5 ms·

Sorry, I admire her writing, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Books are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good,

by sxcurry 12y ago

Sorry, I admire her writing, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Books are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Amazon and Audible. New technologies, and they are helping more people to read more books than ever before.

rquantz 12y ago
This is a typical view around here. Obviously to Le Guin they are more than that. But what would one of the great writers of our time, approaching the end of her life, know about that?
- jasonisalive 12y ago
  She's very good, but great? I don't know about that. I've really enjoyed many of her books, but at heart they seem to me to be the books of an author who isn't particularly conscious of her privilege level in the world. Furthermore she never really seemed to move beyond a very American-centric strain of 60s radical politics in her thinking and aesthetics. If you're a certain type of American, I'm sure you could be convinced that she's a truly rich and resounding thinker. People on the other side of that fence would probably wish she was interested in speaking to the whole human audience.
  - jkaunisv1 12y ago
    That's surprising because in every one of her stories I've read, there is a stark awareness of racial, social and class differences. She is one of the most aware authors I can think of. She writes about differences between men and women, the rich and the poor, capitalists and socialists, leaders and servants, personal family events and large-scale world events. I am not American and your comment comes across as very pigeonholing. What other part of the human audience do you wish she'd speak to?
kitsune_ 12y ago
This is ironic because you could apply the same statement to issues like open-source software, walled gardens and net neutrality. To the regular joe, the issues we talk about as developers on here hardly matter, yet as a people actually writing the software, we tend to be of the opinion that we know better. I.e. re a typical speech by rms: "Sorry, I admire his coding, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Programs are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Apple's or Google's app stores. New technologies, and they are helping more people to consume software than ever before."
carlob 12y ago
Even from a hardcore free market perspective, you can't really say books are a commodity, insofar as they they have limited substitutability. There is no way to make up for quality with volume. You can't just take a masterpiece of human literature and say: "Suppose the Ulysses was never written by James Joyce, well I can just have the same utility by producing 10^9 pages of teen Twilight fan fiction".
- sxcurry 12y ago
  But I think that's my point, although I didn't express it very well. I happen to be reading Ulysses right now - amazing book. But what about Danielle Steel's books? They're also books, right? There's a tremendous range, so I don't think we can have these blanket statements that books are special and that we need protection against companies like Amazon.
  - carlob 12y ago
    No, that's exactly the opposite of your point. The history of thought would not be the same with or without Ulysses, we would not be more or less the same with enough Danielle Steel. And books are not special, many other forms of human expression deserve this kind of protection.
pjmorris 12y ago
Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, no better or worse than the dozens of alternatives?
- jasonisalive 12y ago
  I think he answered your question already: "Some are good, some are terrible." Try reading the parent a little more thoroughly.
  - pjmorris 12y ago
    After I posted, I realized that my phrasing made it look like I didn't read the article thoroughly. Here's another attempt: Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, good books among many equivalent good books?
firebones 12y ago
I watched the video (rather than just relying on the transcript) and while I am inclined to agree that books are commodities, I think the only failing in her speech was the conflation of concerns that produced an incoherent thesis. On the one hand, she had a call to action for authors (and perhaps others in the publishing industry) to respect quality, to produce quality and to seek quality. But she ended up out of her depth by entering the Amazon/Hachette dispute with a poor understanding of the forces at play, and a lack of awareness of how Amazon has enabled new outsider authors to find broader recognition that she started her talk complaining about how it took her and her peers a half-century to find. The lamenting call for quality was inspiring. But the lack of awareness of how the industry has changed, and perhaps suffering from what JA Konrath calls the "Bookholm Syndrome" of being inside the publishing world too long that you start to empathize irrationally with your exploitative publishing company--that was bad. Or at least some kind of cognitive dissonance at work.

by sxcurry 12y ago

rquantz 12y ago

This is a typical view around here. Obviously to Le Guin they are more than that. But what would one of the great writers of our time, approaching the end of her life, know about that?

jasonisalive 12y ago
She's very good, but great? I don't know about that. I've really enjoyed many of her books, but at heart they seem to me to be the books of an author who isn't particularly conscious of her privilege level in the world. Furthermore she never really seemed to move beyond a very American-centric strain of 60s radical politics in her thinking and aesthetics. If you're a certain type of American, I'm sure you could be convinced that she's a truly rich and resounding thinker. People on the other side of that fence would probably wish she was interested in speaking to the whole human audience.
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  That's surprising because in every one of her stories I've read, there is a stark awareness of racial, social and class differences. She is one of the most aware authors I can think of. She writes about differences between men and women, the rich and the poor, capitalists and socialists, leaders and servants, personal family events and large-scale world events. I am not American and your comment comes across as very pigeonholing. What other part of the human audience do you wish she'd speak to?

kitsune_ 12y ago

This is ironic because you could apply the same statement to issues like open-source software, walled gardens and net neutrality. To the regular joe, the issues we talk about as developers on here hardly matter, yet as a people actually writing the software, we tend to be of the opinion that we know better. I.e. re a typical speech by rms: "Sorry, I admire his coding, but I call complete and utter bullshit on this speech. Programs are commodities, not some magical elixer from the gods. Some are good, some are terrible. I buy mine from Apple's or Google's app stores. New technologies, and they are helping more people to consume software than ever before."

carlob 12y ago

Even from a hardcore free market perspective, you can't really say books are a commodity, insofar as they they have limited substitutability. There is no way to make up for quality with volume. You can't just take a masterpiece of human literature and say: "Suppose the Ulysses was never written by James Joyce, well I can just have the same utility by producing 10^9 pages of teen Twilight fan fiction".

sxcurry 12y ago
But I think that's my point, although I didn't express it very well. I happen to be reading Ulysses right now - amazing book. But what about Danielle Steel's books? They're also books, right? There's a tremendous range, so I don't think we can have these blanket statements that books are special and that we need protection against companies like Amazon.
- carlob 12y ago
  No, that's exactly the opposite of your point. The history of thought would not be the same with or without Ulysses, we would not be more or less the same with enough Danielle Steel. And books are not special, many other forms of human expression deserve this kind of protection.

pjmorris 12y ago

Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, no better or worse than the dozens of alternatives?

jasonisalive 12y ago
I think he answered your question already: "Some are good, some are terrible." Try reading the parent a little more thoroughly.
- pjmorris 12y ago
  After I posted, I realized that my phrasing made it look like I didn't read the article thoroughly. Here's another attempt: Would you then say that 'The C Programming Language' are 'Structure and Interpretation of Programming Languages' are commodities, good books among many equivalent good books?

firebones 12y ago

I watched the video (rather than just relying on the transcript) and while I am inclined to agree that books are commodities, I think the only failing in her speech was the conflation of concerns that produced an incoherent thesis. On the one hand, she had a call to action for authors (and perhaps others in the publishing industry) to respect quality, to produce quality and to seek quality. But she ended up out of her depth by entering the Amazon/Hachette dispute with a poor understanding of the forces at play, and a lack of awareness of how Amazon has enabled new outsider authors to find broader recognition that she started her talk complaining about how it took her and her peers a half-century to find. The lamenting call for quality was inspiring. But the lack of awareness of how the industry has changed, and perhaps suffering from what JA Konrath calls the "Bookholm Syndrome" of being inside the publishing world too long that you start to empathize irrationally with your exploitative publishing company--that was bad. Or at least some kind of cognitive dissonance at work.