Tuesday 25 January 2005

Penguin Pick Up

Chris over at Splinters, fresh from ranting about The Incredibles[1], spots the flaw in the John Sutherland's article about the massive Penguin warehouse cock-up:
People are unlikely to buy direct from publisher websites because most of the time, people don't know, or care, who the publisher is. The reason why Amazon continues to thrive is because it has built itself into the consciousness of Net users as the first place to go and look for just about anything. That's especially true of books, and Jeff Bezos's first great idea was to stock a far greater breadth of more obscure books than any sane advisor thought wise - the result was that he attracted a huge audience looking for hard to find books.

Penguin, though, might actually be one of the few publishers for who this might work especially with their huge Classics range, but other than that I would image that few people buy books based on who published them.

That said, I did buy mostly Picador books for a time. I'm sure this says some thing very bad about me.

[1] Chris is so proud of his rant, he's made it a feature of the Spike main site, which is like being proud to show off the scar you got from shooting yourself in the foot. He mentions his referrer logs showing up links from Animation Nation, but doesn't link to the discussion in particular. It's here. You can't help but agree with this:
Anyone who thinks Shrek and Shark's Tale had intelligent scripts and knows enough about daytime American sitcoms to use them as good comparisons doesn't hold much credibility with me than any other armchair critic.

1 comment:

Chris said...

Touche! Pay a compliment and then bring the fist up in the iron glove... I've just returned to the Animation Nation board and find that Mr U has said exactly what I meant - with less spittle-flicked venom. The Incredibles was incredibly dull, stillborn, devoid of all entertainment. The Edna sequence was the only good bit in it, as I pointed out. If you prefer this dreck over Shrek, or even Shark's Tale, then we're lost in terms of a discussion, because we have no common ground. Shrek and Shark's Tale are alive because they're powered by wit, by a good script. The Incredibles isn't. This isn't just the view of myself, but of several of my friends who've seen it independently. (OK, that's not worth much, but it's to show that I'm not alone in thinking it's rubbish).

Animation Nation is an industry animation board apparently, so obviously there are a lot of insider perspectives and people will appreciate the film for the quality of its technique and yadda yadda yadda. But to me, as a paying punter, I don't care. I want to be amused and entertained like I have been with all the other Pixar films, just as I said in my post.

You can't persuade me that The Incredibles is a good film, but I'd be interested in hearing your reasons why you rate it. I didn't post this on the AN board because, frankly, I don't want a flame war and I don't see any real attempt beyond Mr U's comments to engage with what I said. For all my anthemic savagery in my review, I'm not interested in being quite so unpleasant in discussions.

Blimey. Didn't mean to go on quite so long... Anyway, take it easy, top blog and thanks for the comments

Cheers
Chris