Over the past year or so, wisdom has been accumulating in the blogsphere about who should self-publish, what they should self-publish, and when. The advice seems to amount to this:

• If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it was commercially published once but is now out of print, or it’s new but your agent can’t sell it) AND
• It is good (which you can tell because it was once commercially published, or your agent has been trying to sell it) AND
• It has been professionally edited (this is harder to judge, but if you paid someone who works as an editor and you both agonised over the text for weeks or months, getting it to the point where the editor was satisfied, you’re probably OK) AND
• It has a good cover, designed by a professional AND
• You are willing to spend hundreds of hours promoting it, or thousands of dollars paying a professional to promote it THEN
• You should self-publish.

OR

• If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it would only be interesting to your immediate family) AND
• The quality doesn’t matter (because your immediate family will only be looking at the pictures anyway) AND
• You don’t care at all if only five people ever see it THEN
• You should self-publish.

Nevertheless, with self-publishing being so easy these days, and ebook publishing not necessarily having any up-front costs (except cover design) it is very tempting to give it a go.

Strangely, the temptation is probably higher for published authors than for not-yet-published ones. Published authors have already had (on average) ten years of being rejected by agents and publishers. They have already felt the frustration of having the publisher, agent, and retailer between them take 90% of the sale price of each book. They have already felt the strain of running themselves ragged to promote a book when no-one else in the food chain seems to care. They have already gnashed their teeth over their lack of control over the pricing, positioning and presentation of what used to be their own property, the product upon which their whole future depends.

Yet commercial publication is still the best option for the new writer. (Joe Konrath may be demonstrating that, for established writers, or writers with a huge ‘platform’, it no longer is.) If it all goes well, it is by far the best – and easiest – way to make sales and establish a reputation. If it all goes well.

And this is all by way of a preamble to the announcement that I have just self-published a small collection of short stories. Some of them have already been published in magazines, some have not. What links them is that they are all set in the same ‘world’ and all belong to the unfolding story of a group of transhumans who inhabit a virtual world called Placid Point.

The collection is called “Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity” and is available in all popular ebook formats from Smashwords (over the next few weeks, it will also be available through Amazon, B&N, the iBookstore, and other major retailers.) I’ve set the price at $1.99, which I hope you’ll agree is reasonable. I don’t actually intend to sell bucketloads of this collection (unlike my debut novel, TimeSplash, which I do want to sell lots of) but I want these stories out there because they are in the same world as the novel I have just finished writing (The Credulity Nexus) and, if that is ever published, it would be nice to be able to point readers to a book of related short stories.

Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity - A collection of short stories by Graham Storrs

Voyager by Stephen J Pyne

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery by Stephen J. Pyne is a book that aims to set the West’s exploration of the Solar System in its historical context. Pyne, a historian at Arizona State University, has an “organizing conceit” for looking at this context based around three broad ages of discovery.

The first began with the great voyages of discovery by Renaissance explorers of the fifteenth century and was led off by Portugal. The second began in the Enlightenment, when mid-eighteenth century Britain and France led the way with scientific expeditions to measure the transit of Venus and measure an arc of the meridian. The third Great Age kicked off in the mid-twentieth century, tackling the exploration of the last great wildernesses of Earth—the Antarctic and the oceans—and space. Driven at first by the cold war, the great voyages that distinguish this new age of discovery are marked by technological sophistication to the point where the explorers themselves are often robots.

Whether we accept Pyne’s categories or not does not matter much. The framework provides the author with a means to explore many parallels and similarities he finds between the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modern worlds and the West’s attitudes toward the three great motives for pursuing these difficult, dangerous, and expensive voyages: discovery for its own sake, the ability to do science that you can’t do at home, and finding new worlds for people to colonise or exploit.

What results is a broad and sweeping investigation of the very nature of exploration, with the larger-than-life adventure of the two Voyager spacecraft’s “grand tour” of the Solar System to give it all shape and direction.

After the introductory chapters, which do an excellent job of setting the ground for the three Great Ages and the Voyagers’ role in the present Great Age, Pyne follows the journey of the two robot explorers from their launches in 1977 to the present day and beyond.

The only way it was possible to slingshot these spacecraft to the outer reaches of the Solar System, through the heliopause and out into interstellar space, was to take advantage of a once in 176-year alignment of the outer planets. That the science and technology, as well as the political and social climates were just right at just this moment made this amazing, 33-year (and counting) voyage perhaps the defining journey of exploration of our age. Long years of cruising between planets, punctuated by brief and frantic encounters as each ship swings around a planet and moves on, gives the book its structure and its style, activity and reflection, leading us step by step into the future. As Pyne puts it, the book is “an interpretive history whose internal rhythms mimic those that led to Voyager’s launch and journey.”

