By weird coincidence, on the same day I announce the launch of an ebook review, I get to enjoy some of the harsh realities of the ebook business. Over the past year I’ve published two collections of my pieces about the brain, Brain Cuttings and More Brain Cuttings. I just found out that Amazon has decided, for now, not to sell them. (Here’s some background.)
You still have lots of options for getting your hands on these ebooks.
Scott & Nix, the publisher, offers both titles in pdf and epub formats. (Brain Cuttings, More Brain Cuttings)
Barnes & Noble sells then for the Nook. (Brain Cuttings, More Brain Cuttings)
Apple sells it in them iBookstore. (Brain Cuttings, More Brain Cuttings)
Update: Publisher’s Lunch has the details of the showdown between Amazon and Independent Publishers Group over Kindle titles.
February 23rd, 2012 at 6:26 am
Self-publish, Dude and the hell with the establishment. They don’t own us any more.
February 23rd, 2012 at 2:09 pm
[...] stranger: Carl Zimmer tells how his dual successful e-books, Brain Cuttings and Brain Cuttings II, got pulled from Amazon since of a brawl between Amazon and a e-book’s [...]
February 23rd, 2012 at 3:32 pm
It strikes me as bizarre. When I pull up my copy of Brain Cuttings on my Kindle and go to Book Description via the menu, it pulls up the entry on the Amazon site, and where there is usually the option for buying the book (i.e. the Kindle description is nothing more than access to the info typically displayed on the Amazon site), there is just the statement “Not currently available.” At the bottom of the page, there is the usual “Customers who bought this book also bought:.” The line below that is: “A Planet of Viruses, by Carl Zimmer See more.” Clicking on the latter brings up four pages with six entries apiece of books also purchased by people who bought Brain Cuttings. There are three Zimmer books on the first screen, and at the top of the next screen is The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V. S. Ramachandran. In my case, I believe the latter book was the very next purchase after I had read Brain Cuttings, and one might suppose that Amazon would have recorded that bit of info as an indicator that Brain Cuttings was getting customers to look for more works about the brain. In fact, right after Brain Cuttings is listed Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by Terrence W. Deacon and on the next page is Shermer’s Believing Brain. I didn’t buy the latter two, but, obviously, someone did.