Some Days Are Better Than Others
I’m sure that all of you who write have experienced it.
Things seem to be going well. The words are coming out smoothly. You’re in the flow. And then…
You hit that place, that certain point, where you can’t seem to go any further. The words and ideas have suddenly stopped. It’s like beating the bottom of that damn ketchup bottle, and nothing, but nothing, will come out!
Oh yeah.
But it’s still a fine madness …
… even when it makes us feel like that!
It takes hours to finish a book, even for the fastest readers. This wasn’t a problem when books had less competition, but with the three massive timesinks of cable TV, videogames, and the internet, people look at that massive time investment, and they get apprehensive. Sure, they know that books can be just as enjoyable as movies or games, if not more. They may even feel guilty about not reading. But what if this book is no good? What if I end up hating it? What if I can’t understand it? Imagine all the time wasted! And so they stop before they even start.
A long, detailed, and excellent article.
Strangely, public libraries aren’t mentioned at all.
GutenMark Home Page
Attractively formatting Project Gutenberg texts
What is GutenMark?
GutenMark is a command-line tool for automatically creating high-quality HTML or LaTeX markup from Project Gutenberg etexts. As of April 2008, there is also a graphical front-end called GUItenMark that greatly simplifies usage for casual users. Both Windows and Linux ‘x86 are supported. Mac OS X is also supported, though in some respects it lags the others. Limited iPhone support is also possible.
In combination with other freely-available conversion tools GutenMark aims to convert Project Gutenberg etexts into publication-quality Postscript or PDF, for print-on-demand applications. The goal is for this conversion to be completely automatic, without manual markup or editing, but for the forseeable future some manual intervention will almost always be needed—at least, if your standards are at least as high as mine.
I took the Project Gutenberg plain text file of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and ran it through this.
Amazingly, this:
To Sherlock Holmes she is always THE woman.
was transformed to this:
To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.
As it should be!
I was impressed with the available options and did some light testing. It could be a very useful tool for Project Gutenberg etexts that have only a plain text version available.
On the other hand, I also downloaded the Project Gutenberg HTML of the same Holmes and it was superior.
But this tool remains a very painless way of changing those text files into a format that can then go on to further processing to create an eBook.
The fine folks over at MobileRead have put together a wiki for public libraries that offer eBooks.
I live in New York City, so I don’t have to pay the $100/year fee to get an NYPL card.
Suck it up, baby!
Besides, for that $100 fee, you are competing against my domestic borrowing rights!
I hate you for doing that. You know that, don’t you?
There’s a classic shot in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey when the main character has to first consult instructions on how to use a zero-gravity toilet:
Imagine having to go through all that!
And yet — there is something actually worse than that.
It’s the instructions on how to go about using Adobe DRMed ePub eBooks!
Here are the Zero-Gravity toilet instructions:
Now contrast the amount of text there to instructions for using Adobe DRMed ePub:
Can you imagine the poor technically unsophisticated schmo having to deal with all that?
“For God’s sake, all I want to do is read eBooks!!!”
Really, it turns out it’s easier to take a shit in space than to deal with Adobe DRMed ePub eBooks!
I was going through my LifeDrive memos and came across a Stephen Levy column from Newsweek that nails the argument for lower-than-print pricing of eBooks.
This column is from 2004 — four years ago!
FORECAST: SONG COSTS MAY FALL LIKE RAIN
MEMO TO MUSIC LABELS: LOWERING PRICES WILL GET YOU MORE SALES
This is the key point:
This summer [2004] provided a clue to further harnessing the force of digital nature. For three weeks, Real Networks tried to lure new customers by slashing prices to 49 cents a song and $4.99 per album. Since Real paid the full royalty load to the labels (almost 70 cents a tune), the company lost money on every transaction. CEO Rob Glaser says that the company did get new customers, but here’s the real news: Real sold six times as much music and took in three times as much money.
