Is this available in English?

"Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days."

That would be a hilarious restriction to try to enforce on purchases of non-digital books.

After 225 posts in this thread I'm still not sure whether I should have my 70 or so go books - bought in the go book shop - burnt after my death or have them donated to the dutch go bond.

You can divide authors like that, but it's not the right way to look at it. At the top end are people who make their living from writing: best-selling authors, journalists who also write books, etc. (Me included; I don't make much off of books, but I make my living from writing).

At the bottom end are people who write every evening to write the Great Novel, get it published, sell a thousand copies and never publish again.

In between is a huge mess of different situations. First, fiction and non-fiction are very different, in terms of sales. Second, publishers simply _must_ publish a certain number of books each year, for a wide variety of reasons. So they know that not every novel they publish is by the next James Joyce, and that's why they only choose to really promote a few of them. But many books get accepted because publishers need to publish.

Finally, there are authors who publish non-fiction and really don't care about sales. They want the "prestige" of having their names on the covers of books. I can tell you that by publishing computer books, I got better paying freelance writing gigs than others; just having a list of books published was the best reference I could have. Lots of people who write technical books, or other non-fiction, don't even care about advances, because they make their money by selling their own books at lectures or conferences. With a standard 30% discount on purchases, they get far more than they would from royalties. (Interesting point to remember: the person in the chain who makes the most from book sales (as a percentage of the total price) is the bookseller. S/he gets much more than the publisher or the author.)



Yes and no. It's really quite complicated. And go isn't the best example, but if you show good sales on your first book, the advance on your second book will be higher, in most cases.

As for offering books for free, if that free does replace sales - which may or may not be the case, at least today - then the publisher would hesitate. Advances are calculated on a combination of past performance and future possibilities, so it would be taken into account.

Thing is, book sales are pretty much flat; they're not going down like CD sales. So none of this has come out in the marketplace yet. Advances are a bit lower in general, but that's been the case for the past 5 years or so, and it's not really related to piracy, but rather to an industry that really doesn't know where it's going.

Mostly, this conversation has focused on our role as consumers; how our decisions affect the writing industry. In general though, authors don't get paid by consumers, they get paid by publishers, and it is the publisher and not the author who decides how the work will be distributed and sold. It is in the interest of all three parties, the consumer, the author and the publisher, that books get written, published, and read. Whether they get sold is primarily an interest of the publisher.

I think at least somewhat relevant to this is the difference between owning something and licensing it. When you buy a book you own it, which gives you the right to re-sell, lend etc. Quite often digital media are "sold" to us under license, which as I understand it means you only get the rights granted therein. I know that in the music industry digital sales are almost always under license, although they are counted as sales because the artist then gets less royalties than under a normal licensing act (such as radio play). I think this is at best pretty immoral on the part of the music publishing companies, does the same thing happen with ebooks?

This meant that the pirated version of most music was several orders of magnitude more convenient. You can forget about the price. After that iTunes (as just one example) came along and changed some things, if not all...

It looks like both of these publishers' ebooks are free of DRM. I don't know how they're doing, but maybe go book publishers interested in ebooks should contact them to see.

Slate and Shell has offered one in sgf format.
http://www.slateandshell.com/SSYY015.html

Kiseido Digital of course has the bookshelf, go world archive, and go review in PDF.

So far I've bought the bookshelf and go world archive. I plan to buy go review at some point.

There's also the fact that getting digital music legally in some formats is nearly impossible. For example, I've never come across a place that sells FLAC, my preferred audio format.

Kiseido Digital of course has the bookshelf, go world archive, and go review in PDF.

That's because it's wasteful. While i think a 128kbps MP3 is enough in most cases, upwards of 192 it's really hard to tell the difference, and i'll bet money you cannot distinguish 256kbps+ from your FLAC.

Honestly, I find 128kbps and 192kbps pretty unlistenable these days. While I have not done much blind testing on this, I have had the experience of thinking that something was off, only to discover that I was listening to a 192kbps rip. With any good headphones, even a simple cymbal will sound off if you listen carefully. I'll agree that I can't really distinguish between 256kbps from FLAC, but I also have sufficient hard drive space that the size difference doesn't matter, and knowing that there is no difference from CD quality is important to me. Also, with FLAC I can transcode to any other format without the loss of quality that comes from doing transcodes from lossy encodes to lossy encodes. As MP3 may one day become useless, being able to transcode into a new format is important to me.

How much hd space do you have such that storing all your music as flac is not an issue?

FLAC

Man, you're sure taking a lot of... FLAC... over your preferences. (Sorry, can't resist the obvious pun!)