A Word to Our Australian Friends

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Jun 302009
 

Dear Australian book lovers – from today we are working our way through our TradeMe listings and adding postage prices for Australia, so you can buy from us and pay straight away using TradeMe’s secure Pay Now credit card payment system. For those of you unaware of TradeMe it is New Zealand’s answer to e-Bay and is by far the most popular auction website in New Zealand – and it’s open to buyers and sellers from Australia also. The introduction of the Pay Now system of secure credit card payment processing has done a lot to smooth the way for Australian buyers. To pay by credit card with Pay Now the buyer must be able to choose a specific postage cost, which is why we are spending time adding these costs for Australian buyers. We hope this means we’ll see a lot more of you on TradeMe and we look forward to selling some [...read more...]

Spoiler Alert! BookieMonster likes to ***SPOILER***

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Jun 302009
 

I have a terrible, terrible confession to make. My name is BookieMonster and I read the end of books first. I love spoilers. Yes, it’s true. I am an inveterate spoiler of books, movies, TV shows, you name it. I’ll read about 20 – 50 pages of a book, just enough to get the jist of the plot and/or mystery  and then I’ll flip to the end and read the climax. I look movies up on IMDB and read the spoilers, and I listen to Slate’s Spoiler Specials podcast before seeing the movie. I google TV shows and read the recaps on Televisionwithoutpity before I watch them. Sometimes I don’t even bother watching them after that. The recap is enough. I just can’t help it. I don’t like surprises, and I don’t like distractions. Particularly with books I find that not knowing what’s happening and focusing on the plot machinations [...read more...]

Digital Publishing – In which BookieMonster proposes an idea

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Jun 292009
 

Since I had a slightly Luddite anti-digital publishing rant last week, I’ve been thinking about ways I do see a future for e-books and digital publishing, and more particularly uses for it that are different from the standard “replace the physical book” line. So here’s one of my ideas for advancing digital publishing in New Zealand (and feel free to contact me to purchase the rights/negotiate a settlement if you have the backing and/or funding to put this scheme in place ) : Every child (and yes I do really think it’s needs to be every child for this to work) in school from year 0 – year 13 in New Zealand is given an e-book reader – but this e-book reader needs to be more and do more than the hardware currently available, this needs to be a combination of a Kindle and an Ipod, and it needs to be [...read more...]

Trade Me – Change is in the air

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Jun 292009
 

Changes are afoot in the wind (as Balderick says) at TradeMe with the site announcing last week a new site design. It’s certainly not a total redesign – more of a design tweaking, with the major change being a move to a fixed-width design. Interestingly, as opposed to previous changes, the change is being phased in with TradeMe even inviting feedback and comments prior to a complete changeover, via a dedicated board in their Messageboard area. Overall the response on the messageboard have been fairly standard as per when previous changes have been made. The “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” has been rolled out numerous times, as well as the “why do you change things without asking” (which is somewhat ironic since at least TradeMe have actually asked for feedback this time, albeit with the proviso that change is happening, whether the community likes it or not). This attempt at [...read more...]

BookieMonster’s Unappreciated Classics No. 2 : Under the Skin by Michel Faber

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Jun 252009
 
BookieMonster's Unappreciated Classics No. 2 : Under the Skin by Michel Faber

    Most people know Michel Faber through his doorstopper historical novel The Crimson Petal and the White – and rightly so, as it’s a brilliant example of historical fiction. But before he wrote and published that title he produced Under the Skin – a work of such compelling and shocking creepiness that it puts the more well-known horror names (Stephen King, Dean Koontz, etc) to total shame. Under the Skin starts with Isserley, a seemingly awkward and but erotically appealing woman, trawling roads in the Scottish highlands, looking for hitchhikers who meet her fairly precise physical specifications. So far, so good, so mystery/thriller. But then the weirdness starts. There are odd descriptions of Isserley’s physical body and her relation to it, and disconcerting hints at a wider story – Isserley lives on a farm but seems so isolated from the others that live around her and work with her [...read more...]

Digital publishing : BookieMonster has an opinion, oh yes she does.

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Jun 252009
 

With the Digital Publishing New Zealand Forum’s Future of the Book seminar on at the moment, it’s prompted me to think more about e-books and digital publishing and the way these are presented by the media and digital  publishers. I have to admit to a bias straight off – I’m not a big fan of e-books, or the idea of e-books or how they are currently presented and discussed.  One thing I’m particularly tired of seeing is the stories by mainstream media that constantly revolve around the “E-books kill off books” theme (see two recent stories in the NZ Herald and on TV3)  even when the participants/interviewees in these stories are not pushing that angle. No, the book is not dead. The media have run with these stories for at least 10 years, along with the reviews that present the shortcomings of e-books and e-book readers – shortcomings such as high price, [...read more...]

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