nicoaltiva

Comment Threads

• scentofviolets commented on The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms
  I find the practice of opaque pricing in the context of an economy organized along capitalist lines (the classic demand economy we all got in econ101) rather depressing. Because - even after all that's happened in the last decade - I'm still a pro-capitalist kinda guy. Not on the strength of any of that A #1 rah-rah bushwa, understand. But because I still buy into the idea that 'price signalling' is by and large a superior method for allocating scarce resources. Well, that's the theory anyway ;-) Now it seems from what is being argued as the coming thing, the...
• Charlie Stross commented on The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms
  Actually, that's not quite true in this case. I will not rule out doing more Merchant Princes books in future. However, the series didn't sell terribly well and the money on the table for further novels right now is half what I can get elsewhere for writing Laundry files books, space operas, or weird stuff like "Rule 34". If Penguin Putnam and Hachette go bankrupt, or if my other novels mysteriously bomb, or if the Mongolian translation rights suddenly catch fire and go best-seller in Ulan Bator, you might see a resumption in the Merchant Princes series. (Unlike the Eschaton...
• Charlie Stross commented on The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms
  I can't see why any homo economicus would actually pay full price for the backlist. Though I can certainly understand why Charles would in his more irritable moments see me as a crass little-short-of-thief. Actually, no: the second-hand market and libraries have been part of the reading cycle since long before I was born. What I would like to be able to do is to compete with the second-hand market by selling electronic copies of my back list direct to the public for as little as 99 pence (ahem: I view that price point as being one that kicks in...
• Charlie Stross commented on The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms
  I'm not sure how commercially viable "Shadow Unit" is. (I can ask the folks who write it, if they're willing to talk publicly, but I suspect they won't want to until the project's wrapped.) In any event, there are huge editorial problems once you begin to sharecrop fiction, namely maintaining consistency and tone. Not to mention ideas. Idea-rich stuff, which is my stock in trade, would be virtually impossible to outsource, in my opinion....
• brucecohenpdx commented on The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms
  Once again, the dead hand of the past holds us back: the books I've looked up on the Gateway site are all restricted so we can't buy them in the US....