In a bookshop, idly

[hawkwing_lb]

So, I was in a bookshop yesterday. As you are, you know. Wandering, looking, sometimes (though not often, if I want to be able to buy lunch next week!) buying.

There will be muttering about prices in the next bit, so if such things annoy you, you are forewarned.

In which prices are compared.

So, buying books.

In Easons, the paperback of Wild Magic by Tamora Pierce is 9.10 euro. In Hodges Figgis and Waterstone's the same book retails at 8.75 euro. On Amazon.com, it retails at $5.99. Assuming shipping @ $3.00 (anyone care to enlighten me as to whether this is an accurate figure?), that's (today, at least) roughly 7.45 euro. Saving: in buying from HF: 0.35 euro; in buying from Amazon.com: between 2.30 and 2.65 euro.

Damn but we're getting hammered on price.

Another experiment. When Demons Walk, Patricia Briggs. Forbidden Planet sells it for 10.99 euro. Retail price at Amazon.com: $6.50. Assuming shipping at $3.25, that works out to 8.10 euro. Saving: 2.89 euro.

A third experiment: Sabriel, Garth Nix. Local bookshop sells it at 10.20 euro. On Amazon.com, an illustrated version (my version has no pictures) retails at $7.99. Assuming shipping at $4.00, that works out to 9.95 euro, approximately. Saving: 0.25 euro.

I suspect that the chains here order through the UK. Thus for currency conversions we're getting hammered twice: once from dollar to sterling, and then again from sterling to euro. Evidence for this thesis comes in the form of Charles Stross' The Family Trade, out of Tor Publishers, found all alone in Hodges Figgis for 6.10 euros. As it retails on Amazon.com for $6.99, and assuming shipping at $3.50, it comes in at 8.70 euros, making it one of the few times it's been cheaper to buy from nearby rather than from abroad.

Throughout, I've assumed the cost of shipping to be approximately equal to half the cover price. I haven't touched on the comparative price of TPBs or HBs: they vary between 14.00 euro and 33.00 euro, bottom-end of one and top-end of the other. The moral of this story, friends? Ordering from Amazon.com is in general but not always less expensive than toddling down to the local HF or Waterstone's. It's for-damn-sure less expensive than buying via Easons.

You have guessed that my retailer of choice is Amazon.com, right? With Hodges Figgis (Dawson St) about ten points back in second?

PS: Also, US editions of Tamora Pierce's books have better covers, in addition to being cheaper. Mine are pink-ish and girly, instead of having pictures of swords, wolves, horses, or other more content-appropriate images (you'd think it was a book about hair, honestly). The covers for The Immortals series all look the same, and they only have the title on the spine. I mean, come on, people. Just because the author's a female who's writing about a female main character, there's no need to completely alienate those of us who see a pink cover and automatically cringe (I have an allergic reaction to pink. Ask anyone). Damn good thing I heard of Pierce by the Internet first, or I'd never have picked up any of her books.

Comments

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

The early Piers wasn't bad, but we get into the changes of cultural assumptions that have occurred since the 70s. The later Piers, to wit, the extended Xanth "trilogy" got cutesy. The original trilogy wasn't bad, just...not as great as I'd remembered it.

And then there what you pointed out: you just don't get some of the adult stuff even if you understand the words and the concepts as a child. I was reading RE Howard as a child and totally missing some of the underlying assumptions and biases -- I know I would have a different experience reading his stuff now.

Plus, one's tastes and likings do change over the years. Why, for a while I was into the alternative fiction of Tanith Lee and other strange writers. Now I can't even bring myself to pick up those books, much less read them.

Theodore Sturgeon -- there's one I'll have to look at again and see how things have changed. He was oddly prescient in terms of treating his female characters well, and the story of his that I liked best used that to carry along the plot to some extent. I've forgotten the title, but it was in a collection named The Stars are the Styx. He was a very poetic writer.

Ray Bradbury -- I have re-looked at Something Wicked This Way Comes, mainly because there was a quote in there about the "October people" that I wanted to re-copy. That one looks like it would hold up well.

OTOH, there are writers whom I've never ever been able to read -- LE Modesitt comes to mind, along with EE "Doc" Smith. In fact, I clearly remember searching for Grey Lensman, finally stumbling across a copy in a used bookstore in a small town near mine, finally clutching it in my eager hands, running home, sitting down to read it, and coming up short against some sentence that embodied sexism to the nth degree. I stopped right there, put it away, and never touched it again.

