And you wonder why there is piracy

Amazon.com takes back e-Books that customers paid for because Amazon.com screwed the copyright pooch. Or: why I am never, ever buying a Kindle and am going to start thinking about getting books online from another source.

What's even sadder? Amazon.com took back a book that's available for free online in several sources. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the state of eBooks and eBook readers.

Let XKCD.com do some explaining for you on how being heavy handed about copyrights only strengthens and enhances piracy. Because like the strip says: Remember, if you pirate something, it's yours for life. You can take it anywhere and it will always work.

Or in this case if you'd downloaded a free or pirated copy, you'd still have it.

So, I say again to you folks who are authors, editors, or otherwise working in the publishing industry, if you want to stop book piracy, don't go after the pirates. Go after the publishing companies (and their conglomerate owners), the eBook reader companies, sellers, and all the other supposed businesspeople who are making piracy easier than just legally and easily paying a fair price to download a book. Demand that they get their acts together, because it's the authors, editors, and other folks on the ground that feel the hit when it comes to piracy.

I can promise you if someone took this eBook stuff by the scruff of the neck and came out with an affordable reader that can read a wide variety of formats and deals reasonably with copyrights and makes finding and downloading books easy and fairly priced, you'd see piracy take a nosedive and you'd see authors benefitting as well.

Oh, SF/F, you stay classy

I'm seeing some links around the old f-list about how the Hugo shortlist sucks this year, but more than that, I keep seeing this phrase about the Hugo shortlist representing SF/F or SF/F fandom.

Uh, no.

I would like to state for the record that I am an SF/F writer (however unpublished) and reader, and the Hugo Awards have very little to do with me. They certainly don't represent what I read or like, nor what most of the people I know who are SF/F fans read and like. In fact, in the circles I've been running in for quite some time, they're sort of irrelevant.

I noticed at the bottom that there were 799 nomination ballots cast. That should tell you all you need to know. I would wager that the amount of people who enjoy SF/F, either in literary or TV/movie form, numbers in the millions in the USA alone. Never mind worldwide. Judging by book sales, there are certainly more than 799 people buying and reading SF/F works.

So, say all you like about the Hugo Awards. I don't tend to pay attention to them. But please stop saying they represent SF/F. They don't. I have no bloody idea who they represent, but it's not me, and it sure ain't SF/F as a whole.