This morning, I reviewed an interesting comment left in this blog’s Guest Book. It had been held for moderation, which means I have to review and approve it before it appears online.
Nasty for No Reason
The comment was one of the nastiest I’ve ever read. The person who decided to try to ruin my day told me that this site was like a garage that needed clearing out — or something like that; I didn’t preserve his words for posterity. He told me I should delete anything over six months old. He said he’d come to find information about my books but that he wasn’t willing to use the “convoluted” (his word) methods needed to find content here. He finished up by saying he was an editor — imagine that! — and that he now has no interest in any of my books.
Whew!
He evidently forgot to mention the problem with his eyesight that prevented him from seeing links clearly marked “Books” and “Articles” in the NavBar at the top of the page. He also appeared to miss the note in the description of this site — which appears “above the fold” on the Home page — that clearly said support for my books had been moved to Maria’s Guides. And that Search feature at the top of the site navigation column — I suppose the label “Search This Site” isn’t clear enough. And I guess I couldn’t expect him to scroll down on any page of the site to see the list of books supported with the links to content related to those books.
Convoluted? The only way I could make this site easier to navigate is to take control of his computer while he’s online here and guide his mouse to the link he needs.
He probably spent more time wording and editing his comment than he did looking around the site for the content he evidently wasn’t so interested in in the first place.
I deleted his comment, as I do with any other nasty comment that serves no purpose other than to rudely criticize me or someone else. I think that if he had presented his opinions more courteously, I would have given them some real consideration. But since his comment was obviously posted as a personal attack on me, I threw it away with the rest of the crap I encounter online.
On Bottom Dwellers
But it reminded me that there’s a lot of bottom-dwellers out there, looking to bring other people down to their level. The Internet is full of them and the worst thing you can give any of them is a keyboard and a form to fill in with their rude and destructive comments. I know bloggers who have turned off the commenting feature on their blogs because of the amount of crap like this that they get. Other bloggers let it run rampant in their comments, letting it feed the other bottom dwellers lurking out there until there’s nothing mature or civil about their blogs. As we’ve seen in the past, that can quickly get out of hand.
What these bottom-dwellers clearly do not understand is that my blog is mine. I decide on the design, I decide on the content, I decide on how long to keep blog posts, I even decide whether a comment is appropriate on a post. If he doesn’t like my site, he can go somewhere else — there’s enough content out there for everyone. As my mother would say, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”
Here’s the first video I shot with my POV.1 camera from my helicopter.
I mounted the camera on the bar between the two front seats, using a camera mount I’d bought a few years back for my camcorder. I pointed it pretty much straight out the front. This is the view someone sitting in the back would have if he stuck his face between the two front seats.
The best I could do for sound was to run a small tape recorder microphone into the earpiece of my headset. This works by picking up all the sound I hear and has the added benefit of muffling the aircraft noise. The microphone goes directly into the Mic port on the POV.1. You’ll hear me and Ed talking about the video and various things around town. You’ll also hear all radio communications.
The original video was 14 minutes long — the amount of time it took to take off from Wickenburg, swing past the west side of Vulture Peak, fly over Vulture Mine, fly past the east side of Vulture Peak (low), and land back at the airport. I edited out about half of it.
I know it isn’t the greatest video, but it is my first try. (Be gentle with your comments.) I’m hoping to build up a little library of clips and someday turn them into something good.
A print author’s revelations about electronic book publishing.
As the print publishing industry suffers the pain of ever-higher costs and competition from other media, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about electronic books or ebooks.
You’re probably familiar with the concept. An ebook is roughly defined as text and image content — like you’d find in a traditional printed book — that’s distributed as a computer-compatible file or series of files. So rather than read the book on paper, you’d read it onscreen.
Recently, Sony and Amazon.com have been pushing their versions of existing titles as ebooks for their Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. This is the most basic idea of an ebook — take the text found in the original book and reformat it for use in an electronic device to make it portable. Project Gutenberg has been doing this for years, with a huge team of volunteers transcribing out-of-copyright works to plain text format readable by almost any electronic device. (I have a handful of classics on my Treo 700p so I’m never without something interesting to read.)
