“Booking the Future”

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I had a root canal today. I’ve got another article on description mostly written, but I’m not up to finishing it tonight. So here’s a particularly interesting post on future publishing:

Booking the Future, by Ransom Stephens

Is the book dead? Can the Six Sisters of publishing rescue books? Will publishers find a new profit model? Can bookstores survive the internet? Can writers make a living? What about e-books? Is Kindle the beginning and end of the revolution? Will Google Books be literature’s savior or executioner? Where does Scribd.com fit in?

Though the role of publishing has not changed – connect readers to writers – the revolution will not be led by an established publisher. To date, no established player has prospered through, much less led, the transition to the digitally-based economy. What’s left of the recording industry is still pursuing the fascinating how-to-best-prosecute-our-customers business model. No one was better positioned to profit from the web-based economy than Sears, with its legendary catalog, but Amazon all but killed it. Even IBM barely survived the computer revolution.

For some reason, even when entrenched companies can see the iceberg they can’t turn the ship.

There’s some interesting economic thought in this article. It lacks the naiveté displayed by some digital revolution proponents, and it’s also free of the reactionary “Everything in Publishing is Going to Stay the Same Because Our Way is the Right Way” of most critics of said naiveté.

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Shadow Unit

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Poetry Friday is at Carol’s Corner today.

I’ve been having fun reading Shadow Unit. Imagine professionally written fan fiction for an imaginary TV show about the FBI’s Department of Really Weird Crimes We Can’t Talk About. I’ll donate soon.

Real Soon Now I’ll finish the next post about the Sigurd story, and then move to poetic forms. I was thinking of discussing Christabel and Gerald Manley Hopkins, continuing the discussion of accentual poetry, before introducing a Welsh form that interests me considerably.

Tags: poetry friday, Shadow Unit
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Sacred Texts Archive needs help!

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

The Internet Sacred Texts Archive is sorely in need of funding to keep their impressive collection online. This is a terrific resource for writers, and I’d urge you to donate, or to buy their collection on DVD or CD.

I’ve crossed one ebook publisher off my list of places to buy from because their website is so badly designed and implemented that I can’t bring myself to browse there, atleast not for long. What’s frustrating about this is that I have some reason to suspect their books might be better than average.

I’m checking out another site, but I haven’t actually bought a book from them yet; I’m probably going to.

Tags: Sacred Texts
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Stalking the Wild eBook

Friday, June 5th, 2009

I’ve begun my project to find a better way to buy books. Because I lack much free shelf space, I’m interested in ebooks, so the first thing I’ve done is collected a list of ebook publishers who don’t use DRM. Then I’ve tossed out the ones who primarily publish romance and erotica, because I have no interest in those genres.

The Top 13 DRM-free eBook Sites at Text2Go was of some help in compiling my list; there are a couple that I would have overlooked.

There’s no need to comment on the likes of Gutenberg, but I’ll discuss some of the other sites as I look through their catalogues and decide to buy, or not to buy.

Tags: buying books, drm
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Ebook Readers and the Pixel Qi

Friday, May 29th, 2009

I’m probably in the market for an ebook reader, when someone produces one that does everything I want it to do.

What I want:

1. A screen that I can read outdoors without too much difficulty.
2. And that isn’t too small.
3. WiFi.
4. A web browser. For reading, I prefer to load Opera, because I can easily kill the idiotic formatting on most badly-designed web pages with it, and because its Save Windows features gives me an automatic bookmark that will remember my exact position on the page. I’m reading things online that I have no interest in downloading, or finding a downloadable source for. I want a device that will handle all my electronic reading, not just some fraction of it.
5. Good battery life.
6. The ability to handle common open formats like epub and pdf without me having to send the document to someone else for conversion.

I have a Samsung Q1 Ultra that does most of this. But it’s got a shiny screen that’s a trial to read outside in daylight. Its handling of right-clicks is vexatious — I usually get both a left- and a right-click when I hold the stylus down long enough to get a right-click — and even with XP on it instead of Vista, the boot is very slow. And it was expensive. I needed a capable backup computer when I bought it, so overall it’s serving my purposes, but for an ebook reader, what I really want is a netbook with an outdoor-readable screen and a faster boot.

None of the dedicated ebook readers currently on the market have the characteristics I’m looking for.

The Kindle, according to Amazon, is DRM-agnostic, but there isn’t any way to tell whether most Kindle ebooks have DRM or not; and I’m not buying DRM’d ebooks, not now and not ever. The Kindle has a 3G connection rather than WiFi; and while a 3G connection would be nice, I don’t have service at the house; I’d have to walk down to the end of a rather long driveway. Using the Kindle to read open documents is evidently inconvenient, as it requires mailing documents to Amazon for conversion; and browsing the web is right out.

The Sony Reader has more of the open formats I’m looking for built-in, but I really want WiFi and the ability to read web pages. I usually don’t manually transfer content from my desktop to my Samsung UMPC in any organized manner, since I keep them in different places and often don’t have them turned on simultaneously; I end up using it more because I can connect over WiFi.

So I’m holding out for more.

This morning I came across a link to a blog about the Pixel Qi, which isn’t in production yet. It’s beginning to look there’ll be netbooks with epaper screens in the foreseeable future.

You bet I’m interested. I’m going to be keeping an eye on this one.

Tags: ebook reader, Kindle, netbook, Pixel Qi, samsung umpc, Sony Reader, UMPC
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