http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQAcIyOYaF0&feature=youtu.be

Snowbooks.com will not so much be 'down' as 'patchily populated' for about 45 mins this evening. I'm pushing a fairly hefty change which will require an upload of data as well as code, which can take a bit of time. So forgive any rather spare-looking pages you come across between about 8 and 9pm tonight. I thank you.

(I should say that once the push is completed, you won't see much difference - it's a big change to the code of the website, rather than the look and feel or content. If you see something remarkably different after about 9pm, then something's gone horribly wrong...)

Cracking interview with Mark Hodder at his Forbidden Planet signing last week. Thanks too to our indefatigable printers CPI for pulling out all the stops and getting copies there on time. Nowt like a signing with no books...

Charlie Stross has clearly thought it through. If you have a few minutes, why not read what he has to say about the current state of publishing, the dangers of an Amazon monopoly (and monopsony), and what publishing's next move has to be. Sneak preview: ditching DRM on e-books is the only way to open up the market and put some pressure on Amazon. Read the post here.

What's the collective noun for reviews? 'Splurge' will do.

Look! Here's one for Bound. And here's one for Wildthyme Beyond! And now here's another one for Bound!

[pants]

I like it when a newspaper picks up a topic important to publishers, like the threat of an Amazon monopoly. I don't like it when someone like James Heneage steps forward to give the media a quote and blows it by mumbling about irrelevancies. Perhaps he is being misquoted or the paper is focussing on what were intended to be peripheral remarks, but this article makes it seem like his main objection to Amazon is that they're not really members of the club. Have a read.

Firstly he seems to believe that great authors need to be nurtured by publishers: eliminating publishers imperils literature. I personally am quite sure that great authors will continue to emerge if 'publisher' goes the way of 'lamplighter' or 'footman'. He also seems to believe that publishers have an important role spotting those great writers: without publishers we wouldn't notice the diamonds in the rough. I agree that's a role publishers fill... for now. But if what replaces the current model is readers reading any old thing, including lots of self-published novels, and then blogging and tweeting about them, I think we'll see books with lasting appeal being taken up more not less quickly. I won't lament the loss of the 'kingmaker' role in publishing. And there will still be prominent figures who can champion new writing.

Heneage also thinks that Amazon is not 'investing' enough in the industry, in (implied) contrast to the way that publishers do. He doesn't elaborate, but single-handedly developing and popularising a global e-book platform sounds like investing to me. As does allowing any solvent reader with an internet connection to get any book through the mail in a day or two - including titles that 99% of bricks-and-mortar stores never carried. And it may not be the sort of investment Heneage likes, but Amazon have also made books cheaper. In fact I would say that the problem is that Amazon is investing too much rather than too little.

Here's what Heneage should have said. We should worry about Amazon's oligopolistic power in the paper book world, and worry even more about their monopolistic dominance of the e-book sector. Monopolies are bad for everyone except the monopoly itself, which is why societies break them up or prevent them coming into existence in the first place - which isn't happening with Amazon. Geography gives local book owners some advantages with printed books. But when the product is downloaded, the biggest just tend to get bigger. Amazon hold all the cards here and DRM makes switching away from Amazon a costly and unpalatable proposition for readers.

If I were Heneage, I'd be arguing for a level playing field free from some arguably anti-competitive practices. Imagine if Amazon were forced to let you export your e-book library to another platform if you wanted to: that would at least give competitors a chance. Imagine if their prices were monitored to make sure they're not routinely selling at a loss. And imagine if there was an upper limit on the market share one firm could command like there is in many sectors. The threat from Amazon is its monopoly because it risks taking away the reader's options. So long as there is legitimate room for new players we can rely on innovation and reader sentiment to do most of the work in safeguarding what's good in the world of books.

source

I mentioned The New Aesthetic a while back. I certainly shouldn't be in the business of defining it, but I suppose if I were to try, I'd say it's a kind of reverse flow of imagery from the virtual world to the real. That's to say, when you see designed objects in the real world which take their stylistic cues from the features, artifacts and peculiarities of digital imagery you're probably in the realm of the New Aesthetic. (Alternatively, just go here and look at the pictures until you see what they have in common.)

