Well-Meaning but unhelpful email of the year goes to...

Well-Meaning but unhelpful email of the year goes to Waterstones.

"Hi! You ordered this book from us two weeks before your debit card expired, but it wasn't in stock, so we decided not to charge your card THEN, but to sit there like a lemon not doing anything while it expired, and then not say anything THEN, but wait another two weeks until it's suddenly urgent. Now its Friday evening, so we're sending an email to say to sort this out please, phone this 0845 number between Monday and Friday 9am - 6pm within 48 hours. If we don't hear from you, we will cancel your order."

Well, thank you. Why don't they skip the verbeige and just say "we're going to cancel your order, but it's ok, for your comfort and convenience, we're going to say it was your fault for being incompetant".

At least they tell you _in advance_ you can't simply update the payment details on the website.

I suppose I'll cancel the order, and order it again if it's actually in stock. I don't think I actually get much benefit from having an order waiting. I only went to them in the first place because it looked like they DID have it in stock.

Gospel of Mark Readthrough : 1:16 -

Jesus Calls His First Disciples

¹⁶As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ¹⁷ "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will send you out to fish for people."

I don't suppose it happened literally as its described here, but this is a lovely passage, a very moving start to the hero setting off on his adventure.

It's also worth noting (as was relevant to the Boyarin post, and as is often pointed out Christian writings) that Jesus was attracting comparatively everyday people as followers. His first disciples are fishermen; remember that if a grubby fisherman comes up to you and is the latest to claim to be the new messiah, and you didn't know who Jesus was going to be, why you might be dismissive of him when you really shouldn't be.

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The failure of capitalism

I have an ereader. I had some problems with the battery, so have mostly used it just to read the books Liv pre-loaded last year.

Today, I started looking for a book I wanted to read, that was only available in hardback. Last time I looked, it had just come out, and there were some e-book editions, but I waited to see if it would come out in paperback, but it didn't. In fact, I'd quite like this is e-book, since I mostly want to read it once, and would rather not clutter my shelves.

So, today, I googled. Depressingly, the first two pages of google were (a) amazon (b) reviews (c) (presumably) illegal copies.

In order to install an illegal copy you have to:

* Click a random google hit
* Unzip the file
* Copy it to your USB device using windows explorer

That takes about 2 minutes tops, including installing 7zip.

In order to get a legal copy you have to either:

* Throw away your ereader
* Buy a kindle
* Buy the kindle edition
* Pray like hell amazon don't decide they'll make more money if they "accidentally" delete the file from your device afterwards.

Or:

* Install the ebook library software to get the device driver
* Look on the manufacturer's website for the software
* Google for a link to the software, along with a wiki guide
* Install the software
* Ignore all the software except for the device driver
* Install some _different_ software that sucks less
* Check the wiki to see which ebook formats work on your device
* Register your computer with the manufacturer
* Register your device with the manufacturer
* Try large bookstores looking for a non-kindle edition of the book
* Try googling "'book title' epub"
* Think
* Give up, and go and rant on dreamwidth.

I mean seriously. I already HAVE the book. Right here, on my ereader, ready to read, in pdf, epub and mobi. All I want to do is GIVE SOMEONE MONEY before I read it. I have FREE MONEY here for any capitalist that wants it. All you have to do is call yourself a publisher and give half of the money to John Scalzi. You don't even have to DO anything. At all. FREE MONEY.

But no. I mean, the publishers may be correct that keeping a stranglehold on the market makes them more money than giving people what they want (I hope they aren't, but I don't know for sure). But when I say capitalism has failed, I mean people make more money by colluding in a monopoly than by providing a service.

I mean, ok, some of those steps I only have to do once. But seriously, it's an ebook. It was on sale a year ago. It can't be out of print, can it? If the DRM means that (a) it's free, zero-hassle, simple and immediate to download an illegal copy and (b) it takes an hour of faff to try to find a legal copy, at which time you have to give up, buy a hardback edition second hand at twice the price of the ebook (which makes you NO MONEY because all the physical editions have ALREADY BEEN SOLD) and throw it away, I think you have something backwards. Are you SURE all your customers are going to donate an hour of their time in order to pay MORE for something and STILL waste all the natural resources of a paper copy? Really sure? If they're THAT fricking honest, why do you need DRM at all?

ETA: Practical advice on buying ebooks is also appreciated. Likely I was just unlucky and didn't know of a well-stocked e-store? (I hope?) Probably the thing to do is to order a DIFFERENT book by the same author that I can get in paperback, and donate it if I don't like it.

ETA: In happier news, there definitely is a big thrill to being able to buy something and then have it immediately (a) available to read and (b) not taking up any room. There's a sense of release in being able to :)

ETA: I went looking for another book by Scalzi I was happy to have, and ended up finding two MORE free ebooks by him (this time legitimately). I was scared of entering an infinite recursion of looking for something to buy. In the end, one of them asked for a donation to a particular charity, so I made a slightly larger donation there and called it quits. *shrug* I tried.