4419/17338
84.1kg with two days to go. It literally couldn’t be any more exciting.
Maybe Katie Hopkins can follow up deliberately getting fat documentary with deliberately getting ebola to show Africa how easy it is to shake off.
I browsed through the kindle book offers that come after Christmas and was surprised to see both
David Mitchell and
Richard Ayoade’s latest books down around the £1 mark. Even if I never end up reading them I can’t really begrudge spending less than the price of a cup of coffee on both of those. My newspaper costs £1.60 a day and I sometimes don’t read it. To get two books for £2.09 is a good deal. Plus these book are probably funny and not full of tragic news about dead people. So it’s win/win.
I got into a lively debate about ebooks on Twitter. I have been a fan of ebooks since the early 90s when I confidently predicted their coming and their ascendancy over regular paper books. My friends said I was an idiot and that people love the aesthetics of a proper paper book. But even then I could see that that was as much a generational thing as anything else - it’s what they liked about books, the smell, the feel and no doubt there had been similar arguments when the printing press took over from parchment or stone tablets usurped the oral tradition. "The format I enjoyed things in in the past is the superior format"- is the constant song that stretches back to the start of humanity. Someone claimed a book is not a real book unless it is printed on paper, which sent the rest of us spiralling backwards through historical laments, ending with “The only real book is the silence just before the Big Bang”.
Is a book the content or the format? The format can have some effect on the way the book is enjoyed, but ebooks, especially ones this cheap or free, open the world of knowledge to all. They also open the world of idiocy and self-publishing to all. It’d be interesting to know if ebooks have led to more people reading or less.
But mainly I realised that the ease of access and the savings made on resources would swing things the way of the (as yet uninvented) ebook. I didn’t realise the added advantage that you’d be able to have a thousand books in your pocket and access to pretty much any other book within seconds. I didn’t consider then the benefits for a book that was out of print - that if one person wants to buy “How Not To Grow Up” they now can, because it’s cost effective to do it digitally whereas starting up the printing presses wouldn’t be (though there is now a print on demand service with some publishers). There’s lots I like about book books and I am not suggesting that we burn all the ones in existence, but the benefits of the new format outweigh what we lose from the old and that is a story as old as time. ebooks don’t let you show off your taste to your visitors who are browsing your bookshelves or let the passenger across from you realise how clever you are for reading James Joyce. But those are cunty reasons for liking books in the first place. If you drop a kindle in the bath it’s more serious than if you drop a book in there and you can’t leave your kindle on a sun lounger while you go for a swim.
Some argued that within a couple of centuries none of the digital copies of books will be accessible, which is certainly debatable. And paper books don’t have a great record of surviving through the eons. If there is literally no power at all then it might be tough to access the digital copies, but having multiple versions stored all over the world makes it pretty unlikely that we’ll lose all knowledge (though it’s one of the plot points of my kids’ story “Time Bomb” that that happens).
It was fun chatting about this subject on Twitter and for once it was an argument where people didn’t lose their shit or feel bad that someone else had a differing opinion.
As an author it makes things much more interesting for me that self-publishing is an option. And without production costs there is no need to charge huge amounts for any book any more. My two blog collections have been on sale for about £3.50 for a couple of years and I’ve sold a few copies. I have been making about £25 a quarter from these, after an initial flurry of sales. When you charge a pound Amazon take a much bigger cut of the money, but if you sell loads more books then you make more money. But also more people get to read your stuff, which is probably more important.
So I dropped the blog collection price to 99p (amazon then add VAT, which is going up to 20% in the new year - NO VAT ON BOOKS YOU IDIOTS). And I probably sold more books in half a day than I have in the rest of the year. It’s hard work writing a book and a few hundred people giving you 35p probably wouldn’t make the effort financially worthwhile, but if you’re selling tens of thousands of copies of your books then that’s not a bad return. If only I was more successful the internet would make me a millionaire! Though if I was more successful I probably wouldn't be that arsed about giving stuff away cheap. What a paradox.
Anyway, if you fancy reading
Bye Bye Balham and
The Box Lady and Other Pesticles - the first year or so of this blog, with additional material about what was going on in my life that I didn’t write about at the time, then it will cost you less than the price of a cup of coffee.
If you want to stay old school you can buy the book versions at gofasterstripe,
Bye Bye Balham,
The Box Lady,
Talking Cock but as you can see (apart from Talking Cock which is on sale) they are considerably more expensive (though only 130 copies of The Box Lady have been sold in printed format so they might actually be worth something one day- investment fans).
Don't forget the end of year prize draw will be made after midnight on New Year's Eve and there's a bumper crop of prizes up for all monthly badge subscribers. One of you will win stuff that if my ebay auctions are anything to go, is worth hundreds of pounds.
Donate a pound or more a month here to be part of the fun (and get access to the secret channel).