What I also mentioned was that the person most responsible for bringing the term and the ideas behind it to people's notice is James Bridle, who for a couple of years spent his time finding and publishing innovative fiction for lil' ol' Snowbooks. Whereas now he has influential thinkers like Bruce Sterling singing his praises in venues like Wired magazine. Here's the excerpt that caught my eye: "James Bridle is the master of that salon. James Bridle has never yet claimed to be the Andre Breton-style Pope of the New Aesthetic, but in practice, nobody ever asks the central questions of anybody else but him. So, Bridle’s the guru there. "

I regularly see James's thoughts retweeted by people I look up to like William Gibson and Tim O'Reilly. And now he's the manifesto-writing guru behind an art movement. When James chaired a panel at SXSW this year, Bruce Sterling described it like this: "When I left the room at the SXSW “New Aesthetic” panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with the conviction that something profound had been touched. Touched, although not yet grasped. I’d suggest getting right after it." Nice work, James. Read the full article here.

As you may know, I don't read a lot of fiction these days because of my very sensitive prose allergies, but I'm reading one now. It's a thriller and I'm about a third of the way in. The plucky heroine knows the bad guys are after her but can't work out why. But I know why. The back-cover blurb explained it to me. I know who they are and what their plan involves. You can imagine how that undercuts the drama as the main protagonist searches for answers. And she's still so far off working it out that I'm wondering what percentage of the story the blurb has spoiled. We're already at 35%, but I wouldn't be surprised if I have to get to the 60% mark before I've caught up with what the back cover already told me. If I were the author I'd be furious. And this is a very well-researched book, carefully structured, so for some editorial assistant to breeze in after it's written and drain the tension out of the first 150 pages with a few badly chosen words must be immensely frustrating for the writer - I know it is for me. And this is Macmillan, who presumably know better.

So, just for the record, blurbs are about whetting the appetite not sating it. You don't summarise the plot; you hint at it. A blurb is not a précis.

Update: My guess was pretty good: at page 175 of 301, the story has finally caught up with the blurb. That's 56% of the way through the book.

This is such fun. Go here to see some gorgeous gory types entering Wayne Simmons' latest competition, and to get a sneak peek at the wonderful cover arts we've commission from top tattoo artist Chris Jones. You might want to enter yourself...

The Snowbooks website was unavailable for a few hours early this morning and it seems that it was my fault. Many apologies to our authors and those who tried to visit our site. I screwed up some 'DNS' settings and mayhem/confusion ensued.

As well as an apology I thought I'd use this as a 'learning opportunity' and explain what DNS is and why you need to know about it if you want to administer a website. Then, if you're interested, you can read about what it was I actually did wrong.

If you're trying to picture how digital data passing along a cable can be wrapped up into a packet I should explain that it's all just ones and zeroes, but the IP standard specifies a layout for those ones and zeroes. The first chunk of ones and zeroes will be the 'header' which is like the envelope. The header will contain the destination address and the return address and a few other pieces of information. Next will come the contents or 'payload' of the 'packet' i.e. the data you're trying to send across the internet, which could be something like a request to fetch the home page for the website at snowbooks.com.

But when it comes to the destination and return addresses, IP doesn't use a name like 'snowbooks.com'; it uses a number. This is similar to the way an old-style telephone doesn't let you type in the name of someone you want to talk to; it requires their phone number. So just like with telephones, the web requires a directory so that you can look up a name and get back a number that you can use to make a call. The way the directory is provided on the web is with something called 'DNS' and it's handled by your computer automatically so that you can surf the web without needing to know DNS even exists. But if it's your responsibility to add a new website to the web, you probably need to know the basics of what's going on.

The names on the web are 'domain names' (like 'snowbooks.com') and the numbers used to route data are called 'IP addresses' and most of them are four numbers, normally written separated by dots (e.g. '74.86.153.134'). You can buy the right to use a domain name by 'registering' it at one of the many Domain Name Registrars, like, say, nominet. But until that domain name has an IP address associated with it, nobody can use it to visit a website or send you e-mail.

