Band of Thebes

Welcome To the Future You Don't Want

To spare you a later indignity of asking How did this happen?, please note that video games have had two record-breaking releases this month. Sales of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 totalled $400 million in its first day and $738 million in its first week. Sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops II exceeded $500 million in its first day. That game features performance capture from Sam Worthington, Michael Keaton, and Gen. David Petraeus. 

With Xbox 360 you can immerse yourself in these games, watch tv, rent movies, connect to live sporting events, you can even dance... but you can't read an ebook. 

On Apple's New CEO's Being Gay: "It Isn't Outing, It's Reporting."

The head of a $355 $74 billion company is a gay man. Last February Joe Clark at Fawny wrote about reporters avoiding the queer fact that Apple's Tim Cook:

"When you tell us it’s wrong to report on gay public figures, you are telling gays not to come out of the closet and journalists not to report the truth. (What you’re telling us as gay journalists is even worse.)"

This week Felix Salmon writes:

"Keeping his sexuality a secret is no longer an option. And so the press shouldn’t treat it as though it’s something to be avoided at all costs. There’s no ethical dilemma when it comes to reporting on Cook’s sexuality: rather, the ethical dilemma comes in not reporting it, thereby perpetuating the idea that there’s some kind of stigma associated with being gay. Yes, the stigma does still exist in much of society. But it’s not the job of the press to perpetuate it. Quite the opposite."

(Thanks, Brian.)

One Step Closer to End Times: Me + The Facebook

Certain doom. The most important part of this equation is " + You." Please friend me.

One Step Closer to End Times: Book Publishing

Alex Pham writes a great article, "Book Publishers See Their Role as Gatekeepers Shrink." Can't. Happen. Soon. Enough. Never has an industry been more overdue for the coming sea change.

Pham wisely focuses on money. Here's an example of one author's economics, midlist mystery writer J.A. Konrath's Whiskey Sour [[Kindle]].

Hyperion sells the 312-page paperback for $7.99 and Konrath earns 80 cents per copy.

Hyperion through Amazon's Kindle sells the e-book for $4.69 and Konrath earns $1.17 per copy.

Konrath self-publishes on Kindle at the enticing, take-a-chance price of $2.99 and earns $2.04 per copy.

The notion that Konrath will sell more physical books than e-files somewhat depends on the existence of physical bookstores to sell them. You've already seen most of the independents evaporate. Over the weekend, Borders announced it didn't have the money to pay publishers for their books. As a result, some publishers have stopped shipping to Borders. Hard to imagine how they're going to swing to a profit without new stock to sell.

Industry-wide, in the first 10 months of 2010, sales of print books fell 23% from 2009 levels.

Authors, in addition to Kindle, you can self-publish e-books for Barnes & Nobles' Nook via PubIt! and earn royalties of 40 to 65%. The royalty rate for self-pubbing via Sony's digital Reader Store is 70 to 85%.

Readers, please remember the free options. Although you may want to invest in a portable Kindle reader with wifi ($139), 3G + wifi ($189), or the whopping 9.7" version ($379), you can download the Kindle software for your Mac, PC, or phone, transforming them into Kindle readers for no charge. Likewise, the Nook apps are also free.

The End of Print: Book Sales, Phone Directories, US News

Did you buy a physical book in September? Was it a lonely experience? The Association of American Publishers announced their September results, showing drastic declines in printed book sales, whether purchased in a store or online. Electronic book sales have nearly doubled.

Adult Hardcover sales for September 2010 were down 40.4% compared to Sept 2009, and are down 8.1% year-to-date.

Adult Mass Market sales for September were down 23.6% and are down 15.7% y-t-d.

Adult Paperback sales for September were down 15.8% but increased 1.5% y-t-d.

Children's/YA Hardcovers for September were down 17.4% and are down 15.1% y-t-d.

Children's/YA Paperbacks for September were down only 1.6% but are down 6.8% y-t-d.

Physical Audio Sales [CDs, tapes] were down 42.6% for September and 12.6% y-t-d.

Download Audio sales were up 73.7% for September and have increased 34.1% y-t-d.

