Skip to main content

Kindling in the UK

Yes, I'm on Amazon.com
There's a lot about ebooks that is still a mystery - never more so than when we're dealing with Amazon's Kindle. As an Amazon Prime customer I was interested to see they've added the ability to 'borrow' Kindle books... but was then rapidly let down to find out that you can only do so on Kindle devices, not my trust iPad or my desktop computer. (Not really the topic here, but I am also still very peeved that US Prime customers get free movie streaming and we don't in the UK.)

But the thing that made me write this post was the complications of books and territories. When, as an author, you sell a book to a publisher you sell various rights. You might, for instance, sell world rights, or English language rights, or just UK and Commonwealth rights. And the publisher can then sell the book in those territories. But the internet potentially makes a nonsense of this. I have long been able to buy a book from Amazon.com that only has US rights to be shipped to the UK. However, once you get ebooks in the mix, things get even more complicated.

Take my books with the US publisher St Martin's Press. They have world rights, so no issues here. But for a long time the Kindle versions were only available in the US. Why? No one knows. You couldn't even see them on Amazon.com from the UK. After I moaned about this, they have now made some available on Amazon.co.uk (huzzah!)... but there's still an oddity.

My last two books with St Martin's were published in the UK by the British publisher Duckworth. Rather than export their own copies, St Martin's sold Duckworth the UK rights, just as they would to a German publisher, say, for a translation. The question then is, whose ebook gets published? Because Amazon only does one Kindle edition. Well, surely the St Martin's Press version, as they have world rights? Nope. Bizarrely, even if you buy the ebook of Build Your Own Time Machine from Amazon.com it's Duckworth's edition. The are even using the UK title - the US paper book is called How to Build a Time Machine. Puzzled? I certainly am.

If you are either of my UK fans and have been waiting patiently for Kindle editions, you can now get the following on Kindle:

and you have always been able to get:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense