The Internet

Amazon vs. Disney: FIGHT!

Amazon is already not looking good on the Internet this weekend, thanks to trying to corral KDP authors into their slapfight with Hachette. BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!

Dara discovered that Amazon is apparently ALSO in a dispute with Disney right now. So if you were looking to preorder copies of Muppets Most Wanted or Maleficent or Captain America: The Winter Soldier on disc from Amazon and found that you can’t, this would be why.

And I gotta say–seriously? I mean, picking a fight with a book publisher is one thing, but going up against the Mouse? And by extension, all the Disney and Marvel fans who want to order their movies? Captain America’s fandom, who have Winter Soldier about to drop on Blu-ray and DVD and who have the money to slurp up hundreds of thousands of copies? You want to piss all these customers off, Amazon?

Amazon even pulled this stunt with Warner earlier this year, too, according to the link above. And when you take all these examples together, and add in Amazon’s dispute with Macmillan a few years back as well, they start making quite the trend. If they keep it up, it’ll become a trend of making themselves unreliable to their customers.

‘Cause see my previous commentary on the Hachette post I put up yesterday. At the end of the day, if a customer comes to Amazon looking for Winter Soldier and sees that they can’t get it, if they REALLY want the movie right then, they’re going to go elsewhere to buy it. Target. Or Best Buy. Or Walmart. Or hell, even the video section of the nearest grocery store.

At the end of the day, all the customer knows is that they want to buy a thing. And if Amazon can’t provide that thing on a reliable, regular basis, eventually they’re going to start taking their business elsewhere.

Best comment I’ve seen on this was in the thread on userinfojames_nicoll‘s post about it, to wit:

Reports from Amazon distribution warehouses show massive Rodent Infestation chewing through stock.

Because YEAH. Pass the popcorn.

ETA: The NY Times has picked up the story!

Whedonesque has also noticed, which brought to my attention that yes, this impacts orders for the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., too.

Which of course leads to the obligatory second best comment I have now spotted, this time on Facebook: “Hail Hydra!”

ETA #2: The Mary Sue has the story now. And another NY Times article goes into both of the Amazon news items from over the weekend here.

August 10, 2014 by
Books

Latest book roundup

Bought from Angry Robot Books:

  • The Guild of Assassins, by Anna Kashina. This is Book 2 of her fantasy series The Majat Code, about which I’ll be doing a (delayed) Boosting the Signal post to go up tomorrow morning.

Pre-ordered from Kobo:

  • Lock-In, by John Scalzi. I was going to get this anyway, since I’d read the preview chapters that Tor.com posted as well as the novella that does some introductory worldbuilding for the story. But I went ahead and pre-ordered after seeing Mr. Scalzi’s recent post on the Amazon/Hachette developments, and someone giving him shit about it and cancelling their Amazon pre-order with him. I decided pre-ordering from Kobo was appropriate balance.

Bought from Dark Horse:

  • Spike: Into the Light, by James Marsters. This is a graphic novel purchase, and digital for that matter, but I’m counting it here since it’s a full graphic novel as opposed to individual comics. Wanted to grab this out of general interest in James Marsters actually writing the story. And I always did like Spike! It’s a story going into some of what happened to Spike after he got his soul back at the tail end of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.

Bought in print when I was in Qualicum for De Temps Antan, from a tiny little bookshop there called The Mulberry Bush, where I had a delightful conversation with the proprietors along the lines of “Tell me about something awesome I can buy by Canadian authors”:

  • Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. I heard about the movie version of this, of course. And I’m sure I could have grabbed a copy of this in local bookstores. But I hadn’t known the author was Canadian, and hey, the bookstore successfully pitched it. And I do like to have a bookstore successfully pitch me a book I haven’t read before.
  • The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt. Again, Canadian author, and I liked the idea of the dark sort of noir-ish humor described to me as contained by this book.

105 for the year.

