In just a few hours, people are legally allowed to throw off their shrink wrap, and enjoy the breezy scent of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hollows.
Far as I know, comic author Warren Ellis' only comment about this is "Fuck Harry Potter." Mind you, he's actually allowed to say this. His publishers decided to put out his first novel, Crooked Little Vein, on the same day. Either they thought:
1- Readers of Harry Potter and people who read comic books do not overlap.
2- Readers who buy Harry Potter will have an extra twenty bucks on them, and will have a burning desire to use it.
These publishers are the same ones who decided to bill the book as being perfect for "hardcore comic fans, mystery aficionados, and all readers looking for a riotous summer reading adventure."
This might be true. But when you're publishing a book for a mass market, I'm not sure I would start off part of my sales pitch by saying it's great if you're a hardcore member of a very small audience of readers. Oh, mystery lovers should like it too... as well as people who like books.
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Not only are they allowed take off the shrink-wrap, they're allowed to spoil it for you. It's times like this...well, this is the only time this sort of thing has ever happened that I can think of, but still, it makes me wish less people cared about books. (Though I'd hypothesize that it's really the movies that have made this a problem. When my wife saw Return of the King before her co-workers, people offered to pay her $10 to find out how the series ended.)
Imagine a world where fours hours after A Dance of Dragons came out, you had to go off the grid to enjoy the experience at a casual pace. That's the sort of thing that's making me twitchy every time I accidentally end up on Yahoo! right now. Although a world where I could imagine A Dance of Dragons finally coming out would be kind of nice.
The Warren Ellis book looks cool, and it reccomended Spook County, which I hadn't heard about. William Gibson--why don't we read more of him?
From Publishers Weekly:
"Meanwhile, a mysterious cargo container with CIA connections repeatedly appears and disappears on the worldwide Global Positioning network, never quite coming to port. At the heart of the dark goings-on is Bobby Chombo, a talented but unbalanced specialist in Global Positioning software who refuses to sleep in the same spot two nights running."
I'm in.
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