Pros and Cons of Ebooks
A properly prepared ebook has numerous benefits over a traditional print book:
Ebooks don’t require paper to produce, so they’re “greener” than paper books.
Because ebooks don’t require paper, they’re less expensive to produce and ship. (Note that I said less expensive, not cost-free.)
Ebooks are much more easily corrected for errors or changes in the content.
Ebooks can be extremely portable, depending on the type of device they are designed for.
Since ebooks are less expensive to produce, they should be less expensive for readers to buy.
Likewise, print books still have a few benefits over ebooks:
Print books are generally easier to read, “thumb through,” and refer to, especially for those of us who learned to read with just paper books.
Print books don’t require a computer (or reader) or the expertise that goes with using such a device.
Print books can be read almost anywhere.
Print books are properly formatted for their content and the reader can consult an entire page or two-page spread at once.
So while I think the time has come for ebooks to rise as a serious method for distributing information, I don’t see printed books going away any time soon.
Dawn of the Ebook Revolution?
Although the idea of ebooks has been around for quite a while — and there are several failed ebook readers out there to prove it — a number of technological developments have made ebooks more popular than ever:
The ever-increasing adoption of the Internet and World Wide Web as a tool for finding information.
The ever-increasing speed of Internet connections, making it possible to get more information — including information in more advanced media formats such as audio and video — more quickly.
The ever-decreasing size and cost of computers. Smaller, less expensive computers make computers more attractive as a device for reading ebooks.
The ever-increasing computer savviness of readers. Not long ago, the “average” computer user didn’t have the technical know-how to download, open, and navigate the pages of an ebook.
The development of electronic publishing platforms, both local (such as portable document format or PDF) or onscreen (such as Safari) and digital rights management (DRM) to protect copyrights.
The development of devices such as the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle — both of which are considered “successes” — as well as the improvements to those devices and new competing devices.
As more and more readers adopt ebooks as a medium for reading content, more and more content will be made available in ebook format. Imagine a snowball rolling down a snow-covered slope. The ebook snowball has just started its roll.
Print Publishers Jump On Board — Sometimes in Attack Mode
Not willing to miss out on their piece of the ebook pie — and perhaps glimpsing the demise of print publishing in the distant future — traditional print publishers have begun offering books directly to the public in a variety of ebook formats. They see their competition not only from other ebook publishers, but from the Internet itself.
Interestingly, rather than concentrate on creating an electronically published product that will appeal to readers, some publishers have been concentrating on efforts to discredit their Internet-based competition. For example, one of my publishers cites the ideas set forth and expounded on in Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture by Andrew Keen as a testament for why content published on the Internet should not be trusted or relied upon. Although I have not yet read the book — and frankly, after seeing what a jerk Keen seemed to be during interviews on various talk shows, I’m not anxious to read it — the book apparently claims that “Web 2.0” has put online publishing in everyone’s hands and too many people are trying to pass themselves off as “experts.” From the book jacket:
In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.
Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it. And while the folks quoted on the back cover of the book tend to agree with this view — as my publisher does — there are quite a few highly respected people who don’t. Author Kevin Keohane wrote “Unpopular opinion: everyone’s an expert on the Internet. Is that such a bad thing?” for Communication World earlier this year. In it, he argues that “Keen ignores the fact that for every recognized expert, there are a dozen other passionate experts who have just as much information and insight.” Other critics all over the Web point out the holes and problems of Keen’s arguments.
To my publisher, it becomes more important to get the work of its professional, highly trained, and well edited authors into the electronic publishing world to compete with the “amateurs” out there than to produce the ebooks that people actually want to buy and read. It doesn’t seem to take into consideration that many of its “expert” authors — including me — are completely self-taught, just like the “amateurs” also providing online content. Even the editors, in many cases, began their careers doing something other than editing books. What makes me an “expert” is the 70 books and hundreds of articles under my belt. But back in 1992, when I hopped on this publishing roller coaster, I was no more an expert than today’s bloggers writing how-to pieces on their Web sites.
So my publishers have jumped into the world of ebook publishing by republishing their printed books both as as PDFs and online-viewable documents. And, in doing so, they’ve made several major errors that are losing readers and sales.
What’s Wrong with Most Ebooks
There are several problems with the way my publishers are republishing my work, but to understand what the problems are, you need to have a good handle on how the work is being republished.