We meet a number of characters along the way, not just the luminaries of the Voyager mission, including a succession of project leaders and technical specialists, and key figures like Michael Minovitch, Gary Landro, and Carl Sagan, but also the explorers of previous Great Ages: Magellan, da Gama, Columbus, Cooke, Lewis and Clarke, Shackleton, and many others.

But the people are essentially incidental to the story. This is a history book and rarely dwells on individual stories. Institutions and nations also appear. Portugal’s struggle with Morocco, the USA’s struggle with the Soviet Union, JPL’s struggle with NASA, the Royal Society’s competition with the Paris Academy of Science—all provide the impetus to the great waves of exploration, discovery and, sometimes, colonization.

It is a book that leaves no stone unturned as Pyne’s focus moves from one aspect of exploration to another—the naming of newly-discovered places, the treatment of space exploration (and especially the fantasy of colonisation) in science fiction, the legal treatment of new worlds, the people who speak out for and against exploration.

Sometimes the comparisons between the Voyager mission and earlier explorations are interesting and instructive. Pyne’s discussions of the political and social, even the psychological bases for exploration are often fascinating. Sometimes they verge on the bizarre, as when he compares the physical dimensions of the Voyager craft with those of Lewis and Clarke’s nineteenth century keelboat, and Columbus’s caravel Niña.

While the writing is generally precise and very nicely done, Pyne has a small tendency to sound overblown and somewhat poetical (e.g., “[Voyager’s] trajectory has the arc of a hero’s quest.”) In his defense, he has taken on a huge and quite magnificent subject, and a little exuberance in the writing should probably be forgiven. Even when he swings the other way, rattling off transmission bit-rates, speeds, distances, and broadcast signal strengths, he uses technical terms with complete confidence and clearly understands the engineering, the communications jargon, and the celestial mechanics he is talking about.

Yet there is only so much that can be done with words. As Pyne himself says, “The Voyagers spoke to the public primarily through images, for which words served more as captions than as stand-alone texts.” So it is extremely odd that the book contains not one single image from among all the thousands that the Voyagers sent back to Earth. All we get are a few (simply drawn) diagrams and graphs in an appendix. It is true that many of the Voyager images Pyne talks about are so well known that anyone who has been watching the news for the past 30 years will recognize many of them. Yet the lack of images is a striking and unfortunate omission.

Voyager is a thoughtful and reflective book in which Pyne brings a wide and frequently detailed knowledge to bear on one of our more interesting human traits: the urge to explore. It is not the book to look in for the human faces of the people who discovered and dissected new worlds. It is a book that considers the broader sweep of history in counterpoint to the detailed technical, scientific, social, and political minutiae of this one, exceptional voyage.

The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions game will be shaking their heads and smiling wryly. Four months is no time at all to wait! they’re thinking. Small press publishers are far too busy to worry about updating their websites. This guy is obviously a newbie and will have to learn to control his patience and live with his frustration. Worse still, these old hands will tell you that you mustn’t express your frustration, you mustn’t let your impatience show. It doesn’t matter how the publishing houses treat you, if you kick up a fuss about it, they will put a black mark against you. Commissioning editors, they say, have long memories – as do agents.

Frankly, I don’t understand this attitude. I’ve been in business for three decades. I have managed business units for some of the world’s largest corporations, and I have run my own small consultancy. I know how businesses run. I know how buying works. I know how to manage a supply chain. It’s painfully obvious to me that the world’s publishing houses are making some basic and very stupid mistakes.

At the front end of the publishing business, the companies seem to be doing better than at the back end. Their attitude to book shops – their primary market – seems to be businesslike enough.  It’s a mess, of course, horribly inefficient and the book retailers seem to have beaten the publishers up pretty well over the years, but the publishers are doing as well as they can in a market that has become overly complex and difficult for them. Marketing beyond the book retailers seems to be a rout for the publishers but they are trying hard to redefine the business so that this is considered outside their responsibility.

On the supply side, the picture is patchy. On the one hand you have editing, design, printing and related services, which are going OK. On the other, you have content acquisition and management which appears to be a disaster. Most sizeable publishers only receive submissions from agents these days, having thrown their hands up and given up trying to do it themselves. Despite having been at it for a century or two, the publishers never learned how to do this efficiently. I don’t suppose they think that agents can do it any better, but at least now they have passed a large part of the cost on to someone else.

