Amazon: another ranty rantalogue
I’m in a very boring and ranty mood. Quelle surprise! All sorts of things have been going on to put me in a grim mind, and to top it all, someone has been rude to Stephen Fry, nearly putting him off Twitter, and if he gave up tweeting, where would we all be? Whoever called Mr. Fry boring is himself boring to the power of a very large number indeed and needs to be told so in no uncertain terms.
And then there are things in my personal life (is there another kind of life?) that are causing extreme states of mind but I cannot talk about that here, so I am sure that when I get so pissed off at people being mean to Stephen Fry and when I get so hopping ireful at Amazon, I am not projecting other frustrations at all. No, not a bit of it.
Did I mention Amazon? Fucking fuckwit retard arsehole bastard tosspot wankers. Not content with censoring and killing the independent publishing sector, they’ve gone and delivered books to me. Fuck ‘em.
See, living in Japan and being a reading junky, I have no choice but to buy books through them. It’s that or just stare at a wall drooling. So this week I ordered a pair of books. At the checkout, there was a kind offer of expedited shipping: I pay extra and Amazon guarantees that my order arrives by Saturday. Junky though I am, I have no need of such express delivery service so I declined the expedited shipping. So yesterday, Saturday, the books I ordered arrived anyway with no shipping charge. If I had chosen expedited shipping, the goods would have arrived just as quickly at considerable extra charge. So fuck you Amazon for trying to rip me off.
And if I see anyone using one of those fuckbastard Amazon Kindle devices, I am going to insert it in their bum sideways at great speed. I hope all those Kindle machines prove fatally defective, exploding and blowing the head off each and every one of their fucking users. By creating this technology they are trying to monopolise the ebook publishing market, which will give them absolute control over what we read and therefore what we think. This is morally and practically equivalent to Monsanto trying to own everything we eat — and no, I don’t have to justify that remark, fucking look it up, OK?
But surely I am exaggerating! These nice Amazonians (association with piranhas coming to mind) have nothing but our best interests and our reading convenience in mind. Well, suck on this: as I have already mentioned on these pages, you basically have to have a US company, US address and US tax registration in order to publish anything through Kindle. If you are not American it’s fuck off an die, Sunny Jim, and how democratic is that? Not being a member of the master race, I have to employ someone in that country to represent me in order to distribute through Amazon TO MY OWN FUCKING COUNTRY. Amazon takes a huge cut for listing my books (even though I haven’t succeeded in listing them there yet) and then the distributor takes another cut, leaving me with fucking pennies, and who was it that did all the work of writing these fucking stories anyway? Amazon and these distributors are fuckwankbastard parasites. And they are bullying everyone to go through their own POD publishers (BookSurge).
So. Fuck ‘em. Or did I mention that already?
And yes, I will continue to try to list my work with them as I have little other choice.
However, I am definitely going to interrogate my bank account to see about setting up my own e-book outlet on Psipook.
Gosh, what a lot of rude words, but I do feel marginally better. On the scale of iniquities, it does not rank up there with what’s happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Burma; it’s not global warming, exploitation of the developing world, industrial poisoning, capitalism, etc. but, golly, it does get my dander up.
The books I ordered: Cocaine Nights, The Atrocity Exhibition, both by JG Ballard
Mood: pure vitriol
Music: Ellen Allien/Apparat, and lots of it.