“Why an Angora sweater? If the recipient of your gift is an Ed Wood fan, she’ll know.”

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“The object in a Creditocracy is to keep us on the hook as long as possible as debtors, till the day we die.”

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I will never stop praising this book. You may know of Ed Wood Jr. as the worst filmmaker in Hollywood history, but you probably didn’t know that he spent his later life writing pulp for proto-porno mags that pushed the boundaries of sexual politics. This collection brings together the best of Wood’s writing, and every moment of it tantalizes.

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Once upon a time, selling directly to consumers was a rarity in the book publishing business. Now, publishers of all types are doing it, or planning to. This trend has been enabled by the web and complemented by publishers’ parallel social media strategies. It is driven by the desire to connect with readers and the strategic threat posed by publishers’ number one trading partner, Amazon, who has explicitly promised to disintermediate publishers, even referring to smaller publishers as sickly gazelles to be culled.

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John Oakes, co-founder of OR Books, a small, independent publisher, said that the agreement is far from a resolution to problems of Hachette or publishing at large.

“I think some people said, ‘Well, you know, it’s now been resolved and it’s past, it’s behind us,'” Oakes said. “But there’s a deeper issue here beyond what the terms are between Amazon and Hachette.”

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OR Books, founded by longtime independent publisher John Oakes and former Scribner senior editor Colin Robinson, was a perfect example of publishing veterans using reduced online costs to modify industry standards. Rather than investing in large print runs and taking a loss on returned copies, the company would sell only ebooks and print-on-demand editions. Old hands rather than visionaries, Oakes and Robinson presented this cost-saving model matter-of-factly. For them the project was simply the prospect of “high efficiency, and minimal, or nonexistent, returns,” as Oakes wrote in Publishers Weekly.

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“Technocreep” forces one to dissociate from society in order to understand it. Over the course of 17 funnily named chapters, “Technocreep” covers a range of terrifying material — from a Justin Bieber sex toy made with a 3-D printer to Taco Bell’s supposed exploitation of human psychobiology — in a way that makes discovering the underbelly of technology darkly exciting.

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