Since agents and publishers do not know which books will succeed and which will not, they have no way of telling writers what they want (apart from saying “This, this, and this genre – oh, and anything that’s really good.”) This means writers must produce work on spec and hope it fits the requirements/hunches/moods of the moment when they submit it. Agents are not in a much better position, they have to read through heaps of queries and mountains of slush, then take a gamble on their gut feeling, imprecise knowledge of publishers’ tastes and needs, and their (often quite limited) experience. This amounts to a major inefficiency in the system. If you include authors as part of the publishing industry, this process alone pushes the overall productivity of the industry very close to zero.

The gross inefficiencies of the acquisition process, and the lack of effective process management tools, are directly responsible for much of the rough treatment of authors that ensues. If you call your local utility company, a voice recognition or menu system will channel you into appropriate queues. There you may be given an estimate of how  long you will have to wait to have your call dealt with. You may be told how many are ahead of you in the queue and this will count down for you as you wait. At the very least, the musak will be interrupted every couple of minutes so they can apologise for the delay and assure you that they are still working on getting to you.

With an agent or publisher, it is very different. You may (or most likely won’t) get an acknowledgement that your submission has arrived. After that you will hear nothing. Sometimes you will hear nothing for three, four, six, or even twelve months, before you get a one or two line pro forma rejection. Very often these days, you will wait forever. Many agents and publishers say their policy is that if you don’t hear from them, you can take that as a ‘no’!

It’s not because they’re rushed off their feet (although that is often true.) It’s not because they’re rude and selfish people (some are, some aren’t.) It’s because their business processes are ridiculous, designed for another age, and propped up by free labour and outrageous demands on salaried staff. It’s because their acquisitions business model depends on luck, rather than on knowing what they want to acquire, leading to huge amounts of additional, wasted work. It’s because their suppliers – the authors – are so desperate for success, so cowed by the system, so petrified by the old hands and the long memories of faceless decision makers, that they will put up with this shoddy treatment.

Do you think the suppliers of paper and transport and warehousing do their work on spec, hoping that the publisher will approve and pay them? Do you suppose the printers submit a quote for services and wait six months without hearing a word from the publisher, afraid that if they complain they might uspset them? Of course not. So why do writers?

Honestly, we get the publishers and agents we deserve.

Right now, the publishers stand with respect to writers as the big supermarket chains stand with respect to farmers. But, in a time when publishers and agents are teetering on the edge of complete disintermediation, this is not the time to be upsetting potential suppliers. This is the time to be raising your game. Writers have long memories too!

The Queensland Writers Centre is touring blogs again. This time the tour has a theme: Writers’ Desks. For some reason writers’ desks are fascinating and pictures of same are hugely popular. So QWC is probably onto a winner here. However, when they asked me to put up a picture of my own desk as part of the tour, I was painfully aware that I’ve only recently done that.

Fascinating as my desk is, I can’t keep posting pictures of it. It’s not as if it has seasonal changes or anything. So I’ve taken the opportunity to correct a glaring omission from my last picture and show you my computer ‘desktop’. This should be just as interesting as the wooden one since, for me at least, the computer is where 95% of the work gets done.

The desktop that really matters

For those without broadband (or using Telstra NextG, which is almost as bad) I apologise for the size of this picture. Even so, it isn’t big enough for you to recognise all the icons. That’s why the animation provides labels for the following groups.

• Group A: Various mobile device managers (phone, camera, MP3 player and so on.)
• Group B: Internet stuff (browser, email, Skype, Twitter, and FTP client)
• Group C: Office software (mostly Open Office but also PowerPoint)
• Group D: Music score editing software. (Yes, I write music. It’s a little hobby of mine.)
• Group E: Image editing software (Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView and IconEasel)
• Group F: Media players (Windows Media Player and WinAmp)
• Group G: HTML editors (HTML Kit and Komodo Edit)
• Group H: Sundry utilities (antivirus, encryption, DVD writers, backup, 3G wireless client, and Celestia, which lets me view the universe from various perspectives)
• Group I: Various ebook readers and ebook creators.
• Group J: Stuff to do with my current writing project (the Open Office file itself, my multifunction tracking sheet, and a program called StoryBook that I’ve been trying out as a way of organising the background info – I’m not getting along well with it.)
• Group K: Games (basically, the only computer game I ever play is Freecell – a patience-style card game.)