One of my publishers is currently republishing my work in two formats:
Safari, an online content distributor, reproduces each page of a printed book by reassembling smaller images to build the book’s page. Imagine this: take the page of a book and use a paper cutter to cut it into a dozen squares. Now take those squares and shuffle them up, and place them on a grid, in the proper order to rebuild the page. This is what Safari does electronically.
There are multiple problems with this approach:
You must have an active connection to the Internet to read a book.
If your connection is slow (512 Kbps or less), you have to wait while each piece of a page is loaded and placed to read the page.
If you have a monitor less than 20 or 24 inches, you probably will not see the length of an entire page onscreen. That means you need to scroll and you need to wait while the rest of the page is assembled.
This is obviously not the best way to read a book. In fact, I fail to see why anyone would read a book this way. I have a free subscription to Safari and still buy the books I want to read. All Safari does is help me choose the one that’s likely to be best for me.
There are other problems with Safari that authors don’t like, but since they’re related to sales and royalties, I’ll leave them for another article.
My publisher also republishes my books in DRM-protected PDF format. This also provides readers with a page-by-page view of the printed book. And it also introduces multiple problems:
As I write this, Adobe’s DRM doesn’t work with the latest version of Adobe Reader. It doesn’t work with Preview or any other PDF reader software either. So readers are forced to use a specific version of Adobe Reader software.
The DRM prevents book buyers from copying the book to another device. So if you bought the book from your desktop computer and started reading it there, you can pretty much forget about copying it to your laptop to read while away from your office.
Although you can scale the book’s page size to fit your screen, if you don’t have a big screen, the print size might be too small to see. That means a larger scale and vertical scrolling. You can’t see a whole page at once.
Oddly enough, neither of these formats take advantage of electronic publishing features that would enhance the books. Other than hyperlinking table of contents entries on Safari and enabling search features on the DRM-protected PDFs, the ebooks are identical to the printed books — right down to their black and white screenshots — but presented onscreen instead of on paper.
Do the Pirates Have the Right Idea?
For the past two or so years, I’ve been suffering the heartache of having the electronic versions of my books appear as unprotected PDFs or CHM files on pirate Web sites. The PDF version, when printed, reproduces the entire book, from the [ignored] copyright page to the last page of the index. You have no idea how violated that makes me feel, especially when my ebook royalties from these same titles are so dismally low.
Interestingly enough, the CHM version of a book, if available, is a better product than the original book. Sure, it’s not formatted the same way, but it contains all the content — including the screenshots — and has the added benefit of being searchable and containing hypertext links to other book content. Like the PDF version, it’s portable in that it can be copied to and read on any computer. This makes it possible for the reader to put the book on a laptop and take it on a trip, to read during a long plane ride or consult when working offsite and print books are not available.
Readers Revolt
Recently, a reader e-mailed me with some comments about the ebook version of my Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard book. Although she didn’t blame me, she was angry about the purchase and the product she received. She didn’t like the DRM limitations, especially since she doesn’t like to use Adobe Reader. And although she’d bought the ebook version to save money — there was a special deal going on at the time — she didn’t feel as if she’d saved enough money to make the purchase worthwhile. She concluded in her message that she’d never buy another ebook from that publisher again.
And that reminded me of something that most publishers seem to have forgotten these days: we’re creating a product for our customers. How can we expect to sell a product that our customers don’t want?
The Way an Ebook Should Be
These two developments — pirated book formats and ebook reader feedback — got me thinking seriously about the whole ebook situation. I realized several things:
Ebooks should be designed to be read onscreen. (Duh.) That means a landscape (wide) layout rather than a portrait (tall) layout. The entire page should fit on a screen so scrolling is not required. Type should be sized so it’s readable even when the page is viewed on a relatively low resolution screen (for example, 800×600 pixels).
Ebook formats should take advantage of all commonly-used technology available. That means including color images (which are often too costly for printed books), hyperlinked references, and possibly even multimedia content such as sound and video. Imagine having an ebook with live links to additional content online! Why not?
