The Spindle's End

My E-book Pricing Examined: Part III was posted within two hours of the lawsuit filed by the United States Department of Justice against Apple and five of the six major publishers. I have since had the time to actually read the legalese of the suit itself, so I thought I'd offer this addendum and some corrections. (Honestly, what can I expect when the big news media can't get it right the first time around?)

The key to this lawsuit is that the DOJ is accusing these six companies of violating Section 1 of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. This piece of legislation was passed in 1890, and is primarily about ensuring healthy competition between companies operating within the United States. Section 1 reads:

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, or restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared illegal. Every person who shall make any contract or engage of any combination or conspiracy theory hereby declared illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, at the discretion of the court.

For those interested in doing their own digging, this is US Code Title 15, Chapter One.

In their suit, the DOJ is arguing that the agency model unlawfully restricts the trade of e-books. Further, that the defendants in the case conspired together to deliberately restrict the trade of e-books. The bulk of the document is an interesting list of a chronological order of events which is meant to establish that the CEOs of the corporations in question colluded on price fixing. Keep in mind, the CEOs in question are not themselves listed as defendants and are not being charged with anything. Whoever wrote the document does an interesting game of naming a few CEOs in certain places, but deliberately does not name CEOs or companies in other places. Not being of a legal background, I'm unsure as to the legal reasoning behind this, but as a reader this certainly made me feel like certain companies and CEOs were being targeted more than others.

Also, even though Apple, Hatchette, HarperCollins, McMillan, Penguin, and Simon & Shuster are all listed as defendants, Hatchette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Shuster have all signed a settlement with the DOJ. However, the settlement must be approved by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York before it goes into affect. Random House did not enter into an agency agreement with Apple and other retailers at the same time as the other five, and has therefore avoided any and all conspiracy charges. I should also point out that there are in fact seven defendants listed: Apple, the five publishers listed, as well as Penguin Group, the parent company of Penguin Group USA. I do not know why the London based company is listed along with its New York based subsidiary. All of the five publishers are parts of larger companies, but the multi-national conglomerations are not listed for the other four publishers.

This one is kind of hard for me. I can see where the DOJ thinks it has a case. However, I can see the flip side. In making a move to control prices, publishers actually encouraged having more e-book retailers in the marketplace. While Amazon is still the major e-book player, Barnes and Noble, Apple, and Kobo all have healthy positions. I am unsure whether this would be the case had Amazon continued with loss leading most (but not all) of their bestselling e-book titles at $9.99. Competition is now more about user experience than about price, but that's still a very valid method of competition. It's also become and increasingly important method of competition in the digital age. I've also notice a fairly unilateral rise in print book prices over the last year, though no one has complained about that in flame wars across the internet.

I don't know. Maybe I'm still just stuck on the "if you can't afford it, don't buy it" financial ideals I ascribe to. (Before I spark a flame war on myself, this DOES NOT include things necessary for basic survival. This is only in reference to life's little and not-so-little luxuries, some of which are books.) As well, I'm a library advocate. I couldn't afford to feed my book addiction right now if I bought everything I read at retail value. I'd read myself out of house and home if I tried. So, I borrow my books from the library. If indeed e-book prices were too high, consumers would not be purchasing them, and publishers would be forced to adjust the price to a point where they saw healthy sales or they would go out of business. To me, the fact that e-book sales are growing, as are book sales overall, means that e-book prices are not out of line for the market in general. But, just as my legal understanding of this lawsuit may be completely wrong, my understanding of basic economics may be as well. I also worry about what price the authors, editors, and other staff at the big publishers may pay if their product is deeply devalued. I want them to be able to eat, so they can go on keeping me addicted to all their stories.

A little while ago, I did a post on why Anne Bishop's recent writing hasn't worked for me. Yesterday I finished Patricia Brigg's new novel, Fair Game. It's a straightforward paranormal fantasy with a strong romantic line, and it's relatively short. But I enjoyed it, for a very simple reason: the story was well crafted.

