Back in 2008, when we were first preparing to launch Tor.com, I knew I wanted Jo Walton to be a regular writer for the site.

Personally, I always find it especially piquant when cultural conservatives, usually quick to profess their devotion to the Free Market, rail against the success in said market of some product of which they disapprove.

I was ten years old in 1969, and while we lived in Arizona that year, I spent most of the summer staying with family friends in Portland, Oregon while my parents visited Spain. It was an adventure all around.

I have a severe Google Reader habit. I think people will use blog forms and twitter to contrive fiction.

So many people's school experience contains at least one instance of being looked down upon because they didn't care for one or more of the sacred mutant outcroppings of High Modernism, and they concluded from this that Literature is all about impenetrable stuff that they don't like. That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse.

Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It's like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.

Book publishing was never a heaven run by editors, and it is by no means today a hell run by accountants. If our sole interest was instant profit, not only would we never do any number of the things we actually do every day, we probably wouldn't be in book publishing at all.

The small visual inconvenience of e-books is made up for with find and search functions, and the fungibility of digital text.