August 10, 2014 by
The Internet

Yahoo broke mailing lists, oops

As many of you know, Dara and I host our own teeny Internet site, including Web and mail support. As part of this, we host several mailing lists, using MailMan as our mailing list system of choice.

This weekend one of our users on the LexFA list (that’s the mailing list for the Lexington Fantasy Association) reported a weird problem to me. He was subscribed to the list with a Yahoo email address, but not receiving email from the list. I logged into the list’s administration website, checked the member settings, and determined that he was indeed correctly subscribed to the list, and not set Nomail or blocked for too many bounces or anything of that nature. As far as the list was concerned, he should have been getting mail and wasn’t.

So, since software testing is in fact what I do for my day job, I immediately went, “Hey, I have a Yahoo account myself. Let’s see if I can reproduce this problem.”

I COULD. I was able to subscribe my Yahoo account to the list. I was able to post to it–which I confirmed by monitoring the list’s archives, where the message showed up. Likewise, Dara confirmed by monitoring our system logs that the message got to our server.

Where it fell over, however, was that message trying to get back to Yahoo so that my Inbox could actually see it.

And further investigation finally got me to this Computerworld article. The tl;dr version of this, in case you aren’t a techie, is that basically Yahoo instituted an anti-spam tactic that sounds good in theory: i.e., it’s trying to prevent spammers from sending mail that pretends to be from legitimate Yahoo users. Yahoo has a setting in place that basically now says “If you get a mail that claims to be from a Yahoo user, and it didn’t actually come from our servers, you should bounce it because it’s probably spam”.

The problem with this, though, is that it breaks mailing list behavior. Because what happens now is this:

  • Yahoo user sends a mail to a mailing list she’s on.
  • The mailing list goes “ah, I have a mail from a subscriber! I shall send it to all the other subscribers!”
  • Then the mail tries to come back to the Yahoo user. Except now Yahoo’s own servers see this mail come in, which is claiming to be from a Yahoo user. (Because it IS, because it’s the user’s own mail to her mailing list that she’s on.) BUT, Yahoo also sees that this mail didn’t come from Yahoo’s servers. (Which it didn’t, at least in our case, because our mailing list is not hosted with Yahoo.)
  • Yahoo’s servers go “MUST BE SPAM” and promptly ditch the mail before the user ever sees it.
  • End result: the user wonders where the hell her mail is, and whether something is broken about the list, or whether she got unsubscribed by mistake. When all this time, nothing is wrong with the list at all.

Yahoo, as per this Help link on yahoo.com and this link on the Yahoomail tumblr, is aware of the problem. However, their suggestion for how mailing lists should handle this is suboptimal–i.e., that we should set our mailing lists to have the list be the sending address. This would result in not being able to see who sends what messages.

So for now Dara and I are moving forward with an attempt to do a distribution upgrade on our mail server, for starters. If this is successful, this should let us upgrade our MailMan system to a version that’ll handle Yahoo’s more stringent settings.

In the meantime, though, if anyone reading this is trying to get mailing list mails at a Yahoo address and you’re having trouble with it, chances are good that this is why. You may need to consider getting your mail at an alternate address.

Apologies to folks directly impacted by this on our mailing lists–hopefully we can get a more recent version of MailMan running, and fix this problem! more as I know it!

ETA Dara and I were up till 1am last night trying to fix this, and now we do at least have a fix in place. We updated our MailMan install to the latest available version, 2.1.18-1, which has settings to talk to what Yahoo did and let mail come on through. However, THAT required Dara to do local tweaking of the source code so that we could actually have emails to the list still have identifiable senders, about which she is displeased. She posts about it here.

August 9, 2014 by
Publishing

Sorry, Amazon, I’m not getting in on your slapfight

As y’all know, I’ve elected to self-publish Faerie Blood via as many channels available to me, in the name of not limiting myself to a single channel. Even though the vast majority of my sales are on Amazon, as I’ve posted about before.

