as it also is for the Auroras.
You can nominate for the Hugos here.
And Canadians can nominate for the Auroras here.
Deadline for both is at the end of the month. :)
Oh, and my own suggestions for nominations for the Hugos and Auroras are in this thread.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
An email I received today from a university student, wanting to write her first novel:
I have just read your advice on writing. I am struggling to come up with what to write about. I am sort of tired of writing about things relating to me. I feel like my head is a confused sea of ideas. Can you help me?
My reply:
For me, ideas to write about come from months and months of research. Pick something that thematically interests you — the plight of the poor, race relations, the abortion issue, internationalism, whether it makes since to spend money going into space, the question of whether God exists — and then just immerse yourself in reading nonfiction on that topic looking for ideas and points related to it that lend themselves to dramatic treatment.
Books don’t spring full-blown from one’s forehead; they are the results of months of research and planning before the first word is written.
Good luck!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… I love the Kindle, as I said loudly and clearly right here when it first came out. It’s a great piece of hardware, and Jeff Bezos has done a lot to bring pricing sensibility to the ebook marketplace.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
An interesting shift over the last little while at Locus Online.
Its subtitle has always been “The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field,” but that used to be best read as “The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field” — that is, the site was updated frequently (often several times a day), and the emphasis was on industry news (and not necessarily the same news, or the same reportage of it, that would eventually appear in the magazine).
Now, it seems to be significantly more “The Website of the Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field” — a site about the magazine (although there’s still news posted several times a week).
Of late, the top banner ad has frequently been for Locus magazine (rather than a book), the lead interview right now is with Jonathan Strahan (Locus‘s book-review editor), they’ve added a Locus “roundtable,” where the staff and regular contributors discuss the content of the magazine (which, over the last several days, at least, has been the main source of fresh content), one of the center-of-page news stories last week was Locus magazine staff profiles, the “Locus poll & survey” (which becomes grist for a future issue of the magazine) is promiently featured, and the main news feed — labeled “Locus sf&f news” — is coming directly from Locus‘s editorial offices in Oakland (and rather irritatingly breaks off each story in the middle of a sentence or even a word: “and the late Algis Budrys are the recipients of the inaugu…”).
Still, there’s oodles of great content there, and plenty of comprehensive databases you won’t find anywhere else.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Although most of this profound science fiction novel is passive as the two scientists debate the existence of God, this is a terrific tale that will have the audience pondering how they would we react if an ET arrived with strong empirical evidence that God exists. The story line mostly focuses on Hollus the believer and Thomas the non-believer who wants to believe as he is dying from cancer. There is also a limited but fascinating look at the reactions of various people from the Intelligent Design crowd to the Darwinists and all sorts in between who have their own agendas. Fans of cerebral science fiction will relish the visit from a theistic evolutionary ET spider.
I’m actually re-visiting Calculating God myself: I’m listening to Audible.com’s Audie-award-nominated audiobook of the novel right now; the reading, by Jonathan Davis, is terrific.
(Oh, and a shout-out to Kirstin Morrell for drawing the Klausner review to my attention.)
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
The February 20, 2009, edition of Entertainment Weekly — the #1 best-selling magazine about entertainment in the United States — begins this week’s “The Hollywood Insider: News and Notes” thus:
Despite the fact that they are weathering stagnant — or downright dreary — ratings for dense shows like Heroes and Lost, the networks are still planning on ambitious series with complex mythologies for next fall.
As the drama development season winds up this month, some of the most notable projects include ABC’s Flash Forward (an adaptation of the sci-fi novel by Robert J. Sawyer) and Eastwick (based on John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick), NBC’s Day One (lots of aliens from Heroes‘ Jesse Alexander), and Fox’s Masterwork (a National Treasure-like tale from Prison Break‘s Paul Scheuring).
“These are all huge shows,” says Endeavor agent Ari Greenburg. “Writers are obsessed with Damages and Lost. They all want to write complex dramas.”
Indeed we do — and it’s nice to see Flash Forward at the top of the list!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
What’s not to like? Vivid storytelling with interesting characters, during which we are rocketed through metaphysical exploration of what it is to be conscious (human versus ape hybrid versus web intelligence), lightning flashes illuminate the nature of perception through translucent eyelids and an ape Picasso, 2-D versus 3-D, cellular automata, neuroanatomy, family dynamics, schoolyard dynamics, internationalism, and so much more. Jane Goodal meets Stephen Wolfram at a cocktail party by Lettvin, J.Y. Maturana, H.R. McCulloch, and W.S. Pitts (What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain). A plethora of ideas on every witty page, yet character- and narrative-driven. Superb!
Woot!
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
… you have to buy from the Amazon.com Kindle store.
