Quacking Alone

I have always loved public libraries. 

The library was always a little like church, wasn’t it?  You had to be quiet and you had to respect the fellow patrons.  But you could stroll through the library on any weekend day and find tables of people with books spread out around them.  They were clearly working on some research paper or project.  You could walk the aisles and find a couple of friends chuckling quietly over the pages of some slightly scandalous book they were checking out on the sly.  Or you could have real fun and take a tour through the kid’s section.  There you’ll see the little boy tearing down the aisle back to Mom, excited to share his newly discovered book.

The public library has always been everyman’s temple of knowledge.  And I was always every(wo)man.  Oh, I know that out there somewhere are folks who grew up rich or at least well off.  They rarely visited a library.  If they wanted to read a new book, they’d go to a bookstore and buy it.  Why borrow when you could buy? 

Well, I borrowed because I couldn’t buy.  I grew up POOR – very, very poor.  Can’t buy groceries, holes in the floor kind of poor.  Bill collectors calling kind of poor. There were many things that got sacrificed out of necessity – but books were never amongst those things.  Thanks to the public library, the wonderful world of books was always something I didn’t have to sacrifice. 

Then life moved on and despite our poverty, my Mama (God Bless Her Soul) worked very hard to be sure I got an education.  I did college and law school.  If I ended up as a writing kind of “scholarly” lawyer instead of a rich ole’ trial lawyer, well that surely wasn’t my Mama’s fault.  She gave me the world and even though driving terrified her, at least once a week she’d load me in the car and drive me to the library.  She never checked out a book that I recall, likely because her life was too full of taking care of 2 houses and her sick parents.  But she made sure I worked at my schoolwork and she made those weekly trips to the library for me to make sure that the world of books would be my world.

Things went pretty well after law school.  I was never rich but for many years I met one of my most important goals – I was never poor either.  That was true for most folks for a lot of years, I think.  We became a country of folks who could afford to go to the bookstore and buy.  During all those years the library was still there and I’d pass one and remember when.  But you know, it really is true – everything old becomes new again.

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Howdy, it’s the irritated overweight male here.

If you haven’t heard, seen, felt, or used your Jedi Force Sense powers to figure it out yet, Mary Anne is trying something new – she’s writing a serialized novel titled The Duke of Eden. She’s got the first four chapters up for a mere 99¢ on the Kindle, so check it out. If you like it, feel free to sample and/or grab her other books.

Because of various contractual obligations, we can offer serialized works only on the Kindle. We’re sorry about that; we’d like to offer it everywhere else we offer Mary Anne’s books, but… lawyers. You know. Ahem.

I’ve added Duke to the sidebar and to the book list page. As Mary Anne finishes a sizable chunk of chapters, one of us will announce it and link to those pages for you.

In the meantime, stay chilly peeps. And stay away from lawyers, they’re nothing but trouble. Ahem.

Wow.  Just absolutely – Wow. 

In the last couple of weeks someone hit the fast forward button on the ebook revolution.  Changes that bespeak of major industry shifts have occurred like a landslide. One rock goes, and then another and before you know it, at the foot of a mountain, there’s a new road you can follow that will take you to the unexplored territory of the future.

First came the deal of the Jackal.  Andrew Wylie is a superagent whose “feral pursuit of clients and their interests earned him the nickname of ‘The Jackal.’”  The Jackal’s roster of clients reads like a who’s who of publishing and includes Mailer, Updike, Nabokov, and Cheever. The Jackal apparently saw what many authors saw – publishers have been screwing authors out of their fair share of royalties for years.  The old book numbers were set in stone, the system likely crafted when books began to be mass produced.  But at the dawn of a new day in publishing power shifted to the hands of the creators who wrote the work. The Jackal was smart enough NOT to let history repeat itself.  This time he, on behalf of his clients, would craft a system that would be fair to the folks who made the system possible.  So The Jackal created a digital only imprint, Odyssey Editions (gotta love the name) and inked a deal with Amazon to sell electronic versions of work of 20 amazing authors.

To do the deal Wylie exploited a hole in older publishing contracts written before the era of e-books.  Writers and Wylie believe that the contracts leave those authors and/or their estates free to negotiate separate deals for the ebook versions.  The publishing royals read the contracts differently and believe the older deals should include the ebook rights – because they’re the publishers and they’ve always had the power to set the terms.  Publishers have decided to punish The Jackal where it hurts – the pocketbook.  Random House held the print rights to many of the works in question and it’s announced it won’t do business with Wylie until the issue is resolved.  I’m hoping that the Jackal’s clients are sending him champagne and telling him that they never liked Random House anyway.  After all, Wylie is trying to craft the terms for the new ebook industry at the dawn of the era, so that when they get set in stone, it’ll be in the authors’ favor.  In my opinion, Wylie is to be lauded, revered and much – much imitated.  The biggest literary award for the new e-book industry should be named for him – the Jackal or the Wylie. 

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