Interesting Links for 9-10-2011

[andrewducker]

• The 99c novel. I already know people buying these. I wonder where the market is heading
  (tags: books business amazon ebooks)
• Blackboards in Porn - just how accurate are they?
  (tags: porn sfw blackboard maths science)
• You can't have closure. I want to know if it makes you happier if you stop trying to get it.
  (tags: closure emotions life psychology)
• Fascinating piece on how we think can read each other's emotions, even when we can't
  (tags: emotions perception AmandaKnox)
• The Judge Dredd movie is having problems...
  (tags: JudgeDredd comics movies)

Comments

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure what value the publisher adds to the chain though (marketing and a nice cover?).

Um, publishing? Talking to the printer, getting your book to reviewers, getting it to distributors, arranging for it to appear in good places in shops, and taking the hit on the cost of all of that, so that the author doesn't have to pay to get their book onto the shelves?

Of course, some of that goes away with ebooks. And all of it goes away if you only want to appear on Kindle. But if you don't want to end up with a monoculture then you're going to want your book to appear on more than just Amazon, and that means dealing with distributors at the very least.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Sorry, yes... I mean in an e-book scenario where everyone can "publish" essentially for free (kindle merely simplifies the search problem, it's not at all difficult to set up an e-shop to sell your book and if you want to give away your book for free or just run a tip-box it's trivial).

Yes, there is a necessity for a publisher (or a lot of running around) in the dead tree format scenario.

[andrewducker]

it's not at all difficult to set up an e-shop

I'm going to assume you've largely dealt with authors of the technical variety. And not ones who find writing Word documents tricky enough, thank-you-very-much :->

[steer.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I assume these authors have friends though -- I wasn't assuming they would do it themselves. I know a lot of writers already found typewriters a little much technology for their taste.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I should be clear that I am not suggesting "everyone gets their friend to set up an e-shop" as a viable solution for the longer term but just pointing out that it's very easy to get around right now if you do have objections to "monoculture" (or "standardisation" as it's called when people want it to sound like a good thing).

[andrewducker]

"Standards" is not "Amazon tell you what to do, and you do it." We have an ebook standard - epub - and everyone in the world uses it except for Amazon.

Kindle is a standard in the same way that .doc is.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Heh... well as they say, the good thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

Kindle is a standard in the same way that .doc is.

Exactly... It may be closed, baroque and rubbish but it's far better than the situation which preceded it. .doc may be a hunk of junk but the world before that was people saying "I've sent it in WordPerfect format... you could buy a copy if you like... or you could have plain text."

Any standard widely used (even a crap one invented by evil people for the purposes of doing evil) is better than a bunch of free and open incompatible standards with no take up.

[andrewducker]

The Kindle standard is not widely used. The only company that uses it is Amazon. Everyone else uses ePub, which is generally well regarded, in my understanding.

[steer.livejournal.com]

The Kindle standard is not widely used.

In the same way that .doc is not widely used. It's 80% of the ebook market by most recent figures. I can only see that growing in the short term at least.

Everyone else uses ePub, which is generally well regarded, in my understanding.

Kindle freely converts epub to its own format. Nook started out with ereader pdb as the preferred format I believe but now uses epub as preferred format. The sony reader used BBeB Book as preferred format but also read epub.

Book sellers, a quick survey has a few epub, a few "ipad/iphone format" (whatever the hell that means), googlebooks and Foyles sells PDF and ebook... as I said "the good thing about standards is that there are so many...

Don't get me wrong, I don't like proprietary formats... at all... it would be great if epub somehow rose to be the dominant standard, but pretending it is at the moment is like pretending that ODF is the standard format for documents.

[andrewducker]

It's not widely used in that nobody else by Amazon can use it.

I've not heard of Amazon converting epub itself. Last I heard you needed something like Calibre to do conversions for you.

Waterstones sell in ePub and PDF. WHSmith sell ePub and PDF. Google Books do ePub and PDF. Foyles do ePub and PDF.

So it seems that everyone does ePub and PDF. Except for Amazon.

If I get get a new eBook reader because my Sony one dies then I have a wide selection that I can use - pretty much anyone except Kindle, unless I'm willing to start converting formats myself.

I despise monopolies that use non-standard methods to keep people locked in. It's why I won't use iTunes, and I won't buy Kindle books.

