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