A lot of author's try to cram too much stuff into a book. A friend of mine recently chalanged me to tell him what my book was about in one sentance or less. Granted, I took a moment or two to craft that sentance, but I could do it. I understand that virtually everything else I'm putting into that story is more or less window dressing for that one sentance. When editing time comes, I need to make sure that what I told my friend my story is about is communicated more than anything else. Sadly, I find that sometimes professional authors can make this mistake, and bury their plot in so much extraneous fluff than a reader can have a hard time finding it.

Happily, Briggs is not one of that kind of author, and that's why I tend to respond well to her work. Fair Game is ultimately about Anna and Charles tracking down a serial killer who specializes in supernatural prey. There's a subplot featuring Anna and Charles' relationship, because every relationship requires constant work. That's why romance novels can be so unrelatable: you don't get to walk off into a sunset forever. There's also an underlying theme of racism and intolerance, but that doesn't distract from the plot. Overall, the book is about as relastic as a paranormal fantasy with werewolves and faeries can be.

Now, I will grant you that one reason why Briggs can get away without a lot of window dressing on her latest books is because she's already done a lot of world building in previous novels. But even if you look at her earlier works, even the pre-Mercy Thompson ones, you see that she is an incredibly clean and concise writer. If something doesn't need to be there, you don't see even a hint of it. She built her incredibly detailed world over a number of novels, not in one foundational info drop. And over the course of her career, those tiny additions and explanations have served her very well.

In other words, she keeps it simple, in the best possible connotation. A well crafted story doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles to entertain.

Once upon a time, I stumbled accross The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop. I thought it was dark, gritty, well written, compelling, and just all around awesome. So I lent copies to friends, bought them copies for their birthdays, and just promoted the hell out of the series in my social network. Not that we thought of it that way then, in the days before Facebook. Every book of Bishop's that I've picked up since then has in some way dissapointed me, with the exception of The Invisible Ring. Her most recent books I've actually been disdainful of. I just picked up Bridge of Dreams (sequel to Sebastian and Belladonna) and had to fight with myself to try and like this book.

It's not badly written. The mechanics are top notch, no complaints. The characters are thoroughly fleshed out and believable. The world building is also fully fleshed out and consistant accross all three books in this series. Why then was I not connecting? Why was I just waiting for the book to be over? Why did I think the book needed to be over about at least fifty pages earlier than it was? Maybe even a hundred, if you edited out unnessary plot lines.

My first realization is that Bishop has decided to pull her punches. It looks like something horrible is going to happen, but wait! It's either not as bad as advertised, or it's mendable in some way that takes little effort. Or both. For example, the main character Lee is held captive by the villians, tortured, and blinded. This is hefty stuff! But almost all of the details aside from his blindness are glossed over. What happened to all the bruises, cuts, infections, malnutrition, and other physical trauma? He also appears to not be suffering from PTSD after this experience, and he should be! This book should be littered with his mental issues stemming from the first quarter of the tale, and it's not. In fact, they are so seldom there that the few times they are mentioned they've lost believability.  Finally, there's this magical potion that can reverse his blindness! Huzzah! Bad things happened, and then they all got cleaned up. By the time we get to the point of no return in the story, he's even regained enough sight to wander around by himself. Subconciously, I've pulled away from the story by this point because I know that nothing bad is really going to happen. And if bad things happen, the suffering will be temporary, and at the end everyone walks away into the sunset. The conflict needs to be real, needs to matter to me, the stakes need to be suitably high (and I need to believe that they are high and that victory is not garanteed), and I need to have doubts as to how the characters are going to pull it all off. I have to want to know just how they possibly could.

Another problem is that Bridge of Dreams doesn't really have a main villian. It's a group of villians who are never directly on the page long, those who are are flunkies who are then gone longe before the point of no return, and are given no motivation beyond their action other than 'this is what they do.' I don't care about Lee's struggle against them because I don't care enough about the villians. For that I need at least basic characterization done.

Finally, sheer predictability. By the time we've reached the point in the book where the characters are piecing everything together, I already know how they are going to solve it. There's a few curveballs, but nothing I'm deeply surprised about. The first two books in this series set up the world so well that I found myself reading along, adding everything up, and getting the correct answer. As a reader, I shouldn't be able to do this. If I know what's going to happen, and mostly how it's going to happen, why would I finish reading it?