[steer.livejournal.com]

You're right actually... you need the (freely available) software to do epub. I've never actually converted from that format myself so I didn't notice it wasn't on the emaillable forms.

I despise monopolies that use non-standard methods to keep people locked in. It's why I won't use iTunes, and I won't buy Kindle books.

And presumably why you wouldn't use .doc format documents (or perhaps why you wouldn't until people reverse engineered the format) and (to a lesser extent I admit) .mp3 music files? :-)

Seriously though, for me, it's not a "lock in" as I can convert to and from any other format with ease. As the kindle itself is such a nice toy and the convenience of having all the books I buy archived with a single publisher, I'm willing to see it as the kind of relatively benign DRM that steam also provides. It keeps all my stuff centralised in one place so if I lose it I can get it again, I can shop at alternative places if I want and if the whole situation turns evil then I can rip the books to another format or steal them elsewhere and it's of the same "crime" class as ripping my CDs to mp3.

Mind you, there's still no actual substitute for MS Word on a PC or Mac to read .doc formats as everything else mucks up things royally.

Seriously, I don't think we actually disagree on the preferable hierarchy:
1) Widely used, open standard. (By far preferable)
2) Widely used closed standard.
3) No widely used standards but many competing standards some open, not freely convertible.
4) No standards but many ad hoc solutions.

[andrewducker]

Actually, I use DocX, which is a nice open format :->

And MP3s are playable by oodles of different players. I know there's a fee to pay for it, and I'd rather that, say, Ogg was the standard, but I'm not forced to use a single provider, so I'm happy enough to compromise.

In fact, if Amazon were willing to license out their encryption so that other ebook providers could allow you to read AZW files on their readers then I'd be happy enough with that.

And yes, I think we agree on the general hierarchy.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Actually, I use DocX, which is a nice open format

Heh... my question was in past tense for a reason...

I'm happy enough to compromise.

I'm willing to bet though that, like my kindle compromise, at least some of your mp3 compromise is illegal in this country (feel free not to answer).

[andrewducker]

A chunk of the older stuff is. I stopped torrenting MP3s when they became available to buy DRM-free. :->

[steer.livejournal.com]

I was more thinking of ripping your CD collection... (assuming you had one, could be bothered to rip it, and didn't rebuy everything as mp3s). I still actually buy my music on CDs and illegally rip to mp3 simply for the convenience of knowing where the back up is (it's on the CD rack in the hall). Mind you, that's not an issue with mp3 format as it would be just as illegal to rip to .ogg or .flac.

May be time to rethink though as an entire bookshelf of CDs is bloody huge as a backup system.

[andrewducker]

I haven't bought a CD in about eight years...

New music is coming in 90% through Spotify nowadays anyway.

(Which I don't mind being DRM-ed up, because it's a rental/streaming system, I'm not buying a permanent license.)

[andrewducker]

And, of course, DocX has the advantage that anyone can write a reader for it, or write to it. The standardisation method might have been a tad iffy, but it's out there and documented, not wrapped in proprietary encryption that only MS Office can read/write.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Heh... well if you count "reverse engineering" then anyone can also read and write kindle format.

[andrewducker]

Except that doing so is a violation of the DMCA (and probably similar things in some other countries).

So you _can_ (and I would if I was buying Kindle books), but it's not something people should be openly recommending if they don't want a visit from the police :->

[steer.livejournal.com]

And as I said (elsewhere)... you mean like ripping your CDs to mp3s (which, let's face it, we almost all do or have done)? I've never been visited by the police and nor (as far as I'm aware) have people who sell such tools.

(Actually, the government did plan to make that legal though I don't think they have yet done so.)

[andrewducker]

Plus, in this case, Kindle's format is a direct clone of .mobi, with Amazon's proprietary encryption on it so that you can't use non-Amazon e-readers with it.

So they didn't add anything, they just locked their books down to just their reader, and their reader down so it doesn't support the standard everyone else uses.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Amazon freely convert epub stuff so I can buy epub books (assuming DRM free) and read them from my kindle should I so choose. It's much less convenient as I have to buy then from many different companies and have to make my own back up of said books.

Fortunately, I can rip the DRM off things I buy trivially so if I move away from kindle I can take my books with me if I don't mind a little bit of law breaking (in the same way that ripping my CDs to mp3 and listening to them on my mp3 player is illegal).