So once you've registered yourself a domain name you need to create some DNS records (DNS actually stands for 'Domain Name System'). By 'record' what I mean is a single entry in the database of the world's DNS information. The simplest possible setup is just to create a single record that associates your domain name with the IP address of the computer running your website. That kind of record is called an 'A' record (A = Address) and you might write it out like this:
Domain name ;      Type       IP Address
snowbooks.com    IN A    74.86.153.134

You would normally set that DNS 'A record' up with the company you registered your domain name with. They'll typically provide a control panel to use for that purpose. Where do you get the IP address from? Well, that's the IP address of the computer running your website. Assuming you're not a total DIY fanatic, you'll probably use a hosting company and rent a webserver from them. They'll tell you what the IP address of that server is and you'll create or update your 'A record' to 'point' your domain name to the webserver's IP address. That's how a domain name ('snowbooks.com') is associated with the IP address ('74.86.153.134') of a particular computer (= your webserver) on the internet.

There are other types of DNS record that serve other functions but there are only two that I want to mention. The first is the 'MX record'. That's a DNS record for routing e-mail. The idea is that you have to specify the domain name address where you want your e-mail to go because you might want it to be processed on a different computer to the one running your webserver. In our case we used to use our webserver as the destination for our e-mail, but we decided to change to using an e-mail service provided by Google - and the way in which I screwed up that change is the reason you're reading this blog post.

You can also have more than one 'MX record' in case you want to set a backup computer to handle your e-mail. 'MX records' include a number you can use to decide which computer is at the top of the list for handling e-mail, which comes next and - if you're so minded - which comes after that. Low numbers come first, higher numbers later in terms of their priority. You can create as many different MX records as you like.

The final thing to say on the matter is to explain where DNS information is stored around the web. In theory, we'd put all the DNS entries for every webserver in the world on one really big computer and everyone would connect to it to get their DNS info. That's how it used to work back in the Eighties when the internet was a few hundred computers. With billions of computers on the net, that approach won't work. Plus there'd be the problem of who was allowed to change which pieces of information. I need to be allowed to alter the DNS records for my domains but nobody else's.

The answer is twofold. Firstly, there are master computers for the web, called the Root Name Servers, but they do a fairly simple job of breaking the web into top-level domains like '.com' and '.co.uk'. They tell any querying computer where to get more information about the top-level domain they're interested in. Thus when running a DNS query to find out the IP address of snowbooks.com, you could ask the Root Name Servers where to find nameservers for the '.com' part of the name. Then you'd send a DNS query to one of those servers in order to get information specifically about snowbooks.com. Those nameservers would then respond by providing the address of what's called the 'authoritative nameserver' for that domain. That's the nameserver that is in charge of that domain and whose information can be considered to be definitive. That will typically be the nameserver of the Domain Name Registrar where you registered your domain name. In our case we registered snowbooks.com with LCN, so their computers provide the 'authoritative nameserver' for snowbooks.com: the definitive source of DNS information for our website.

You specify the 'authoritative nameserver' using another type of DNS record called an 'NS record'. That 'NS record' is what the top-level nameservers use to find the DNS information that you set in the control panel: your 'A record' and your 'MX records'.

That's part one of how the system works. Part two is the idea of 'caching'. Instead of letting you directly query one of the top-level nameservers, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) will give you the address of their own DNS servers to use for your queries. (Your router probably picks these up automatically when you connect to the internet by using a protocol called DHCP.) If your ISP's servers get asked a DNS question they don't know the answer to, they go out and ask that same question of the top-level nameservers. But once they've done that they save the answer and next time they get asked the question, they simply give the same answer as last time. Periodically those nameservers will run the query again, just to check that the answer hasn't changed because if they cached DNS results forever then changing them on the top-level nameserver would have no effect and you'd never be able to update the settings for your website. It's a combination of top-level nameservers with authoritivative nameservers, plus the idea of DNS caching, that makes the whole system work even though billions of computers are constantly seeking DNS information.

And that brings us to where I screwed up Snowbooks' setup. I wanted to stop routing our e-mail to our webserver and start routing it to Google so that we could use the Google Apps for Business service for our e-mail. What I did was to go to our Domain Name Registrar, LCN, and set up some MX records to direct our e-mail to Google's servers. What I hadn't realised was that our Domain Name Registrar wasn't the 'authoritative nameserver' for snowbooks.com. We had previously decided that our hosting company's nameservers would be authoritative for our domain. So the changes I made to the DNS records at LCN's nameserver had no effect because that's not where the DNS servers of the world were getting their information.