A Bridge of Dreams is a weird little love story trying to be dark fantasy. It doesn't committ enough to either tale to be really successful. On one hand, it's mechanically well written. Descriptions are well done and even compelling. On the other, there are so many basic, amateur mistakes in the storytelling that I'm really dissapointed. I know Bishop can do better; her debut book was better! If she had tried to debut with this, I'm not sure she'd have made it out of the slush pile. Not because it's badly written, but because the story is poorly set up. It's missing too many of the hallmarks of craftsmenship that I expect a writer at her level to do all the time, every time.

Please, Ms. Bishop. Take some time to really craft your next tale. I'll love you for it! Because at some point I'm going to stop hoping you've remembered how to write, and just leave your books on the shelf.

So, as you can see from the reviews that have been published by me at the Ranting Dragon lately, I spent a few months reading a lot of the popular young adult books for 2011. This included works by authors like Cassandra Clare, Andrea Cremer, Kiersten White, Becca Fitzpatrick, Patricia C. Wrede, Tamora Pierce, Brenna Yovanoff, Beth Revis, Lauren Oliver, and a few others. While I did pick up books that I genuinely enjoyed, I did notice a disturbing trend running through a some of these works.

I talked a bit in my previous young adult rant about the growing proliferation of pre-twentieth century literary themes and devices in modern young adult fiction. I'm going to expand this further now. Again, we can start with the Twilight books. Meyer freely admits that her books are based on Pride and Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet, Wurthering Heights, and A Midsummer's Night's Dream. Now, I'm not going to argue that all of these titles are classics, and deserve to be read, and even be read by young adults. But we need to understand something fundamental about these works: they are all from a time, place, and society different from ours. The relationship's described in them are reflections of those other times, places, and societies. When adapting them for a modern reader, in particular for a young modern reader, we need to be careful about what aspects of those relationships we keep and how they are presented. 

For starters, all four of the works mentioned above are from a time and place where women had few options other than marriage. They also deal heavily with society's expectations of what a good marriage is, which do not match modern ideals. Elizabeth finally accepts Mr. Darcy after she sees his mansion, after he helps her family avoid ruinous scandal and after he convinces his best friend to marry Elizabeth's sister even though the Bennett's are poor. Romeo and Juliet die tragic deaths because their love (and brief marriage) is not socially acceptable. Notice here that the lovers die. This is not necessarily meant to be starry-eyed romance, but a very real warning about the cost of inappropriate love. A Midsummer's Night's Dream is completely based on what are appropriate relationships, and a woman's place in society. The play opens with the very political marriage of Hippolyta (a former Amazon) and Thesus and with the threat of death or a nunnery for Hermia if she does not marry her father's choice of husband for her. Demetrius is literally be-spelled so he will fall in love with Helena. Oberon shames  his wife Titania by making her fall in love with a man with the head of an ass. While this is hysterical on stage, pull it into the realm of drama and suddenly things become very dark and very creepy, and extremely misogynistic. Wurthering Heights is a mess, with Catherine marrying Edgar because he is the more socially acceptable choice, rather than Heathcliff who she really loves. This tension literally destroys all three of them, plus a few more people along the way. While we're finally getting into the realm of love for love's sake, this gets turned on it's head when Heathcliff tries to resolve his own broken heart by making his son marry Catherine's daughter even though Linden and Cathy aren't in love with each other. What is perhaps most disturbing to me about using Wurthering Heights as modern teen literature is the choice between two men becoming a choice about a woman's future.

Don't get me wrong, before the late twentieth century, who a woman married very much decided what kind of life she would have. If she married an educated man, she would likely live in material comfort, her children would be better fed, have access to healthcare, and be more likely to be educated themselves. If she married a poor, uneducated farmer life would look very different. But this is no longer the case. Women can now have careers outside the home, and are in fact encouraged to do so. Recent studies show that women are now out earning men, likely due to higher education rates among modern American women than men. A growing number of women are the breadwinners for their families, with the husband staying at home with the children. So the idea that who a woman marries, or dates, decides her future is no longer applicable. Why then are we seeing it in teen literature in not insignificant numbers?

