A couple of weeks ago Amazon had me correct some typos in “And What Goes Around”. After I uploaded the corrections I apparently failed to hit publish at the end of the third page. Thus several people told me the book was not available for sale in the US and Canada. It showed as live but wasn’t. I believe it is corrected now. – Mac’
“The Way Things Seem” book also seems to not be listed on Amazon.
That was withdrawn because relatives objected a character was identifiable and it was defaming. Not worth fighting for as little as it made a month.
Just tried buying off of Amazon and it is still not available for purchase. 7/21/2024 at 1642 central time
Will email them.
Still unavailable 11pm on July 21. I’ll try again tomorrow.
up now
It also seems to have taken it off UK sale. I tried to buy it a few minutes ago. Amazon just tells me it is not available to buy in my area but every other book in the series is on there to buy.
I’ve contacted them. FIXED!
Thank you. I’m reading it now. 😁
/rant
I don’t have a problem with technology. I have a problem with the software ignorance slathered on top of it. I cannot forgive the wretched gunk I have to use to do something simple.
/rant off
The books is not llisted as updatable for me, so something odd is clearly going on. But that is Amazon for you, my kindle app on my phone should automatically update books when an update comes out. But often I notice that some books do not auto update while other do.
Half of what they do is a mystery to me but you should be able to manually update.
No, that did not work. I even tried to fix it by deleting the book from my library and then added it agin to my library. But apparently its just the same version, so perhaps the updated version is not available for us that lives ourside USA or in Norway as I do.
It’s not the first time I have noticed this issue with a couple of other books that the authors updated. Even now 3 years after one of them was updated, that version is not available for me to upgrade.
But it could also be happening due to a curse that has been affection my life since I was 15 year old. The curse I’m affected by is that If there is some bug in anything based on technology I will be affected by that bug or fault. Several times have I been the first to find a bug on a brand new smart phone and several other things as well. Back when Nokia released N95 I sort of by accident found a way to brick it by opening 3 apps, one after the other. That disocvery ended by them sending me money to keep my mouth shut and one month after I sendt them my phone a important update was sendt out. After that it was a lot of harder to brick the phone, but it was still possible using the same 3 apps just in different way.
It’s still happens to be, like my brand new side-by-side freezer / cooler which for some strange reason can’t seemed to figure out if I want to see the temp in C of F. It’s annoying, but I’m used to it.
I do not beleive in curses, but since it happens to me several times each year, it’s hard to figure out another reason. Due to this I have learned to not by brand new tech things, but rather wait for at least 6 months and after the first 2 updates, which usually means I don’t see those issues.
I’ve seen all sort of bugs in every bit of tech one might buy or get hold off. I have seen my PSU explode into smoke that covered the whole appartment in white smoak withing 5 second. I’ve seen a pc cabinet holding a charge even while it’s disctonnected, strange crashes of normal tech is something that I see every few months and I know that this is not normal at all. Which make it possible that somethign weird is going on so a curse is just as possible as there is something wrong with my bio electric field which causes it. As it’s impossible to know why basically. Which is why I think it is funny to call it my curse.
Amazon is the worst way to market books except for all the rest of them. On occasion they treat me badly too. Not surprising in a company of their size. They send me email ads suggesting I’d like my own books and should buy them. It seems like once a company/church/fraternal order gets past 100 people the all get institutional dementia.
I am reading ‘And What Goes Around’ and encountered a small glitch at the 50% point where April and Jeff are talking to the Japanese representative of the micro-drones in the cafeteria on Home. You are consistently excellant on technical points so I thought you would actually care about the issue. Which is: the ‘one gee’ ring of Mitsubishi 3 is not actually under one gravity. An object on that level is accelerated to one gee by the deck ‘rising’ continuously due to its circular trajectory. There is no body mass attraction like the mass of the Earth interacting with the persons body mass. A micro-drone flying in that internal airspace is in a micro-gee environment that is dominated by the aero forces. Yes, the deck will ‘rise’ to meet it… but the drone does not ‘fall’. So the control law issues Jeff is talking about will be in effect even in the one gee section of the station.