I waited the required 48 hours for the world's DNS servers to update their caches and (of course) found that our e-mail was still going to its old destination. So I complained to LCN. They looked into the matter and must have spotted that we were using someone else's nameserver not theirs. So in order to make my changes work they made their nameservers authoritative for our domain. But of course I hadn't created an 'A record' at LCN's servers - I assumed all that had been done long ago - I'd only created some 'MX records'. So once LCN's nameservers had become authoritative for our domain, all our e-mail used the new MX records, but there were no 'A records' to tell any web browsers where to find our website.

The situation was resolved by adding the appropriate 'A record' to LCN's nameserver and that's how you're able to read this now.

There's a lovely article by Baldur Bjarnason here about the possibilities for visual design in the world of e-books. Excerpt: "The problem with generalising about publishers is that you can’t generalise about publishers. Big or small, they are all uniquely crazy." (link) Lots of other interesting articles by the same author here.

I've just been reading some of the conclusions about the UK riots of last year.

Whereas the report itself seems to lean more towards the idea that people without a solid stake in society, who have very little to lose, are most likely to attack that society. Or put another way, society itself has let too many people get to the point where they say, "Why not?" That finding chimes with my personal feelings, and I have to say, in terms of what's happened in the last couple of years, it still feels like we're moving very much in the wrong direction. Because of what the banks did, we're eliminating jobs for young people, then we're eliminating benefits, we're cutting back on many of the programs that might support them and we're hoping that threats of increasingly harsh punishment will keep them in line. You couldn't make young, poor people feel less wanted if you tried. We don't care about them and we won't help them, but woe betide them if they treat us with the same disdain.

And this last budget underlined the point. No matter how grim things are, we can always find a way to cut taxes for the rich. But (apparently) there simply is no way to offer anything to the poor except stiffer sentences if they do something anti-social. We can find money for the Olympics. We can find money to protect ourselves from the threat of Afghan horsemen menacing the shores of Britain. We can afford an 'independent' nuclear deterrent (which only the Americans have the keys to). But support for young people facing a bleak future is considered an unaffordable luxury.

And obviously I don't know what's going on inside the heads of rioters, but I can't help feeling that part of their problem is that they don't believe those at the top are actually playing by the rules. In terms of devastation to the country, the financial crisis dwarfs the riots: so where are the calls for draconian deterrents to prevent another credit meltdown? Shouldn't we be locking these people up and kicking their families out of their homes to send a message to future would-be ransackers of the financial economy? The answer appears to be 'no'. You have to assume that a different set of rules apply when rich people threaten society. None of which excuses rioting, but I'd feel much less disgusted about locking someone up for stealing some bottles of water if recklessly gambling away a billion pounds of other people's money was also vehemently discouraged - and by 'vehemently discouraged' I don't mean taking away someone's knighthood.

If we want to make potential rioters feel like we're all in this together we can't excuse the rich and jail the poor, and we can't bail out the rich and squeeze the poor. Doing those things is how you force people to riot, not how you prevent it.

Briar

Have you noticed how much the topics of privacy, secrecy, surveillance, leaks, spying, censorship and the role played by social media in uprisings have been in the news lately? Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen have pitted their ability to censor criticism and suppress online dissent against the ability of disgruntled citizens to share what they know and what they plan to do about it.

And yet if you were to attend a conference of bleeding-edge security experts like, say, the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Berlin, you might be horrified to find just how insecure all modern communication is. (Note: CCC is the kind of conference that's full of brilliant girls and guys with piercings and tattoos who know what they're talking about, not the kind with guys in suits offering to sell you a new firewall-in-a-box.)

Even if you're not that technically-minded you might like to scare yourself a little by watching one of CCC's presentations on, say, how easy it is for someone to clone your mobile phone's ID as you walk down the street, and then to intercept your calls or pretend to be you (link). Police forces routinely track citizens via their mobiles - and in some places they set up their own temporary cell phone towers to give them greater access - which extends not just to the supposed bad guy's communications, but everyone whose phone is captured by that tower. At home that's troubling, in some parts of the world you'd have no way of knowing whether your calls home or to your office were now a matter of record at the local Ministry of Truth.