Oh, and Sheri Tepper owns the dubious honor of writing something so bigoted that I threw her book* across the room. I have never touched her stuff again, not even the books I really liked.

*..and it was a hardcover book, and a library book, to top it off. The horror. The shame.

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

and it was a hardcover book, and a library book, to top it off. The horror. The shame.

Insert appropriate gasps of shock, since that's something I've never yet been driven to do. [I am now extremely curious as to what bit of bigotry prompted this reaction, but notice, I'm not asking. I can be restrained :-)].

I've never read any Sturgeon, Smith or Tepper. On the other hand, I own quite a few books by Modesitt, despite the rather clunky prose style, characters and plot. Only the fantasy, though. ::shrug:: You take what you can get, and Modesitt does have a British publisher.

I tried reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, not too long ago. Didn't manage to get much past the second page. I managed the same distance with Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. There are some books I'm just not cut out to read :-).

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Not all of Bradbury is the same. If you didn't care for F451, do try some of his short stories, or his other books. I found Something Wicked This Way Comes to be much more lyrical when I first read it, oh..more than 20 years ago. He wrote a lot of neat short stories, though.

Sheri Tepper had a nice little series on the Land of the True Game, which was a planet on which some people had powers like shapeshifting or talking to inanimate objects. There were three trilogies, each focused on a different character. Those were good writing, and I miss them -- but I won't touch her books again.

Because in Gate to Women's Country she claimed that (1) homosexuality was a defect caused by in utero exposure to something (not specified) and that (2) since that had been identified, pregnant women no longer had to worry about bearing gay or lesbian children. It was so full of hatred and bigotry that it took my breath away, and it was shocking because I'd enjoyed her writing so much up to that point. The odd thing is, that same book has the men (off in their Men's Countries) are presented as engaging in sexual behavior -- but it's because they're so warlike and evil and other bad things and once all the evil warmongering males are eliminated by the women, the remaining males will be the good hetero kind, gentle and artistic and not warlike at all.

Simplistic much? ;-)

And that was the only book I've ever tossed. :-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

in Gate to Women's Country ...the remaining males will be the good hetero kind

Um. Um. Um. ::speechlessness::

Clarify something for me? Is she saying homosexuality is bad and causes evil? Or that only evil people (predetermined evil)engage in homosexual acts?

Not to, you know, insult a book I've never read or anything, but that sounds a bit cracked. Well cracked, even. Truly deserving of tossing.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Gee..since I couldn't bring myself to actually read the book, I can't really say which it was. It was all very simplified and confused and muddled. I think it was basically that the evil warmongering men were engaging in homosexuality because they had no women to otherwise act with, and the kind/gentle/artistic males didn't because they were with the women, but it could have been other things. The evil males did evil things and the nice males did only nice things. So I think she was saying both - that homosexuality is evil and that evil people engage in it.

Yes, it was cracked. And well deserved tossing. All feminists should retch at that premise.

OTOH, if you want a good book on a similar premise, have you looked at Wen Spencer's A Brother's Price? That was really well written. She just published that last year. Men are scarce and must be protected by their sisters. ;-)

[hawkwing-lb.livejournal.com]

A Brother's Price is very good, yes. :-)

[davefreer.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I have a huge collection of 60-80's sf. I really battle with anything after William Gibson, as I found the tone of sf shifted so that I could no longer ID with it. Some of the earlier stuff was sexist and dated. Some of it was less sexist and far more exploratory than the genre is now. Some of it -- like EFR's "next of Kin" is a little dated but so funny and clever a satire as to be re-readable, despite the prose. But some of the prose isn't bad... Ever read Zelazny's "I Immortal"? Cooper's "Overman Culture"? Spinrad's "Agent of Chaos" (a lot of his stuff stinks on ice, but that is a good one) or on fantasy side de Camp's "Fallible Fiend"? Scott Rohan and Scott's "a spell of empire"? I struggle with a lot of present fantasy, to be honest. And the Tepper sounds enough to make me tbar a book. My brother read a few, but gave her up.

Oh well, so long as I don't write too dated a stories to be read. Too sexist of course;-)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Oh well, so long as I don't write too dated a stories to be read. Too sexist of course ;-)
Oh, yes, indeed...that's exactly the word I'd use to describe you. Not.

Zelazny's "I, Immortal" was well-done and in some ways predicts the identity storage/theft/crisis of the computer age. EFR is all old, and you can spy the elderly bones of the story -- but he wrote so well that the social mores of his time aren't so apparent, and his stories are just fun.