https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawlPAFMebQXG6KmH1iuibbYAr71cYQ9Y_ZA

Comment Threads

• TRX commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  @160: some authors have been known to accept filthy lucre from beastly corporations to put product placements in their novels There's one "thriller" writer who has some product featured in each of his books - a knife, gun, light airplane, whatever - with lengthy and irrelevant descriptions and praises of the product's usefulness and virtues, plus pricing and contact information for the manufacturer or a vendor. Since I haven't seen this in any of the other books from the same publisher, I've been assuming the author made his own deals for product placements....
• zhochaka commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  We may all have been misled by magazines such as Analog, which might be taken as an instance of a tolerable level of advertising in fiction. But I doubt people see it as a "book", and that matters too....
• zhochaka commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  Something that occurred to my brother: will publishers still indulge in bidding wars for books by certain sorts of author? Charlie is well short of the bestseller class of author where the royalties might come closest to matching the advance. On the other hand, production process costs are hardly likely to change until we get to printing. It's publicity which will increase the publisher's costs. Perhaps the numbers make sense as a share of the profits. But the bidding failures that get reported seem to be the memoirs of the celebrities (including politicians) and the more literary sorts of fiction,...
• RDSouth commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  "Why not use animated covers?" Because it would waste bandwidth and lead to slow page downloads? However the issue of tiny icons could perhaps be solved by rigging up some kind of a rollover magnifying glass effect, so if you roll the cursor over an icon it shows in a larger form on part of the screen, without requiring clicking on it and going to a new page exclusively about that book. Fat chance that will happen, they probably have done the statistics to know that once you click to go to a book specific page you are more likely...
• Antonia T Tiger commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  You can get waterproof cases for e-readers, essentially plastic bags with a guarantee. So the bath/beach problems are surmountable....