We can start with the Twilight books. Bella must choose between Edward and Jacob, and this choice is a metaphor for the choice between being human or becoming a vampire. Andrea Cremer is another great example for her Nightshade series. Calla must choose between Ren and Shay, thereby choosing whether to remain in her own repressive society and do the expected thing or leave. Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall uses two boys as a metaphor for who her female protagonist chooses to be at the end. Granted, this is the choice between a socially acceptable but abusive relationship which rewards her for negative behavior and a non-popular boy who actually likes her for who she is and will encourage her to be a better person, but the pattern is still there. Cassandra Clare plays with this a bit in her Infernal Devices series, even if Tessa's choice between Will and James is not a choice between two different lifestyles. It's still a choice between two boys.

It's gotten to the point in much of young adult literature where a girl's choices must involve choices about a boy. Brenna Yovanoff's new book The Space Between guides the female protagonist's growth  is through the growth of her relationship with a boy. Again, this was well done and worked in context, but after a month of reading the above books, even this was too much for me. Enough with the romance! Let's give my fellow Millennials some ass-kicking role models like Generation X had. Do we as women really want the younger members of my generation to backslide on the feminist front? Because that's what we're teaching them in their literature.

I'll end this by saying I am very much looking forward to new books by Tamora Pierce and Patricia C. Wrede. Pierce's female protagonists are always strong in their own right, and the boys can either keep up or get out of the way. Wrede's current series, Frontier Magic, had at the end of book two yet to develop a romantic line for it's female protagonist. Stories like these are becoming as rare as young adult SFF for girls was when Pierce and Wrede first started writing it in the late eighties and early nineties. Wrede's Far West is due out sometime this year, while a new as yet untitled Circle book is due scheduled for publication in 2012 as well.

The library may be an excellent place to spend an afternoon with your significant other when you're a teenager: it's a safe public environment that your parents will not object to, and is filled with entertaining things like computers, books, music, and movies. However, should you choose this venue for your courtship, do keep a few things in mind:

1. You and your girlfriend should not disappear into a bathroom together. At the very least this will get you banned from the library for at least three months for indecent behavior.

2. When caught in said bathroom by your girlfriend's father, you can expect some verbal abuse and anger. Please be understanding, even if his threatening to beat you up is not terribly thrilling. Put yourself in his shoes in twenty years with your own fourteen year old daughter and her older boyfriend. Granted, a public library lobby filled with witnesses is not a good place to have this altercation as it attracts all sorts of attention.

3. Do not threaten to shoot your girlfriend's father. While he has threatened you with assault, you have now threatened him with assault with a deadly weapon. Guess which one is more likely to get the cops called immediately?

4. When being questioned by the police, try to be respectful and do not lie about who you are and how they can contact you in the future. You've just made them very suspicious, and they suspect they should hold you and question you further. Perhaps back at the precinct, because you must have a reason you're lying and giving them a hard time in general.

5. When the handcuffs come out DO NOT RUN AWAY. This is resisting arrest, the most serious charge thus far. However, if you do feel the need to prove your track star qualities, I would suggest not running towards a pedestrian heavy street and/or a place like a bus station. There are likely to be fine upstanding citizens who may feel inspired to help the police. The chances of your making a clean getaway just got worse, not better.

6. When the police do catch you, DO NOT HIT THEM. This is assaulting an officer. You have now so thoroughly pissed them off they will charge you with everything they can, treat you like shit, and generally do their best to make your life as miserable as they can. And all this goes on your record. Won't Mom be proud?

Kids these days! What are they thinking?

On a side note: working in an urban library is never dull for long! However, keeping your sanity does require a certain amount of black humor to get through the day.

Over the next however long, I'm going to be posting some observations I've made about the current state of SFF young adult literature. A few months ago, I joined The Ranting Dragon as a reviewer, and asked why there weren't a lot of YA reviews on the site, since they were popping up in the monthly Anticipation lists. The answer was simply that while many of the staff agreed that the YA end of things were important, no one was taking the time to read any of it. Well, I thought that was a shame, and with one thing and another, I stepped up to the plate. It helps that I work at a library, and so can borrow these books without the need to buy a book I'm only likely to read once.

