What is evident -and very welcome – is the clear direction that Google cannot obviate e-copyright simply because works have been published (in translation or otherwise)in the UK or USA. Lynley Hood and…

Guardian story

"We won! (this battle not the war)"

Traditional publishing and indie publishing aren't all that different, and I don't think people realize that. Some books and authors are best sellers, but most aren't. It may be easier to self-publish than…

But complaints of Whitcoulls' predatory loss-leading (and demanding publishers suck up ridiculous discounts and sale-or-return conditions) are nothing new. I remember when Thomas Harris' Hannibal was…

This one?

__Instead, they claim, the company's current predicament is an all-too-familiar tale of mismanagement: of shiny new executives rubbishing the opinions of experienced staff; of a bizarre attitude to discounting which…

One point that stood out to me: odd discounting practices, namely slashing prices on bestsellers and quietly ramping up prices on less exalted items. In hindsight I feel guilty about buying…

That's the point that interests me. Do wish I could have found the link for that earlier story I mentioned by an author about his experience of transition to the new model.

Some genres will be…

A journalist…

Not too long ago, we wrote about JA Konrath's claim that we had reached the tipping point with ebooks, where a decent self-published ebook author, who priced their books cheaply (generally under $4) could make a really good living, selling thousands of…

If I'm not very much mistaken, somebody has done exactly that on two wrecked cars in a Christchurch street.

No, Steve, its value is that you can get drunk QED!

I can see why it caught on. I believe that the most small popular primitive sculpture is that of a woman with large breasts and a big…

I would have to say that any assumptions that we know, at least on my part, would be grossly overstating the facts.

Word-speak is truth inversion. That's not mine, but you can have it.

do you know, the vast majority of so-called ice-age engravings/pictures were made by yer usual grubby-minded adolescents depicting their pricks or their…

See, that almost makes sense to me. In my mind context is still the main thing modernists fail to explain, although to their credit they do try. Always they seek "context-free" knowledge.…

Funnily enough, I didn't find that very funny.

Depending what you mean by grammar, I'm not sure there's much difference. Formal grammars, which are used to define computer programming languages, and other languages too, are…

That did come up. The answer? No one. There is no biggest infinite set. This is because you can always form a bigger set when you take the set of all subsets of a set.…

(Ok, it's mainly, "Marshmallows, gis us matches & a stick" but it does appear to be interspecies communication (which has always happened – dogs, horses (less so), cats know but refuse to actually talk other than manipulate, and most especially, some cetaceans, and…

Islander: close, it’s…

The important point is that, regardless of what they are in any individual case, all words and all rules have been made up by…

Wait a minute, I thought in NZ the value of a particular bottle of wine was…

You're right about the first statement, wrong about the second.

You can't point to 'which' for example.

However, grammar is…

Yes, it was the work of about 2 months in a class I did in Stage 3. Having done that, it actually led to history's first…

Most human cultures never did have that – it's a more recent abberation

+1

I am forever thankful for going through through WHS in the 90's, while I saw friends crash and burn at Wellington College down the road.

My son will start college in…

Bertrand Russell had to do quite a bit of work in Principia Mathematica to demonstrate that one plus one equals to, as I recall.

No longer can you have a strictly material conception of what exists.

Down the rabbit hole we go.

I like "we're all born into language" as a paraphrase of Derrida's otherwise waffly French academic prose.

And I reject the assertion I quoted above that we can only care about either symbol or object, politics or culture,…

I am not discussing Derrida.

Again, I'm not so sure, and wary of buying a doctrine. Maybe there is a 2 in some abstract idea-space. Certainly 2 is a very powerful idea, with extremely wide applicability. It would seem to have captured some very…

Likewise, just as you…

Except for the fact that he never said that. What he said was that there is no outside-text, that is to say, there is nothing outside context.

A dry wine is an empty bottle, I keep saying that.

This one's confounded me for around 15 years. Not that partial to postmodernism (perhaps mainly through lack of exposure), it strikes me as a proposition which could go either way. Maybe there is only text. Or maybe the…

can be taken to excess but I reckon it can also be an exciting and fresh way of regarding the world and the making of meaning

Yes. And sometimes simultaneously, especially when combined with deconstructionism. Derrida was partially correct…

"If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it."

It's the cymbals I…

All those words that get used and abused, such as natural or authentic

I recently read an interview with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, which is…

From the linked article: "...refusal to play the publicity game, or to appear to swim in the same…

Yeah, it's what those new bourge-wah lefties are using to undermine clothcap modernism, don't you know.

See, the Left, or at least the socialist Left, is very much a modernist project. We’re materialists – we’re interested in government and the political-economic system for the…

What, you mean I should burn my Barthes and Baudrillard? That would just leave Baudelaire, and I quite like my alliterative approach to library classification.

I knew the respect for Te Herald couldn’t last, but really – you couldn’t try and sketch out the…

Oi!

That's a year of my life I'd have never got back, if I hadn't stopped going to the lectures.

Oi!

Which references The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes in 1968.

Dude, step away from the Post-Modernism!

Pish. That’s not as high a barrier as you might think.

Elsewhere: Richard Flanagan has a good (but depressing) piece in The Age..

Meanwhile, in the NZHerald least said…

[Coat]

But on a more serious note, the LA Times had this interesting piece in 2007.…

Unfortunately authorial anonymity is considered at best a disease, at worst 'brand suicide'. And from where I sit, in a metaphysical fug here on my sofa in front of the television, whiskey in hand, slippers on and pants off, that seems unacceptable.

And on a related note, Iceland shows that saying "NO!" to bank bailouts need not be a recipe…

Yes it does.

