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Our expert articles on the changing world of books may be recycled provided source is acknowledged as booktaste.com. Our parent is the independent publisher Darling
Newspaper Press. We welcome feedback comments by email to danpress@optusnet.com.au
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Corrosive humour scuttles British myths
Cathy Macleod, 29 June, 2009. Like many others, I use and love the English language. Today it is the world language, predominant in science, trade and politics. And maybe it
always was predominant. At least in Europe.
This mind-blowing idea presents itself in an outrageous book first published in 2002 by a
small London publisher, Nathan Carmody, and only now making big global waves.
“The History of Britain Revealed” by Michael John Harper Ph.D is funny to read, insulting
to Academia, and logical in its main argument. This is stated as:
1.The present British population has no Anglo-Saxon content (save for some insignificant inbreeding).
2.The English language has no Anglo-Saxon content (save for some similarly insignificant loanwords).
Delightfully corrosive in demolishing accepted historical and linguistic beliefs, the author
dismisses fellow scholars as “highly-educated fools”. Equally perplexing for men (or women) of letters, he writes: “A prerequisite for working on the Oxford English Dictionary
is a degree in English Literature, which might explain why most of its several million entries are wrong.”
The author describes himself as an Applied Epistemologist, i.e. a philosopher who
specialises in the methods, validity and scope of human knowledge. But is Harper himself wrong in his history and his linguistics? Not according to the common sense he applies. The
cherished national myths of England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France take a battering that could eventually prove terminal.
“Historians have got it completely wrong,” he says.
The original small publisher, Nathan Carmody, has been reinforced by Icon Books of Cambridge, with an expanded hardback in 2006 and a paperback in 2007. Since then, sellers
have grown to include Allen&Unwin, Penguin, Faber&Faber and others. The acorn has grown to a huge oaktree.
I could not find this title in ebook format, but the Web is buzzing with its audacity.
I did discover a related website, www.applied-epistemology.org, where enthusiasts debate new theories, and where “rudeness is permitted so long as it's funny”.
Who’s reading efiction?
asks Cathy Macleod, 28 April, 2009. IN the vast sea of digital fiction, one recently voiced
trade perception is that there are more authors than there are readers. Whoopee for readers! The choice of titles has never been greater, yet are these books worth reading?
As an avid reader, I welcome the comment that an established epublisher gets from 50 to 500 submissions per week. How this will evolve into published fiction is a statistic still to be
discovered. Individual publishers, so far, have been wary of issuing any sales figures.
Statistics for ebooks as a whole (which includes non-fiction) confirm rate of growth similar
to past years. Sales have doubled annually since records began. But what’s the breakdown between fiction and non-fiction? Business and academic texts obviously claim the major
slice of sales. How fares fiction? Who’s reading it?
Well, for a start, I am. Printed books from my public library are a lifelong habit, as are
purchased titles from a bookshop. Free downloads to my laptop have so far been limited to classic works that I never bothered to read before. Here I confess they are no more attractive
onscreen and usually get dumped after a chapter or two. With few exceptions their language is dated, their time long past.
Other free fiction downloads are so numerous, and so awful, that I don’t bother with them anymore.
But what about the BUYING of ebooks? Yes, I purchase them, mostly fiction, and delight in
the big array on offer. These are the genuine titles. Their publishers have confidence in their worth. What’s more, free samples allow fairly accurate judgment by a digital shopper before
proceeding to the checkout.
Sifting through these samples is a pleasant chore. The unappealing are simply deleted.
The great advantage over physical bookshop browsing is this: discovery of a good
unfamiliar author is quicker. So is the capture of a current bestseller.
My favourite browsing is at Mobipocket, for reasons that need no mention here. Just visit
and see for yourself.
At Booktaste we display some of the best finds. One click on a cover takes you to them.
Happy reading!
The beasts of Eden bite, tickle and soar.
Cathy Macleod, 31 March, 2009. People seek peace, and yet instinct to prosper contaminates
this prize. So it was when Britain created an Eden for enlightened gentryfolk in 1830s Western Australia.
Far from the turmoils of Europe, settlers moulded the Swan River Colony in a wilderness
where class barriers would prevail amid firm, fair masters and loyal servants.
They found it possible to endure conflicting individual ambitions, but failed to allow for a
Native Class, the Aborigines.
Author John Ivor exploits this setting for a story that bites, tickles and soars through eight
entertaining episodes. “Eden’s Deadly Shore” has more than one serpent, and all take human shape as the clash of cultures proceeds.
In digital format only, this serial is extracted from Ivor’s novel “Great Land of Dreams”, published by Darling Newspaper Press in hardback 2000 and paperback 2005 (isbn 9781419609299).
