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The Hunger Games
I read The Hunger Games recently. I read the trilogy on my iPad using the Kindle app. There are a lot of Kindle books in the world and a lot of iPads. And The Hunger Games occupies four of the top ten positions in the Kindle Store. In other words, the collected edition of the trilogy is about as high-profile an e-book as it's possible to get. I mention this because different chapters were set in different sized fonts. One would be comically big, and I'd reduce the size. But in a few chapters' time the words would become tiny and I'd have to increase their size again. I'd guess there were four size changes in all, but it might have been more. It probably shouldn't annoy me, but it does. I've never encountered a cheap paperback in which the typesetting was as problematic as some of the multi-million bestselling e-books I've read. I understand that the technology isn't there yet to do the fancy stuff, but when you're sure you're going to sell more than a million copies of something, isn't it worth paying another hundred pounds and getting someone to check it? And unlike a huge paper print run, if you find out you've botched the typesetting, well we all make mistakes: just upload a corrected version. Assuming it matters to you.
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Horowitz reviews publishers
Anthony Horowitz, author of, among other things, the Alex Rider series, has an amusing, rambling piece in the paper today entitled: "Do we still need publishers?" I'm not much wiser having read it about what he himself believes, but he has a lot more fun reviewing the evidence than most articles of this sort. My favourite excerpt: "Relations between [Orion and me] have been strained ever since they published my Sherlock Holmes novel, The Mouse of Slick, with no fewer than 35 proof-reading errors. Their proof-reader tried to kill herself. She shot herself with a gnu." Read the article here.
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E-book faux-pas and gaffes
Why are scruffy paperbacks beautifully typeset, but anything goes with e-books, even when they're global bestsellers being read on a high-end tablet? It's something I've grumbled about in the past and my theory is that it's about new, fragmented workflows versus old, bedded-in ones. And it's about having the right tools. We've had a couple of decades to get the hang of typesetting for a fixed page-size on a computer and we've got dedicated software for the purpose in the form of QuarkXPress and latterly InDesign. In the world of e-books, it's still amateur hour. Which perhaps makes it easier for genuine amateurs to sell their wares among all the 'professional' disasters. On the other hand, if a dedicated publishing company finds it difficult to get things right, then it stands to reason the self-publishing novice can really struggle. Here's an interesting blog post from author Michael Stackpole pointing out the worst e-book howlers and some tips on avoiding them.
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Eternal Copyright
A jaunty article in the Telegraph today in which the author (following in the footsteps of Swift's Modest Proposal) suggests we no longer limit copyright to a mere seventy years after the death of the creator and do the sensible thing: move to Eternal Copyright.
Excerpt: "Under the current system, if you lived to 70 years old and your descendants all had children at the age of 30, the copyright in your book – and thus the proceeds – would provide for your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. But what, I ask, about your great-great-great-grandchildren? ...With eternal copyright, the knowledge that our great-great-great-grandchildren and beyond will benefit financially from our efforts will no doubt spur us on to achieve greater creative heights than ever seen before."
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Kindle Direct Publishing - Select
Amazon is big enough that it can launch entire new business models without anyone in my little village noticing and telling me. I was aware of Kindle Direct Publishing, but I hadn't heard about Kindle Direct Publishing - Select. There's an article here from a fellow called Christopher Wright discussing whether or not it's a good idea - but I actually found it most useful for first explaining what the new service actually entails. link.
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The last mile
I spent a good chunk of 1999 working for a company that was busy pondering ways to solve the problem of 'the last mile' in internet delivery. At the end of the 90s it was clear that the world was going to order its goods online in ever-increasing numbers. But where were these goods to be delivered to? An empty house with its occupants out at work. We daydreamed about neighbourhood concierges, about petrol stations and post offices used as local collection depots, about lock-boxes in people's gardens. And on days when none of that seemed likely we imagined a disappointing Plan B where couriers narrowed their delivery windows to half-hour time slots and offered evening and weekend options. Not once did any of us working on that problem foresee that in the year 2012 online ordering would be the norm but most deliveries would work in the exact same way as 13 years before.
I have a mobile phone being delivered tomorrow and Vodafone's text message on the matter says, "Your delivery may arrive at any time between 8:00 and 18:00. Please ensure someone is available to sign for it." Good job I'm not a high court judge or a rocket surgeon or something. I mean, staying at home for a day could be bad news if I was supposed to be directing air traffic somewhere. It's a version of 2012 that no sci-fi author of the 90s predicted.
For one or two abstruse meditations on how this problem might be solved continue reading. Strictly optional.
update: In the interests of fairness I should say that Vodafone texted mid-morning to let me know my delivery would arrive between 1:45 and 2:45. I'd have still had to take the whole day off, but at least I could have gone out to get some lunch.
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Anonymous vigilantes
So, have you got an opinion about Anonymous yet? They 'hack' computers so they're bad, right? And they release classified information. And they take down commercial websites. And many of them are puerile and vulgar.
