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Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic
I mentioned in my last post that the CDC (that's the Center for Disease Control in America) have issued some guidelines on how to prepare for the coming zombie apocalypse. Of course, they're sneakily telling you lots of things that would also apply if the outbreak were less supernatural in nature. But this is surely more fun. And it seems like they're continuing the pretense by offering zombie posters and now a zombie graphic novella. Posters are here. The novella is here.
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Pre-apocalyptic zeitgeist
The extent to which I don't have my finger on the common pulse is considerable. For instance, I rarely get my news from TV, which means the current-affairs I know about tends to be skewed towards what seems bad when you think about it rather than on what looks bad when you watch the video of it. But even without all the Mayan calendar nonsense about 2012 being the end of the line, I keep picking up the vibe that lots of people think the end of the world is coming. Soonish.
More and more I read about people obsessing about where they live, where they stash their money or what sort of supplies they keep in the house all considered in the light of Something Bad Happening. And I suspect one of the reasons for the explosion of interest in zombies of late is that it gives us all a chance to consider "what would I do in that situation?". The Walking Dead is a chance for us all to do a bit of personal End of Days planning. And in fact you can find scads of answers to the question of how we should respond to the undead overrunning the Earth from everyone from the CDC to multi-tool maker, Gerber's, Apocalypse Kit.
As well as evangelicals worrying about The Rapture and the rest of us contemplating the Zombie Apocalypse, we've got the real life prospect of climate disaster, we've got the potential catastrophic lock-up of the global banking industry, we've got wars and famines, we've got terrorist threats and we've got periodic panics over pathogens like H1N1 and SARS. And I suppose people can be forgiven for letting those threats seep into the general psyche because - after all - they are real (well, except for terrorism, which statistically speaking, is insignificant in the West)
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Tablet ownership doubled at Xmas
I used to write titles to my blog posts which amused me. But then I could never find them again unless I could remember the joke. So look at what I've been reduced to. It's a blog title composed of utilitarian gruel, I know.
Anyway, what it refers to is a slightly surprising, potentially pivotal statistic. Over Christmas, we went from one fifth of American adults owning a tablet computer to two-fifths. Kapow. Exactly the same thing happened to U.S. e-reader ownership too. Kazap. In fact it actually sounds wrong to me. But I'm assuming that Pew Research know a lot more about these things than I do. And that being the case, it's a big reason why someone should get busy on the whole cross-platform interactive book idea that Apple may have just bungled.
Pew research link.
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iBooks odds and ends
Just to wrap up my recent (1 and 2) focus on the new iBooks 2.0 interactive textbook launch there are two snippets to add.
You might not have to upgrade to the latest version of the Mac OS to use iBooks Author after all. Supposedly it's for Lion only, but tech-minded tinkerers seem to have got it to work with Snow Leopard. See here for the fiddly details.
Apparently the EULA that comes with iBooks Author is the most greedy, grabby agreement of its kind according to someone who examines them for a living. See here. Apparently it attempts to control what you can do with the documents you create. People have likened it to trying to control what you can do with a Word document you write.
All in all, Apple seem to have taken a great idea - bring the world interactive textbooks - and done a slightly sleazy, short-sighted and tight-fisted job of it.
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iBooks caveats
Imagining a new way of learning and then seeing someone build it (and show it off in a slick, glossy video) is a very exciting experience (as I mentioned in my last post). Last night I did a bit more reading about the iBooks 2.0 format on which this new Apple interactive textbook platform is based and I'm now 30% less enthused. Maybe as much as 60% less. It's difficult to get a really accurate figure until the field of neuroscience advances a little, but suffice it to say the latest weather forecast for the iBooks parade now includes rain.
When I started getting excited about iBooks Author, the program Apple has just released for creating these interactive textbooks, it was largely because I thought they were building an ecosystem in which the textbook industry could make their new home. And perhaps they will. But this first version appears to be a closed system: you use an Apple program to make a book you can only read through Apple's iBooks software and can only sell through its iBooks store. And you can't easily carry over the work you've put into that book into a version that works elsewhere because you can't export your designs into other, more open formats. And since the iBooks 2.0 format is chock full of undocumented features it's going to be very difficult for anyone to write a conversion tool. Sad face.
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Books that teach
For a while now I've been mentally preparing for a world where non-fiction books could go digital and could contain interactive, intelligent, visually responsive content. Last year I talked about the possibilities here. If Adobe were on the ball, they'd have created a platform for these things, but they seem to be letting the world of e-books pass them by. Unsurprisingly, Apple have stepped into the breach and produced a free authoring program for creating interactive textbooks. You can go here and see their video about the ideas behind this new technology and what it's already capable of. Yes, the video is full of treacle and meaningful shots of multi-ethnic kids smiling, but I defy you to not get a little bit excited about the potential here. I've already downloaded a free copy of iBooks Author and when I get a chance I'm going to properly explore it. And remember, this is Version 1. Apple have a strong history of building on their innovations until they really create something powerful.
Downsides: to run iBooks Author you'll need a Mac. And it'll need to be running Lion, the latest version of the OS. Other downsides: if you work in non-fiction publishing you've suddenly got a lot more work to do.
update: check out my follow-up post with what I consider is some solidly bad news about the iBooks 2.0 platform.
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"We’re in Amazon’s sights, and they’re going to kill us."