The heroine is Maggie, 17, grown up from the innocent waif wanted for murder in Ivor’s previous serial “Run Maggie Run”.
Settled in the Eden for gentry, her adventures start anew after a dashing aristocrat invites her to the Governor’s Ball. The rest is calamity, both the funny and the fearful kind.
“John Ivor entertains readers, that’s his style,” said publishing chief Charles Bryce on releasing the serial worldwide via Booktaste. “The novel was perfect for short-take
presentation, which ebook readers seem to prefer.
“Our short stories and novellas sell in electronic format at a fraction of hardprint prices.
This is because there are no overheads for printing, binding, warehousing, distribution or postage.”
“Eden’s Deadly Shore” is available online from leading ebook retailers, with free samples of every chapter.
Darling Newspaper Press is a small independent publisher in Perth, Australia, where the strifetorn Swan River Colony began in 1829.
John Ivor blends humour and thrills in a style that is refreshing. His research involved diaries, letters, newspapers and government reports of the period. His publisher has also
produced an authentic fictional trilogy in hardback and, for schools, a factual history of Britain’s first Free Settlement in Australia.
Elementary, my dear Rab
Cathy Macleod, 24 March 2009: The poet Robert Burns inspires a murder tale released to coincide with his 250th anniversary year. “Murder Piping Hot” by whodunit diva Ann
Morven scatters clues for the shrewd after an exploding haggis pudding poses the first puzzle. Can dynamite be boiled? Aha! Send for Inspector Sheryl Holmes, pedantic descendant of you-know-who.
The smarter sleuthing, however, comes from an amateur, familiar to Ann Morven fans, none other than the heavyweight chump of crime fiction, Sheil B. Wright. She’s a dunce at
deduction but well versed in human frailty. Overweight on the scales, overdrawn at the bank and nudging forty, the trouble-prone folksinger is hired to play bagpipes at a
millionaire’s Burns Night. Sole survivor, she herself becomes a suspect and, later, prey to the killer.
Bonnie Jean, an old Burns lovesong, holds a vital clue. So does a long lost manuscript of
lewd poems by the passionate poet.
Bumbling along this modern murder trail, Sheil also discovers the truth about the
317-year-old Glencoe Massacre. She’s a busy lass for sure, aye, yet still finds time, between murders, to warble her ballads. Would you like a sample read? Click the bookshop link at top of this page.
Serials capture online readers.
Cathy Macleod, 19 February, 2009. The Daily Telegraph newspaper in London, boosting
circulation with serial fiction, has also caused its online hits to soar. Top-selling author Alexander McCall Smith provided the bait, which finally reached 100 daily chapters.
In the process, his feel-good stories about quirky characters promoted the cause of ebooks. Online readers captured by "Corduroy Mansions" included many a digital novice who will
now find it easier to embrace the ebook era.
The serial isn't done with yet. The newspaper's daily delight will be gathered into a printed
Polygon book in August, while more Corduroy happenings are planned for the future.
This formula of online chapters, followed by printed hardback and paperback, worked well
for the "Scotland Street" series by McCall Smith in The Scotsman newspaper. It simply illustrates the wide appeal of good fiction, with sufficient readership to score in every format.
There is another gripping serial, not available in any newspaper, that gets pleasing attention from web browsers. Readers have to download it from the Darling Newspaper Press. With free samples, "Run Maggie Run" by John Ivor goes to 14 chapters online. The publisher
believes short takes are the best way to deliver digital fiction. That is, until the world gets used to the various electronic devices wooing bookreaders. Entertaining short stories and
novellas are also prolific (and low cost) from this source.
Leave a comment.
CLICK! Easy as that.
Cathy Macleod, 10 Feb, 2009: Simply click. And here’s where to click. The link takes you to
a bookshop stacked with well written novels, novellas and short stories. Browse at will. For more information on any book, just click its cover. To read inside the book, click “Free
Sample” and follow the prompts.
Okay, you’re into ebooks, the biggest thing in reading since Penguin introduced the paperback in 1932.
Got a favourite author? Enter the name and click “search”.
A particular title? Ditto.
Specific genre? Do likewise.
It’s fast and delightful. Digital texts have sped, in recent years, to embrace schools, business and fiction. If you have yet to unclutch your spine-bound comfort and venture into
cyberspace, there’s never been a better time.
Leave a comment
Obama Tells Me All.
Cathy Macleod, 29 January 2009: I met Barack Obama on my back verandah early morning,
while sitting with a pot of tea at my elbow and honeybirds crooning. Such is the start to my day in the southern hemisphere.
