Morning Links: New 2 week return policy on European iBooks. What is Margaret Atwood reading?

Two-week, no question refunds on ebooks bought from Apple? That is crazy.

I usually know whether I like or dislike a book in less than fifteen-minutes. Two weeks is more than enough time to read an ebook and return it without paying the author a penny. That’s going to make life even more difficult for those who write short to medium length novels. Did these EU regulators think about that? Well, that depends on what you mean by “think.”

Sometimes I suspect Europeans live in an alternative universe where the principles that apply in ours don’t exist. At other times, I conclude that the EU bureaucracy is filled with utter idiots.

The latter is far more likely. A couple of years ago, I read an article by a physician in the UK who was heavily involved in training residents planning specialize in dealing with circulatory issues. Such care is very complex, subjective and important.

When someone with diabetes has poor-circulation-induced infection in a leg, amputation can save their life, but amputation also means that they’ll spend the rest of their life in a wheelchair. It takes lengthy, intense training to know how to tell the difference. He describes one situation where he had to stay at the hospital for twelve hours to monitor one of his patients through that crisis. It meant long hours for him, but he knew it pulling the guy through without amputation would make a huge difference in that man’s life.

And yet an EU directive was about to be forced on him and those he was training that looked with great disfavor on any work week, including that of resident physicians, that was longer than forty hours. How can I train these people?, he asked. I get two years to do it, and that’s barely enough with long hours. With 40-hour weeks, they’ll graduate knowing too little and, deprived of supervision have no way of learning. When people die because they wait too long, they’re default to doing too many amputations. (Incidentally, while Britain’s NHS rates poorly in most areas, in this particular speciality it is world-class.)

Of course we’re not immune here. I saw something similar in my neighborhood when I lived in Seattle. There was playground down the street from me that was already so excessively safe, it was dull for kids. The city, guided by “experts” was going to make it even “safer” by spending almost $400,000.

Duh! I pointed out in a local blog. In and around that playground were far greater dangers than that playground: streets to run into, trees to climb, and steep hillsides.

Even more telling, literally a few blocks directly down the hill from that playground was there was a amphitheater so dangerous, I had trouble imaging how it passed the building codes of the early 1950s when it was built. There were gaps in the railing so large, a child of three and under could plunge through the opening to concrete 40 feet below, almost certainly dying. That could have been fixed for a few thousands dollars.

Behind this lies an observation too long to get into here that our society and that in Europe, is increasingly troubled by credentialed “experts” who’ve learned their lessons well in school but have no grasp of what they should really know.

G. K. Chesterton noted the phenomena about a century ago and described it well when he remarked that some people learned to read before they learned to see. They’ve never built a bridge between what books teach them and the real world. They are typically oh-so proud of those credentials and sneer at people (like me about that playground) who don’t share those credentials, people who simply see and understand.

Two-week, no-questions-asked returns on ebooks is an example of that.

–Michael W. Perry, the author or editor of numerous ebooks that can easily be read in under two weeks.

Michael, you may hate to lose sales but in t h e world I grew up, bookstores took returns with a receipt 30 days after purchase no questions asked. Get over it.

In the world we used to live in, you had to take the book and receipt back to the bookstore which took a great deal of time, and most people would be ashamed to return a book with obvious wear.

Now, we can return an ebook almost instantly, and no one can tell if you’ve read it or not, and a lot of jerks are using this as a way to get free books. Some go so far as to run it through a translator and put it on the free sites. I’ve had friends whose first sales were returned and the book showed up on the free sites. So, I can understand authors’ unhappiness.

Plus, most of the sites offer a free sample. If you can’t spot incompetent craft and poor formatting after reading that, the rest of the book probably won’t bother you either.

Hopefully, Apple will limit the number of returns for each user to keep this from happening.

So, yes, AvidReader, the world has changed. Get over it.