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Publishers backing DRM helps Amazon achieve monopoly
...or so says Charlie Stross. The argument runs like this: the big publishers don't want people nicking their books, so they insist on DRM so they're locked down nice and tight. The biggest and best DRM platform is Kindle so that's where they head. But once Amazon have taken over the world, they will have considerable power over the big publishers and will squeeze their profits. (Or to misquote evil-Willow from that one episode of Buffy: "In my world the publishers are in chains and we ride them like ponies." Not that Charlie Stross said anything specifically about chains or ponies. I'm just colourfully illustrating his point.) Anyway, have a read of the blog post.
It's an interesting idea, no? Fear of naughty, light-fingered readers is pushing big publishers into the maw of the threat that they should be focussing on.
It also makes me wonder what I'd do if I had a magic wand that gave me control over the world of publishing. Get ready for threadbare profit margins whatever happens, I suppose. I mean either Amazon are going to 'win', in which case margins will get thinner, or electronic self-publishing is going to combine with reader-led forums to bypass a lot of traditional publishing... and margins will get thinner. If I get to choose our method of execution, I think I'd probably prefer option 2.
Incidentally, I saw the link to the Charlie Stross post on Tim O'Reilly's Twitter feed. Not a bad fellow to follow.
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Whatever happened to Climate Change?
There's a great Onion story from last year about how: "According to a report released this week by the Center for Global Development, climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth's continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem." It's dark humour, but it skewers that attention-deficit problem the world tends to have when it comes to news stories. Have a read here.
A much longer and less funny article in The Nation goes a bit further than suggesting we forgot about climate change. Despite the supporting science getting stronger and the evidence getting harder to miss, public opinion is heading in the opposite direction. What percentage of Americans believe that burning fossil fuels is changing the climate? Here are the poll results in three different years:
In 2007: 71% of Americans recognised man-made climate change was real.
In 2009: 51% believed it was real.
In 2011: 44% believe.
Wow. Likewise the media have been backing away from the issue. In 2001, American TV networks ran 147 stories on climate-change. By last year the number was down to 32. Celebrities buy fewer Priuses and Vanity Fair have long since abandoned their 'annual' Green issue. The article I'm referring to is probably TL;DR* for most of you, but it's here and contains a fair bit of information that's, you know, important to the continued well-being of our species. (The printable version gets rid of all the ads and page breaks and it's here.)
It's breathtaking, really. We need massive, globally-coordinated action to fix this nonsense and the only people who seem organised and vocal on this subject are the oil companies and a few right-wing billionaires claiming the whole thing's a hippy plot and that ten-thousand climate scientists are fudging their figures as a way of getting grants. Come on, humanity. Fixing the world could be fun! And I don't want to spend my old age living in a cave eating grubs .
* In case you don't know, TL;DR is disparaging interweb lingo for 'Too Long; Didn't Read'
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Amazon Swansea
Let me be the first millionth person to say that the Amazon distribution hangar in Swansea looks like the warehouse-at-the-end-of-Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark*. It is biiiiig. See here.
* or the WATEOROTLA as I tend to call it to save time as it is such an oft-referred-to-thing (ORTT).
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The People's Library
Any fans of libraries out there? No? Oh yes, a couple. Good. Here's a heartwarming story (to me at least) of a nice lady/professor/librarian working at the Occupy Wall Street site picking the books out of dumpsters after the police raid the place and trying to get the library going again. She seems to think that democracy and libraries are somehow linked. I wonder if she's right. [link]
And while I was still thinking about libraries I saw this quote (which is nothing to do with the story above) on Twitter: "Checked out a library book — shocked the librarian didn't tell my friends, or try to sell me a coffeemaker used by others who like this book." [source]. Funnily enough, that sort of thing is the subject of a post about targeted marketing that I'm trying to get round to finishing.
And finally, if you're so moved, you can send the People's Library books. Details here.
