Finally!
After six months, unceasing wailing, and a solid refusal to censor myself, The Proviso was finally approved for sale as an application in the Apple iTunes store.
(Now I don’t feel hypocritical by naming iPhone names in Stay, because, you know, Eric would be on top of all manner of gadgetry.)
Y’all probably don’t read my blog. I curse muchly and there is “sex” in my banner, not to mention a bare nekkid lady.
Before you read any further (if you are still reading or the least bit interested), please go to these websites and study them. Ignore the content; I want you to see what they’re doing. Then come back. I’ll wait.
My Bookstore and More (mostly Samhain Publishing‘s titles, but look under the “manufacturers” tab and see the other e-book publishers).
Back? Cool. Now, please go here:
A more complete list of e-book readers.
Did you understand what I wanted you to see? Awesome!
As a consumer of e-books, I would like to offer you a friendly suggestion, which is to embrace the digital distribution of your titles. The e-book publishers I linked are making money hand over fist. The devices I linked are the way people read e-books. This will grow.
You probably don’t understand the seduction of having an entire library in your palm, and that’s okay. There are lots and lots of people who say they won’t give up print for anything, and then they get to live with an e-book reader for maybe two or three days, and they’re hooked.
There’s also something very seductive about being able to log onto an e-bookstore and download a bunch of books onto your device immediately. No driving. It’s all about impulse. I can talk myself out of an Amazon purchase because it involves shipping time. It leaves the shopping cart and goes into the wish list, never to be seen again. I don’t even want to go to a bookstore anymore.
I’ve now encountered three small LDS presses and individuals somewhere in the LDS publishing arena dismiss e-books as so much of a passing fad, a waste of time or, worse, think that “e-book” is synonymous with “PDF.” I simply have to shake my head at their short-sightedness.
Be on the cutting edge of the digital age of books. Take a cue from the church’s rabid embrace of the interwebz and streaming audio and its ability to reach its members nearly effortlessly.
But beyond that, the take-home message here is this: E-bookstores are dangerous to the health of my checkbook.
Want to know the real reason I don’t buy anything from Deseret Book, Zarahemla, Signature Books et al? No e-books. I want to read your books; really I do, but I’m not going back to paper unless you give me something terribly compelling. I buy e-books on impulse. Impulse. Hear that? IMPULSE.
Please give me a reason to throw my money at you in the middle of the night when one of your titles catches my eye. Pretty please?
Backstory for those non-e-book types out there (hey, the non-Mormons get backstory when I post on Mormon stuff, so deal):
1. Last fall, when I was formatting The Proviso for e-book consumption, I made a decision to include the EPUB format, which is the heir apparent of the title “The MP3 of EBooks. ” I’ll spare you the geek politics of this.
2. I formatted it in HTML, went to BookGlutton to use their HTML-to-EPUB API. I plugged it in and voilà! a nice EPUB version of The Proviso. No muss, no fuss, and at no cost to me. Beautiful. Perfect.
3. Fast forward to March and I’m trying to format The Fob Bible.
I’m bored of this template. Now that THE FOB BIBLE is done (more on that in another post), I’m going to be switching this blog over to the template I use for THE PROVISO cuz I like it (even though it does have a black background) and it’s amazingly flexible. Also, I find this template limiting for the e-book series (eBook? ebook? e-book? e-Book? I need to define my style).
Twitter. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. My thoughts run in small bursts, so it’s perfect for me. Better than blogging. Follow me!
I’m giving up Facebook. I can’t stand it for many, many reasons, all of which would make me mad were I to enumerate them. If you friended me there, I’m so sorry. Catch me on Twitter.
I’m still banned at the Apple iApp store. However, you can still get THE PROVISO on your iPhone using the PDB (eReader) or EPUB files we offer, through SmashWords, and through Scribd.
STAY, book 2 in the Dunham series, will be appearing at all of the above venues some time this winter. Crossing fingers it’s around Thanksgiving.
That is all for now.
