Thank you, Harlan Coben…
Sometimes real life creates mysteries too. I’ll describe one that remains unsolved. No, I’m not an UFO junkie reporting on some mysterious events occurring at Area 51. There’s just one real-life mystery, and it would even stump Dame Agatha.
An author-friend’s husband—a fellow ex-physicist too, by the way, so there was a lot of scientific prowess applied to solving the mystery—was interested in one of Harlan Coben’s many tales, so he queried “Harlan Coben” on his smart TV system. Up came my novel The Last Humans, and Alexa started reading it. He repeated this experiment several times, as scientists are prone to do: different chapters, same book…and not Harlan’s! He was understandably bothered by this, so much so that his wife asked me what was going on.
Given my general lack of knowledge about how all this smart TV/streaming video/internet stuff works (we have neither a smart TV nor any streaming video service—I’d rather read a book), I haven’t been able to solve this mystery completely. Admittedly I was only a consultant and chronicler, a Dr. Watson for the true sleuths, my author-friend and her husband. They were the detectives at the scene of the crime, and they haven’t completely solved the mystery either.
Considering that my ebooks have been pirated before, my knee-jerk reaction was to think that was the problem, in which case all hope was lost. The only thing I could personally have done was to inform Amazon, Black Opal Books (my publisher, not Harlan’s, because mine would be the one worried about piracy), and whomever else might be affected. (Probably all ineffectual—book pirates are hard to bring to justice.)
But then my author-friend informed me she’d discovered that, if one buys an ebook (they bought the .mobi or Kindle formatted version from Amazon), one can ask Siri to read it—you can find the details here. Imagine. An audiobook version made from an ebook without the extra production cost of an audiobook! Who knew? Maybe some readers can try this with other ebooks—I have neither the hardware nor software to confirm this, nor any predilection for purchasing Apple products (Siri is that monotonous iPhone gal) that often only work with other Apple products, but I have no reason to doubt my author-friend, who writes excellent mysteries. Let me know if this works.
That solves part of the mystery. Two ex-physicists are stumped, as well as my author-friend and I, about this part: The real mystery just might be why Harlan Coben’s name was the trigger! I had some email correspondence years ago with Harlan after I started to publish my novels. He was patient with my impatience, saying it took a few books to gain some name recognition (the Myron Bolitar series is still my favorite in his opus, so he already had my attention). In hindsight, that email exchange only amounted to a pep talk, because what he suggested would happen hasn’t (i.e. name recognition—ebooks didn’t exist back then). Shortly after that exchange, his email address disappeared—he’d become too famous, I guess. (I don’t save email addresses anyway, just to protect people’s privacy, the exception being addresses of subscribers to my newsletter.) No further communication with the reclusive Harlan has occurred.
Maybe Harlan is the culprit behind all this? Nah! That’s hard to believe. But thank you, Harlan Coben, for showing me how I can avoid production costs for an ebook. A lot more thanks are due my author-friend and her husband for showing how the tech elves can help authors without the authors doing anything. I wrote a post not long ago about the new trend of adding an audiobook at a reduced price when a reader buys an ebook. Readers, it looks like there’s no need for you to do that as long as you buy iBooks, which means, authors, it’s not such an effective marketing tool to offer that. Of course, readers will have Siri reading the ebook in that case, not James Earl Jones.
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Comments are always welcome.
A Time-Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse. Readers of this blog know I don’t write romance or erotica, but I’ve met those popular genres halfway with this sci-fi rom-com—that’s sci-fi romantic comedy. Enrico Fermi wasn’t the last physicist who was both an experimental and theoretical genius, but Professor Gail Hoff will never receive the Nobel Prize. She goes time-traveling through several universes of the multiverse, never to return to her little lab outside Philly. Jeff Langley, her jack-of-all-trades electronics wizard, accompanies her. Their escapades, both amorous and adventurous, make this novel a far-out road-trip story filled with dystopian and post-apocalyptic situations, first encounter, robots and androids—those and more await the reader who rides along. An excellent distraction from the pandemic that’s coming soon!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
