April 2011 Editorial

End of Winter Round-up

 

It is March, as I write, and April is on the way. We had a lovely

time at Boskone (see pix, page three) and many of us are headed to

ICFA, and we anticipate the usual intellectual ferment and good

times, and pictures next issue. In early April the Hartwell family is

traveling to Ad Astra in Toronto, and then apple tree care season

sets in Westport.

    We are having a rainstorm instead of a blizzard today, for

which we are grateful, in this winter of near-record snows. We were

forced to cancel a couple of weekly meetings due to an evil cocktail

of storms, illnesses, and travel during February and so got behind

on ordinary paperwork, fulfilling orders, and data entry too. We

hope to be back in shape in another couple of weeks, just in time

to leave town, as above. Our computer hardware and software is

approching or past its planned obsolescence date, and so we must

contemplate upgrades.

    We wish to call attention once again to our continuing attempts

to cover sf and fantasy theater in our New York area, since we are

the only publication we know of that is doing this. We have no

shortage of productions to review, and would be interested in

proposals from other places to cover live theatrical events, and of

notices a few months in advance of upcoming productions. Theater,

like film, is its own aesthetic project quite different from the written

literature, but it has been apparent to us that the attention given to

live performance related to sf has been negligible.

    We are also always looking for new reviewers for sf who are

comfortable writing the longer considerations of books that we

prefer to publish, and who have read enough in the field to be able

with some ease to place individual works in their context. Drop us

an email (address on page three).

    And we want to make the point once again that we accept

PayPal payments, and have for the last couple of years. We have

announced this before, but still have subscribers coming up to us

at conventions and saying that they wish that we did, so the word

needs to be spread. We still process checks, mostly, but are aware

that many banks have just raised their charges. So do consider the

PayPal option (address on page three).

    The publishing news from the last month is kind of sad,

since Borders has finally declared bankruptcy and is closing many

stores, and the H. B. Fenn organization, the largest distributor in

Canada of trade books, also went bankrupt. There is a quiet but

significant discussion going on in e-books between Amazon (big)

and Apple (bigger) about the sale of Kindle e-books onto Apple

iPads, whereby Amazon is perhaps being required to sell through

Apple at the same discount as any other publisher of e-books (at

30% of each sale via the iPad app to Apple). This has significant

implications for e-book prices and for Amazon’s profitabliliy in

the long run. Meanwhile, the new iPad has been announced, and

we are eager to see if it sparks another huge bounce in e-book

sales in the next couple of months. We’ll discuss that in a future

editorial down the line.

    One side note that I find hopeful: there is a lot of discussion

about the changing role of bookstores, and there are still people

starting independent bookstores around the USA with a variety

of business models, but commonly with the intention of providing

some kind of community focus built around the books. We are

in favor of this and feel it could be one of the many waves of the

future. *

—David G. Hartwell

& the editors