This reflected the experience of Audible, which sells audiobooks on the iTunes Store. Working in conjunction with publishers and Apple, Audible offered some online titles at a fraction of the normal price. One of those buyers was me — I had been thinking of getting a David Sedaris audiobook to entertain my family on a summer drive, but balked at paying $11 for something I might play just once. After I got an e-mail informing me I could get it for $2, I snapped it up. Audible CEO Don Katz says the featured books on that single e-mail were downloaded at 60 times the previous rate.
Emphasis added by me.
Let me hammer down the point.
Audible was selling an audio-eBook. It sold at sixty times the previous sales rate once the price was slashed.
Let me run some math, and I’ll use simple numbers because math usually gets me in trouble!
An eBook at $10.00 with a 10% royalty, one copy sold = $1.00
OK, that’s the “normal” rate of sale.
Now let’s do the Audible price cut numbers.
An eBook at $2.00 with a 10% royalty, sixty copies sold = $12.00
Which would a writer rather have? A guarantee of $1.00 per copy with an increased risk of piracy?
Or sixty copies sold at a piracy-prevention price that makes him twelve times as much money than expected sales?
I will keep hammering this point home again and again, dammit.
I want to walk into a printed bookstore and witness this conversation:
Shopper 1: “Oh, this book I want to buy!”
Shopper 2: “Me too. But it’s cheaper as an eBook for my Sony Reader!”
That is the Marketing Point for eBooks, the one that will drive hardware sales and then increase eBook sales exponentially:
If you buy it as an eBook, it’s cheaper.
Remember: eBooks are not like music. People will listen repeatedly to a song. But people don’t read an eBook over and over again. Once it’s been read, people want to buy something else.
And the resistance to eBooks is not as strong as anyone believes. See Vox Populi: eBooks.
Found via TwitteRel (which I recommend):
Wonderful.
Update: Arjun basu writes in the Comments:
Thanks. But it’s not a novel. I just want to clear that up. Each tweet is a single story. At the max 140 characters. I’m calling them Twisters. Thanks for the support.
That makes what I screensnapped above even more remarkable!
Americans prefer news from Web to newspapers: survey
The Internet has surpassed newspapers as the main source for national and international news for Americans, according to a new survey.
Television, however, remains the preferred medium for Americans, according to the survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
Seventy percent of the 1,489 people surveyed by Pew said television is their primary source for national and international news.
Forty percent said they get most of their news from the Internet, up from 24 percent in September 2007, and more than the 35 percent who cited newspapers as their main news source.
Emphasis added by me.
Hey, the Newspaper Fetishists used to whiiiine, “Oh, I can’t think of a Sunday without curling up with The New York Times.”
So, question: Did they all drop dead — or get electronic religion?
And, no, book publishers, the moral here is not “books on TV.”
Get real. Make with the flood of eBooks in 2009!
I need to do this again because people weren’t listening the first time — and, frankly, many still had jobs in the dying printed books industry and so were too smug to pay attention.
This is what the book tour of the future — the future being 2009! — will look like:
Click = big
That’s Darren Rowse of ProBlogger doing a special “Christmas party” live streaming videocast via UStream.
What was his big outlay to do it? His existing MacBook Pro! And the connection was via WiFi too!
He was in Australia. There were people all over the world tuning in. One person was from Brazil!
The dying dinosaurs of print have asked: “Well, how can we do an author tour for an eBook? There’s no … um, book for people to bring to a store!”
That’s how. The author doesn’t go to any store. He goes to where the eBook store is — the entire Internet.
People can type questions. See and hear the writer respond. No one has to deal with bad weather or bad schedules. And the videos can be archived for people to see again later.
What about autographs? I did that earlier too.
Instead of sending a writer out on bad plane (or train or bus) trips to bad hotels and the mercy of weather, everyone can stay where they are — the writer at home, the readers at home (or likely stealing bandwidth from work!). It’s all win.
The writer can even, if so inclined, show the missus and child:
(Happy holidays, Mrs Rowse!)
Previously here:
Reference: Internet Video Chat
How Our Future Does Things
I Am Internationally Persecuted!
Live jkk & Chippy!
Mike Cane 2008 
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