In repressive regimes we see the other side of the coin. There are a number of Western firms who use their knowledge of network vulnerabilities to make surveillance equipment which then ends up in the hands of dictatorships where it's used to spy on restless citizens. Sometimes the manufacturer's excuse is that they sold the equipment to third-parties who then sold it on; at other times no excuse is offered. But you can imagine how dispiriting it is for, say, Syrian activists to read President Obama's words that "...what the Syrian regime is doing is unacceptable." (source) and then to discover the equipment that's used to spy on and capture them is made in California (source).

And it's not just those who live under dictatorships who have to worry; so do those who simply want to report on them. Western journalists can get to almost any trouble-spot on the planet these days and they can file stories with their editors back home over satellite phones that will work almost anywhere. But it turns out - you won't be surprised to hear - that many of those satellite phones are totally insecure. Some even broadcast the user's exact GPS location in an unencrypted transmission that can be intercepted by someone with the right equipment. Which is probably how awesome veteran journalist Marie Colvin and her colleague Rémi Ochlik of the Sunday Times came to be killed a few weeks ago in Syria: the Syrian Army knew exactly where they were phoning in their revealing reports from.

We live in a world where some innocent-seeming decision that some programmer took about where to store a piece of data resulted - indirectly - in two journalists being blown to bits. When you trust your life to technology the tiniest technical details matter - and most of us know nothing about that.

The list of countries who still don't choose their leaders in free elections is a long one - and it's likely that most of them put a lot of effort into spying on those citizens who are most likely to push for democracy. Helping those who are prepared to risk their lives so that their community can live free is clearly something we want to support. And I personally think there are better ways to do that than by invading the country in question.

One such way is to support the TOR Project. They make The Onion Router (=TOR) which is nothing to do with the satirical magazine The Onion and everything to do with letting oppressed citizens use the web without every word they type ending up in an intelligence dossier somewhere. By disguising web traffic and bouncing page requests between multiple 'relay nodes', TOR makes it difficult for repressive authorities to identify those they would most like to 'disappear'. If you want a really fascinating and rather moving account of the cat-and-mouse game played between the TOR architects and the dictatorships keen to break through TOR's protection so that they can get their hands on the activists it hides, then go here.

You can donate to TOR, you can run a TOR node to help others use the web in safety, or you can download a copy for yourself. Even if you don't think the government are spying on you, a simple thing like placing an Amazon order while you're using the WiFi in some random coffee shop could leave your credit card details in the wrong hands. TOR can keep you safe (though there are some gotchas you must avoid - details here).

TOR always has the problem that the channels they are trying to protect run over the public internet. It's a constant battle to hide vulnerable users when a repressive authority owns the physical infrastructure. That's part of why another project, the Briar initiative, has come into being. They're developing tools to help democracy activists in un-democratic places use secure local connections to talk to each other while keeping Big Brother out of the loop. By making local links between laptops and smartphones, which make use of chains of trust among activists, those in danger of a visit from the secret police can keep many of their most sensitive communications off the internet altogether.

It's not difficult for me to imagine a single project like TOR or Briar changing the world for the better beyond anything an invasion, diplomacy or embargoes can achieve. After all, dictators always enjoy minority support - otherwise they wouldn't need to be dictators. They stay in power by stopping their opponents from organising (or from drawing breath in many cases). Technology like TOR's, and soon Briar's, can help to give the majority their power back.

Briar are currently looking for funding from the Knight News Challenge, and I really hope their project is chosen.

Without getting on my high horse about it, the recent U.S. invasions have cost $3 trillion (source) and left two countries in ruins. A few hundred thousand dollars to support the right projects could bring about much better outcomes by helping countries in similar situations rescue themselves. That's value for money.

So I know how *we* make ebooks for Amazon (as you'd hope). I was wondering, though - how do *you* do it?

We make our own ebooks, from their typesetting files in InDesign CS 5.5. We use the Kindle InDesign plugin that Rob's mentioned before, which helps a bit, to create the Mobi file, along with a lot of custom macros. If you want, I can write them up. Then we upload said file, along with an ONIX message and the cover design measuring no less than 500px wide, to the Mobipocket FTP site. From there, I follow a series of not very obvious links to get the files from the upload folder (which is a mobipocket site, but which is called ebookbase.com, to my endless confusion) to the 'import cabinet' (more confusion) and thence live onto the interweb for to be vended.

I'm interested, though. If you're a publisher, do you upload things to Mobipocket yourself, or do you get a man in to do that? Do you upload single-title ONIX messages? Or what? Do tell!