Tonight, I’ve just received a mass email that Amazon’s apparently sent out to all the KDP authors, asking us to email Hachette on their behalf in their ongoing dispute. (KDP, for those of you who don’t know, is Kindle Direct Publishing. It’s the system for authors to self-pub their stuff to the Kindle.) And I’m pulling my jaw back up off the floor as I’m trying to figure out what exactly Amazon thinks this is going to accomplish.

The first big thing that boggles me about this is this money quote:

We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies.

Yes. YES WE DO. So why am I getting email about this?

Because seriously, aside from any question of where I stand on this particular dispute (about which I have already posted), exactly how many fucks is Hachette supposed to give about what the self-published crowd has to say on this matter? We’re not making them any money, after all. We’re not their authors.

Amazon appears to be assuming that KDP authors are naturally going to side with them on this, too, if they’re actually going to the trouble to email us. That is not a good assumption to make. Because y’all know what Tolkien has to say about going to the elves for counsel, right?

Moreover, I can’t help but flash to the episode of Avatar: The Legend of Korra, that we just watched tonight, “Old Wounds”. There’s a scene towards the end of that, wherein Lin Beifong has it out with her sister Su over old family history–and the fight is brought to an abrupt halt when Su’s daughter Opal whips out her airbending, and chastises the two older women. “You’re sisters! Why do you want to hurt each other?”

Airbender Opal is Not Interested in Your Grudgematch

Airbender Opal is Not Interested in Your Grudgematch

‘Cause okay yeah fine I’m with Amazon on this part:

We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.

Speaking with my reader hat on, yes. I think $14.99 is stupidly high for an ebook, and I’m very reluctant to put down that kind of money for one, even for my top favorite authors, even though I have disposal income and a real big yen for ebooks. $12.99 is the very top of the price range I’m willing to semi-regularly consider. And given that there are hundreds of other ebooks I also want to read that I can get for $7.99, I’m a lot more inclined to wait until the ebook price drops before I buy it.

But speaking with my writer hat on:

I’m really not cool with turning off buy buttons on authors’ books when you’re in a dispute with their publisher. I’m really not cool with passive-aggressive messaging to the basic effect of “we can’t get this book for you right now, maybe we MIGHT get it in another 2-3 weeks”. And I’m really not cool with trying to distract people looking for Hachette titles–“we can’t get you this title so how about this one over here?” No. No. And NO. If I’m a customer coming to a site looking for a particular ebook, and you’re going to waffle at me about how it’s not available right now and you MIGHT be able to get it for me in a few weeks, y’know what I’m going to do?

Go buy it from Kobo or Barnes and Noble. And if I want it in print, I’m going to Third Place.

My interests lie in supporting the author. Amazon talks a real good talk about how lower ebook prices mean more sales, but when they’re going out of their way to make it hard for customers to buy Hachette ebooks, it’s the authors who’re losing the sales. It’s the authors who are taking it in the teeth. A lower ebook price isn’t worth much if people can’t buy your book.

ETA: Ah, here comes the author commentary.

Scalzi is not impressed with this maneuver on Amazon’s part and reminds us all that Amazon is acting in its own best interests, not those of authors or readers.

Chuck Wendig is likewise severely unimpressed, and calls this maneuver on Amazon’s part tacky.

ETA #2: Housemate Paul, when I mentioned to him that Amazon had pulled this stunt and how I was boggling about it, told me that he knew pretty much only that Amazon and Hachette were having a dispute, full stop. I explained that the fight was about ebook prices and that while I agree with Amazon on how prices for ebooks are often too high, I don’t like Amazon’s tactics against Hachette authors in this. Paul drew the parallel here of a grocery store trying to force a dog food company to lower prices on its dog food, and yeah, I can see that. Meanwhile, the customer comes in looking for dog food, and the store is all “well we can’t sell you this dog food, and we can’t get this brand of dog food for another three weeks, how about a nice sack of charcoal briquettes instead?”

And the customer, who has no idea whatsoever why the store is fighting it out with the dog food company, goes to the dog food aisle and does not see the dog food she came in there for in the first place. “Crap,” the customer thinks, “now I’m going to have to drive to another store.”

