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.

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.

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.

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).

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)

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!

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.

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!

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.

poster source

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.