BilmBlog500

The Author's Guild just doesn't know when to stop, pursuing its quixotic quest against Google for scanning books. I blogged about this over four years ago, here ... And per the letter I just sent to Paul Aiken today, which I paste below, I wish the Guild would finally get over it, and realize they're wrong.  The Author's Guild could have helped JABberwocky clients, saved them thousands of dollars and had many of them selling e-books years and years ago if they had listened to my advice. December 30, 2013 Mr. Paul Aiken The Author’s Guild 31 E. 32nd St. 7th fl. New York, NY  10016 Dear Mr. Aiken: You are colossally wrong on Google, and should stop wasting your organization’s money. You can read my full blog post from 2009 on this subject here http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-settlement.html But in essence, I advocated at that time that we force Google to give us a copy of our scanned books so that we could do with them as we please.  This was and is the...

So I popped over to the Baen twitter feed today, and was saddened to see a little tiny tweet: In memoriam: Richard T. Gallen, one of the original founders of Baen Books. Which says something, but maybe not enough. He wasn't just a founder of Baen. He was some of the money behind Tor Books.  As mentioned in this article in the NY Times from 30+ years ago. He was some of the money behind Carroll & Graf, which published actively in sf/fantasy/horror/mystery, including things like the Mammoth Book series, or David Pringle's 100 Best SF Novels , which C&G and other publishers used as a road map for bringing a lot of deserving books and authors back into print and to a new generation of readers. We'd have science fiction and fantasy today without Richard T. Gallen, but it's safe to say it would be different somehow.  His being around or not being around, it's one of those things like "Hitler Wins World War II" or "Lincoln Survives" that alter...

More bad news for most of us this week, with a federal judge ruling that Detroit can go into bankruptcy and cut pensions, Illinois legislators voting on a bill to cut pensions there, another judge ruling that employers can force employees to arbitrate and not have an option of class action suits. I have a deeply ambivalent relationship to public employee unions.  While I believe very strongly in the right to form a union and collectively bargain, public employee unions have much better luck gaming the system by making contributions to the politicians who then determine how much money to give the union workers.  In the private sector, an independent labor union can't game the system, at least not this way.  In the private sector too often the interests of my representative are more aligned with the unions than the public purse. But that said, the attack on benefits that were won in negotiations reflects a distressing tendency in public life these days, which is to solve yo...

I haven't done a lot of blogging recently.  To make up for it, I'm going to try and do quick capsule reviews of some movies that are in theatres now and/or not in so many theatres but in the buzz for awards season. Thor: The Dark World I didn't care for this at all.  The first movie with a very odd superhero movie choice in Kenneth Branagh directing was a little off the superhero movie tracks, as interested in showing Chris Hemsworth in a tight tee-shirt as in endless superhero battles.  Not this movie,  As is so often the case, I tuned out and went to sleep when we got to the last half hour, because I knew it was just going to be another long, dull, over-CGIs, boring, been-there done-that fight scene.  That said, I saw it with a client who enjoyed it quite a bit, as have most of the other people I know who saw it.  Really? Last Vegas If you think you might like this, you probably will like it.  It's not good by many objective critical standards, but i...