July 2010 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: !@! Amazon Says E-Books Now Top Hardcover Sales
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Jul '10

23 Jul '10

a whole chorus of whiners popped up after amazon's "kindle sales triple" press-release to heap their usual crap on the online giant. they accused the big seattle retailer of being "misleading", betraying their own ignorance and a lack of reading comprehension skills. as usual, these whiners want _specific_ info, on how many devices that amazon has sold, how many e-book units it has moved, etc. it's as if they think they have some kind of god-given right to riffle through amazon's books -- meaning its financial ledgers... and the teleread idiot rothman was on his usual blathering kick about pulling in some kind of federal government oversight dogs... he doesn't even realize how stupid he sounds. the funniest part of all is that some of these whiners claim amazon is "in deep trouble"... yeah, right. meanwhile, according to publishers weekly, a number of publishing houses have now all confirmed the e-book/hardcover differential: > http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/43926… but that's not the biggest amazon story today. andrew wiley, who is some big "super-agent" (with clients like andrew mailer, ralph ellison, saul bellow, john updike, philip roth, etc.) has just signed with amazon to bring backlist titles to the kindle -- in an _exclusive_ arrangement. > http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/books/22odyssey.html the exclusivity only lasts for 2 years at present, but i suppose that it can be reconsidered then, giving everyone time to see how it shakes out. (and believe me, a _lot_ will change in 2 years.) amazon already signed unknown authors and midlist authors (like joe konrath) to deals for kindle exclusives, and now extends its range to backlist titles from quite well-known authors, including "fear and loathing in las vegas", by that famous bullet-kisser hunter s. thompson, which is the first of these e-books i will buy... and publishers who thought they had a vault full of money from their "intellectual property" now find that agents are picking their pocket, claiming that e-books were never a part of the contracts from the old days, an assertion which courts have sided with whenever it's been tested. amazon is most decidedly not in a weak position. it is _strong_, and way out in front in the quest to make e-books a solid reality in the 21st century. -bowerbird

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Re: !@! Amazon Says E-Books Now Top Hardcover Sales
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Jul '10

22 Jul '10

darn, just came to post that, and michael beat me to the punch. and, remarkably, notice how this is describing the last quarter? if memory serves me correctly, april was when the agency model was put into place. those stupid publishers. before that change, which they instigated, amazon was subsidizing its kindle e-books, taking a loss on many of 'em, just to get the business kick-started. since then, amazon makes a cool 30% on every e-book they sell -- from the agency5 anyway -- and they use that money to advertise the kindle. so their commercials are pervasive on t.v. these days. oh, and it also allowed amazon to drop the kindle price, to $189. thus, unsurprisingly, kindle hardware sales are steadily increasing. meanwhile, the agency5 publishers are making _less_ money on every e-book they sell these days, so as the consumer shifts from hard-backs (which was _the_ cash-cow for corporate publishers) to e-books, the agency5 publishers see they cut their own throat. and -- just to provide the ironic twist serving as poetic justice -- the absence of any price difference between e-bookstores means customers are _increasingly_ turning to amazon, because that is the only format they know they can read on any and all platforms. amazon sold _3_times_ as many e-books in the first half of 2010 than they sold in the first half of 2009. yes, three times as many! and of the 1.14 million _total_ e-books sold by james patterson, amazon sold 867,881 of 'em. that works out to a whopping 75%. three out of four e-books sold in the marketplace are by amazon. the corporate publishers thought they were cutting amazon down at the knees, when in actuality they have only boosted it higher... -bowerbird

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!@! Amazon Says E-Books Now Top Hardcover Sales
by Michael S. Hart 20 Jul '10

20 Jul '10

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/technology/20kindle.html?_r=1&hp "Amazon.com, one of the nation’s largest bookstores, said Monday that for the last three months, sales of electronic books for the Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time."

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zen markup language dot com
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jul '10

16 Jul '10

yes, it does appear zml.com has been shut down by the government for breaking copyright laws... no, that's not my site for zen markup language... i'm here: > http://z-m-l.com copying content from the corporate cartel just plain doesn't interest me. i would rather create new stuff, content that uplifts the human condition and society, not crap that drags it down into a commercial sewer. -bowerbird

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Re: catching up with fadedpage
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jul '10

14 Jul '10

so somebody backchanneled me and said that they thought roger had created his own format, with tools that handled it, so what's up with that?, and why is he now exploring t.e.i.? i don't know... i think it's because he's a bit frustrated, because all the auxiliary sites that scarf up p.g. e-books go on to create their versions using the .txt file, so even if roger makes .epub, they won't use it... something like that, but i dunno; don't quote me. *** this person also inquired about my own system... it's fine and dandy. i recently reworked it, so that you can use the web-based version to write a book, and not just proof scans. this basically meant that i removed the scan, and the pre-existing o.c.r. text, so it's not like it was a big stretch to "adapt" it thus. i've run a couple books through it, and it works fine. i think most writers will use my offline authoring-tool, rather than the web-based one. but the online version lets people collaborate on a book, if they wanna do that. (i did the "adaptation" because some people were making a big deal about using wordpress as their communal tool; since that process involves taking wordpress .html output and shoveling it into indesign just to make a .pdf, i figured a purpose-built tool to collect .zml text could outshine it.) with the last book i put through the system, i worked with lots of images, so now i am even comfortable with books which are heavily illustrated. dropping images into a .pdf can be troubling, as the pagebreaks introduce difficulties, but i think i'm well on the way to sorting out that thicket... images in the .html version are simple, since the browser is responsible for positioning them and wrapping the text. *** so, um, yes, in case anyone out there might be wondering, roger could indeed use my format to get what he wanted. indeed, he would even save himself the post-processing, since in my system, the proofer creates the end-product. they keep working a page til it looks like it's supposed to. and when every page looks like it should, the book's done. -bowerbird