I should also mention the background picture. I change my background quite often and it is usually an astronomical theme. This one is a long-exposure shot of the space shuttle taking off in Florida last year. I love pictures of astronauts on EVAs, Hubble deep field shots, and the ISS. Images like these help keep me inspired.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening February to April 2010. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog.

If I wanted an ebook reader, would I buy an Apple iPad? I don’t think so. Would I accept one as a gift? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.

The only ebook reader I know well is my 6″ Kindle 2 (foreigner’s edition). It cost me $256, and there are no ongoing costs. It’s a great reading device. I love the e-ink screen (especially because it means I can read in the garden) I love the physical size, weight, and ergonomics, the battery life (it goes for weeks!)  the 3G wireless connection, and the dead easy Amazon shopping experience.

With the iPad, 3G is an ‘optional’ extra, so the base model starts at $629 (2.5 times the Kindle price!) plus, you have to pay a monthly fee for it, which (currently, in the US) starts at $15/mo – so another $180 per year (about 3/4 of a new Kindle each year!) That the Kindle bundles the price of a 3G ISP connection into the price of its books is, in my view, one of the best things about it. Say you buy 20 books a year from the Kindle Store or on the iPad’s new iBook store. The Kindle’s books will cost you just the cover price. The iPad books will cost you the cover rice plus a twentieth of $180 (i.e. $9 !!) each. For identical $10 books, that means you’re paying $10 on the Kindle and $19 on the iPad! Where is the sense in that?

The iPad is very pretty, it has colour and a touch screen and so on, but try taking it outside to read a book during your lunch break and you’ll soon see the benefits of e-ink, and the Kindle’s small size and light weight. What’s more, because the Kindle is designed for ebook reading, you can easily hold it in one hand and turn the page with the same hand – the buttons are just where they should be – so you can eat a sandwich with the other hand. Try doing that with an iPad.

You may argue that it’s not a fair comparison, the Kindle is a dedicated ebook reader, the iPad is, essentially, a PDA on which you can also read books. I say, so what? I don’t want a PDA. (And, if I did, I’d buy one with a proper, non-modal operating system, not a souped-up iPhone OS.) I’ve already got a smartphone that does useful things that the iPad doesn’t (like taking pictures and making phone calls) along with useful things that the iPad does, like displaying maps, managing a diary, and so on. If I had an iPad, I would still need a phone (with a camera). I would also still need a good ebook reader – because a bulky, LCD-screened, expensive, heavy iPad just doesn’t cut it.

I’ve got to say, Apple, I feel pretty disappointed.

Tara Moss is running a series of posts over on her blog on writers’ desks and what they look like. So I took a snapshot of my own, to see what it might reveal about me. Well, what do you think?

It was the maid's day off.

Looking at it with an outsider’s eye, I suppose it looks rather scruffy. Even looking at it with my own eye, it looks that way. Well, if I’d have known you were coming…

Just out of shot on the left is a filing cabinet so full I can’t get another sheet of paper in it – yet I can’t bear to throw out any of the junk it contains, which I never look at. Over on the right, again out of shot, is a bookcase and some drawers. The drawers are full of rubbish and the bookcase is full of books, CDs (mostly software), souvenirs, and a collection of mugs, each of which has its own story.

Left to right on the desktop are:

• Some unattended admin (receipts, letters, etc.)
• My pens, pencils , post-its and what have you
• My notebook (with the only pencil I actually use lying on top of it – a beautiful, lacquered, Waterman propelling pencil that my wife gave me over 20 years ago)
• A small weather station, ironically placed right in front of the window (shades of Subterranean Homesick Blues) The window, by the way, has a fabulous view across hills and forests.
• My Asus EeePC netbook, with a music CD lying open on top of it (a Christmas-themed collection of rock songs, compiled by a friend in Switzerland.)
• Tissues, spare ink cartridge, printer…
• The round white thing is a Stargate Atlantis coffee warming pad. It is, perhaps, the most useless thing I own (my Airedale excepted), but it lights up in neon blue when you switch it on and looks cool.
• Behind the coffee warmer is a collection of family photos (so I don’t forget who they are), a tray filled with flash memory sticks, acquired here and there, a phone and, out of sight, a bunch of chargers, USB hubs, transformers, and such. I actually have the wiring for 13 electronic devices on this desk. You can see some of it dangling attractively down the back.
• Then there’s my external hard disc drive (for backups)
• My dear old computer (actually, my original dear old computer died a few months ago but I got a new dear old computer with the exact same specification for $300 on eBay)
• To the right of the computer is a hideous but extremely reliable and accurate clock
• Another USB hub and an MP3 player
• A copy of Advice to Writers by Jon Winokur, which I won recently in a competition and which I dip into while my machine is booting, or I’m waiting for software updates, or whatever.
• Just visible at the top right is the corner of my whiteboard. This has the ranges of various instruments and voices written on musical staves, phone numbers, passwords, and Linux shell commands.