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Humiliating bug climb down
I'm really tempted to switch to the passive voice the way politicians do because it turns out I was wrong about something (I know!). Let me just try it for a while: Today, Rob Jones, expressed his wish to 'clarify' his earlier remarks regarding Amazon's InDesign plug-in for creating Kindle e-books. Mr Jones said that it was 'regrettable' that certain assertions were made regarding user problems with the plug-in and that he was pleased to be able to announce that the bug in question is not part of its default operation. He thanked Amazon for their help in laying that portion of the public's concerns to rest.
Or in other words, when I found a nasty bug in the plug-in, I said that it occurred when using the default settings, but I was wrong. There is a bug, but it only bites if you manually set 'Footnotes location' to 'In place' - and that's NOT the default setting. That being the case, far fewer people than I imagined will be affected. I expect the main users of that setting will be: a) blunderers who select it without realising b) blunderers who don't really know what any of the settings do anyway or c) honest-but-confused yeoman e-publishers who are frantically trying any and all settings as part of their desperate attempts to correct their yucky e-book layouts. I haven't decided which one of those camps I claim to be in yet.
Anyway, thanks to the chaps and chapettes at Amazon for getting in touch, setting me straight, and for letting me know that they're working on the bug. And sorry again for always slagging you all off, like I sort of did *again* about an hour ago. link.
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Why you need to be a computer expert - Part II
Be the guy on the right
I think my mistake in Part I was couching my pro-technology argument in technological terms. It's just dawned on me that there's a better way to make my point. And it's this: if you had to choose, which would you prefer to be: an eloi or a morlock? I'm promoting the Morlock camp. And remember, for all their happy picnicking, the Eloi couldn't read and could hardly talk.
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Two-tier KF8 roll-out
So, there are 'enhanced' e-books available from the Kindle store that will only play on your shiny new Fire (which I'm assuming most of you don't have yet because of your lamentable lack of Americanness). There are lots of comics but I've found at least one e-book too with what I understand to be KF8-style content. On the other hand, I'm still on the waiting list to be informed when Amazon releases software tools for publishers to help them create KF8 content. Which raises the question of how those publishers who had enhanced e-books ready for the Kindle Fire managed to do it. Presumably it's the two-tier system I wrote about before. Certain, selected publishers must have been briefed and assisted by Amazon. Or is that an unwarranted assumption? Anyway, assuming it's true, I'm just wondering how they chose their pals. I mean, imagine Snowbooks had been chosen and we'd got Fire-only e-books ready for Christmas when many tens of thousands of people will unwrap the aforementioned tablet and go looking for some content. I mean, a leg-up like that could be worth a lot of money. We could stop buying Mr Kiplings mince-pies and switch to the Waitrose ones. Permanently. So if Amazon are interested in anointing an indie publisher and giving them a real advantage over their equally-deserving competitors, why not choose us? [oh yeah, and I'm sorry for all the times I lampooned/criticised/scaremongered about you guys. No hard feelings.]
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Scanningenuity (don't try to pronounce that)
How do we feel about book-scanning machines? <East End Gangster Voice>Takin' food outta the mouths o' my kids</East End Gangster Voice> maybe? Or making once-rare books available to millions of people? Or perhaps (you being such a nuanced lot) it depends on the use to which they're put. Irregardless (as I like to say), building one from scrap for $300 that can scan a 400-page book in 20 mins is pretty cool. That's what student, Daniel Reetz, did. And then he realised that other people would want to follow in his footsteps so he set up an online community for collecting and refining designs for DIY book-scanning machines. I love that kind of technology: simultaneously state-of-the-art while using scraps of plywood and junky old cameras. There's an intro article at Wired and The New York Times and the community site is here. Plus Daniel is an interesting guy to listen to if you track him down on the YouTubes, etc.
[Incidentally, I hate using those <East End Gangster Voice> tags. I'm always afraid I'll forget a closing tag and the whole blog will end up in a right ol' two-and-eight.]
