By CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE [her blog] – My interest in ebooks is a tiny percentage of my interest in books. I didn’t dream of being a writer so I could spend my time discussing file formats and what Author X (even if X= me) did to sell a whole bunch of copies. Maybe it’s stupid and romantic, but I got into this because I loved books. Because stories were the most important things in the world to me, and I had so many of them to tell. Don’t get me wrong, there are vital and important things to talk about with regards to ebooks, and it is changing the industry. But when we discuss writing these days, we almost always end up talking about self-publishing and ebooks. And then any other conversation is over.

I and you and everyone has heard a lot about Amanda Hocking in the last year. But no one has ever said to me: Amanda Hocking’s books moved me and spoke to my life, I love them and I read them over and over because they mean so much to me. They say: Amanda Hocking sold a million ebooks. Frankly, I couldn’t tell you one of her titles without Googling if you paid me. And this gets repeated over and over. It doesn’t seem to matter what’s in the ebook as much as that it’s an ebook. I hear about so-and-so and how they charge 99 cents for their ebooks and make money hand over fist. And that’s the topic for an hour in some con bar, and it might not even get mentioned what the book in question is about.

I understand that we’re all just trying to get by in an industry that was always brutally tough. But remember how when we were all kids and wanted to be writers and a big part of that was sitting around with other bookish people and talking about literature? Yeah, me too. Nowhere in there was a deep longing to talk about epub vs MOBI until I can’t remember which one makes techno music.

Continued at Catherynne M. Valente |

…and then there’s always what you didn’t know about John Locke.

Leading article [The Guardian] – The great John Locke proposed the tabula rasa, the blank sheet on which experience writes human characters. Outside philosophy, the empty page is an image to terrify writers.

One exception is a new John Locke, an American businessman who has taken to producing fiction at a rate that suggests he shares his namesake’s passion for grappling with the blank sheet – although it must be admitted that this is about as far as the parallel stretches. Don’t look to the new Locke for guidance on the continuity of the self or epistemological distinctions between primary and secondary qualities. He churns out ebooks that come littered with images of stockinged legs, and prose that leaves critics cold. One, Sameer Rahim in the Daily Telegraph, cited a Locke line about seductions taking place with “all the precision of the Normandy invasion” and concluded: “No self-respecting publisher would touch it.” As may be, but punters not puffed by self-respect are happy to lap it up. Indeed, Locke has become the first author to sell a million ebooks without a publishing deal.

Continued at The Guardian | More Chronicle & Notices.