The President was a few thousand miles away, because our meeting came from the pages of his book "The Audacity of Hope", published in 2006. This recounts his early struggles in a
race-conscious community.
He's a good writer, with skill that directs his thoughts to one's inner psyche. I felt he
was chatting beside me. In fact I was reading, on my laptop, the digital version of his book, downloaded from mobipocket.com. Mr Obama convinces me he shares the same dream that
rests in most people, the desire to live without stress and relish family joys.
Dedicated to Grandmother Tutu and to his mother, it relates his striving to achieve. It also
confesses frankly his motivations. And his despair when things seemed impossible.
"It's been almost ten years since I first ran for political office," he begins. "I was thirty-five
at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with life."
As a human-rights lawyer, he found himself nudged into politics. “Where’d you get that funny name?” people asked, and then queried why a nice guy would choose to take part in
something dirty and nasty like politics. He gives his answer in this memoir, namely that there is another tradition in politics, stretching back to the founding of America. "We have a stake
in one another." I reckon you could apply identical philosophy to the world and its many woes.
Campaigning for a seat in the US Senate was tough for Barack Obama. I like his anecdote
about the annual St Patrick's Day Parade in Chicago, which his team saw as a promotion opportunity. "We were assigned the parade’s very last slot, so my ten volunteers and I
found ourselves marching just a few paces ahead of the city’s sanitation trucks, waving to the few stragglers who remained on the route while workers swept up garbage and peeled
green shamrock stickers off the lampposts."
There were other campaign hurdles. Sometimes, after driving several hours, he found only
two or three people waiting to hear his credo. There were also press conferences to which nobody came.
As we know, the big successes came at last, and now greater challenges loom ahead. I for
one look forward to more writings by author Obama.
Audacity of Hope is not his first book. The initial effort was in the 1990s during law school.
"Dreams From My Father, a story of race and religion" gives interesting personal background and an insight into what makes Obama tick. Sales were underwhelming then but will certainly soar now.
This first book answers a puzzle many people ask. Being of mixed race - mother white, father black - why is Obama portrayed as black? He tells us.
"I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites."
There are more revelations here and in the more recent book "Change We Can Believe In". What he calls "the American idea" (I suspect non-Yanks have it too) is a chance to progress
if you really try.
Says the new president: "It’s the promise that led my father, who grew up herding goats in
Kenya, to cross the ocean just for the chance to study in America. It allowed my mother, who raised my sister and me as a single parent without much money, to send us to some of
the best schools in the country with the help of scholarships."
So good luck to America's new boss. All his writings are available as ebooks, including his inspiring inaugural address.
Happy reading from Cathy!
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Tralala, it has got me going lyrical . . .
Cathy Macleod, January 2009. Surging, flooding, books galore, sweeping over Reading's
shore. Where to dip and find a winner? How to tell a saint from sinner? Easy done, I promise you - here is all you have to do: Browse the millions on the Net, download samples
(free to get). There's never been such low-cost deals. Buy an ebook that appeals.
My apologies to Shakespeare's ghost, who nevertheless must concede that the reading public
has never had it so good. In addition to crazy high-street discounts, the current digital offerings number millions of titles. These are sold, or should be, at a fraction of the hardprint price.
Side by side with bestsellers can be spotted unfamiliar authors, peculiar covers and an ocean of self-published flotsam. Sure, there's lotsa crap, but also gems to pick up for a pen'orth.
As long as free samples are given, the Net today is a no-risk buyers' heaven.
Free titles abound too, usually Classics you've been ignoring for years at your local library.
Nor do readers have to wait any longer for someone to invent the ideal handheld device. Use what you've got already! I am achieving happy reading on my laptop. To overcome my
chronic screen phobia, I simply downloaded the free Mobipocket Reader software that is available to everybody at mobipocket.com.
For ebookers who prefer short texts, Amazon has set its short-story standard at 0.49 cents,
but I have found better tales elsewhere, and glad to pay $1 or even more. Happy reading! Return to top. Leave a comment.
Fiction Heavyweights Go Digital.
Cathy Macleod, January 2009: Agatha Christie, Fay Weldon and Ann Morven have all
embraced electronic publication as the ebook revolution gushes into the new year of 2009.
For evergreen Christie characters, such as Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, it entails a
reformat from the hardprint titles. But new Weldon and Morven titles, exclusively digital, can be read only on an electronic device. These may be handheld, laptop or desktop, the
worldwide appliances that have changed reading habits.
Ann Morven, diva of the short whodunit, said her publishers had decided to issue her latest
mystery in digital style only. It is a short story, “Birthday Snakes”, featuring the heavyweight
chump of crime fiction, a female sleuth with bumbling instinct for human frailty.
