July 18, 2008

Review of: Your mother was a Neanderthal by Scieszka, Jon

Parker loves these Time Warp trio books.

In my case, I was the Neanderthal and my mother the Cro-Magnon.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful:

Review of: Hoodwinked [videorecording (DVD)]

The animation in this updating of the Red Riding Hood story is really hideous, and the flip attitude is grating, but the kids loved it. Go figure.

Feh.

Are they talking about 15% of the catalog retail price for the e-book, or for the printed version?

Either way, 15% is fair…

Doesn’t matter much to me, because I see no evidence that e-books are going to take off anytime soon.

Authors Guild Warns on S&S e-Book Royalty Proposal - 7/18/2008 7:17:00 AM - Publishers Weekly

The Authors Guild has sent out an advisory to its members suggesting that they carefully review a letter from Simon & Schuster that looks to add an amendment to their contracts that will set the standard royalty for e-books at 15% of the catalog retail price for e-books. The Authors Guild alert makes three points about the proposal: members should discuss the amendment with their attorney or agent; warns that, depending on a member’s particular contract with S&S, the amendment may grant S&S rights that otherwise would be retained by the author; and notes that members should be aware that the amendment may affect their ability to obtain a reversion of rights.

The alert further advises that members should “keep your powder dry,” when negotiating e-book royalty rates, suggesting that members try to retain the right to renegotiate e-book royalties. “The Authors Guild expects that the 15% of the retail list price will be the low-water mark for e-book royalties,” the Guild speculated. “As the e-book market develops, authors with clout will doubtlessly insist on a more reasonable share of e-book revenues, and the industry will have to adapt.”

I see the leading apostropphe as a potential source of typographic inelegances and syntax explosions and would rather refer to them as bots.  there are quite a few books with the word “bot” in the title in Amazon (see http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=bots&x=0&y=0) but none of them use the leading apostrophe.