Just to complete the picture, the room also contains the gutted remains of my original dear old computer on the floor, a guest chair, a pile of wires of various kinds, pictures around the walls that are mostly from work-related events, a small collection of poker dice, a box full of music CDs I keep meaning to give away, and my guitar.

If you can imagine me slumped in that big, black chair, typing with three fingers at this blog post, you pretty much have my working life in a nutshell. It’s a good room and, I have to say, a good life.

Dear Mr. Conroy,

I see from your recent announcement that you and the Labor Party are still determined to go ahead with installing national Internet filters. As an Australian writer, I cannot stress how strongly opposed I am to this measure. Whatever your good intentions for filtering child pornography – and I give you and the Party the benefit of the doubt here – once such a mechanism is in place, the possibility of abuse by this government or future governments is unacceptable.

Please do not respond with assurances. You cannot predict what this government may choose to censor in the future. You certainly have no control over what future governments may choose to censor and for what purposes. The mere existence of such a mechanism will provide the temptation as well as the means. The lack of transparency of the blacklist (which can always be manipulated) will mean Australians can no longer trust their government not to be hiding information from them. Australia is one of the finest democracies on the planet, but with this filter in place, we will never be able to speak out against political or ideological censorship again. We will be no better than China and we will be far worse than any other Western democracy.

Whatever your motives for censoring the Internet – and let’s hope and pray they are good – a mandatory filter is the wrong solution. Whatever you intend to use it for, you will have created the potential for serious abuse. Whatever your beliefs about the moral integrity of future Australian governments, while such a filter exists there will always be the suspicion – because there will always be the possibility – that it is being abused for political or ideological ends.

I am a lifelong supporter of the labour movement and come from a poor, working class background. There are few things a Labor government could do to change the way I vote. Censoring the Internet with mandatory filtering would be one of them. I would swap my vote immediately to any party that would promise to scrap it and that might stand a chance of achieving power. That is because such a filter strikes at the very heart of democracy and puts everything I believe in at risk.

Regards,

Graham Storrs.

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

I suppose the title sums up my overall reaction to my new Kindle ebook reader but there are all kinds of details of the experience that I should probably add.

I was reluctant to get a Kindle. It’s not the best e-book reader in the world and e-ink is not my favourite screen technology. The ‘international’ version (why don’t they just say ‘the one for foreigners’?) doesn’t have a proper charger (just USB – which is SLOW) has no SD card slot, and, even at the current exchange rate, I still think it’s overpriced.  However, it is the best – certainly the best value – that is currently available in Australia, I really, really wanted an ereader, and it’s wireless connectivity trumps most other technical features.

When I took it out of the box, I have to say I was a little disappointed. The screen was smaller than I had expected and the device weighed more. The e-ink page is not as high contrast as I remembered (much less than the LCD screen I’m typing into at the moment) and the slow refresh rate makes the user interface feel slow and clunky. When I uploaded a few MobiPocket files from my PC (a piece of cake, by the way) and started to read, I found the slow page turning and the flickering through black as the page turns a bit of a worry. (Please note that most of these drawbacks would be common to all e-ink ebook readers.)

Then I started to read. Within a couple of minutes the page turning and the rest didn’t bother me at all. I got used to it and the whole device just melted into the background. In fact, now that I’ve spent a few hours using the Kindle, I found going back to a real book quite a surprise. Have they always been so big and heavy and cumbersome as that? How did I cope with such a ridiculously cumbersome technology for all those years?

Someone put a lot of thought into the Kindle hardware. The ergonomics of the physical device are excellent. The controls are just where they need to be. Most things do just what you’d expect them to without having to check the manual. It’s easy to hold, well balanced and feels natural to operate. The only part of the machine I don’t like is the on/off switch at the top. It’s hard to find (when you’re holding the machine in a reading position) and fiddly to use. But then, you don’t use it all that often.

