Buddy is a pain in the ass like this; Every time I’m eating he starts a commando raid on my plate. Of course, with my good defenses he never makes it. Because I have learned to love thee enemy, I’ll usually break off a piece of meat and put it over there for him. He goes and looks at it, but rarely eats it, and soon begins the next strike on my plate.
He doesn’t want to eat, he just wants to headbutt whatever dead animal I’m eating.
Beer.
I don’t feel like signing up for Craigslist right now, so I’m just going to stick this here. If anyone’s interested in this weight bench (and the weights) make me an offer.
You’d get the bench, the six foot bar, both dumb bells and 125 pounds in weight (that’s eight 10-pounders, six 5-pounders and six 2.5-pounders)
We were all busy preparing the food. My dad and I had brought in the chicken wings and chicken liver that we deep fried in the garage with this propane deep frying thing my dad has, and we were busy mixing it in BBQ sauce. Uncle Ron prepared the shrimp while Mom helped him. And it just occurred to me to look at the clock.
Me: It’s already 6:35.
Mom (repeating what I said): It’s 6:35.
Ron: Oh shit!
By the time we sat down in front of the TV, we’d missed the first three minutes of game time.
GoDaddy.com has a lot advertisement during the Super Bowl. All of GoDaddy’s commercials cast sexy women who are playing sex objects and being sexy as hell. But, alas, GoDaddy.com sucks, I think so anyway. I recently transferred my domain from GoDaddy to another host. It’s not that GoDaddy doesn’t offer good deals and it’s not that their service is bad, it’s that their site is such a pain in the ass to use. Everytime I logged in to update my credit card information or whatever, I’d keep going around and around until finally I found the page I was looking for. Got tired of it and switched to a domain registry that doesn’t require you to wade through a mess in order to find what you’re looking for.
After a week of law enforcement officers surrounding the building with no shots fired, negotiators have talked the suspect into giving himself up… oh, wait, wrong story.
I don’t know that Macmillan authors are rejoicing, but I imagine they are relieved that this didn’t last any longer than the week. You can buy Macmillan books from Amazon.com again.
However, after this, I’m not sure I want to shop at Amazon anymore, although I probably still will, but not without reluctance. I often find what I need at Amazon.com, so it’s likely I’ll still stop in from time to time.
Next to Amazon, you can also buy books from Barnes & Noble and Powell’s, in fact, I recommend you do. Amazon has shown that they will yank an entire publishing company just to win an argument. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it again, and not just to book publishers. I would rather not support a business like that.
If you’re still interested, Tobias Buckell does a better job of explaining how it works.
There’s been a lot going around about the price of ebooks….
Erm, for those who don’t know what’s going on, let me try to explain. Macmillan is a big time publishing company, one of the biggest, in fact. You all know who Amazon.com is. Amazon is the biggest bookseller online, among other things. Amazon wanted to sell ebooks at a certain price. Macmillan who supplies them with this product wanted them to raise the prices, I guess because Macmillan wouldn’t make a fair profit otherwise.
As I understand it, the two companies had not reached an agreement, but on Friday night, Amazon took down every single book from Macmillan. Not just the ebooks that this whole debate was about, but the printed books too. This hurts Macmillan authors because Amazon is now a place where you can’t buy their books. Authors count on people being able to buy their books because that’s how they make a good chunk of their money. Amazon is punishing these authors for something they had nothing to do with. This makes Amazon totally uncool.
I think it was Monday when Amazon announced that they had accepted Macmillan’s terms and would sell ebooks at the prices Macmillan wants them to sell. However, it’s been several days now and Amazon still will not let you buy Macmillan books from them, whether ebooks or print. A lot of authors are worried about their wallets, this mess can really hurt their careers. So again, this makes Amazon very, totally uncool.
The popular opinion is Amazon is just being a dick. It’s hard not to agree.
Anyway, a lot of discussion is going around about the prices of ebooks. I guess a lot of people think ebooks should be sold at very low prices. I don’t agree, because when you think about it, the ebook has the same content as the printed book, the ebook even has the cover art. For that reason, I don’t think ebooks should be sold for much less than the printed book. Maybe a dollar or two less, but not ten or more dollars less.
See, with printed books, the publisher has to buy the paper and resell it for profit along with the books content and so on. With ebooks, no paper necessary. Now, I don’t know for sure, maybe someone with more knowledge on these things can fill me in, but I’m under the impression that a single copy of a printed book (the paper and whatever other material is used to put the book together) doesn’t cost much more than a few dollars. Note: I’m talking about ONE copy of A book, not the hundreds or thousands of copies a publisher would produce, which likely costs thousands of dollars.
So if a publisher puts together a single book and it costed, say, ten bucks to put together, I would expect him to sell that one book for maybe 15 to 20 dollars, or more. Because when that one copy sells, the publisher has to pay the author, his staff and keep some money for himself (why else is he in the business if he’s not going to make any money.), not to mention, Amazon (or whatever store that sells the book.) is going to want a cut out of the books earnings too.
So, that’s why I think the printed books can be more expensive than the ebooks, but I don’t agree that ebooks should be sold for that much less than the printed books, because the same content is there and that content has value and there’s still the author to pay, the staff to pay, the publisher to make his profit and the store to get their cut. I think that’s pretty much how it works anyway, but I could be wrong.
So, if the printed version of a book goes for 15 bucks, I would expect the ebook to go for no more than two or three dollars less than that.
If MacMillan would just admit that Amazon has the biggest dick, maybe Amazon would then be satisfied and put all those books back up for sale.