Starting today, December 15, and until New Year’s Day, Smashwords is running a sitewide end-of-year sale on participating books. This includes all three of my books on Smashwords, which are available at 50% off. While you’re there, look for other titles that might interest you. Here are the links for my books:
Just in time for your holiday shopping, The Magic Battery and Spells of War are now available from Amazon in paperback!
With the explosion of Mastodon use, some people may have come across Bookwyrm, a federated network that uses ActivityPub protocols. It’s supposed to be something like a decentralized alternative to Goodreads. I was excited about it at first, but fortunately was quickly warned about its license. It’s unsuitable for me, for independent writers, and for advocates of freedom. I thought about whether I should even mention it, but decided I should post a brief warning.
The problem is write at the top: “This is anti-capitalist software, released for free use by individuals and organizations that do not operate by capitalist principles.” Software licenses that restrict who can use the software and for what purpose are almost always a bad idea, even when the restriction isn’t inherently bad, as it is in this case. Open-source code which only some people are allowed to use isn’t open-source.
Most obviously, it implicitly excludes publishing houses and self-employed authors. Organizations that aren’t employee-owned are explicitly excluded. That’s worse than senseless. Depending on how you read it, it could also exclude people who live by capitalist principles, such as giving value for value and rejecting governmental control over what can be published. ????
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There are 520 employees of Penguin Random House who think it should take a partisan position in what books it publishes. Hopefully the publisher will tell them it doesn’t take their orders. They want the publisher to drop Amy Coney Barrett’s upcoming book, which as far as I can tell doesn’t have an announced title yet.
Update: Good news! The publisher has effectively told that bunch to go to Hell.
It reminds me of some Amazon employees lying on the ground a few months ago and demanding that it not carry some books. Do some people get jobs in publishing and distribution because they dream of controlling what people can read?
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Race, we’re often told, is a social construct. Sometimes it’s even more arbitrary; it’s a government construct. Since the days of slavery, governmental units in the US have assigned people racial designations based on bizarre criteria. The civil rights era and the introduction of affirmative action only made it crazier. Iranians, Afghanis, and Arabs aren’t Asian, even though they’re mostly from Asia. Instead, they’re “white.” You can be from Spain, yet not be Hispanic. Native Hawaiians aren’t Native American. Members of recognized minority groups lobby to keep other people from being recognized as minority groups.
Official designations of racial and minority status in the United States are insane, but David E. Bernstein keeps a straight face as he documents them in Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America.
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