Are you suggesting that the…

That’s also why I trying to break my addiction to literary biographies – I should be higher-minded about it, but it was rather uncomfortable reading the [[http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=307l|Library of…

Orson Scott Card is an author whose works I have enjoyed, but…

I think it…

* Saying this a lot lately :-(

I've been trying to remember the title of this book for the last two weeks!

Thanks for that.

'He never once said please....'

In-person contact between writers & readers is one development; something like Cursor's publishing model is another, http://thinkcursor.com/ and booksellers are part…

Are we still talking about the viability of bookshops though, or have we moved on…

I also love Time Out books, and their children’s section is nice, except when you can smell dope smoke drifting in from the back room; it’s kinda amusing I guess, but not when I have my…

That's not a very long term financial model is it? I'm mortgaged up the wazoo and I don't pay that %…

Dude, that was quick. I’m dying a little inside now, just so you know. ;-<
This from High Tide in Tucson by Barbara Kingsolver:
Also very well put. Where would we be if only celebrity authors made it onto the shelves of bookstores? Oh, in Whitcoulls. As you were.

Yep

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xgeT2hzxrQ

So here's a question for my tasty Brains Trust – is there a future for the general bookseller (a bit of everything and pulling digit from rectum when it comes to…

You mean whether readers and listeners will be…

Where’s the music thread when you need one? Radiohead slipped out their latest release overnight The King of Limbs. I’m sure there will be many ‘mehs’ going round, but I’m such a TY geek, he could fart on record and I’d buy it. Which is just as well. As…

I don't think what I'm arguing for is incompatible with this point. Engaged…

Fiction is bad enough in NZ, but technical books are insane. Whenever we went to Borders, my partner would always go…

These days I do Unity Books for new novels (because they love books) and Arty…

Whitcoulls has always felt like a variety store with…

Good bye Whitcoulls, you had over ten years to figure this shit out. #flyingpig

And seriously, folks, thanks for all your wonderfully thoughtful contributions. The nice…

This happened to me in Whitcoulls St Lukes with Karen Healey’s Guardian of The Dead. It was apparently ‘there’, just that ‘there’…

Bloody good question. I'm certainly hoping a solid business journalist – either here or in Oz – is going to get under the "evil interwebz broke our business" meme which seems…

I don't know the back-story here — anyone here who does? I'd be interested — but it looks like yet another example of how fucked the private equity model is.

Is this another case of a successfully trading company being…

Technically you're an unsecured creditor and with everything legally frozen they don't legally have to honour them at all right now.

Any new owner won't be obliged to…

Oooh.

I know the feeling. Last year I was given a $30 Whitcoulls voucher and spent an hour going through their biggest store down here (Cashel St) looking for something I might actually…

Certainly – small indie book stores, which seems to be thriving as much as anyone in the retail sector can at the moment, don’t have that luxury. You’ve got to go that bit further, be innovative and flexible in your customer…

Whitcoulls gift voucher is my standard present from the in-laws (not this year, as luck has it…

Indeed – and while it would still piss me off if I was trying…

My brief dabble in independent book publishing certainly didn't leave me with a good impression of Whitcoulls. When Great New Zealand Argument launched, Whitcoulls' copies hadn't left the Warehouse and later we started getting direct sales requests from…

"People who bought this book also liked...." has worked for me on Amazon with surprising frequency.

Top 'also liked' for Not Safe For Work? xkcd. Works for me.

"People who bought this book also liked...." has…

I liked The Sparrow, although I think the way the author brushes off the (at times quite startling) similarities between her book and James Blish's A Case of Conscience are unconvincing. I found Children of God to be…

My favourite story about the 'patchy' customer serrvice at Whitcoulls was when I went in search of a…

I thought The Sparrow and Children of God are both excellent books, but (avoiding spoilers) I now recommend them with the caveat that they may be extremely triggering for survivors of rape/sexual abuse and domestic violence. after unwittingly loaning my copy…

That is both a fantastic plan I may have to emulate, and something I'm going to taunt my market research colleagues with.

Too late :-) I thought it was pretty good, although perhaps not up to the hype I had heard/read about…

As for books and me, I read as much as I ever did, but nowadays it tends to be websites…

I also…

this

Whitcoulls stopped stocking books and I stopped going there. Sure they had some picture books and some bestsellers, but if I wanted to find the books by say, a top SF author, Whitcoulls sure as…

For Craft books, borders are the only place I'm lucky enough to find them, normally i have to go online, and even then i…

I suspect his conclusion is right:

The sort of high volume disposable fiction which is their stock in trade, will migrate almost entirely into electronic form…

Ah, Russell I didn't know you were a slash and burn kinda guy. :)

I only go into Whitcoulls during the sales (anytime during the year) when I go looking for pressies for the…

Once I passed the age of, mmm, thirteen, Whitcoulls barely ever carried anything that I wanted to read – at…

So would I, and the floor is open. But to be fair, from what I've picked up nobody is that sure how to react. It wasn't a surprise but most definitely…

A little from column A, a pinch from column B and add randomness to taste? Funny how much of life works out like that.…

Also, I made my last stationery purchases from specialist stockists like Warehouse Stationery and Gordon Harris (both on Wellington's Victoria St).

On a related…

Borders, on the other hand, has the best sci-fi selection in Christchurch. Yes,…

ETA On the…

Or The Book Depository, whose world-wide free postage has been…

Yup. My tastes are lowbrow, but not enough, it seems. Whitcoulls drove me back to public libraries. Once that floodgate reopened, the only thing I've purchased…