I first started reading YA literature back in the mid-1990s. Ancient history as far as the genre goes, I know. The very idea that teenagers a) read books voluntarily and b) aren't likely to read children's books anymore was a new one. I'm not sure why that was new, but it was. While books had been published for this age group for some time, it had just become something that got shelved on its own in libraries and book stores. These sections were small, and filled with a lot of Cynthia Voight, Caroline B. Cooney, and Lurlene McDaniel. Not that there is or was anything wrong with these authors, but there was a general lack of SFF. About the only authors who were consistently publishing SFF for young adults were Tamora Pierce, Tanith Lee and Patricia C. Wrede. I devoured everything I could get my hands on, and then ran out by the time I got to high school. And so I moved on to the adult SFF section, and made only occasional return trips to the YA section.

And then, in 1999, Harry Potter happened. Just after the fifth HP book released, Eragon was re-published by a major house. YA SF has never been the same, and not just in terms of page length. Were I making the journey from Children's to YA literature now, I would never run out of SFF to read. My journey from YA to Adult would not have been so soon, and would not have been made because of lack of age appropriate reading material. (Let's face it, reading Bradley's Mists of Avalon when you turn 14 will warp you a bit.)

Sadly, I think it would have been made out of boredom. Don't get me wrong, there are a number of wonderful YA authors out there (some of whom I've never stopped reading since my own teenage years). There's also a lot of trash mixed in. While I don't expect to like every book that's published, or even every book I pick up, I am depressed at the sheer amount of boilerplate going around.

Let's pick an easy place to start: Twilight. I know, I've made some of you shudder in fear, and others are about to tear my head off. In my opinion, Stephanie Meyer did one thing right with that series, and that was know her audience and know what literary devices, tropes, and archetypes work for that audience. People tend to forget that vampires had been a big deal long before Twilight. There was Buffy and Angel on the WB (which later became the CW), Anita Blake had been flirting with Jean Claude since 1993, and Sookie Stackhouse fell for Bill Compton in 2001. Major films include the Blade and Underworld series. I could go on. Meyer didn't invent the sexy vampire love interest, she just got rid of the majority of their ick factor and made them even prettier. Teenagers are filled with hormones and just discovering love and lust, so writing a romance ups your marketability factor. There's a long long standing trope of the good girl who falls for the bad boy, and bad boy makes good. Everyone loves the rebel. So when I read Twilight, I wasn't surprised that it was so popular, I was just utterly shocked and insulted at the incredible number of grammatical mistakes (really, who was so supposed to copy edit that book? 'Cause they didn't). In the further series, there is again a long-standing trope of having the female protagonist choose between two possible lovers. It's everywhere in Regency and Victorian era literature, and now it's everywhere in modern YA literature (don't worry, I have a whole post for that particular rant).

What I can't get over is how many read-a-likes have been published since Twilight. Yes, you have a working model, but eventually you have to face the fact that you can't have twenty people all write the same book and have any one of them do especially well. You can only read the same book so many times, just as you can only eat the same meal so many times before you have to have something, anything else. Love story between girl and super-boy, with a few male distractions thrown in for her (but not him! although that would be interesting), is not so complicated or fascinating or important that it needs to be inundating teen girls' literature. Over and over and over again, I'm seeing references to companies like Alloy Entertainment, which package books. As in, someone comes up with a concept they think will sell, they hire a writer to do it, and sell the result (sometimes before it is finished) to a publisher. They then can also sell the film rights to the work. Alloy's credits include Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. This is fundamentally different in many ways from a writer coming up with an idea, working out the kinks, and then selling it. For one, they get paid more if they do finally publish the traditional way, but it also starts out as something they love. A book-packager is also not as likely to do something completely new, they want to do the same thing but just a little different. Because if it sold well once, they bet they can get it to sell well again.

Now, I'm not advocating a return to only 'literature worth reading.' For one, I'm not entirely sure what that means, other than I am likely to be bored. What major literary critic thinks SFF is worth reading? But I would love to see less pre-packaged fluff, and a return to some creative home-cooked books with some soul to them.

What are your thoughts?