Let me start with this little sweetmeat given what yesterday's post was about.

Author Loses Royalties From 5,104 Books

By Dianna Dilworth on November 1, 2011 1:35 PM

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform offers authors a great way to self-publish books, but authors using the platform should proceed with caution. Author James Crawford reported that he lost royalties for 5,104 downloads of his book when Amazon slashed his book’s price without his permission.
eBookNewser has more: “After noticing a huge spike in downloads over night for his novel Blood Soaked & Contagious, Crawford went to see what was going on with his book. It turns out that Amazon dropped the price of his zombie novel to free, after finding the book cheaper on another site, as per the company’s terms. The problem is that Amazon was wrong about the other listing.”
According to the author, the other offer was actually for a few free sample chapters from Barnes & Noble. While Amazon has corrected the error and his eBook is now on sale for $5.99 in the Kindle Store, they don’t plan to pay out on the 5,104 books that were given away for free. Crawford (pictured, via) published an email from Amazon: “We’re sorry, we’re unable to pay royalties for your sales when your title was listed at $0 on our website. As per our KDP Terms and Conditions, we retain discretion over the retail price of a Kindle book.”
Crawford expressed his frustration in his blog: “KDP’s terms stipulate that they will change the price if they find the SAME work priced differently elsewhere. This isn’t what happened with me. They found something that is quite similar, asked no questions, and used their power to discount my novel 100%.”

Wow. No questions asked. No discussion with the author. Amazon acting on their own.
Yeah. I don't see a problem with that mindset, do you?

The $35 Aakashic Records tab will now be available in the US for $60 or whatever. It sounds fairly stripped down and probably can be matched pretty closely on price with a tab on sale. Like (TODAY ONLY)

New Velocity Micro Cruz Full Color 7” Reader with Media Player, Wi-Fi and Google Android R101

retail price: $199.99

you save: $140.00(70%)

your price: $59.99

http://www.dailysteals.com/

I have no idea what this tab is anymore than I do the Aakashic Records one, so research and do the homework before spending $.

As I say every time one of these deals comes along, well I say Yippee because that just means more readers and more sales. I would say I love to see the spinning, gyrations and contortions of those who continue to defend legacy publishing in the face of all evidence that it's being superseded by digital, but there's so much blooming spinning from everywhere that it just makes people look like stupid Luddites. Time only progresses. The only time time doesn't go forward is in sci fi. People in NYC living in apartment buildings can't have vegetable gardens to sustain themselves. We don't have an agrarian society any longer no matter how green your dreams. And paper publishing is not going to make a resurgence.

However, while time might not move backwards, things can be repeated. I expect I will repeat that paper publishing is not coming back quite a few more times in the next years.

Some blogger decided that all self-published books suck. All? Really? And the cure for this is EDITORS!

Pardon my disbelief. I don't think so. I can't explain the psychology of specific writers. Some may want an editor. Some may need one but don't think so. Some don't need one. Some people may think they should be an editor and shouldn't. It's a real skill to be able to see past all the words and find out what's going on. It can also take real skill to be able to fix that once it's pointed out. Self-published books aren't going away and some of them are pretty sucky. Some readers are pretty sucky too. Some legacy pubbed books suck bigtime. So what's the cure for that, more editors? Or self-published books where writers can control the quality of the work.

I was still bothered by the softness of the Nikon D7K so a week ago I started the process of sending images to them to study and determine what the problem was, if there was one. I love--doesn't everyone, be honest--being agreed with so it was good to be told by a tech that yes, the images were substandard. But that meant I had to pack up the body and ship it to Nikon for repair since it's still under warranty. I have no idea when it'll come home.

I wish Nikon would make a camera that took beautiful clear images without all the bells and whistles. I don't need video capability in my DSLR. It seems stupid. So you wind up paying for functions you will never use. Just make it possible, Nikon, to take the great kind of images my Nikon F did so effortlessly. Put all the research, technology and construction into quality, not hoop jumping.

Update: This morning I got an anonymous comment that I spelled jetsam wrong. I had gone to Dictionary.com and looked because I was so tired after not sleeping, I think I could have misspelled my own name. (2 T's or 1?????) So I chose jetsom because that's where my fingers went first. Again I suppose Anonymous was proving that drunk troll complaining about objet/object was right. I'm sure this person won't return to the scene of his big triumph catching my "error" but I offer this copy/paste from dictionary.com anyway. And actually we learn that it's from jettison, so yes at one point in its history there were 2 T's.