The Alabaster Library is having their annual book sale, April 26th and 27th. Paperbacks are 50 cents and hardbacks are $1. They said 50% of the stock is pulled from the shelves and 50% is donated, all sorted by category.
Category Archives: News
Ghost (Writer) in the machine
Philip Parker is the most prolific author in history, according to Amazon. The NY Times ran this article about Philip Parker and his amazing technicolor technical writing machines. Apparently, Parker unleashes his computers on the Internet, which look in every nook and cranny to glean all stats, numbers, data, etc. Then Parker peppers in a few introductions and transition pieces, hits another button to format, create charts and an index and…. bam! You have a collection of 200,000 “published” books (actually they’re sitting in a POD database waiting until someone buys one).
Most are dry niche-technical stuff. The kind of specialist info you might expect from a data miner like the one he is running. But he says that he’s looking to produce works in one area-of fiction… the romance novel.
“I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
Wow. Writing so formulaic that someone thinks a computer could do it? It will be interesting to see if it ever happens.
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Ghost (Writer) in the machine
The NY Times ran an article about Philip Parker and his amazing technicolor technical writing computer program. Basically, his machine collects every factoid, statistic and number from the web, Parker then peppers a few introductions and transitional phrases in there, hits another button to format and index… and bam! You have a collection of 200,000 separate books “authored” by one man.
No doubt, the texts are dry and boring. But I bet some neat trends start to appear in what his program finds online. It’s a pretty interesting way to collect data and organize it for a book. Though I imagine, if you ever want anything beyond tables and graphs, you’ll always need that human element.
Of course, there is romance fiction which Parker said he has already targeted with new algorithms…
“I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
So we’ll have to wait and see if it ever goes any further!
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Amazon, again
Wow, if there is any truth to this tid-bit Amazon is getting good at throwing their weight around. On the heels, of the P.O.D. smack-down, publishers in the U.K. now fear an Amazonian backlash over pricing structures.
Basically, the gist is Amazon prices all they offer at a big discount. Some publishers, in order to lure a few customers are offering deeper discounts on their own websites, undercutting Amazon. Evidently, this has upset the Amazon gods and they are sniffing around looking for a fix. Due to some legal-ese in the U.K. contracts, some fear
Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that.
So, if you publish a book and mark it $10, Amazon’s price is $8 at 20% off. Then, you, as the publisher and owner of the book, offer it at $7, on your own site. Amazon says “your offer of $7 is the ‘real market’ value since that’s what you, as the publisher, are offering” so we’ll now sell your book for $5.60 per our 20% off agreement”.
You know, I can appreciate the chance of lower book prices as much as the next starving book hoarder… but there is just something about a retailer having the clout to tell publishers and content developers what they can and cannot do with their products, that gets my all kinds of ticked off. I hope it never happens.
{via Bookninja}
