through dear Aunt Ada.
The hysterical fun of genealogy, or—kissing cousins and worse. It seems 2Oth-great-grandfather Ralph’s father Henry was also related to 20-times-removed Aunt Ada’s stepfather or something like, and the genealogy program wants to take the blood relation of Aunt Ada as more important than the relationship between my 21st-great-grandfather Henry and his own son Ralph, because, yes, 19 times removed is one mathematical step closer than 21 times removed, even if he’s a half first cousin at that remove, rather than a direct great-great-great, etc.-grandfather in line with ME.
Making matters EVEN worse, that’s my
-
father’s
side of the family. On my MOTHER’s side, at several centuries’ remove and completely unexpected, we located a line of ascent going up from one Mary, sweet child, daughter of Captain Humphrey, wife unknown, who is HIMSELF a direct descendant (through another brother of a large family at generation 6) of the SAME 21st-great-grandfather Henry.
Not only that, but Henry is ALSO himself my 20th-great-grandfather in yet another line, because of cousin-marriage, and that line, over centuries, tending to procreate just a little younger than the other one. [You have two grandparents, four great-grandparents, 8 great-great [or 2nd-great] grandparents, and by the time you get to the 20th-great, your number of 20th-great grandparents is quite large—somebody want to work that out? Neighbors married neighbors, people stayed in the same villages, and it just got worse and worse, my friends, until it became a complete tangle. I believe in five more generations, ie, by the 25th, I am likely related to everyone in England.
Jane and I are, by best calculations of the same program, 20th degree cousins…BOTH of us related to Ralph and Henry, or at least to their ancestor Humphrey, not to be confused with Captain Humphrey, but then—we haven’t gotten the Pierces we’re pretty sure we have in common.
OK, I did some nosing around. Most of the publishers really haven’t figured out the new marketplace. Penguin figures they can charge the same for an ebook as for a physical book and in any case is restricting ebook sales to purchasers within America. DAW isn’t much better. Baen is experimenting with Websubscriptions, but they’ve always been willing to take a chance. I suspect I’ll fill out my Kindle when I’m in America for the summer.
DAW can’t do anything without Penguin’s cooperation—and Penguin has blown the e-book thing more than once with bad efforts. They keep trying to reinvent the wheel in a proprietary way rather than going with standardization.
Penguin appears to be hopeless.
It is not leading me to believe that it will cope with the changing world.
Buggy whip manufacturers of the world unite!
That’s right: just do a little gold trim and uphold the prices: the weak will drop out of the market. Authors setting up their own book sales will never make a dent in us.
They’re a UK company, and they’re used to UK copyright law, which has no concept of fair use. The CD and DVD companies are rapidly going out of business here, and the book dealers and publishers are just a couple of years behind.
I have to wonder if the new market model may be something more like Fictionwise.com than the traditional publisher. I don’t believe paper copies are going out of style — too many people like them — but for the new authors and lesser sellers, a one-stop-shop may be where readers would have to go to find them.
I have this image in my head of latter-day traditional publishers trolling such set-ups, looking at numbers for the ‘break-outs’, like Amanda Hocking. And niche markets for reviewers, marketers, and POD houses growing up around them, as well as indie artists (gotta have covers) and indie editors, too, for those who find their language of choice more difficult to write in than to tell tales in.
Or I could be out to lunch. That happens distressingly often.