So finally my issue with Apple‘s getting some play, which is to say, over at The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It blog.
Author Moriah Jovan had a book rejected last month on that basis (although the rejection didn’t mention the book’s more creative obscenities).
Let me be clear about one thing. My other obscenities are no more or less creative than the average steamyhawt romance novel. In my opinion. However, if the steamier novels could make the cut because of the absence of the F-bomb, then yet another level of hypocrisy will have been reached. (I’d be interested to know what, if any, romance novels get converted to apps and put in the store.)
The article talks about the difference between rejected apps that are NOT e-books because e-books do have an alternative method of distribution to iPhone. (Ahem, my book is available through the SmashWords/Stanza catalog.) Anyhoo, I’m hearing that there is absolutely NO organization to the iApp store, so maybe it doesn’t matter anyway.
Except, you know, my cover Bewbies are totally eye-catching, no?
Okay, so remember where I said I wouldn’t put The Proviso on SmashWords because it had special formatting and boo hoo hoo?
You know what? I’m a capitalist-pig whore* and I’m full of shit, too.
SmashWords partnered with Stanza and Stanza’s iPhone store, so naturally I got over my formatting/design hubris immediately and figured out a way to do all my special little touches with your bare-bones Word settings. So, yeah. Apple, bite me. Or rather, let me bite you. The Proviso is now available on your iPhone/iTouch at the Stanza store via SmashWords in EPUB, LRF, MOBI/PRC, PDB (the PalmDoc source file, not the eReader container), and PDF. You can read 30% of it free there, too.
*Yeah, I know it was redundant and probably went without saying anyway.
But, erm, be patient. Their servers are very popular at the moment.
Yay Stanza and a big THANKS! to Mark Coker and Bill Kendrick for going out of their way to help me.
So let’s try this again and I will make myself very clear: I’m seriously pissed.
Apple rejected my book from its iApp store on the basis that it has the F-word. Now, I’m sorry, but the fact that the F-word is in my book is the least of its crimes (they must have missed the “cunt”), so…“fuck”? Really? But that’s not the point.
And you can download the Stanza (free) or eReader (free) applications to your iPhone, download my book, and read it that way, so all is not lost. But that’s not the point.
Some people call this censorship. I don’t; they’re well within their right to accept or reject any book they want. But that’s not the point.
The point is also not that Apple is cutting off its nose to spite its face. For whatever reason I don’t understand, they’re wishing-washing on e-books.
1) There is no iBooks.
2) There is no restriction of explicit lyrics and explicit/violent games and R-rated movies in the iApp store, which leads me to believe that the restriction is solely for e-book applications. Why? Are we discriminating against reading as a leisure activity? Why?
3) At the same time, Apple made a deal with ScrollMotion to provide a host of e-books as applications, but I notice they are of the young adult variety, which is a pretty safe bet, content-wise. However, they’re wrapping these up in DRM. Why?
4) Not only that, but some of them are seriously over-priced. More than the hardback!!! Gah.
5) When I actually looked at what was in the e-book section if the iApp store, it was classics in the public domain (good!) and puppies-and-kittens (no, seriously, books on puppies and kittens) and manga (in which I have no interest whatsoever). Yeah. Selection. I can get a better selection of books to read at Wal-Mart, albeit I have to go there and buy dead-tree books.
6) On Teleread, the speculation is that spikes in iTouch sales are good for e-books, but is that true for e-book applications?
Nothing Apple is doing on this front makes sense to me. David Carnoy’s Knife Music (read his whole post) was rejected for the F-word, but this wouldn’t have even come to light if he weren’t already semi-high-profile (which fact is okay with me, but it’s happening all over the place, not just with him). I mean, they’re adding e-book applications a little bit. Here and there. Snootily.
On a purely capitalist pig basis, wouldn’t you think this would be a market they would want to exploit? I can only conclude that Jobs simply carries an utter abhorrence for The Book and does not want to exploit it for another revenue stream.
Seriously.
Music.
Movies.
Games.
But not…books?