E-book sales rose 158% over September 2009 and y-t-d are up 188%.

Here's another aspect of the future: From 1878 until today, phone companies have had to pay to print, store, ship, and deliver directories of phone numbers, aka The White Pages, free of charge to the areas they cover. Now that New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida have approved Verizon's request to cease publication of residential directories, the only way to get phone numbers is online; or via directory assistance, which you pay for. Other states that have already approved or are pending similar approval: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. Yes, it's a great reduction of environmental impact (paper, evil ink, shipping) but this is the wrong net result: was their cost, now your cost.

U.S. News & World Report, founded in 1933, announced that December would be its last print issue. Tumbling from a weekly to a fortnightly to a monthly publication, it continually lost readers. The magazine will continue only online and in rare special print editions like their annual college survey.

In September, NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger conceded, "We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future." Enjoy it online while it's still free, this month and next. The NYT website pay wall is coming in the first quarter of 2011.

Help Solve Hundreds of Unanswered LGB Questions on WikiAnswers

Worried that you're spending too little time online? Try amping your internet hours by answering strangers' most pressing queer questions. Among the tens of thousands of unanswered questions on WikiAnswers are several hundred in the LGB section. Beyond the squillions of questions asking if specific individuals are gay (celebrities, people at school), inquiring about vocabulary (shade, femme, queen), and lots seeking relationship advice (how do I know if he likes me, where are street hustlers in Tampa), there are scores like these:

Why did Nietzsche write gay science in parables?

Who started GayPASG?

Why was the decision by Massachusetts to recognize gay and lesbian marriages such a controversial issue of federalism?

How many gay high school students drop out because of being bullied?

What is the history of gay adoption?

Who is a famous 13 year old bisexual?

How tall was Harvey Milk?

An author created Boys Rule and this authors first name is Felice what his last name?

How many gays are there in India?

Who was the first gay person on the Dodgers?

How do you write formal mailing address to homosexual couple?

What sites can help you become an amateur gay cam model?

Are monkeys bisexual?

Who were gay actors of the 1930's and 1940's?

Where is the best gay beach in the world?

Is it gay if you made out with your cousin?

After you've answered all the gay questions, try Entertainment and the Arts.

Born June 23: Alan Turing, David Leavitt

Anyone calculating the cost of Britain's horrific homophobia must include all the things Alan Turing didn't solve or invent because he killed himself at 41. The brilliant mathematician had already broken the Germans' Enigma code during WWII, become an OBE, laid the groundwork for the modern computer by designing the Automatic Computing Engine, and devoted himself to a field of mathematical biology called morphogenesis (specifically, discerning the Fibonacci numbers in plant structures). In 1952 his home was burgled by two men, one of whom was a 19 year-old Turning had slept with, and as a result of their break-in he was charged with gross indecency under the same 1885 law that felled Oscar Wilde. To avoid prison, he was forced to undergo painful injections of estrogen as a form of chemical castration. He died by eating a poisoned apple. His mother strongly believed the cyanide in the fruit was accidental, owing to her son's legendary carelessness, but his death was ruled a suicide. Timothy Ferris points out that Turing's favorite fairy tale was Snow White. The best short biography of him is The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Raised in Palo Alto, David Leavitt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale at 21, by which time he had already published a gay themed short story in The New Yorker. His first collection, Family Dancing, appeared the following year and was nominated for an NBCC (losing to Louise Erdrich) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (won by Tobias Wolff). Since then he's published seven novels, the most recent of which, The Indian Clerk, was also a PEN/Faulkner finalist (won by Kate Christensen); three other collections of stories or novellas; his collected stories; a brief book on Florence; and, because karma is king, the short biography mentioned above of gay birthday-mate Alan Turing. He is a professor at the University of Florida, where he and his partner Mark Mitchell co-edit the literary journal Subtropics whose fiction is regularly selected as among the year's best. Leavitt and Mitchell also co-edited an anthology of gay fiction from 1748 to 1914, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand. They divide their time between Florida and Tuscany and in their spare time have co-written two other books about Italy. Today Leavitt turns 49.