BTW: I had to work out from context that Mitsubishi 3 is in the Earth-Moon L2 point and not in the Earth-Sun L2 point. Did I miss the defining statement somewhere?
Good catch. Glad to know that but I’m not going to go that far back and do a major re-write.
Yes, they are out beyond the Moon. Not sure if I ever explicitly said that. There plenty of context.
Good catch!
However, if you want to get technical with rotating station gravity behavior, then things would look way different than nearly any science fiction description. There’s a certain amount of poetic license that everyone tends to take to make these stories flow.
I read one author (can’t recall the story or author name) that includes this in his story, and it made for some weird effects. Station life would be a fairly unique “gravity” experience. For example, the only thing experiencing the 1 g would be something frictionally locked to the floor surface of the 1 g ring. If you every dropped something it would not fall straight down, but would curve away from the direction of station rotation. If you were standing on the floor wearing roller skates you would tend to roll away from the direction of station rotation until you either met something to stop you, or the friction of the bearings in your skates slowed you down to a stop. Weird centrifugal gravity effects…
On top of that, I seem to recall that there is currently no known material (including the carbon allotropes) that could handle the tensile load of a 1 g rotation. Several different engineering analyses can be found on a Google search describing the problem.
All-in-all it usually makes for a better story to ignore all of that and pretend the materials work and gravity is real gravity instead of centrifugal force.
The book is not updated on Amazon, not for me at least so I’m hoping it will happen sooner than later as I have a plan to reread the whole series again as soon as I manages to get my new place ready to live in.
The Way Things Seem – 01/09/2024.
As of this date, it isn’t on amazon uk. Neither does it show on the authors page or by searching physcially for it via search bar.
No. I had people object one of my characters was identifiable and demeaning. It was going to create expensive legal problems for me so I unpublished.
Interesting. Thanks for explaining, I’ve been wondering about this a while ago. I suppose I was fortunate to have bought (rented, actually) the book while it was still available. I had liked it and was looking forward to a sequel. Wanted to re-read at one stage but by then it was gone. It’s a pity. Perhaps something could be changed to avoid the issue and the story continued? Too much to hope for, I’m sure 🙂
I had wondered about The way things Seem. Sad that that had to happen.
I keep offline copies of all my digital books I buy so that they can’t disappear due to random policy change of vendor or disappearance of vendor. I have over 4000 books in my amazon account that I have purchased or gotten on periods the author set them to free in the last 20+ years. I would never trust amazon to keep making them available to me forever. I have read to many accounts of peoples amazon accounts being shut down because they went on vacation, or moved back home and left the united states and started buying and using books in Europe or Asia and amazon saying they were in violation of TOS and having everything they bought disappear. Probably 15 years ago I first read account of woman that went back home to Europe to live and amazon did that to her. Eventually after a LOT of hassle and going viral online with the story amazon finally paid attention and fixed it but for many people, they would just have to suck it up unless they had the resources to file lawsuits and and become a big enough hassle to make amazon care to deal with them.
I also can see amazon eventually spinning books off or deciding not to sell books or some other major issue with them as a business and all the users with books on there losing access. Or a cyber attack that damages user account data that shows your purchases and they just disappear because amazon no longer has data showing what you have purchased.
end result 🙂 i still have my copy and enjoyed reading it. 🙂 I know you can’t (maybe) tell your relatives to get over themselves. But maybe they will read this 🙂 lol. Hey relatives… No one cares, none of us know who you are, nor do we care. They only one that cares is you. Was it even about you? or are you just seeing yourself in a fictional character and feeling bad about yourself and taking it out on someone else?
Yes – It’s stupid. As is being embarrassed for your relatives as if they all reflect on you. The possibility Amazon may disappear as a business for me has always been a possibility too. I’ll ride it as far as it works.