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catching up with fadedpage
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jul '10

14 Jul '10

ok, so i haven't talked about fadedpage in a while... mostly because there's been very little to talk about. the site is cruising along. the biggest news of note is that they switched to a "match-the-scan" meta-rule. that might not sound like a big deal, but they actually take it _seriously_, as primary directive, not a fallback. thus, they utilize _no_ blank line between paragraphs, for example, but instead indent paragraphs (2 spaces). nor are proofers instructed to close up contractions... whether or not you enjoy this approach across the board -- i don't -- you must admit it's better than the thicket of complexity into which distributed proofreaders descended my preference against a "match-the-scan" meta-rule is that i think digitizers should iron out the irrelevant differences in presentation marking the variety of public-domain books. our goal should be to create a uniform library for cyberspace, so our books can meaningfully "talk to each other", a la kelly. a "match-the-scan" meta-rule _celebrates_ those differences. roger might counter that he will attain uniformity of output via the .tei markup he's exploring. yeah, you read that right. mr. frank is looking at .tei as a possible format for his books. and nobody seems to be saying what a mistake he is making. i guess nobody cares very much about the time he is wasting. oh well, at least he's saying that .tei will have to prove its way, rather than be issued as edict, so common sense will prevail... eventually. but my word, if we had all the time .tei has wasted. the good news is that, in exploring .tei markup, roger learned that one can indeed automate the handling of _quote-marks_, which is significant, since that's the last thing that i said to him which pissed him off. eventually he always seems to learn what i try to teach him, he just refuses to learn it _from_me_ is all... speaking of which, it's nice to see roger has taken a solid stand against the excessive individualization of d.p. post-processing... he's recognized that it means that the books can't be maintained in the long run, or improved, which means they will eventually be discarded, which is sad. of course, i was saying this 5 years ago, back when i still believed it was important to care what d.p. did... so it's good to see that someone like roger (who gets spitting mad at whatever i say) _finally_ will come around to say the same thing, and say it in the mush-meal type of way dale carnegie might say it. anyway, back to fadedpage... *** the very best thing about the site is fadedpage trusts its people. and that's a huge step forward from what d.p. has devolved into. not enough can be said about this fundamental shift in attitude. the next best thing about fadedpage is that the interface is slick. roger has _singlehandedly_ built an experience superior to d.p. ok, maybe he got a smidge of help from dkretz, but otherwise he programmed the thing by himself, and he did it from scratch, and the code is lean and mean, and flexible and agile, and it rocks. the d.p. interface, while it isn't "bad", has none of those qualities. it's old and brittle, and everyone's afraid if they touch it, it'll break. given these two huge advantages, fadedpage is a real winner... *** the saddest thing about fadedpage is that it has so few believers. on an "average" day, it will pull just a half-dozen volunteers... if you look back a week, a dozen people might've been active. d.p. has gotten even more insular over the years, and people seem to be truly disinclined to even _explore_ an alternative. as a result, fadedpage hasn't posted many books. since january, they've completed 26 titles, and most of them were quite simple. that's just 1 book a week. i don't know how many _hours_ were volunteered at fadedpage, so i can't judge their _efficiency_ yet, but on an absolute basis, 1 book a week is _not_ a lot of output... roger might be fine with this "boutique" approach, but it's still more of a cult than anything else, and a very small cult at that. *** and there you have it, the good, the bad, and the ugly of fadedpage. the good part is its refreshing attitude and its wonderful interface. the bad is that it hasn't shown that it can attract a critical mass. and the ugly is that it's still being distracted by crap like t.e.i. *** so, at its 6-month "anniversary", that's the scoop on fadedpage... -bowerbird

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another month, another million
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Jul '10

13 Jul '10

2 million ipads sold to date, exactly as i predicted last month, once again doubling the rate achieved earlier by the iphone, and said to be the fastest to $1billion by any tech product... > http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/05/31ipad.html i think i said they'd hit 3 million by the fall, and 4 by year-end, which -- at this time -- is beginning to look fairly conservative. -bowerbird

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Stanza now supports iPad
by Marcello Perathoner 01 Jul '10

01 Jul '10

Version 3 of Stanza now `supports´ the iPad. You should now be able to get books over wifi from alternate sources. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stanza/id284956128?mt=8 -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster(a)gutenberg.org

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