…well I post my iPad, iShmad note and then come across Jason Perlow’s Why I Will Be Getting an iPad listing all the reasons to get one … he includes “great ebook platform among them”. This is the same Jason Perlow who recently decried Kindle, Sony and Nook in his posting Stink, Stank, Stunk. It’s interesting to note that Jason (who I recall amiably from the days when he covered the Santa Cruz Operation, a former haunting place of mine) is in the category of users who simply are not appreciative of the difference e-ink makes. I’m tempted to suspect that perhaps they don’t really sit down and read for any length of time, but the real truth is probably … people are different. But those who don’t appreciate the difference shouldn’t dismiss it either. The real question is, what is the market overall going to do? I suspect there are plenty of Jason’s out there that will keep Amazon from having a total lock on the ecosystem … which is a good thing, we’ve already seen some changes out of Amazon.
More re: iPad
March 9th, 2010Old efnord post …
March 9th, 2010Well this is the one (and only) post from my other ebook blog, efnord, posted back in February 2009. Reposted here for archival purposes, meanwhile, will be pointing efnord.com (love that name …) to here. After all, how many blogs can you ignore?
Welcome to eFNORD. What’s a FNORD — well we’ll get to that later. Right now, there has been such a lot of activity in the ebook space, that I thought I would share my perspectives. My “center of gravity” revolves around the platforms/devices I actually own (and publish for): Kindle, Sony Reader, and iPhone.
I’ll jump right in with comments on the latest item of interest — Google and Sony’s announcement making the books.google.com library of public domain (mostly pre-1924) content available. This is a reasonably interesting development. For Sony, it represents a momentary, at least, retreat from the precipice of irrelevancy and a pretty clear statement, I think, that they are primarily in the hardware/device business — or at any rate, see that they have been hopelessly outclassed in the content delivery game by Amazon. (I find this very ironical for Sony, it’s still betamax redux for them.)
The Google angle is also quite interesting — it seems Google is not above a concerted tweak at Amazon, its cloud computing competitor.
Well, it was quite exciting, at least momentarily, and was plenty of motivation to take my PRS-505 (with firmware suitably update to support the required epub format) off the shelf and — plug it in. You of course access the Google titles through the Sony Reader iTunes-like application — which, while slightly cumbersome, certainly make sense for Sony — hey, while accessing the free content, I might buy some paid content too.
The thing not quite made clear or mentioned in all of the press announcements is regarding the quality of the scanned books in the Google collection. The OCR scan of the page images found at books.google.com is essentially brute force and less than 100% accurate — there is no apparent human proofing to all of this. This means that while large swaths of text are clearly and correctly scanned, there are any number of bad scans, errors, etc., — resulting in garbage text, page breaks, and so on.
The earlier release of the iPhone reader for books.google.com showed that they had done some further work to recognize page breaks and wrap a little more of the structure around the raw page scans. This same work seems to be applied to creation of the downloadable epubs in the Sony store.
It is very exciting to have such easy access to the Google library — it’s never fun to read a book on a computer screen. The bad news is, it’s still not at all comparable with reading a truly well formatted book. I imagine for those with scholarly or academic interests in particular, one can truly “check out” a book from a vast library.
For the moment, though, Sony has come up with a pretty decent reason why you might want to have a Sony PRS, although for the average reader, not so much. There is not so much in the 600k+ titles in the Google library available through the PRS that is either of immediate reading interest and not otherwise available elsewhere in a much better format.
I note that the number of books available is a subset of the total available, presumably there is some kind of work flow around converting these to the epub format, and they are working through it.
iPad iShmad
March 9th, 2010Hmm, we’ll wait and see about the iPad … all the hype about it being an ebook platform is interesting, -ish. No doubt Steve, bless him, wants to rule the world of ebook media as well, since it looks like it’s going somewhere, despite his having said “noone reads anymore”. (I’m reminded of my disillusionment when I worked at Apple years ago — 80’s — and some fellow from the Advanced Technology Group gave an internal talk about how media was going to be where it was at and that we were headed for a ‘post-literate’ era … more prescient than I was at the time.)