Over on MobileRead.com, they have a thread entitled “Kindle Myths and Partial Truths,” in which the very first claim is this:
Myth: If you buy a Kindle, you are locked into Amazon’s Kindle store.
Truth: There are many sources for books that can be read on the Kindle.
And he goes on to site Fictionwise.com as an alternative.
My reply:
Weeeeelllll, since this thread is about “myth” vs. “truth,” the “truth” should be the whole truth, explicitly spelled out.
Yes, it’s a myth that you can only acquire content for the Kindle via the Amazon store. However, it’s a truth that the only source for a wide range of major-publisher content is the Amazon store: you want a New York Times bestseller — or even most of the authors you see in a bookstore or library (assuming their work is available as ebooks at all) — you do have to buy from Amazon.
When someone buys an ebook reader to read novels by James Patterson or Stephen King (or even me) or nonfiction by Malcolm Gladwell or Bill Bryson, to tell them that — hey, no probs, you can get Jane Austen’s Emma over here — is ducking the question and not really separating myth from truth. :)
Fictionwise’s multiformat books available in Mobi format can indeed be used on the Kindle but they are principally titles from small publishers, old and otherwise out-of-print works, or public-domain works.
For a graphic example of the difference, simply go to the main page at Fictionwise.com. The books listed on the left-hand side are the ones you can get there for the Kindle; the ones on the right-hand side are then ones you can’t get for the Kindle anywhere but the Amazon store.
Myth vs. truth is useful discourse; obfuscating boosterism isn’t. :) It seems “Kindle Myths and Partial Truths” is indeed an apt title for this thread.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
As I’ve already said, I support the ability of the blind and visually impaired to be able to use assistive technologies — including screen-readers — to access text. Hell, anyone who’s read my Wake (recently serialized in Analog), which has a blind girl as the main character, can’t have any doubts about that.
My grandfather was blind for most of his adult life, diabetes (a leading cause of blindness) is rampant in my family, and I myself spent six days blind in 1972 (hospitalized with both eyes covered because of a severe eye injury); I am totally, totally sympathetic to the needs of the blind. If you’re blind, as I’ve said in this blog, I think it’s perfectly fine for the Kindle (or any other device) to help you access text you’ve legitimately acquired.
But the market that Amazon is pursuing with the Kindle is not blind users. We need to clearly understand that Amazon did not put text-to-speech in the Kindle as an assistive technology; they put it in so people could have books read to them while driving in their cars, and so on: they put it in to go after the market segment that now buys audiobooks.
You want proof? If it were an assistive technology, then the user interface for the Kindle 2 would also support text-to-speech, and it doesn’t. I quote Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, on this very point:
We note, however, that the device itself cannot be used independently by a blind reader because the controls to download a book and begin reading it aloud are visual and therefore inaccessible to the blind.
Now, some have said the text-to-speech quality is so bad that no one but the blind would routinely use it; it’s a “GPS voice,” as Stephen King called it. But it will not always be so; Amazon is savvy enough to grab the rights now when few will use this technology, rather than waiting until the technology is more mature and widely used.
Authors have ALREADY FOR DECADES NOW waived their rights to income from audio versions of their work made for the blind, whereas Amazon has said nothing about giving away ebooks — let alone Kindles — to blind users. We authors are the ones with the established track record of supporting the rights of the blind; let’s not forget that: we’ve been the good guys for decades when it comes to making our content freely available to the blind.
This is not an authors vs. the blind issue, and to paint it as such is unfair and misleading. I fully grant that an accommodation for the needs of the blind and visually impaired has to be found as we move ahead with technology, but an accommodation for authors’ rights has to be found, too.
And the bottom line hasn’t changed: contracts have been breached, and unless and until we decide that contracts don’t matter in our society, that fact should not be glossed over.
Indeed, I bet that if Amazon had approached authors’ organizations first and asked if they could do this, they would have gotten permission from authors’ groups to do it for free (or, perhaps, on condition that Amazon donate a portion of its profits on the Kindle hardware and the ebooks it sells to the National Federation of the Blind). But they didn’t ask. They just took the rights — and that’s wrong.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
Twenty-six years ago, on January 4, 1983, I joined the Writer’s Digest Book Club. I bought a lot of books from them over the years — my friend book-collector Jack Brooks once remarked, looking at bookcases in my home, that I had the largest private collection of books about writing he’d ever seen. I let my membership lapse some years ago, though, but thought I’d check out what they were up to these days.
The URL WritersDigestBookClub.com now points to a page labeled Writer’s Digest Book Shop, and leads off with a note that says, “Please note that we are no longer accepting new members.” So, it looks like they’re essentially gone.
It’s very hard for book clubs of any type to survive in the era of Amazon.com (which discounts books so much that their prices aren’t much different than the special book-club prices, plus offers free shipping). But, still, this was one that I was fond off, and I’m sad to see it go.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site