Of course, a good portion of what they leak, just like with Wikileaks, is stuff that we need to know. And by 'we' I mean people who vote. We're in the dark about so many things and we realise that most clearly when groups like Anonymous spill the beans. This week they showed they could eavesdrop on the FBI making deals with the Metropolitan Police. Well, I for one want to know how much influence the U.S. has over the British justice system. And apparently they're just about to release all sorts of information about a supposed massacre of Iraqis by the U.S. Marine Corps. And I definitely want to know about that. (source)
I can't believe the powers-that-be will tolerate the ability of anarchists and rogues to interfere in their plans and reveal their secrets for much longer. And I'm pretty sure I won't like whatever response the establishment comes up with. But for the minute, I personally think it's nice to be slightly less in the dark than usual.
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E-books: Franzen vs. Zimmer
It's a tricky thing to rail against the march of technology. It's very easy to seem like a grumpy old fool - even if you have a point. And it's an activity with an embarrassing history. You risk joining the ranks of people who thought phones, computers, trains, cars, television and the internet were silly fads. Jonathan Franzen takes a crack at it in the context of e-books, and I have to say I think he makes a hash of it. He comes at e-books from a couple of angles, starting by pointing out their flaws compared with a paperback. Paperbacks are cheap and robust so: "No wonder capitalists hate them." What? And he seems to suggest that ink is more respectful of good work than a digital file. Then he stumbles into the weeds by suggesting that the impermanence of digital books might just undermine society.
There's a pretty good response to this silliness by NYT science writer Carl Zimmer at Discover Magazine. But Franzen, like so many people who rant about the internet, fails to understand what he's looking at. By creating millions of copies of a book, digitally locking each one and then distributing them around the world, a book can achieve permanence with a thousand times the speed of a paper book. Whatever evil lurks within the idea of electronic publishing, I'm pretty sure it's not on the list Jonathan Franzen has drawn up.
If you read his words summarised in the Telegraph then I should say that I start to agree with him in the second half of the piece. It's great that President Obama can read at college-graduate level and does so voluntarily (unlike the previous incumbent). And I never tire of people pointing out that bankers and big business control the political process (I've been in the tiny majority who believed that for a while now and it's great to suddenly have so much company).
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Amazon recommendations visualised
Well, it's not exactly Amazon's recommendations (which have always been abysmally wide of the mark in my case) that someone has chosen to make into giant interactive pictures; it's information contained in the 'Customers who bought this item also bought' links. Why not take a look here at the interconnected cloud of books. I can see a tool like this being very useful for figuring out what to read next. (via GalleyCat)
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Greptastic.
Flushed with success from the overwhelming response to my previous geeky post, I am thrilled to bring you something else that you'll never use, but if you did would save you masses of time.
Do you ever have an XML file which isn't validating because of invisible non-ASCII characters? Yeah? You do? I bet you do! Allow me to help!
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Ruckus in the world of academic journals
I've always assumed that academic journals are a force for good because they're the keepers of science's most important documents: the basic research papers themselves. Moreover, journals are part of the mechanism of peer-review which keeps science headed in the right (=truth-seeking) direction. I had noticed that many journals were kind of expensive - scarily so for multi-user licences - but without knowing the business model, I just assumed there was a good reason for that. But increasingly I'm learning disquieting things which suggest that some journals have effectively become toll-gates through which vital information is forced to pass. I've also been struck by the argument that virtually all of the research that appears in scientific journals is wholly or partly funded with public money, and yet if you want to see what your taxes paid for, you have to enrich a private company first. And worse still, scientists themselves have to pay to see each others' publicly funded work.
I imagine that there are significant costs involved in producing academic journals but I would have expected in the e-book age we might have seen prices beginning to fall for digital versions of articles. After all, if scientists write the papers at no charge to the journal, then other academics peer review those papers at no charge to the journal, can a digital download of that paper really cost that much to produce? Well, perhaps it can, but I do feel these journals have some questions to answer given the important and highly privileged position that many of them occupy.
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Running XSL
Well, fancy that. I've found a new command-line way to transform massive XML files. No more java heap space exceptions! No more paying a mahoosive license fee for Oxygen XML just to transform XML!
This is for Mac only. Open the Terminal application. Change into the directory which contains both your XML and XSL files by entering the file path:
cd path/to/your/folder
You can use XSL to transform any sort of XML file. For instance, you might want to convert an ONIX file from its short-tag version to the long reference tag version. Run:
xsltproc shorttolong.xsl short.XML -o long.xml
That syntax is: call the command 'xsltproc'. (The libraries are built in to OSX, so you don't need to have installed anything to get this to work.) Give the name of the XSL file you want to use. Then give the name of the XML file you want to transform. Write -o, and then give the name you want the output file to have.
Simples and usefuls!