“My publishers have attracted on-screen readers for the past year by means of texts below
6000 words,” Ann Morven said. “This means short stories and serials. The reason is simple. Booktrade watchers believe that to absorb a long digital novel needs practice when we are
all used to paperbacks. People are still just bonding with their megabyte machines, whether mobile phone or a book-friendly computer.”
She revealed her own preference remained a hardprint paperback, but said she achieved “something of the same intimacy” reading a laptop loaded with the free Mobipocket Reader software.
Fay Weldon’s efiction is also being introduced in short takes. It appears in serialized episodes at YouGov.com, under the title “Woodworm”.
Fay Weldon says she welcomes feedback and is writing the chapters in a continuing plot that can be influenced by what followers of the serial suggest to her.
She is not the first to follow this course. Alexander McCall Smith began the interactive formula with “44 Scotland Street”, a serial in The Scotsman newspaper. Later, it was
published as a hardprint book, and several more Scotland Street titles have followed involving the same characters.
McCall Smith is currently writing a similar serial for London’s Daily Telegraph. It features London dwellers and appears under the title of “Corduroy Mansions”. The chapters are
available for digital download at the newspaper’s website.
Books by the late Agatha Christie that will appear in digital format are, of course, already
popular in hardprint. The digital publisher, Penguin in the United States, believes there is a new market in the electronic field.
Initially, ten digital titles will be published by this publisher, one of the global giants to recognize that ebooks are here to stay.
Up until 2008, it was small publishers who led the trend into ebooks. This was mainly an economic choice to avoid the crippling overheads of printing, binding, warehousing
thousands of books, distributing them to bookshops, and receiving just 40% percent of the cover price. That 40% had to pay for all those things plus advances and royalties to authors
and, perhaps, leave a small profit for the publisher.
Such an impossible business formula encouraged small publishers to try the alternative
digital market, selling direct to readers. Their pioneering endeavour has shown the way to the global giants who now suffer in the world recession.
The year 2009, therefore, is going to mark out fresh focus on ebooks following dismal earnings from traditionally printed titles. The business world is well into electronic
documents, so is the world of education, where text books now come on a screen.
Fiction will enjoy its best digital year yet, because what was once a trickle has become a torrent. Happy reading!
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The world market is open to all.
Cathy Macleod, December 2008: With ebooks pushing into the book trade, all publishers
enjoy the miracle of worldwide marketing without costly warehousing, distribution and the tyranny of the bookshop chains. For Christmas 2008, for instance, readers were able to
download a serial hailed as “the best since Dickens”. Run Maggie Run, a digital title,
continues to wear its publisher’s audacious boast with optimism, and success.
It coincides with rivalry between several electronic reading devices that are competing for a
place in the global markets. In this sales skirmish, content is a vital ingredient and Maggie’s spicy adventures are available in all, or most, of the appliances.
The serial joins digital-format bestselling novels, and could outsell them if a trend favouring short texts continues. The Scots-Australian author, John Ivor, holds star rating for historical
fiction from Darling Newspaper Press.
Ivor’s digital serial, following successful hardbacks and paperbacks, blends thrills, humour and outrageous characters.
“That is why we liken it to Charles Dickens,” said publishing executive Charles Bryce in Perth,Australia. “It is also interesting to recall that the Victorian novelist used serial form to
popularise his novels.
“We have found that ebooks (electronic books) are particularly suited to short-span scrutiny,
say text up to 6000 words. People are still coming to terms with reading on a screen even if it is hand-held. Our short-stories sell well in digital format, mostly mystery and romance.
We offer lengthy novels too, but these tend to lag compared to our traditional hardback and paperback sales.
“Thanks to the Internet, the essay has also made a comeback, although nowadays people call them blogs.”
Run Maggie Run begins with a heroine aged 9 sentenced to hang for murder in the 1830s.
Her odyssey to womanhood begins in Scotland and culminates in The Great Southland, as Australia was then known.
The serial was one of the goodies nudging readers towards ebooks in the weeks to
Christmas 2008. Enthusiasm for onscreen reads is almost certain to grow in the tight economic months of 2009.
An ebook can be read on any computer screen, or on most hand-held designs. There are
several appliances, such as Iliad (British), Cybook (French), Sony (Japanese), Bebook (Dutch), and others. All have small individual differences. A launch in Britain of Amazon's
Kindle, after success in the United States, is expected in 2009.
Internet retailers heavily into ebooks, and easy to access and search, include Mobipocket,
Cyber Read, Ebook Crescent, Books on Board, and many more that can be found via Google. Happy reading!
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