“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Everything Goes Better With An E

All three regular readers of CAP will be aware that I’m planning to upload a book to Kindle in the very near future, so I’m more exercised by the whole e-book / e-reader phenomenon at the moment than I generally would be. Still, even the luddest of Luddites should be intrigued / alarmed / horrified by a couple of interesting pieces that popped into my email this morning. The first was from the Guardian:
In the first Terminator movie he tried to extinguish all human life. Now, as governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to make textbooks history in favour of digital formats.
  Schwarzenegger, trying to plug a budget hole of $24.3bn (£15bn), thinks he can make savings by getting rid of what he decries as expensive textbooks. The governor is serious about an idea that might make Gutenberg turn in his grave. He appeared in class yesterday to push an idea he set out in the San Jose Mercury News newspaper.
  “It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators’ hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources.”
  The second piece was from Reuters:
The recent Book Expo publishing industry convention held in New York accelerated the impression that the industry is rapidly embracing new technology. Many attendees remarked that e-books pervaded every discussion they had on the convention floor. “It has tipped,2 tweeted Todd Sattersten, president of Milwaukee-based 800-CEO-Read, an influential online source of business books. “Buckle in for the ride.”
  Indeed, the last few weeks have seen a flurry of announcements across the book-to-technology spectrum. Amazon (AMZN) informed users of a small-but-meaningful tweak to the Kindle that now allows users to export their reading notes. Google (GOOG) revealed its own e-book distribution system, publishers launched book-specific iPhone apps in the United Kingdom, and computer makers unveiled new ways to incorporate e-ink technology into highly portable but robust computing devices [ … ]
  So with all of this fast-paced activity, are we hurtling into a brave new reading world where authors deal directly with their readers and keep more of the profits? Not yet. For all of the publishers’ fumbling with e-books, they retain one important advantage highlighted by all of this activity. There’s a blizzard of standards out there that only a big company can manage. Without an established standard, size matters in the supply chain. Publishers have it; authors don’t.
  Dang, there goes another get-rich-quick scheme.
  Speaking of get-rich-quick schemes … I’d no sooner announced that I was thinking of uploading THE BIG EMPTY, the sequel to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, to Kindle, when a publisher stepped in and asked to see it before it goes to Kindle. Which was nice. And this morning, I got a call from a movie producer guy saying he’d read THE BIG O, and was keen on optioning it, and was I free to sit down for a meeting next week …?
  Guess I’ll have to postpone washing my hair next week ...

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

And a few decades ago people believed that by now we'd eat little pills instead of food, and holiday on the moon.

Long live the book.

Declan Burke said...

I'm all for books, Ms Witch ... But I'm all for anything that'll keep Lilyput in the standard of nappies she's accustomed to, as well.

Cheers, Dec

Gerard Brennan said...

Ooooh, good luck with THE BIG EMPTY and the meeting with the produccer. You're well due a flurry of good news, man.

gb

Josephine Damian said...

Um... I thought the whole need-a-US-bank-account thing put the kibosh on the kindle upload.

But hey, who needs a book deal when there's a movie deal in the works? Sweet.

Corey Wilde said...

Probably can work around that bank account thing with Paypal, I expect.

Best of luck with both publisher and producer, Declan. Keeping all digits and other extremities crossed.

Declan Burke said...

Ta, folks ... although I won't be getting ahead of myself with the movie 'deal', there's been interest expressed before and it's come to nowt. There's every chance nothing will happen with it.

And the Kindle / bank account thing is get-aroundable (?), correct. We'll see how it goes ...

Cheers, Dec

Joe Barone said...

Two brief comments--I think we probably are moving toward a time when some authors deal more directly with readers instead of through traditional publishers. We've all heard it said freedom of the press belongs to those who own the presses. Well, I have a press of sorts sitting on my desktop, a computer with thousands of times more computing power than the computer that first took humans to the moon.

Second comment--Let us know when we can buy your presently unpublished books in an electronic format.

Gerard Brennan said...

Hey Dec, here's a guy from Dublin wit plenty of constructive stuff to say about self-publishing.

Mick Rooney.

gb

Alan Griffiths said...

Good luck with TBE Dec and the film option conversation. I'm still looking forward to the first chapter of TBE here on CAP.

Stuart Neville said...

Big congrats on the latest news, Dec. Hopefully that'll give you an encouraging kick in the arse.

On the Arnold thing - I think he's got a solid point. Reference and textbooks might find their natural home on E-readers long before novels do, seeing as they're not so tied in with the tactile experience of reading.

graywave said...

Declan,

If you do find a way around the American bank account problem, will you post about it, please? I just can't get past it myself.

Declan Burke said...

Graywave - I'm afraid it's a matter of having someone in the U.S., with a bank account, allowing me to use their account to download the money into ... If / when I get that sorted, things should be good to go. I can't find any other way around it.

Cheers, Dec

graywave said...

Bugger.

Isn't it always the same? It's not what you know...

:-)

Thanks anyway. Good luck with the Kindle experiment.

Graham.