Amazonians

One of your correspondent's friends from her younger days is a raving Amazon brand advocate, and gleefully forwarded this link along to the old college circle. "Another reason to buy music from Amazon," he called it.

Just like the old days, your correspondent countered with a sigh and then a flying tackle. (We did, after all, go to a football school.) In the middle of my obligatory publishers-indignation-at-Amazon, I realized that this friend probably had no idea about the teeny tiny margins Amazon offers to publishers, the way the used book market has dissolved educational book sales, and the erosion of our preferred route to market, the chain bookstores. The punters just see Amazon as a great place to buy books.

That's kind of why I'm not sure if I would prefer to bury Amazon, or to be them. They do understand what makes customers tick.

I don't know, then. If a job opened at Amazon next year, would I apply? Would I accept? Seattle's not a bad place to live, and I can't exactly complain about the weather from where I'm sitting in England. The Kindle is doing great things for reading, and they're even starting to bridge cultures through their own translation imprint.

The real problem for me is the reliance of price on their marketing mix. Ebooks are great for consumers, especially if you price them at $0.99. I can buy loads of ebooks for that amount! But, really, is that good in the long run? What kind of book can you profitably produce for that amount of money? Should someone's Great American Novel cost as much as one song on iTunes?

It's pretty clear I will buy ebooks for higher prices than I would print books, for the convenience factor. As long as they're worth reading. If publishers stop making money and I have to slog through self-published novels--which I'm sure are great but are just overwhelming in their sheer volume--I will probably end up unhappy.

Something tells me the final answer to my internal debate over Amazon won't be settled until this trajectory is either changed or ... we hit a wall somewhere. Until then, I sure am glad I'm not employable for at least a few more months.

Interview Fail

The European CV is twice the size of an American resume. In the USA we're told to put all of our information on one page (which, as a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet, is smaller than the UK standard A4). In the UK you need two sides of A4, and, no, large font and flowery writing do not earn you any points.

After tossing on as much information as I could, and inwardly rebelling the entire time, my CV was still looking one line short. So, to balance all the line items about travel, books, more travel, and foreign things, I decided to put one mention of strictly American hobbies down at the very, very bottom.

Last Thursday, I had a half-hour interview with a Dutch company about a potential summer internship. At minute twenty-seven, the publisher looked at this final entry and started laughing to himself.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I couldn't help but notice that you like American football and ice hockey."

"Yes, sir," I replied.

He shook his head another moment, and then giggled, "How violent."

D'oh.

"It's funny," he explains, "because I don't even know girls who like European football, let alone American football. I suppose it's because you went to Notre Dame."

Yes! Of course it's because of my prestigious university, sir. That must be it.

Anyways, I can't see how my sport of choice could be any worse than rugby. I can, however, see the merit of changing my favorite sport to something like, um, baseball. Batter up.

You're Telling Me, They're Hunger Games

There's a new debate of the day in book publishing circles. Now that we're pretty clearly in the realm of e-publishing and the proportion of book sales has tipped in favor of electronic copies in the US, no one is questioning whether customers will read books onscreen. Now the question is, how much can we get them to pay?

It's sort of a shame when you hear that authors are selling their books in the Kindle bookstore for as little as $0.99, or even giving it away for free. I loved this post from Roxane Gay for a lot of reasons, but mostly for this paragraph right here:

If we as writers don’t value our craft enough to price our work appropriately, how can we expect readers to want to pay appropriate prices? If you have to basically give your writing away, what does that tell you? [. . .] I could see myself selling a short story for a buck or two but a book, a whole book? My work is worth more than that. Your work is worth more than that.  If I cannot sell my books at a ore reasonable $8-$10 price point, perhaps the market is telling me something about my writing. Humbling? Perhaps.

On the other hand, this weekend I downloaded the first volume of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins to my Kindle. Big mistake. I loved it. When, ten hours later, I finished the first book, the first thing I did before going to bed (at an ungodly hour, of course), was download the second book. I read that one in its entirety the next day. The third book was started before breakfast on day 3 and, just because I wanted to draw it out, I finished after class on day 4.

When was the last time I bought three print books in a row? Especially new? Amazon just made loads of money off of me. So did the publisher. More than I would have spent otherwise. But, my goodness, now I appreciate why it would be nice if ebooks could cost less. That's even though I know exactly how much goes into each book, and the giant commission Amazon gets per sale.

I suppose the trick is, convince publishers to drop the prices while I'm a student, so I can still eat. As soon as I go back to work for a publisher, move the prices back to normal, so I can keep eating. Doesn't that sound like the best solution?

Studious

Your correspondent has no control over the selection of her uni's film society, but when they advertised a showing of the Bollywood hit 3 Idiots . . . Well, I'd be an idiot not to attend!



The film's message is the importance of life lessons over school lessons. Real learning over school memorization. The dangers of too much pressure on students for a few meaningless grades on a paper. Sounds good to me! So I guess it's OK to spend the rest of my afternoon studying whether I should prefer Shah Rukh or Aamir Khan.