I'm quoting from an article at Pando Daily where Sarah Lacy interviews an anonymous, but nevertheless quoteworthy publisher:
"Long-term there’s no future in printed books. They’ll be like vinyl: pricey and for collectors only. 95% of people will read digitally. Everybody in publishing knows this but most are in denial about it because moving to becoming a digital company means laying off like 40% of our staffs. And the barriers to entry fall, too. We simply don’t want to think about it. Amazon is thinking about it, though, and they’re targeting the publishers directly."
And: "To be honest, publishing is a quaint little industry based on romance and low profit margins. But now we’re in Amazon’s sights, and they’re going to kill us."
Provocative and polemic. Over the top, maybe. But I did have a brief moment while reading the article where I thought, "of course. this is all true." Probably because it's just a flashy and slightly paranoid version of what's been swirling around in my brain for a while now.
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Sherlock, 2nd season
Did you watch the second season of the BBC's Sherlock? You might just about be able to catch all three movie-length episodes on iPlayer if you're quick. I'm all conflicted about it. The first ep was absolutely wonderful. The second episode disappointed me. The third episode left me fuming.
Comprehensive spoilers ahead.
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Copyright and censorship
Today great chunks of the internet are offline as a protest against the SOPA and PIPA legislation that the U.S. Congress is soon to vote on. Like many pieces of anti-piracy legislation, it seems very happy to throw a lot of babies out with what might be a very small amount of bathwater. It contains a lot of bad ideas that have been proposed (and even partly adopted) before and will be again.
The heart of the debate is "how far will we go to defend the interests of copyright holders?" If you're an author or a publisher you probably have a dog in this race. You probably don't want to make it easy for people to use your copyrighted works without your permission. And when I've mentioned this subject before I've got the impression from the comments that many visitors here are in favour of very strong protection of copyright. For instance, when I've complained about the works of dead authors being protected for fifty or seventy years after their death, some commenters have questioned whether those protections should ever expire. I mean, why should what amounts to your personal property ever pass into public ownership?
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Apple textbooks announcement
It's become a bit of a cliché to wonder what an Apple version of something would be like - assuming it doesn't already exist. The firm totally redefined entire industries with their mobile phone and then their tablet, and there's talking of them tackling TVs soon. But an announcement that's crept up on me a little bit is that they've also been working in the field of interactive books - specifically tools for creating them. The sound bite seems to be 'garageband for e-books' - which won't mean anything to you if you don't know what GarageBand is (it's a music-making program with a famously intuitive and non-technical interface). On the 19th they're going to unveil whatever they've been working on and a lot of people think it'll revolutionise the textbook and drag it into the electronic age. More details here.
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"Why e-books will be much bigger than you can imagine"
Well, that's a chirpy title for an article, isn't it? It's written by Trey Ratcliff of the travel photography blog StuckInCustoms. He's also the founder of Flat Books. The article contrasts how you sell a pbook* and the kind of money you make, set against the evolving practice and profitability of selling ebooks, and it's based on his recent first-hand experiences. My summary: e-books can be fat moneyspinners and they're only going to get better. So head over and have a read if you want to be buoyed up about your e-book prospects. (He also bandies around terms like 'doomed' and 'dying' when referring to pbooks so depending on what you do for a living the net effect of the article on your mood might be down instead of up.)
*It's probably annoyingly faddy and jargonistic of me to refer to paper books as pbooks. On the other hand, 'paper books' sounds stilted and I'm tired of calling them 'traditional books'. But when I'm talking about e-books I need a way to convey the idea of non-e-books that's not too clunky. Any better suggestions?
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The Red Men
Here's a very fine review of The Red Men. We published it in 2007, would you believe. It sports one of the most technically challenging covers we've ever done - all the yellow lines are in gold foil. You can just imagine the poor man in a blue boiler suit, down at the printers, mopping his brow, puffing and muttering something about not being able to change the laws of physics. The book was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award in 2008 - well worth a read. (The agent nabbed back the ebook rights so I can only direct you to the printed version.)
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Things that happen
Stick around in publishing - or any business, I'll bet - for long enough and things get a sort of momentum of their own. I was procrastinating today, reading the Guardian, and came across this article from one of our authors, Carlton Reid, author of the mighty fine Family Cycling. The article's nothing to do with the book (well, both are about cycling, but that's about all), but it was nice to see an article by one of our own.
And then I get a marketing email from Amazon, about steampunk. It might be because I - obviously - look at a fair number of Snowbooks' titles on Amazon, but it was funny to see five of the eight books in the Amazon email were our own. It's even weirder to see Amazon reviews where the writer cites other Snowbooks' titles (along the lines of 'I liked this book, but this other book was even better'). The writer didn't seem to know the two books were published by the same company - we just seem to be relatively dominant in our sphere.
Like I say, I suppose this sort of thing just comes from being around for a while. The other huge benefit of that, I was thinking today, is that we're so practiced. We can get a book out the door - if we feel like it - in about a day (with the exception of editing and proofreading. Ain't no shortcut for that). Not that we do. But we could. Cover design, writing blurbs, typesetting, generating printer files, getting the metadata done, uploading things to Amazon, informing retailers, sourcing printers, sending out review copies, publishing to the website - we've done it a bazillion times before, we're good at it, we can do it quickly and it's fun.
Whilst it was exciting to be a start up, it's absolutely magical to be established.