I do hate a lot of things (Disney, marketing, Andrew Wiley etc) but I want to put it out there that this isn’t all I’m about. I got really excited when Tim Hely Hutchinson (CEO of Hachette UK) decided to go with the agency pricing model, Amazon be damned, and was excited again yesterday when Penguin and HarperCollins joined the party – soon to be followed by the kings at Canongate and Simon and Schuster apparently. One of the coolest things about this is the massive debate that rages on forums around this topic and I spent many a good work hour yesterday reading both sides on The Bookseller and the Kindle Forum.

What strikes me most is the dichotomy between the trade forums and the consumer forums. What sort of relationships do the publishers have with their audience? Will no publisher issue a statement to their public about the reasons they want to take control of prices away from the retailer? So I went on the Kindle Forum and stirred in my two pence, and then a few more things, like sarcasm and blame.

People are championing Amazon as their hero – who “continue to fight against higher prices for e-books” (read: pamper to a customer’s desire to pay as little as possible for as much as possible) – and are ignoring the fact this whole debate was spawned by an effective press release by an international corporation. The blinding holier-than-thou attitude that Amazon has instilled in its customers is nothing short of disgusting and gives me that drunk-on-rage feeling. But then again, you can’t spell ‘Kindle’ without ‘Kind’. (Does this strike anyone else as exceedingly sinister?)

I'll be Kind-le to you - pun definitely intended!

But with publishers staying silent, what are people supposed to think? Innocence doesn’t clam up like a pair of nun’s legs when people start asking questions.

Still, actions are louder than worms etc etc and so I applaud all publishing houses involved for putting a spanner in Amazon’s face. I can’t help but feel this is a major milestone – publishers are now taking the ebook medium seriously and won’t let retailers like Amazon give authors a short straw. It’s already operating in the US, now the UK – Australia’s next, I’d say. Publishers there better make a move before someone else does it for them.

Get involved: head over to the Kindle forum. It’s an amazing conversation that’s worth getting fired into.

A couple of months ago I was hungover and hungry and I’d just woken up at Ronnie’s place. For ages it’s been something of a personal hangover ritual of mine to make it to the Queen Vic Markets, which are right near his apartment, and get a bratwurst.

These are not just any bratwurst – they’re thick, tasty and juicy, lathered in however many types of mustard you like, maybe a bit of cheese and then a field of sauerkraut balancing on top. These are a two-hand job. Nothing like this – way better:

Bratwurst!

I was dazed and it was Sunday – typically a day of decadence to make up for the previous night’s decadence. I figured I’d grab a bratwurst and then drink my hangover away.

I was ambling along, halfway to the market, content that I had planned my day, when I remembered that I was vegetarian – had been for all of about two weeks. The decision was made not in haste, but without any real preparation for the required lifestyle adjustments. Such as knowing where to get delicious comfort food off the cusp.

I wondered if it would really matter if I contradicted my recently developed consumption principles just this once – how much could my abstinence from meat really contribute positively to the welfare of the world’s animals and our environment?

I knew I could get some sushi to tide me over, but sushi isn’t bratwurst, and the main reason for my decision to give up meat was environmental concern. I couldn’t be sure that consuming rice grown in Australia was any better than eating the meat of flatulent, hoofed animals farmed on our arid land¹ . As with cotton, the water requirements are far greater than our arid lands can support, something something … rising freshwater salinity.

By the time I found two soggy sticks of blandness, I was feeling guilty. For potentially contributing to salinity, and for being ignorant. Because my choice to abstain from meat is informed by a broad interest in ethical consumerism and environmental conservation, rather than specifically animal rights, the requisite decisions are not as simple as trading animal rights for a diet of mung beans and tempeh.

In this series of sporadic articles, called Sans-bratwurst Blues, I will chronicle my research and decisions about ethical consumerism – lest I begin to alienate my friends with my self-righteous indignation. I will try to be equally sceptical of the CSIRO as I am of dubiously anonymous, blingin websites like The Main Meal.

This post is part of Blog Action Day.

Blog Action Day | 2009 | Climate Change

1. I have since figured out that rice might even be as flatulent as all those cows!

I have a question to ask that seems simple, but which grows increasingly complex when you think about it. How do you consider author intention when reviewing a novel?

I’ve come up ambivalent about a book I’m reviewing. When this happens I like to make note of the positives and negatives and try to round up with a suggestion that readers should check it out for themselves.

I have no problems suggesting that readers don’t bother if a book is below sub-par, but if something comes up halfway decent, I assume that one person’s free review copy is another person’s first edition.

My problem is that in the process of scraping the barrel, I find myself ploughing deeply into speculation and interpretation of the author’s intentions. I tend to say things like, ‘The author didn’t quite carry this theme, but that’s because they were focussing on this other theme, which is explored well.’

Is this a problem? I’m worried that I’m making concessions for books when they should be flagged as undeveloped. That I might save people the trouble if I were more honest about the book.

If I think the book warrants being supported – if it’s a debut novel and the author has demonstrated considerable promise for certain styles and techniques – is that enough to warrant concocting a positive interpretation? It’s not just this novel in particular – I come up against this with many young-adult and debut novels.

This has been just like trying to fix a car engine: as soon as you start pulling it apart, you find more things to fix, or questions to answer.

There are comments to this post here. I couldn’t carry them over to this new site.

I have this thing – a kind of guiding principle – that I have come to call Three Degrees of Uncoordination. Calling it a principle is a bit of a stretch. It’s more like an explanation for my disorganised, frenetic, fumbling approach to life. For a long time, before I labelled my own methodology of life, I just read and wrote and observed the world, noticing things and ideas and wondering what on earth to do with them. And I talked a lot of shit.

Recently I began to get pretty tired of all the talking, and frustrated by the lack of doing. But I’m reluctant to act without conviction in my opinions, so I got kind of stuck: how could I act without conviction about my ideas, but how could I reach conviction without experiencing life (without acting)?

This was all happening at the end of my tenure as Voiceworks editor, where I had been reading a lot, talking a lot, editing a lot, crunching spreadsheets a lot, and not writing a lot. I was leaving my editorials to the last minute, but they came naturally when I finally got down to them.

This, I found, was because all of the reading and talking I was doing had a place to coalesce: as I drew from things that had happened in the three months since I last wrote an editorial, usually about three separate instances of something like intellectual coincidence would occur and I would have an idea – something to write about, some intention for the editorial.

Usually the process of writing the editorial had forced me to think about something in a way that I had not previously considered. I would express this, with the intention of encouraging readers to do the same.

Since then this ‘principle’ has developed naturally as a way of connecting ideas into some form of coherent thought, without which I get wickedly confused and forget my opinions all the time. I still chase ideas down rabbit holes until I find bits of grit, around which all those ideas coagulate.

I don’t have editorials to write anymore, but I have posts to write for this blog. The themes will develop sporadically, as I process ideas and output them here: kernels of principles I will then use to guide my way through life in an approximation of goodness and decency. Maybe, dear reader, you will too, as, here, in the category Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I will capture those kernels in the hope of disseminating something useful.