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: Feedback
Quick question: did anyone find my scripting tutorial useful? Or have any comments or complaints? My impression is that there's not much interest in things like that (as you'll have gathered from its snarksome intro), but I thought I would give it a go. Happy to do more posts in that vein if they fulfil a need (maybe a scripting turorial for InDesign?); happy to focus on other things if they hold no interest.
Update: I think I might take that deafening silence as my answer. Gotcha: no InDesign or Photoshop scripting tutorials. Ungrateful swines.
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Glimpsed through a veil of fusty empiricism
Goodness me, I'm such a philistine. Half the time when I see an artistic creation, sitting there in its cloud of poignant symbolism and chin-strokey challenged-assumptions, I am as likely to tut as nod. I don't know much about art, but I know what I don't like... and it's a long list. I don't like art that's too smug or too openly manipulative. I don't like simplistically shocking art that treats me as though I'm just a moral-panic button to be jabbed at according to the artist's whim. But every now and again I, you know, sort of see what someone is getting at. Or I think I do (which, as all you post-modernists know, is just as good). I happened by ex-Snowbooker, James Bridle's web-site and saw his Iraq War Wikihistoriography. It's a chronological compendium of all the edits on the Wikipedia page for The Iraq War done up like traditional, multi-volume, bound history books. It makes me think about how news becomes history, about how sometimes history is what's happening right now and about how crowd-sourced information, with all those vying viewpoints, is changing the way historical texts will be laid done for posterity. Plus it's a cool idea which looks neat. Nice one, James.
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Bound
Oh check this trailer out. Clever, clever Sarah Bryant who did it all herself. Bound is published in paperback and hardback next February.
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Google Web Fonts
Snap! I see that Emma just pointed you towards Google Images' new feature. Now I'm wondering if y'all have seen the fonts available at Google Web Fonts.
You may or may not know that these days you can choose from thousands of fonts when you're putting a web page together. I mean, you could do that in the past, but unless your users also had those fonts installed they'd just end up seeing your site in one of the standard fonts we're all used to looking at on the web. But with HTML5 you can choose any old font you like and if your visitors don't have them installed your webpage can tell your browser how to secretly fetch them from somewhere like... Google Web Fonts.
But what surprised me was that you don't have to use those fonts in your web pages. I just downloaded a font to use in Illustrator. This one in fact: here's a bit of text that will appear in Stardos Stencil font if you're using an up-to-date browser and let's face it, why wouldn't you be? They're free after all.
The fonts at Google Web Fonts are all open-source and free (like it says here). So fill your boots. link
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Wowsers
Hey, did you know about this? You can search by image on Google. How astoundingly cool is that? Click the icon that looks like a camera, in the search bar on Google Images. How do they do it?
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Pet hate
I'm not a grammar Nazi. I don't much care if you deploy the subjunctive cackhandedly or you use 'less' with count nouns. As far as I'm concerned, infinitives shall be split according to taste. And prepositions can bring up the rear if they wish. I'm aware of solid historical reasons why you might think 'you was there' is entirely grammatical. And I believe that if the majority of speakers think a word means something - even if older versions of the dictionary disagree - well, now it does mean that, because language is a democracy, whether we like it or not (and I happen to like it). But I do draw the line when it comes to professional writing - by which I mean the output of journalists, authors, editors, copywriters, spokespeople and those intending their words to reach large numbers of people. Unless you have a good reason - like you're writing in your local dialect or being edgy, urban and slangy - then I'd rather you stick to the rules they taught you in school. And in a pinch, if you can't remember anything else, if you get your homonyms muddled and switch randomly between "their", "they're" and "there", could you please, just for my sake, get your mind around "its" and "it's"?
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First person to guess what this is...
WINS...the respect and admiration of their peers. What, you think I'm made of prizes?
Is it just me, or does anyone else's heart jump for joy when you see a list of things that are ALL GREEN?