Meanwhile and anyway, in all the oohing and ahing, no one seems to talk much about the real difference about an ebook reader, namely the reflective eink display. A luminescent screen is great for all kinds of “knowledge worker” activity, but gets old real quick for genuine book reading. IMO anyway, the simulation of a book by an (eink) ereader is the best “virtual reality” experience I’ve had, as judged anyway by its versimilitude …
I will probably covet one to some extent, but not sure I will add it (immediately) to my Kindle, Sony, Nook collection. Reading books on the iPhone is nice in a pinch, but only in a pinch; can’t imagine it will be much different on iPad.
I know some folks are working on “multimedia” experiences — it reminds me again, speaking of Apple, of the “ebooks” published as Hypercard stacks. Talk about ahead of your time — wish I could remember the press offhand that really pioneered this (books as Hypercard stacks). They had vision but I think that was really the bit flipping off for me and ebooks until eink happened.
Go Alice Go!
March 8th, 2010The first title published through BLTC Press was Alice in Wonderland — published in format meant to exemplify the standard I was shooting for in ebook publishing. The Classic Sir John Tenniel illustrations were included, as well as the verses and other prefatory materials by Carroll; and finally, an editorial introduction to this edition. Through the Looking Glass was subsequently published in the same format, including the “Chess Problem” posed by Carroll.
Anyway, just wanted to crow a bit and say these titles are enjoying quite a little run near the top of the list for Alice titles for the Kindle – fueled indeed by the lastest round of new Kindle sales (which seem to be holding quite well) and, of course, the release of the Tim Burton Alice.
Of the film, I have to say it was like a mash-up of Alice and the Lord of the Rings, with some Wizard of Oz thrown in. Mildly entertaining, but really far from faithful to the spirit of the Alice books.
Google Books for the Kindle
March 8th, 2010Whilst the BLTC editorial calendar has been somewhat slow lately, I’ve been active launching another vehicle that opens up access to all of the hundreds of thousands (or possibly millions) of public domain books scanned by Google. For close to a year now, they have been making these available not for download, not only as a PDF of the original scanned images (in other words, as a graphic image of the text), but as a intelligent but brute-force scan into an epub format file.
epub is probably the coming standard, but for now (why …?) it is not supported by Kindle, nor has Google “reached out” and provided support for the native Kindle mobi format. Another boring standards war by two internet colossi who clearly see each other as primary competitors in the ebook space (whatever happened to Google’s epub business anyway …?).
Anyway, visit www.retroread.com, and you will be able to create an account through which you may upload any
Google epub, and have it converted and forwarded directly to your Kindle. It’s pretty neat! The quality of the converted book can vary greatly depending on the quality of Google’s OCR conversion. On average, generally readable.
The conversion technology used to power the site is, unsurprisingly, Kovid Goyal’s Calibre engine, instrumented into a web service. The hosting of the conversion engine is, btw, Amazon’s very own “Elastic Compute Cloud” — if this gets really big, I can scale it to infinity! (A friend suggested I host the front end using Google’s app engine, but that would have required learning Python. It would have completed the symmetry, however.)
Anyway, if you find this post, please check out www.retroread.com!
Homage to Crockett Johnson
June 27th, 2008Well today I’ve been mostly working on my awakenings.com site, which I am cleaning up and transition to Joola as a content management system for it. In the process of cleaning up my root directory, I found this orphaned bit I worte some time ago on Crockett Johnson, best known for Harold and the Purple Crayon, but most loved by me (I was probably at least eight years old before I conected the dots and realized the Harold and the Purple Crayon Guy was also the “Blue Ribbon Puppies” guy, although it is intuitively obvious by the illustrations) for “Puppies”. Since “The Blue Ribbon Puppies” is probably the least known of the three “BLTC Press” inspirational books (the other two being The Little Engine That Could and Stone Soup” (= BLTC PRESS as an anagram), I thought I’d repost it here. So here goes, here’s my Homage to Crockett Johnson:
Crockett Johnson is best known as the author/illustrator of Harold and the Purple Crayon, a classic of modern children’s literature. He is also the author (among a number of other children’s books) of The Blue Ribbon Puppies (an illustration from which above).
