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News Thinking
File this post of mine under 'a day late and a dollar short', but I thought I'd (belatedly) share this little morsel of interest from a couple of weeks ago that kind of makes you wonder about news reporting in the media. It's from the London riots over university tuition fees.
Most people have seen the picture in the thumbnail there. Click on it to see a bigger version. There are two really interesting things about it. One: it more or less became the print media's official picture of the riots. You can ask yourself why that would be (too good not to use? not much else they could use?). Anyway, click here to see what I mean about its popularity; it seemed as though it was in every paper.
And the second really interesting thing is this photo:
Please click on it to see a larger version. Doesn't that put a completely different complexion on the scene? Is it really a riot if ten photographers, in a pretty docile-looking crowd, watch one lunatic break a window? Or is it OK to use a picture that turns out not to be very riotous if you're using it to give the impression of the sort of rioting that you believe is going on nearby but don't have any cool photos to illustrate? Even if you go for the latter explanation, it's difficult not to feel like you've been 'had' when you get a look at the original photo's backdrop.
(And well done to the BBC for including that last, zoomed-out photo on their website.)
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ONIX to XMP
I know, I'm a nerd. But I do enjoy geeking out on a Sunday. Imagine me surrounded late at night by empties of Mountain Dew, novelty hat perched atop my head, servers whirring, illuminated only by the glow of the screen. None of that is, of course, the case. However, I have found enough geek in me to knock together a bit of handy XSL tonight.
I'm knee-deep in creating ePub versions of all our books. ePub books live or die by their metadata - the stuff that describes what's in 'em. I really don't want to enter all that bibliographic metadata manually when it's all safely stored already in my Onix data. So here's a video to show how I get it out of the Onix format and into Adobe's XMP format. It's very quick and it's very accurate - and 'quick' and 'accurate' are things what I like.
I suppose I'd better put the video below the cut to be sensitive to those Snowblog readers who really couldn't care less about code. Think of it this way, though - this'll save me about a day's work, not to mention the embarrassment and lost sales due to the inaccuracy that my cack-handed manual data entry would inevitably lead to. More time to do fun things! Like, er, my bookkeeping course which I'm really enjoying and will tell you about later. Anyway. Videos first.
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Friday!
No matter how long you work for yourself; no matter how the traditional working hours, evenings and weekends merge into one another, I always like Fridays. Because it's the end of the week! Er, even if I will do 8 hours at least on both weekend days.
And I'm feeling remarkably light-hearted on this particular Friday. Perhaps it is mania. That is a definite possibility. Perhaps it is a great boredom with thinking about all the crap that's gone on, and just wanting to be happy instead. Also true. Perhaps it is because so many silver linings have appeared in this week, and I've had so many conversations with kind, thoughtful and generous people, that it's restored my faith in human kindness and serendipity.
I hope that over the coming days, weeks and months we'll have lots of good things to share with you here. I think things are on the way up. But for today: hey! It's Friday! Tell me Fridayish things.
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Some good fortune
Like one of those straggly cheap trees which are the only ones left at the Christmas Tree place because you've left it too late, our Christmas offering is a bit sparse this year. We have Krimson in hardback, which is brilliant, but not much else. This is as much to do with the eye-watering marketing charges at this time of year than anything.
However: great news! Lovely Waterstone's are running a horror promotion in section over the next 8 weeks. You may have noticed that we have some rather fine examples of the genre. So this morning when I looked at sales, there's hundreds of copies of most of them sold! It's made it a nearly £5000 sales week, which is smashing, and a lot more than if we'd have sold one or two frontlist titles on promotion - along with the associated marketing charges and print bills. It's only taken 7 years, but at last we have a viable business in the backlist. Yey!
Right: on with my To Do list!
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Hello
Hello world. I'm back!
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Watching movies
Just so you don't think it's all-sociopath-all-the-time here, I wanted to say something about the rather childish enthusiasm I'm seeing for 3D movies at the moment - and I'm not talking about the audience; I'm talking about the childlike enthusiasm of the film industry.
I'm far from the only one who keeps an eye on both the music and the movie industries as a way of peering into possible futures for book publishing. All three sectors package essentially intangible products of uncertain and frequently inscrutable appeal for a fickle customer-base and all three are struggling with the impact of changes in technology. It's getting easier to physically make (if not to author) music, movies and books and it's getting easier to consume them - without paying if you want.