Very cool, if true

Pundit misunderstands publishing industry, mistakes retailer (Amazon) for publisher. Film at 11.

Shorter form: he's wrong. Longer form: go track down my comments (cstross) on the piece on Hacker News.

Edited Date: 2009-11-28 11:18 am (UTC)

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Thanks! I was 99% sure that this was the opposite of what you thought - and wsa hoping for a response from someone to point out the flaws.

Link to Hacker News article here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963577

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If I thought he was right, you would have noticed some radical changes to my main blog by now. Not to mention my relationship with my agent and editors ...

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I shall look forward to it :->

Seriously - I think you're right, book publishers are basically editors and marketers (so far as I can see) - changing the medium doesn't remove the need for editing or marketing.

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'Zackly.

If you self-publish via the Kindle store and expect the money to roll in, then you'd better be famous to start with or you're in for a very nasty surprise.

(All the other self-publishing folks will be in there with you -- and these are mostly folks who couldn't interest a "real" publisher in taking them on. Those readers who don't already know you from elsewhere will assume you're more of the same. When you buy a book from a "name" publisher, one of the services you're paying them for is filtering the slushpile. Self publishing on the Kindle store equals unfiltered slushpile. And if you've ever seen a slushpile in all its stupefying crapness, you wouldn't want to go there ...)

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momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com

Oh we have seen the slushpile. It's called fanfic.

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Oh goodness no. There's fanfic out there that's actually _good_ (admittedly not most of it). Whereas the slushpile is generally worse than Dan Brown.

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momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com

I can barely imagine that. In fact, no, I can't.

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Well, _he_ got published.

Even if I've not managed more than three paragraphs before my reflexes kicked in and saved me from brain death.

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I'm informed by one of my editors that 70-80% of the slushpile consists of the emissions of paranoid schizophrenics with hypergraphia and word processors. Their only punctuation is the ellipsis .... between phrases ... some no verbs ... doubleplus unjointed self-generated newspeak ... GETO UT OF MY BRAIN!!!

One of the indicators that slushpile matter might be worth looking at is the existence of white space and paragraphs.

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James Patterson?

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undeadbydawn.livejournal.com

Somewhat embarrassingly, I have bought most of your books but never fully read any of them. Shall try to at least finish Accelerando by the end of the year. [I basically fail at reading. Your writing is excellent. Like you need *me* to tell you that.]

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It's not a done deal for me without 3 things;

1.You buy it, you own it, full stop.
2.You can read it on all book-reading equipment (and pcs/laptops/*nix devices/phones etc).
3.You can get your existing books onto it without cost (or for a very nominal cost).

Music - > mp3s set the bar....

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epub is the format of the future - it's the only open standard, as far as I know (PDF is also open, but it's not designed for mobile readers).

The other two you're stuck with, I'm afraid.

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1.is possible - but given people seem quite inured to the evils of iPods/iTunes I don't know how *probable*.

3.is solvable - given a market to make it worth someone's while. If there was a truly decent reader maybe I'd be willing to destroy my books by gillotining the spines off and using a highspeed scanner.

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1) Is only solvable if they give up DRM - I haven't had a problem so far, but I haven't tried to do anything complex.

Scanning your books for less than, say, the cost of a paperback seems unlikely.

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buy the high speed scanner. sell it afterwards. £350 gets you a 20 pages/per minute duplex scanner (with OCR). I have *hundreds* of books.

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How long does it take you to prepare each book, and what's the accuracy rate of the OCR?

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lilaanne.livejournal.com

Scanning with decent hardware from a good condition book you would expect 99% accuracy in your OCR if you're happy with accuracy being defined as lack of spelling mistakes, misplaced punctuation or unrecognised characters.

It is much much less if you expand that definition to include font matching, formatting and layout retention - in that case it will vary dramatically from publication to publication and crucially the OCR engine driving the process. This can will show huge differences from version to version of the same program and between software from the same developer with the gap being biggest from company to company.

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OCR was pretty good when we used it in the CV processing part of the recruitment software I worked on (back when paper CVs actually got sent in!).

