I like to give away lottery tickets and other gifts at readings and book launches as a way of saying thanks to people who’ve come out. When I launched The Warhol Gang in Vancouver, I gave away lottery tickets for a particularly large jackpot, making my reading one of the potentially most lucrative events ever. Alas, no new members of the Warhol Gang won the big prize. However, Ethan Baron, one of my colleagues in journalism, may have been saving up all his luck for something more valuable: staying alive when attacked by a grizzly bear. Read his personal account of the terrifying encounter.

The war in Hipstamatic.

I had a great time today meeting up with filmmaker Dylan Reibling and talking about the art of the long tracking shot, whether Twitter has an emotional appeal, how directors sometimes have to be actors — and meteorite hunting as a viable career. That’s right, there are people who make a living selling meteorites they have found. I so want to work that into a book….

Driving down the highway the other day in my brand-new Ford Focus, I listened to the Freakonomics podcast about the Prius Effect. In short, people are willing to pay a premium to buy a car that signals it’s a hybrid, or are more likely to buy a Prius than other hybrids that don’t look like hybrids, even when the vehicles are more or less the same. See also: Humvees.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’m a big reader/champion of ebooks. I split my purchases more or less evenly between Kobo and Kindle. I prefer Kobo because of its social media features, but it doesn’t have all the books that Kindle does. I’ve purchased a few books on the iBookstore, but I don’t like it as much as the other services. The design is a typical Apple mix of elegance and common sense, but again, I prefer Kobo because of its richer social features.

So I’m disappointed by the news that Apple is crippling the apps of other booksellers on its iOS devices by forcing them to remove in-app links to their stores or give Apple a 30% cut — the booksellers’ profit margin on most books. Apparently Apple is even rejecting apps that mention the websites of their parent booksellers. Which means the only apps they are approving are apps that don’t contain any information on how to purchase books….

From a business perspective, I understand the logic behind this. Apple’s bookselling service has failed to become the iTunes of books because the competition was there first and just does a better job on most fronts. Why would people switch to iBooks when they’re comfortable with Kindle and Kobo? So Apple makes them switch by breaking the competitors’ apps, so it becomes just plain easier to use iBooks to buy books.

But that’s a crappy business model and, well, pretty much the opposite of what Apple normally does. This is more a Microsoft move — “We’re going to force you to use an inferior product by removing your options.” If iBooks isn’t performing the way Apple wants it to perform, then Apple should improve iBooks, not try to shut down the innovative competitors. The design is already great for the iBooks app — now add some social media features, better preview options, that sort of thing. I’m sure the forthcoming Apple cloud will be of interest to many readers, as it will presumably allow them to access their books on any device, and it’s innovations like that they should be using to make their service stand out. Make people use it for the same reason they use other Apple products — because they’re better than the competition.

I rarely used iBooks before because it wasn’t a great service. I won’t use it all now.

Given the latest news about the Borders bookstore chain going under, I’m tempted to write a sequel to my last post about how publishers need to start thinking “digital first” and reaching out directly to readers rather than courting bookstores. After all, there may not be any bookstores to court soon. And I don’t even want to think about how much money publishers just lost because of the Borders collapse, or how much harder it’s going to be for them to sell anything other than potential blockbusters now that there are fewer markets — which means you’re going to see a lot more indie writers soon, because they won’t be able to get deals with publishers. (Or the deals won’t be worth selling their rights.) But I don’t have the time or energy to write that. Mayhem and carnage await in my life. (I’m talking about the new book I’m writing, not my toddler.)

Instead, I’ll just point to this post from Futurebook that says publishers shouldn’t even be thinking in terms of print at all anymore. The delay in getting book to market with print is killing them, especially when it comes to non-fiction. Publishers need to develop “rapid response units” that operate in the digital realm, Futurebook argues, and it’s a good argument. When publishers start rethinking how they react to breaking news — hell, when they realize they can react to breaking news — and figure out ways to make money with quickly distributed ebooks, they’ll force the change in the rest of their organization as well. Why make the fans of author Y wait a year for his new book when they know he’s finished it? They want it now. Why make fans of writer X wait a year for her new book when she’s got two others already done? With print, there are logistic demands that require the delay. With digital, the delays are just seen as lag. And then there’s the social integration built into ebooks — how many extra sales are there in books, just waiting for someone to highlight a line and tweet it or + it or Facebook it? Ebooks are a licence for publishers to print money — real money. But to do so, they have to think digital first.

In my earlier post, I said publishers need to start thinking about bookstores as niche markets for them. I think it’s time they also start thinking of print books as niche products for them.

It’s the 21st century. The readers are here. Where are the publishers?

In case you thought the Warhol masks in The Warhol Gang were a little futuristic….

Apparently there are fake Apple stores in China so believable that the employees think they’re actually working for Apple.

I had a good editing day today, reworking a large part of my new novel, The Apocalypse Corpse. I ended the day with a phone call to the partner of a friend to talk about what it felt like to have his finger cut off by a saw. The places a book will lead you…. #research

I wish I’d known about this while I was writing The Warhol Gang.