The Blue Ribbon Puppies is the story of a boy and a girl who want to give a blue ribbon to the best dog out of a pack of puppies. To select him, they proceed to try a blue ribbon on each of them, expecting I suppose to ‘recognize’ the best by how he wears his ribbon. Unfortunately, as each of them is examined in turn, they all prove to have some significant defect: too fat, too long, too tall, too big, too short, too shaggy, too spotty, too plain.
However, when the defect is announced, each puppy stares plaintively at the boy and girl, who respond by declaring each pupy the best fat, the best long, the best tall, etc., puppy. In the end, they all wind up with a puppy, and sit around and admire each other ‘for quite some time.’
When I was three or four years old, living in Rowayton, Connecticut in the late fifties, I lived on Crockett Street. My older brother thought that the cool thing about me living on Crockett Street was that my name was David, Davey Crockett being the hot thing on television at the time. For me, thought, the special thing about living on Crockett Street was that Crockett Johnson lived down the street.
I’m pretty sure I never actually met him, although I have owned since that age an inscribed copy of The Blue Ribbon Puppies, which I liked to think he gave to that ‘cute boy down the street;’ unfortunately, my mother recently disabused me of any such fantasy notion by telling me that she bought it at a book signing Crockett did at the local bookstore.
Notwithstanding, it remains my earliest memory of a book that belonged especially to me, and a special favorite (along with The Little Engine That Could).
Recently, I’ve begun to dream about Crockett Johnson and The Blue Ribbon Puppies.
I re-connected with The Little Engine That Could when I was 22 and went to work for the Platt & Munk Company, who were its publishers. How that happened, and what happened, is mostly another (not super interesting) story. In the short time I was there (before it was bought up by Grosset & Dunlap), I was tasked to ‘write’ three children’s books of my own. Amazingly, one of them was credited using the ‘house pseudonym’ of Watty Piper — ‘author’ of The Little Engine. (This used to impress women tremendoulsy. In 1979, there was a cartoon in the New Yorker of one woman breathlessly telling another: “Imagine! 24 years old, and he already has a pseudonym!” That was about me, honest.) Anyway, it was a pretty crummy book ‘Watty Piper’s Trucks.’ I also did ‘Puppy Pals’ (the Blue Ribbon connection) and also the only one I put my name to, ‘It’s Fun To Wash,’ mostly because the illustration was so good (not by me).
I was editorially involved with a number of projects there, one of which was a re-issue of a slightly sanitized Little Black Sambo, which Platt and Munk had published off and on for years.
—–
There is a great Crockett Johnson site here.
following my blitz
June 26th, 2008BLTC Press is a “follow your bliss” activity for me — or as Rudolf Steiner would say, something, at bottom, that I pursue from “pure love of the deed”. Just about a year ago (July 2007) I bought my first Sony Reader with some of the proceeds from a sell-off – give-off – trade-off of several thousand “extra” books I had accumulated over the years.
I made the jump from my first passion, book publishing, into the software business (once upon a time it was even called “software publishing” and my first business card even said “software acquisition editor”) years and years ago, and found myself weaving in and out of various text and extext projects — product manager for an early Word Processor for the Apple II (PIE Writer); Development lead on a publishing system at Mirror Systems (part of Times Mirror) to move medical abstracts from Year Book Medical Publishers online with Lexis/Nexis, and at Apple involved in various technical publication projects as part of my software tools product manager role, and “godfather” of their Adobe Acrobat precursor, DocViewer – rightly abandoned by Apple as Adobe stepped forward with PDF.
Yet I never ever seriously considered ebooks a viable thing. I’ve never read a book (other than documentation) from a PDF. I did read a couple of books on my Palm Pilot, and also bought a few of those “Books in a Hypercard stack” for the Macintosh (weird!). But when I saw the e-ink display, I flipped a bit and felt all my book publishing, software, and platform ecosystems juices flowing. I got religion.