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Portals 2.0
There’s an interesting piece in this month’s Wired about the launch of the Kindle Fire and the future of Amazon. It begins as an editorial and turns into an interview with Jeff Bezos. A chunk of it concerns what you might call the ‘positioning’ of the Fire and the devices that will come after it. As many have speculated, it seems that the Fire is not primarily intended as a general-purpose tablet; it’s designed more along the lines of its Kindle predecessors in that it’s a dedicated delivery-point for Amazon content. But unlike its predecessors, the Fire lets you consume not just books, but movies, music and apps - and it has an innovative full-service web browser built-in. It appears that Amazon would like to do to each of those new channels what they've already done to e-books.
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Busman's holiday leisure activities
Ages ago I mentioned a kerning game you can play in your web browser by going here. If you fancy yourself as a bit of a typesetter then why not give it a go.
Then, when you're ready for a real aesthetic challenge go here and have a go at perfecting some font designs... as a game.
I think I like the idea that there is room in the world for games where nothing explodes, no music plays and you're using some highly abstract ability - like your feeling for how the stroke on a capital 'Q' should curve - as your primary game skill. It's easy to imagine similarly abstract literary/artistic games based on your ability to choose between synonyms when honing a sonnet. Or correctly identifying complementary colours. In fact someone should make a game where you adjust the typeface, font size and text placement on a book cover for maximum beauty and impact. (Might be just the thing to help self-publishing authors avoid saddling their books with covers that scream 'self-published'.)
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Too early?
Frantically hit refresh a few times and you might see a different look to the SnowBlog. Any excuse for some snowflakes, right?
We started with an image we found on Flickr that had the appropriate Creative Commons permissions. And then we changed it so much that you can hardly recognise it. Here's the original if you're interested. Thanks Mya of Flickr.
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Scripting tutorial
Curses. Now two people have asked that I take you through the Photoshop script I recently wrote. And one of those people I actually know, so now I suppose I'll have to do it. Even though I know all you other people reading this now aren't going to bother with it. You'll stop reading in a paragraph or two because something shiny will catch your eye or X Factor will be on or, now that I've mentioned X Factor, you'll realise you'd like to go to the Daily Mail website and catch up on the latest sizzling gossip. So here is a link for that.
Ahem. Now the rest of you open your textbooks to chapter three and we'll begin.
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Amazon below cost? Part two.
I was pontificating recently on the fact that Amazon are happy to sell at or below cost as a strategic investment. The phrase 'strategic investment' in that last sentence you will recognise as business speak for 'attempting to buy market share'. And now here's an article suggesting that the latest Kindle reader might cost more than they're being sold for. (And incidentally, could Amazon start giving their e-readers model names again, please. 'The one they've been selling since last year' and 'the one they're just about to ship' are not good names.)
As for selling below cost, I certainly have mixed feelings about that strategy. As I said before, the problem comes not so much from a corporation choosing to give things away, but from what it might want in return. I'm concerned that the idea behind 'dumping' product at below cost is to make the market temporarily unprofitable for everyone else in order to drive out the competition - after which Amazon could bump the prices back up, conceivably even higher than they started out. Not only is a move like that about reducing competition in the long run, it's a strategy only open to those with deep pockets. And that in itself is an important point: I can't say for sure that Amazon are intending to extract 'monopoly profits' from the book/e-book market once they're in a strongly dominant position, all I can do is look at what all this selling-at-a-loss must be costing them and worry about how they intend to make it all back (and more besides, presumably).
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Creepy log
If I'm at my desk*, I have a terminal window open, running a log of what's happening on snowbooks.com. Yes, it is a bit like that bit in the Matrix where the bloke looks at a series of green characters on a screen, and sees a woman in a slinky red dress. And yes, it is weird that I can see every link that you click on, as you click on it.
But don't feel self-conscious. You just carry on. Don't you worry about me. I'll just be over here.
* well, I say desk. Sofa, is what I mean, laptop on lap.
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Save time, people. Automate!
