See, I’m just cranky. You know how, when I report on having read a book, instead of linking to an evil on-line retailer, or even a less evil (but less widely used) on-line retailer, I go to the effort of linking to the publisher? This is usually not a pain in the ass; as either I have the book next to me in the tottering pile of Books I Have Read But Not Yet Blogged and can read off the name of the publisher or I can do a quick internet search and discover the name of the publisher in 0.09 seconds. And then, of course, the publisher, who is in the business of publishing books, has a nice page specifically for telling people about the book. Usually.
Oh, ACQweb has a Directory of Publishers and Vendors, in case you’ve forgotten that Alfred A. Knopf at randomhouse.com or that Shocken Books is at randomhouse or that Del Rey is part of randomhouse. Actually, it might save time to just check the Random House web site first.
There are, however, a group of publishers owned not by Random House, a fully owned subsidiary, by the way, of Bertelsmann AG, which also owns the Book-of-the-Month-Club-trademark-you-betcha, half of BMG music (including RCA, Victor, Arista, Jive and Windham Hill), three-quarters of the Gruner + Jahr magazine empire, and a variety of printers, publishers, DVD presses, widget factories and ninja troops. No, there are publishers owned by an entirely different set of Germans, the Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. Yes, a young sharecropper named Georg, just after the little unpleasantness in the middle of the century, worked his way up from the mailroom of a pig-fat rendering company to become head of the largest publishing empire the world has ever known, if you don’t count Bertelsmann or those Dutch guys, or Gannet or Murdoch or Viacom or any of them.
Actually, Holtzbrinck is really just a simple little family publisher that bought up a bunch of other simple little family publishers with family names like Fischer, Rowohlt, Kiepenheuer, Droemer, MacMillan, Holt, Straus, Faber and Doherty. Doherty? Oh, yes, Tom Doherty. Or, as Herr Holtzbrinck likes to call him Tim Doherty. Good old Tim Doherty. What I like about Tim Doherty and his Associates is that they publish quite good books, even to the point where if I handle a book of which I have never heard and I see that it is published by Tor, I feel more favorably inclined to check it out from the library than if I don’t see that publishing information. What I dislike about Tor is their utterly worthless website.
And by utterly worthless, I don’t mean totally without value. I mean, if you wanted to know, for instance, the new release schedule for the first six montsh of 2002, there’s a link right there. And if, for some reason, you wanted to know the incorrect URL for their ill-fated cross-promotion with sci-fi.com, well, it’s buried in a pdf press release that isn’t labeled as a pdf. But if, for instance, you wanted to link to a page of information about a book they are publishing, no, they aren’t very helpful. If you are interested in just finding out whether a particular book is in print, no, they aren’t very helpful.
This is particularly irritating because the public face of Tor, for me, is the mad editing couple known as the Nielsen Haydens, who are also known as the hosts and enablers of Making Light, one of the most valuable and well-loved time-sink blogs in the internet era or indeed any era. These people get the internet, don’t they?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.