Black Sheep

My favorite complaint about Oxford is its teeny tiny size. I'm training for yet another marathon, which means sixteen- to eighteen-mile runs at least once a week, which last time resulted in a few rather unfortunate run-ins with cows.

This time, I've gotten to know the area a bit better and found a lovely path following the Thames for miles and miles, which, technically, could take me all the way to London. It won't, however, because I run in the opposite direction, north through the Thames river valley, and into wide open fields where soon there's not a building in sight. Just miles and miles of fields, and, of course, new dangers.

Mile eight of yesterday's run found me blissfully trotting along in one of these fields, enjoying the peace and quiet of the river, when suddenly, I rounded a bend and saw them coming at me: sheep! Not just one or two sheep. A herd of sheep. Maybe a hundred, maybe more.

Worse, they were being herded. There was the sheepdog barking them forward, there was the farmer driving them from behind, and now here comes me, sprinting right for them, which was no less surprising for me than for the sheep.

"Baaaaaaaaaah!" they called.

"BAAAAAH!" I cried back.

Now, of course, the sheep saw themselves as being herded from all sides, so they reacted as sheep usually do: blind panic. Sheep everywhere! I considered jumping off the narrow path, but then I'd be running through some random field and did it belong to the farmer? Would the farmer like that? I couldn't cut through the herd without dispersing sheep everywhere, and the farmer was giving me a look that, if I wasn't already running, would have set me off at a sprint immediately.

So, I turned tail and was chased for the next mile or so. By sheep. What can I say? At least it was good training: I can't remember the last time I've run so fast.

The Irish Rover

It's St. Patrick's Day today, one of my favorite holidays, if not one that I've had much success celebrating in recent years. For the second year in a row I've missed my college friends' reunion over pints of Guinness and probably just a little bit of mayhem - as alumni of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, it's a holiday we take seriously.

Last year was a wee bit harder than this one, of course. I was in India and besides the obvious technical difficulties and the paucity of corned beef and cabbage, there was one more problem with my attempts to share the holiday with my friends.

I walked into the office with a bright green shirt on and a big smile on my face, only to run smack into one of my coworkers. He looked tired, drawn, and he had a streak of white on his forehead. He explained, he was celebrating a holiday too - the days of Vasant Navratri leading up to Ram Navami - and he was fasting.

So, no green beer, in other words.

That was probably the quietest St. Patrick's Day I'd ever had. No matter where I'd spent it, though, it would probably be hard to top the time I actually lived in Ireland, the holiday's spiritual home. My sister was in town, and besides the usual tomfoolery we stumbled across a céilidh and danced like idiots with half of Dublin. The rest of the night, we [scene missing].

More than anything, today's celebration of its patron saint makes me reminisce about the good times I had there both as a student and more recently for a rather long run. Maybe it's time for an impulse trip back to the Emerald Isle . . . You never know . . .

Trinity College and Dawson St

O'Connell St looking towards the Dublin Spire

Cadbury Without Borders

An Iranian friend and I were chatting yesterday about where to go on one of our weekly lunch dates. As often happens, the conversation veered from a description of a traditional English Sunday Roast to one of our own respective traditions. As it turns out, the Persian New Year, or Norouz, begins next week.

My friend tried to describe the festive table setting Iranians have to celebrate the new year. It's called haft sin, where sin is a letter of the Persian alphabet (س). Seven foods are placed on the table, each starting with the letter sin, and each carrying its own symbolic meaning.

We were sitting in the school's computer lab, so we clicked over to Wikipedia for a full list. (It's not very easy to describe your own traditions without visuals. Last season this same friend asked me why we decorate Christmas trees and I could only quote Jim Gaffigan.) Sure enough, there was a list of seven foods - sabzeh (wheat or barley), sib (apples), senjed (oleaster), somaq (sumac), sir (garlic), samanu (a sweet pudding), and serkeh (vinegar).

"That's so funny," I said. "That sounds a lot like something we do in Italy, where we eat seven fishes for Christmas."

"Sometimes you have other things," she added. "Not just those seven." She pulled up one of the many photos of various haft sin spreads.

Haft sin spread, by Mandana Asani

"That's lovely!" I said.

"But . . . Wait a minute."

Peering closer.

"Is that . . .?"

"Um, those look like Easter eggs," I told her.

They are clearly not Easter eggs, of course. But, at the same time, they are. Hard-boiled eggs, decorated and painted, although in Iran you place them on the table where in America we hide them and make small children go hunt for them.

So we reminisced together for a while about decorating eggs. It was all well and good, of course, until she asked me about Easter.

"Um . . ." I said. Where to begin - the high religious significance, or . . . "We celebrate with . . . the Easter . . . bunny? Who lays . . . chocolate?

"Shoot, we're going to need a visual."