That's a bonus for me,any readable format will do for a book (diagram, illustrations etc have to be right though!), and I am not overly fussed about file size.

I want *as good as* a book before I worry about better.

Otherpeople,ofcourse want different things.

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a-pawson.livejournal.com

I've never come across pirated books. You can buy pirated Graphic Novels on Ebay, but only because the value of say a series of graphic novels is far greater than paperbacks novels.

As far as I can gather the publishing industry is very wary of electronic books because one thing is certain - there will be piracy - which is something they really don't have to deal with currently.

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There are definitely pirated ebooks about the place.

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a-pawson.livejournal.com

I'm not surprised. What I meant though was that there are, as far as I know, no widespread pirated versions of printed books.

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Not in this country, so far as I know. But you do get them in India and China, I believe.

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nmg.livejournal.com

You've never looked for 'book warez' torrents, then. There are a hell of a lot of pirated e-versions (usually .lit or .epub) of printed books available out there. It's quite clear that they've come from print, because most of the errors in the text are typical OCR errors.

eta: if you're talking about print->print piracy, this is common in India, China and Russia.

(hell, go back to the C19th, and it was common in the US)

Edited Date: 2009-11-28 05:30 pm (UTC)

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Yeah. A fair few. Not enough >:-).I have obtained a few - interestingly, the ones I actually liked I then bought an actual copy of (2nd hand!). Whether this buying stage would happen if readers were any cop is a debatable point...

Books aren't like music. 'Records' can be sensibly considered purely as advertising for the live performances. [somebody told me that's always been the attitude in say, Russia]. It's concert tickets and, most importantly, merchandise, from which bands make money. Not the records. Oh, a bit from albums, but singles have never generally made money. So it is not such a huge disturbance to the model as it would be for books.

I don't know the answer. I grew up with free access to books at libraries - woudlnt' want to lose that. I buy *shitloads* of books, I clearly don't mind paying - but once and once only!!!

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Records' can be sensibly considered purely as advertising for the live performances.

That doesn't explain my Beatles albums...

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At the time, they could.

Of course there are thing than cannot be done live- but less so these days. There are bands that no longer exist. But there are plenty of re-formed ones too.

Actually, thinking of it like that means thet nobody else can make money off you after you are dead or retired. That is, in my opinion, a pretty good thing. Maybe it's just a weird Sunday thought.

(deleted comment)

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If you remove the ability to change font size you lose on of the very nice abilities of e-readers. And if you're storing everything as images then you can't store that many books - and one of the other key advantages is being able to hold dozens/hundreds on an ebook.

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I don't object to extra features, nor dispute their usefulness. OCR is sensibly, the way to go - but it's not an initial stumbling block to getting your actual real books onto a reader.

One of those, say 500Gb USB hard drives for laptops is a lot smaller than a book (particularly than a hardback!) A reader has to be a certain physical size just to display the text so it's not subject to the same ultra-miniaturizing pressures as an mp3player...until we get to glasses/direct retinal projection. Which ain't next week (sadly).

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Getting there:
http://www.bhfo.org/news/press-releases/contact-lens-display-system-2.html
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/26/brother-nec-look-to-invade-your-retinas-next-year/

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I knew something was tickling my brain about that recently.

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Updated data on OCR from someone who works with it commercially right now on a day to day and large scale bases. Better than 99% accuracy (uses language-based dictionaries and trigrams). Diagrams are generally rendered as image files of some sort.

Font recognition is not out of the box but high end OCR is totally customisable.

Anyway - most books list the font on the flypage under the publisher and date. Not always the point size but that is something you might change on the reader anyway.

Google is doing a shedload of book-scanning, isn't it?

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Yup - but it's definitely worth it for them, as they end up with something they can use multiple times.

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and so worth it to anyone with lots of books. *if* I was willing to destroy the books in the process. But I need a reader that is book-equivalent first.

It'd be much better if I could just prove I owned the book and download from a central library but in any case have to HAVE it locally under my control forever.

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That's about as likely as you proving you own a DVD and being allowed to download an MPEG, or proving you own the CD and being allowed to download the MP3.

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sadly, you are right.

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