Journal

Saturday, June 30, 2001

American Gods Blog, Post 103

I'm home, and I almost got through today without signing any books. But there were some copies of Biting Dog Press's beautiful limited edition MURDER MYSTERIES to be signed waiting for me at DreamHaven, so I went there from the airport. (Link at http://www3.sympatico.ca/george.walker/gaimanbkad.html although it displayed rather oddly in Explorer for me.)

There were also two copies of Angels and Visitations to be signed, some WARNING:CONTAINS LANGUAGE sleeves. And, um, about 500 presold mail-order copies of American Gods. So my day of not siging anything rather failed to happen. Still, it's a genuine down day. And it was good to play with Maddy. The garden has erupted, there was an awful lot of waiting mail, and pretty soon I'll have a bath and go to bed and sleep like a dead person.

Starting to suspect that the Ebook REB 1100 is going to prove useless and frustrating unless Gemstar decides to allow it access to more content, and cheaper. I keep batting my head against the whole thing of price and convenience, and with access to Public Domain stuff cut off, no way of sending my own content to the thing (which would be genuinely useful), and no easily discernable way to access the kind of stuff I'd need -- most of which is out on project Gutenberg (nice people, who lost a page with some in-copyright stuff on it when I pointed it out to them.) Which is a pity, because as a delivery mechanism, it' s rather wonderful. But it's a bit like having a TV that will only play a handful of proprietory shows. Unless the content is easily available, and in quantity, and it's the content you want, then the delivery mechanism is almost beside the point.

I signed all those books last night, by the way. They were for Golden Apple and Dangerous Visions respectively, for any LA bookbuyers looking for a signed book. And I was at one point tired enough that I wrote the name of the person on the post-it note instead of my name on a copy I was just meant to sign. So I sighed and blinked and did a drawing of Mr Wednesday, hoping the person would forgive me.

The weirdest thing about the whole NY Times Bestseller thing, is that the rest of the worlld doesn't know, and won't till next Sunday -- when I shall be in the UK...

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