Friday, October 10, 2014

May your antiquated book publishing models die, die, die!

Read an interesting review of what appears to be an interesting book, Hieroglyph.

I read the sample chapter and was ready to buy it. Book was "released" 14 Sep 2014. Clicked on the ebook button so I could read it straight away. "This publication is not available in your area" (Australia). Huh?

Oh well, maybe Amazon.com could help. Nope: "we do not have pricing for the Kindle version yet". Paperback? "Not available till 2015".

So here is a book publisher which will not sell me a book I would like to buy right now.

I can guess why of course. They want to sell hardcover versions for a few months, then paperback versions, then ebooks but only in USA. Then sometime in the middle of next year they'll get around to making ebook version available to Oz.

So of course I will wait till it's available as a Torrent, download it and pay nothing. Or simply forget about it. There are some people who like to buy hard copies of books. I'm not one of them. I don't have the room any more. I only buy electronic versions. (Yes, I do buy (some) ebooks, usually on the spur of the moment of course.)

And the final irony is that the book is about optimistic techno futures. Hah! hah!

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