Yesterday I (finally) wrote a script to turn an image of any size into one of the little thumbnails that you see next to SnowBlog posts. It's written in JavaScript and you call it from within Photoshop - in fact I gave it its own shortcut key. It instantly does something which normally takes me a minute or so to do manually. Not a big deal, but then I waste that minute every time I write a blog post. And worse still I know I'm wasting that minute as it happens. The script more or less instantly does the following:
* Flattens any layers leaving the image and the background
* Resizes the image to be 280 pixels wide, while maintaining its shape
* Resizes the canvas so it's just a bit bigger than the image (we need room for a drop shadow)
* Nudges the image out of the top-left corner (so we can select around its edge if we want)
* Applies a pre-defined style to the image (you can't apply drop shadow and outer glow from the code)
* Selects the area outside the image, feathers the selection and then removes it to give a soft edge
It didn't take me long to write and would be much faster if I wrote a few similar scripts. I've also written scripts to automate my use of InDesign (although it's actually not me who does our typesetting). You write these things, drop them in the correct directory, and suddenly they're available to run from Photoshop or InDesign (or Illustrator or what-have-you). What I'm wondering is: if I showed you guys how to do that stuff would anyone be interested? Would anyone write their own scripts? I don't think it's difficult to write these things - fiddly, but not difficult - plus the standard is merely 'good enough' not 'commercial quality' - but then I'm maybe more used to programming than most publishers. Maybe you feel the same way about the prospect of writing a few lines of code as you would about learning quantum mechanics. I'm happy to share a bit of simple guidance and a worked example if there's some demand, but I can't really gauge if most people would get a kick out of automating and customising the tools they use or if that's more of a nerdy/Rob/just-me thing. Thoughts?
Also, while I'm on the subject, please check out Monday's XKCD: link. (You hold your mouse pointer over the image for a bit more humour.)
Apologies to commenter Nathan, but if only one person out there is interested I might save my lengthy explanations of how to do this stuff. Luddites.
OK, so I cracked and wrote a tutorial. It's here.
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Gee whiz
I know I do this occasionally, but I had another of those we're-living-in-the-future moments the other day. I was reading an article about micro-controllers because that's the sort of person I am. The article started with a reminiscence about the Cray 1 Supercomputer. Cray 1s still look like something out of science fiction. They built seats into it so that you could sit round the edge and it had a central column like the time rotor in the Tardis. In 1976 it was the world's first proper supercomputer. Its incredible processing capacity required vast amounts of electricity: 115 kilowatts (equivalent to fifty household electric heaters on full blast). In fact most of the computer was taken up by its liquid cooling system.
Today you can get a chip that does the same job. It costs about five pounds and it consumes 1 watt. So you could run sixty of them on the same amount of electricity used by an old-fashioned light bulb. So can you think of anything you might need a supercomputer for, because chances are you own a couple.
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Uncle Rob's Tech Treasures
magic?
So, a lot of people think of me as a bit of a trendsetter*. And when it comes to the technology I use, I'm always getting asked to share my nifty secrets*. That's probably because I tend to be up to date with all that's cool and useful when it comes to web-related tricks and tips*.
*not true
But (semi-)seriously, here are a couple of things I'm getting lots of benefits from at the moment. First, I recommend using a service like Instapaper. The idea is that you can clip whatever you like from the web for later perusal. Most of the common browsers let you add Instapaper functionality. And you can set it up so that whatever you've clipped is available on whichever machine you want. Clip interesting articles at work and then read them on your phone while traveling home, for instance. For a less useful version of the same thing, you could just synchronise your browser bookmarks between computers, using something like XMarks. Not as handy, but XMarks can synchronise passwords as well as bookmarks. Or you could use the Safari browser which now comes with a 'reading list'. If you happen to use an iPhone or an iPad (and you keep your phone's software up-to-date) then you also have access to that same Safari reading list on those devices. On a side note: I'm also loving Safari's new 'Reader' button: it takes all the clutter out of a web-page and formats it like an article in a book. It even makes the text a sensible size. It's a much easier way to read longer pieces of text, and again it's available on iOS devices as well as Macs and PCs. (There's a plug-in for Firefox called 'Reader' which attempts to do the same thing.)