Because at the end of the day, all she wants is to feed her dog.

ETA #3: Oh look! Hachette responds to Amazon’s efforts!

ETA #4: I just had this link brought to my attention–some interesting analysis of where exactly Amazon and Hachette are coming from in this ongoing spat between them. Refreshingly neutral in tone. Check it out.

ETA #5: One more link with some analysis, over here. Starts with calling Amazon out for erroneously invoking Orwell in the mail that went to KDP authors.

August 8, 2014 by
Music

What I can do with a guitar

As I have previously squeed about, O Internets, I just had a delightful time scampering up to BC again to see De Temps Antan! This time though there were specific opportunities to make musical noises myself in a house that happened to contain three of my favorite musicians–even aside from André’s workshop, there was also the after-concert session, and I did in fact wind up making noises on both my flutes and my guitar.

Trust me when I tell you that the prospect of making musical noises of my own in any room that contains these boys is simultaneously deeply exciting and nerve-wracking! I’m comfier on my flutes since those are my native instrument–so that did help. And so did the knowledge that I had the General with me. Because you better believe that if I was going to show up in Éric Beaudry’s proximity with a guitar, I was going to bring the good guitar.

Not that I actually played in the same room as Éric, and I don’t really have enough play-by-ear fu yet to be the backup guitar for a full roaring session. But I did wind up hanging out in one of the other rooms while I was chatting with Aussie Ian, and noodled around a lot on various songs I know. Because as will surprise none of you, I get the General in my hands, I start playing Great Big Sea.

And if you want to have an idea of what else I’m likely to do with a guitar in my hands, here now though is a roundup of Stuff I Can Do With the Guitar.

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August 8, 2014 by
Bone Walker, Music

A long overdue Kickstarter update

I’m still dealing with my obligations to Carina Press for the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, which means I haven’t been able to put attention to finishing up editing Bone Walker and prepping it for release. To wit: AUGH.

Meanwhile, Dara and I both have had medical crap to deal with, as many of you know–my medical crap from last fall, as well as Dara’s eye surgeries, plural. She’s got another one coming as well, since she developed cataracts after the last procedure, and that’s got to be dealt with. To wit: AUGH.

AND, as Dara’s been posting about a lot lately, she’s had to throw a LOT of time into renovation of one of the tenant spaces in MurkSouth. This has taken a huge amount of her time and our money, though now she’s finally finished with that, and if I may say so she’s worked magic in that kitchen. You can see before and after pics here.

BUT, we do finally have some progress to report! Even though I’ve been stymied on dealing with the book, Dara’s made some progress on getting the soundtrack done. She’s had significant progress on the instrumental sets–and we do also have some very, VERY exciting news.

We got Alexander James Adams.

Those of you in the Pacific Northwest fandom community, and hell, any of you who are into filk and SF/F-based or pagan-based music at all–you know who I’m talking about. He who stepped in to take up the mantle of song when Heather Alexander went off to Faerie. THAT Alexander James Adams. We are beyond delighted to have him joining us on this project, lending not only fiddle, but backup vocals and some drum work to various tracks.

And now Dara’s got a preview track to share with you all. It’s right over here!

This album is going to ROCK. 😀

August 5, 2014 by
Quebecois Music

De Temps Antan in Qualicum Beach, BC 8-2-2014

This weekend I engaged in my lightning-strike road trip up to Canada and back–specifically, to Qualicum Beach to attend a music workshop, house concert, and post-concert session, featuring my boys of De Temps Antan!

Which meant I got up at 4:30am on Saturday morning and spent pretty much all of the morning in transit in order to get to Qualicum in time for the workshop. And I spent pretty much all of Sunday in transit home. But the time in between? Stupendous levels of awesomeness, and worth every minute of the hours I spent on the road and on ferries! For the chance to learn more tunes from André Brunet, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

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August 4, 2014 by