The software user interface design isn’t quite so good, but it’s acceptable. The menus are OK, screen layouts for books and so on are adequate. The book cover images are too small to make much sense of and being black and white and fairly low resolution doesn’t help. But the designers made some good choices about menu contents and about defaults. The first time I went back to a magazine I had been reading and found that it opened just where I had left off, I wanted to shake the designer’s hand. My (long-sighted) wife particularly likes the fact you can easily switch to a larger font size.

Registration was easy (essentially there is none – unless you received the Kindle as a gift) and the shopping experience really shows the years of bookselling expertise that Amazon brings to bear.

So far I have a handful of sci-fi magazines on the device, and a bundle of 50-odd books by Wilkie Collins that I bought from Amazon for about $7. (Yes, I know they’d have been free from Project Gutenberg but, for a few dollars, the convenience of having 50-odd books delivered direct to the reader is irresistable.) I’ve yet to see how the Kindle handles collections of hundreds of books and other documents. The way it seems at the moment (books easy and cheap to acquire, reading simple and pleasurable) I can only see one reason I would ever buy another print book: availability.

The Kindle Booksstore has about 300,000 titles but it is nowhere near enough. The first three books I looked for using the device (‘Anathem’ by Neal Stephenson, ‘Dead America’ by Luke Keioskie, and ‘Old Man’s War’ by John Scalzi) were not there. Stephenson and Scazi would definitely have made sales if they had been. (I’ve already got ‘Dead America’.) Fortunately, there are plenty pf other ebook shops and ebook editions of everything will be the norm soon enough.

I’m pretty sure my Kindle (for foreigners) will be thoroughly outdated in a couple of years’ time (hell, it’s starting to slide even now) but between now and then, I expect it to be my constant companion. People who don’t think electronic publishing is the future, probably haven’t tried using an ebook reader yet. I’ve only had mine 24 hours and the advantages of presenting books electronically over presenting them on paper seem overwhelming. Yes, the technology is not yet perfect, but it is already good enough that I don’t want to go back to the old days (yesterday morning) before my ereader arrived.

Like many ‘emerging’ Australian writers, I’ve been concerned that the government is thinking of lifting parallel importation restrictions (PIRs). This is legislation that helps Australian publishers compete by giving them the opportunity to publish works over here and keep out overseas editions of the same work. Virtually all countries, including the US and UK have similar legislation. It is almost certain that without PIRs, imported editions of popular books at lower prices (possibly remaindered books, and most of them, if they came from Australian authors, edited and censored to suit their primary, overseas markets) would make life very hard for Australian poublishers and thereby reduce the number of new Australian authors who could sell their work. For lots more on this subject see the Saving Aussie Books website.

Today, however, I read a blog post by Joanna Penn that made me think that PIRs were not the only, nor the major threat facing Australian publishers. Joanna makes no bones about the fact that she finds books published in Australia too expensive. She has often said she buys books from Amazon.com and pays the shipping and still gets them cheaper. With the huge mark-ups that Australian booksellers put on books, she has a valid point. However, Joanna recently bought a Kindle. In fact, she was probably one of the first people in Australia to have one. And, if you’ve read her blog post, you’ll see one of the main reasons why. A book she saw in a local book shop was available for instant download to the Kindle at about a quarter of the book shop price.

The important message for Australian publishers and Australian book sellers in this is that Joanna states flatly she would not have bought the book from the shop. It was too expensive, but, on the Kindle, the price was right.

Joanna is at the leading edge of a wave of change that is going to sweep through this country in the next couple of years. As an early adopter of e-reader technology she is among the first of probably millions of Australians who will buy these devices and use the wireless connectivity built into them to buy books – from anywhere in the world.

Australia has a book-selling infrastructure that is almost guaranteed to encourage rapid adoption of e-readers now that the first have arrived. Even when I lived in a Brisbane suburb, my nearest decent bookshop was 30km away (in the city, where parking costs a fortune). Now I live in the country, my nearest good bookshop is 150km away! (I don’t count the K-Mart that is a mere 60km away.) I rarely get to a book shop to buy books. I buy books from Fishpond.com.au (when they have them) and Amazon.com (when they don’t) or I go to the library. When I buy e-books, I tend to get them direct from the publisher where possible. It won’t be long before I get my own wireless e-reader and stop using Australian bookshops altogether.

There will come a tipping point, in five or ten years, when the number of people using e-readers and the number of books published electronically means that books printed on peper will be printed in smaller runs and will start rising in price – on their way to becoming rare, luxury goods. PIRs seem almost irrelevant in the face of what’s coming.