Got some news on the whole Kindle mess.

For one thing, which won't really be news if you glance up at the more immediate history in the twitter.com feed, I went ahead and asked Henry how Network Zombies wound up at zero dollars; his answer, unsurprisingly, was that the publisher had somehow made it happen. Which told me almost nothing.

Then, somewhat later, I finally got a response to my response to the initial response from amazon.com. Instead of copypasting the whole thing, it amounted to pretty much this....

You write a book. It used to seem that that might be the hard part. And then code it to work on the Kindle [more on that in a couple paragraphs] and upload it and fill in fields and set a price, from nearly a dollar up to two hundred; we knew that.

Then, you stop trying to control much of anything in the universe. Because, ultimately, amazon.com decide, somewhat randomly and entirely arbitrarily, whether a book can, however temporarily, change in price.

Again: by setting the price at, say, ten bucks, you guarantee that, whatever else ever happens in the world, you'll always get thirty-five percent of that. You'll get $3.50, despite any additional weirdness. Meaning that, in fact, if the book becomes available for zilch, you still get that $3.50 you contracted to get. Which on its own is cool and could certainly be worse.

In order for a KindleBook to be free, it's got to be one of two things. First, it could be a publicdomain thing, in fact coded and controlled entirely by amazon.com themselves. This cuts me out of the process, even if I were dumb enough to release something I've written into the public domain. Second, it could be copyrighted and set at one to two hundred dollars, and amazon.com themselves could, based probably on the fact that you've got thousands of KindleBooks listed with them, play with any given single title by dropping its price to zero, rarely for more than a couple of days. Meaning in the case of Network Zombies that I stumbled across the thing during that anonymous smidgeon of time during which it was zero bucks instead of whatever—twelve or thirteen.

I get that. I don't like it; but I get it.

I don't like it because the book I launched with [and, delayed a bit, more about coding in a couple more paragraphs] was always meant to be free, and now it simply can't be. Or, it could be, but not if I want it to exist on the Kindle.

For now.

Also in the lengthier explanation was the concession that, though, for now, I can't be trusted with the ability to make it free, it's something amazon.com are looking into for the murky and dateless future. So: goody.

Then there's the coding....

I uploaded the thing and started the weird little countdown to its availability. Which is funny, since I caught it existing for sale [albeit for only ninety-nine cents; take it or leave it, I guess] around three in the afternoon. As a matter of course, and curiously unable to bum myself a free copy of a book I've got lurking on my computer as a .doc, I bought a copy and downloaded it. For 99¢. Because nothing else would be weird enough to make any sense. Then, a matter of minutes ago, twelve hours after I bought my own virtual copy of the book, it finally cleared the process in the backend. In theory, starting anytime now, I could upload revisions which should replace even any purchased copies once the Kindles they lurk on synch up and learn that there's a newer version. And, trust me: I'll be doing that, sometime after a nap.

Mostly, the coding's okay. It'd be more okay if the book were entirely free; it's probably okay enough for a dollar. We are after all talking about a vast sum of money that, if you added a penny and then added salestax, would amount to something you'd have to be a flaming mendicant to demand back if your McDouble had too much mustard on it. Plus, revisions being possible, I can upload future versions with less mustard. Or, really, just less 'tard.

I got a couple niggling little things a bit wrong. I missed a forced pagebreak in one spot; I underestimated the hugeness of the <H1> tag relative to the more common fontsize; that sort of thing. Stuff I intend to fix with nary a thought.

Also, in cleaning up the code, it looks like I got a little too used to going through the file, backspacing new lines up into the lines above them, inadvertantly creating a few impossible compound words here and there, like hesaid. That's something to go through and fix, and remind me next time to respellcheck the thing after hypertexting it.

Worse still, I see reading through the buyable version that I'd grabbed the penultimate copy of the original. The original itself, in fact. What amounts in my world to a first draft, which is pretty much the final version prior to the spellcheck. So there are a few negligible little bits of goofiness, like Maastrichtian epoch where I'd meant to write Maastrichtian age, but somehow didn't. Stupid little things, fixed right away in 2000 prior to compiling to PDF, if apparently in an edited version I don't have as a .doc anymore. So: oops.

Given all that, I'm in no immediate hurry to link to the thing at amazon.com. I will, once I've fixed the little problems and uploaded the revision. Technically I could do that now, assuming that the revision would in fact lower the 'tard content of the prepurchased copies. But, having not done this before, that would be a level of faith [any at all], in amazon.com's sudden ability to make any sense, that I can't display while remaining reasonably intellectually honest. Probably it would work out; certainly, if I do it my way instead, it will. One way or another.

Oh. Funny story: remember how I had to buy my own copy? Once the backend told me what I'd already worked out, twelve hours earlier, it also began to congratulate me for having made thirty-five cents. Technically, what I did was to lose sixty-four cents; but, again, that's two thirds of a McDouble and I don't really give a damn. I just find it amusing.

Additionally, and amusingly, and weirdly, the book I refuse to advertise at least until I get things fixed up is sitting at #32,437 in rank. If the Bestseller List went to six figures, we could be fairly impressed right about now. Instead, I've got a downpayment with which to throw a McDouble on layaway.

I'm still in no way thrilled that the free book costs a dollar. But maybe it'll be okay. Technically, being a book, it's worth that [technically, it's worth whatever books are worth—ten to twelve bucks, it seems]; I'm just still disappointed that I can't yet make it purely and forever the hell free, as intended.

Maybe I can just release the other nine in the series at, like, $9.90 each. There's your dollar back. Sorry on behalf of amazon.com that they made things so weird. Or something like that.

But that's later. I'm too tired right now [euphemism in large part for Have Headache Laughing at Vicodin] to think about hypertexting any more novels tonight. Even the one I should fix up before anyone buys a copy. And I'm way not in the current mood to go dick around with websites more directly related to the S97S right now. I might, maybe, possibly, consider thinking about that by summer or so.

More later....