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InDesign Kindle plug-in bug
This post isn't going to make any sense to you unless you're creating Kindle e-books by using Amazon's plugin to InDesign. But if you are making e-books that way, there's a bug you might like to know about. The plugin lives here, by the way. It's a beta release and it's flaky, but it's still very useful. The bug I'm referring to is in the 0.95 version (which is the latest as I'm writing this - and I'm using it with InDesign CS5.5 for Mac). The problem is that if you choose the wrong settings when using the plugin, the e-book creation process ignores page breaks in your source file. What that means is that text that's on different pages in your InDesign file ends up on the same page in the finished e-book. You can insert more page breaks into the InDesign document but they have no effect. But with the correct settings, those page breaks do what you'd expect them to and trigger a new page in the e-book wherever they appear.
So what's the setting which controls whether page breaks are honoured? I'll give you a clue: it's not called 'Ignore page breaks'. No. It's the setting marked 'Footnote location'. If you tell the plugin to put the footnotes at the end of chapters ('Before break / new chapter'), then page breaks are honoured. If you choose the 'In place' setting, page breaks are ignored. Of course that makes no sense and is clearly a bug. But if you don't know it's there you could spend hours trying to work out why your Kindle books have all their text smushed together... like I did. Click the thumbnail picture to see the dialog I'm talking about.
[Update: despite what I said in the rest of this post, 'In place' is not the default setting. I got it wrong. More details here.]
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Go on, self-publish
I think we might actually suggest some guidelines for self-publishing at some stage, but we haven't organised our thoughts well enough for that yet. In the meantime, I thought I'd share a link I came across while getting to grips with our 'e-book creation workflow' (as I rather grandly like to think of our attempts to make really nice Kindle books). The link on the Amazon page said, "Publishers can also self-publish content as a blog or news feed using Kindle Publishing for Blogs beta". And the page it led to said, "Amazon Kindle Publishing for Blogs is a fast and easy self-publishing tool that lets you add and sell your blogs on the Kindle Store." That, so far, is the entire extent of my research, but it sounds like one more route to market for your words. Link.
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Moving to the latest e-book formats
KF8 comic
So, if you read this blog, or if you keep up with this stuff already, then you'll know that Amazon is replacing its current e-book format (based on Mobipocket) with KF8, which is based on the latest web standards. The old Amazon/Mobipocket format was also based on web standards, but from a few years ago. KF8 brings things up-to-date by using HTML5/CSS3. Those are also the standards you'd be looking at if you were considering a snazzy makeover of your website. On the web, HTML5 allows designers to do a number of cool things which they could only do previously if they added lots of behind-the-scenes code (=javascript) to their web pages or they used a third-party platform like Flash or Air or Silverlight. With HTML5, a web page can do a lot of that with no extra code required. HTML5 lets you make use of embedded fonts, lots of new layout commands, transparency, custom-curved corners to shapes, animated transitions - and it can better tailor its behaviour to the device it's being displayed on.
Presumably not all of these new web features will make it into KF8, but there's talk of "embedded fonts, drop caps and CSS selectors such as line spacing, alignment, justification, margin, color, style and borders.[1]" One of the things I'm looking forward to (which I think is supported) is footnotes implemented as popups, rather than as jumps to another page. I'm also hoping that we can have e-books laid out with the same attention to detail as paper books have always enjoyed.
What I haven't seen much information on yet is the tools publishers can use to create these better, more beautiful e-books.
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Weirdy punctuation marks
Here's a fun little article entitled '14 Punctuation Marks That You Never Knew Existed'. You guys being you guys almost certainly did know that most of them existed, if not perhaps all of them. For instance, you'll have seen the symbol in that thumbnail there many times. But perhaps, like me, you didn't know it was apparently called a 'pilcrow'. Article.