I couldn’t quite figure out where to channel it, so I wound up doing BLTC Press in my spare time (I’m currently unemployed from my day job in enterprise software product management, so there’s a bit of that right now). I am the chief cook and bottle washer here, and trying to figure out how to scale it, and also contemplating a move into copyright publications, among other things.
Mostly, I enjoy publishing books that I think are worth reading and interesting. I remember last fall standing in the basement of the Strand bookstore in New York and laughing at the hubris/impossibility of ever gettin all this backlist stuff electronic. But that’s the space that interests me the most — the copyright backlist stuff that you pick up in used bookstores. Used bookstores (good ones) are great filters as they (usually) are pretty selective — they know what sells and what doesn’t (what has sold). New York and Amazon will take care of the frontlist — which is great, and which become tomorrow’s backlist. Meanwhile, there is tons of gold to be mined.
More later, like — “Why haven’t you published any new titles in the last month?”
dinged!
June 24th, 2008One of the initiatives at BLTC Press is a sub-brand called “GoodMountain Books”. Right now these titles are only available on the Amazon site for Kindle, but will be showing up here for Sony and non-DRM availability soon.
Anyway, the principle is — let’s embrace and acknowledge Project Gutenberg as the source of many (most) public domain titles published as ebooks. Typically, the Project Gutenberg attribution is ripped out of the text, as its use entails a trademark license and some somewhat onerous additional requirements, e.g., inclusion of their (hopelessly verbose) trademark license, the commitment to make the “raw text” available, and of course, payment of a trademark royalty (20%).
On the other hand, production of an ebook from existing source text such Project Gutenberg source is … pretty easy. Not so easy, however, that many (most?) of the (for example) public domain titles on Mobipocket/Kindle are less than elegant productions — some of the are simply a cut and paste yielding what I refer to as a long scroll of toliet paper — no chapter headings, no linked table of contents, etc.
Meanwhile, the tagline for GoodMountain books is “Premium editions of Project Gutenberg (TM) etexts”. Imagine my dismay then when a review showed up for my “Wuthering Heights” which was, to say the least, withering (wuthering?). Apparently the chief complaint was that the text was right (full) justified — which in fact, it isn’t and further, I don’t believe it’s possible to force right justification in a Kindle book — they’re designed to “flow”. The USER can however select left or full justified using the “J” key (secret option) when the font key is pressed. The reviewer also complained that there was too much space between paragraphs (which, for some obscure reason, in the build as published there WERE an extra blank between paragraphs).
Well, I posted a rebuttal and an invitation for the reviewer to contact me and explain what the heck their expeience was, because on my Kindle, it looks fine — the way I intended. (I have however since updated with the extra blanks removed).
Not a good start to a brand intended to be about quality. When purchasing a public domain book (especially one that is available in raw text, at least, for free from Project Gutenberg), the ONLY thing worth paying for is the quality of the formatting/packaging. One should ALWAYS use the “download preview” option when purchasing any public domain work published in multiple editions and shop for the best. I don’t know why this reviewer didn’t do that, but I hope that in future, despite this particular review, those who compare BLTC Press and GoodMountain titles (either the free downloads or Amazon Kindle samples) will find them worth the price.
I am looking for the best mechanism to process customer comments on the books, especially formatting editing and transcription corrections.
welcome
June 23rd, 2008I’ve been doing some work on the www.bltcpress.com commercial site, and thought I would augment it with a little “running commentary” and other remarks on my one-man-band book (as of today anyway) book publishing site. Perhaps it will generate a little more interest/traffic, which is the primary concern, as one of the first “learnings” in the process is how expensive it is to generate traffic using AdWords or similar advertising. And moreso, when your “shop” at the present is still quite humble, and the average unsuspecting visitor is at present limited to a choice of the 30 or so titles here.
My ambition however is simple and perhaps marvelously illustrated by the story of the daffodil principle. That is, over time, we’ll have more and more of a list for people to choose from.
Meanwhile, if you’re interested, you’re welcome to follow me along as I plug along with my contribution to the creation of a target-rich ebook universe for readers.