Amazon is the not-so-secret villain of this week’s link roundup, as it often is. This wasn’t deliberate, though maybe my choice of reading was influenced by reading Shaun Bythell’s excellent Diary of a Bookseller, which covers daily life in Scotland’s biggest secondhand bookshop. (Bythell keeps a bullet-riddled husk of a Kindle ereader nailed to the shop wall, which tells you how he feels about Amazon.)
As for this week’s AI art, I did some futzing around with Stable Diffusion’s ability to redo famous paintings and subjects. I started with my favorite painting, Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. Here is the original:
And here is a quick render of Van Gogh’s version:
Now, on to the links!
Who Was Supposed to Win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
You’ve probably already seen that Annie Ernaux has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. I haven’t read Ernaux (my readerly immune system reacts violently to most autofiction), so I don’t have much to say about that. In fact, I’m not really a huge fan of the Nobel for literature at all, to be honest. I find it utterly bizarre that we give so much time and attention to what a bunch of rich Swedish professors think about literature, and a casual glance at the prize’s history suggests that the Swedish Academy’s predictions about which authors will stand the test of time is wrong more often than it’s right.
More importantly, Nobel season means it’s time for Alex Shephard of The New Republic to come out of hibernation and release his column covering the official Ladbrokes betting list for the Literature prize. Shephard stopped actually trying to seriously predict winners back in 2016, when he very publicly (on the subheading of the article!) said that Bob Dylan would not win the Nobel Prize. You probably remember what happened next. Since then, Shephard has used the column as an annual Airing of Grievances with international literature. I look forward to it every year.
The above compilation of writers on the Ladbrokes list is striking for its range and the generally high literary quality. Some of these writers have appeared on the list for years and will continue to do so because bettors aren’t the world’s most imaginative people. Others are newcomers, like Andrey Kurkov and Amitav Ghosh. Most of them are simply great writers, and while their victory wouldn’t be as satisfying as Pynchon’s (because that would feel triumphant) or J.K. Rowling’s (because this column strongly endorses shitshows and absurdities), it would be a good thing for literary culture, which has been having a rough time of it ever since the invention of the quote-tweet feature.
But who knows! Maybe the Swedish Academy really will give it to Murakami, at which point I will fly to Japan, steal all his T-shirts, and slowly eat them in a fugue state of disgust and grief. Please don’t give it to Murakami.
Amazon and the Penguin-Schuster Merger
Often lost in the discussion around this year’s proposed merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, the two biggest publishers in the anglophone world aren’t trying to combine their forces from a position of strength and confidence. In fact, they’re scared and scattered, desperately forming a confederation of the tribes to survive the empire at the edge of their territory, which threatens to absorb them so completely and utterly that their grandchildren won’t even know what a Penguin Classics paperback ever was. The threat here, obviously, is Amazon. Like I wrote about last year with Goodreads, Amazon is less of an “everything store” and more of a surveillance agency with a sales department, which gives it a massive edge over traditional publishers. Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, in an excerpt from their new book Chokepoint Capitalism, lay out the claim neatly:
While Amazon started with books, that was never its main game. Right from the beginning it planned to use books we searched for and bought to gather data on us in order to sell us more stuff and, ideally, take over the world. Ebooks were a perfect fit for Amazon’s extractive mindset, because they cost us more in terms of privacy than physical titles ever could. Amazon knows what we search for, what we read, and what we listen to—when and for how long. This “actionable market intelligence” allows it to poach authors, market its own titles to readers, and cross-sell non-book items to readers. The combination of surveillance and vertical integration means that Amazon vastly out-powers both publishers and other retailers, cementing its dominance, and giving it more opportunities to spy on readers.
The whole excerpt is worth reading for more detail, and I’ll be checking out the book shortly. Doctorow is always worth reading.
Secrets of the Publishing Industry EXPOSED—Big Five Execs Hate Her!
Anne Trubek, owner and proprietor of Belt Publishing, also runs an excellent little newsletter about the inner workings of indie presses. I recommend it highly. This week, she posted Common Misconceptions About Publishing, posted in no particular order. I’ve seen points like these come up over the years, but it’s nice to see them all in one place.
(Controversial editorializing: the internet is a huge boon for disseminating images. Books are no longer the best way to show off your cool photos or supplement your novel with a Caravaggio painting. Use the web for art! Use books for words! It took me ten seconds to put this painting in this newsletter; it would take 2412 emails, lots of money, special paper, lots of extra printer care, and an annoying amount of designer time to put it in your book)
Indie Authors Actually Do, Legitimately, Hate This Guy
One of the bad breaks you get in blogging is finding a great research source after you’ve already spent a week working in that topic and posting on it. I did a deep dive on Kindle Direct Publishing back in July, when it would have been nice to know about "Confessions From the Underground World of Kindle eBooks." The confessee in question hires Filipino ghostwriters to bash out 30,000-word drafts of “self-help books” for $150 a pop, which he then edits, publishes, and markets under various pseudonyms. All told, he claims to publish several books a month and earn more than $150,000 a year from this enterprise. Why self-help? The author explains:
After checking out the self-help section in the Kindle store, I noticed how godawful the writing was. I couldn’t tell if someone had outsourced their book to a non-native English speaking writer (which is common), or if it was actually someone’s legitimate effort at a book. I was shocked that anyone (a) put this stuff for sale, and (b) the books actually sold.
For example, here’s an excerpt from a top-selling Kindle book:
“The way that we must use coconut oil is to use it with the best of intentions. If you do not, you will not benefit fully from usage of the said coconut oil. Were you to not use or eat the coconut oil, don’t worry there are many more uses for the coconut oil you will see!”
Clearly the bar was low. I knew I could kick their asses even without experience writing and publishing a book.
It’s part of a longer 2015 series from a publication called (ugh) The Hustle. The bro-speak is annoying, but it’s undeniably fascinating to see just how bad Amazon is at regulating the content on its Kindle marketplace.
And that’s it for this week. I hope to have a short, snappy Bibliophilia article up soon. Happy reading!