Ebooks should not be protected by DRM. Readers hate DRM because it limits their access to the content. For a reader to get the most from the ebook experience, he should not be held back by limitations and the frustrations of poorly designed DRM software. If you buy an ebook, you should be able to read it on any of your devices that support that format.
Ebooks should be priced low enough that anyone can afford them. I believe that most people want to be honest and will not steal content. But people don’t understand why an ebook costs the same (or nearly the same) as a printed book when there’s no paper, printing, or shipping costs. They’re right — ebooks should be cheaper! (They should not, however, be free because a great deal of effort on the part of authors, editors, and layout folks goes into the book.) Fairly pricing an ebook will encourage people who want to read it to pay for it rather than possibly obtain a pirated copy.
And this is where I’ve apparently locked heads with my publisher. I don’t like the way my books are being republished as ebooks. I don’t like dissatisfying or upsetting my readers. I don’t want my readers going to another publisher’s ebooks and authors because my publisher can’t produce a product that meets their needs at a price they’re willing to pay. And I’m not the only author who feels this way.
Thinking Outside the Book
Simply put, my publisher cannot think “outside the book.”
They insist on regurgitating printed books in primitive and inconvenient electronic formats. They insist on sticking to the same price points when the average reader simply doesn’t believe that a paperless book is worth as much as one printed on paper. And they wonder why the books don’t sell, why the authors are angry, why the readers are staying away.
I believe that to succeed in today’s publishing world, publishing organizations need to stop thinking of books in terms of paper and print-friendly layouts. They need to think about the best way to disseminate information to the people who are willing to pay for it. They need to provide quality content in a format that’s convenient for readers. If that’s a printed book, fine. But if it’s an unprotected PDF with hyperlinks to internal and online content, publishers need to accept that — and make their ebooks the ones readers look for when they need information.
What do you think?
I’d love to get feedback from authors and readers about the ebook situation. Use the Comments link or form for this post to share your ideas. You can remain anonymous if you wish.
Yesterday was one of those days when you’re just so darn busy doing things that time goes by in a blur, ending in exhaustion and a good night’s sleep.
I woke as usual before 6 AM. I made coffee for me and a scrambled egg for Alex the Bird. Then I settled down at the kitchen table with a laptop to write up my “Feels So Good” blog entry. Mike and Jack the dog came down and had breakfast. Later, I cleaned the remains of the previous day from Alex’s cage, set him up with food and water for the day, and locked him in.
A typical morning.
Taking Out the Tires
Mike had gotten new tires for his new used car. He bought the car a month or so ago and it came with fancy rims and low-profile tires. Those rims and tires really aren’t practical for life on the edge of nowhere, especially when the last mile of road to the house is unpaved. So he bought new rims and tires on eBay. They’d arrived the day before and he had a Saturday morning appointment to get them put on his car. Since he couldn’t take them in his car, I had to drive them over to Big O in his pickup. We did that at about 8:30 AM.
It was a beautiful morning. It had rained steadily most of the day before, so everything was wet. The sky was mostly clear and the sun shined down on all the water droplets hanging from the trees, making everything sparkle. But what was even more interesting was that as the sun heated the moist ground, it was creating thin trails of mist in the washes and wispy low clouds in the low mountains around town. Wow.
Horseback Riding
I dropped the tires off and took the truck back home. My friend Janet called along the way. She’s visiting the area from Colorado, where she now lives. She used to live in Wickenburg and then in Congress, which is one town north of Wickenburg, but like so many of our friends, she moved away in search of a place better matched to her lifestyle. She’s an artist who paints original artwork on turkey feathers. While that might sound tacky, it really isn’t. You can see some of her work on her Web site and in a number of galleries and gift shops throughout the southwest.
Janet has three horses. Although they were in Wickenburg for a few weeks, her husband took them home when he returned a week or so ago. Janet’s here for some more business and to help out a friend before she heads home. She’s got one of their two dogs with them, Maggie, a part hound dog who looks a lot like the dog from The Simpson’s, but brownish red. Janet and I planned to go horseback riding the day before, but weather had cancelled that plan. With nothing else scheduled that morning, we figured we’d try again.
I’d been home less than a half hour when she showed up with Maggie. I showed her my baby chicks — she raises turkeys — and we went down to fetch the horses. We had them both saddled up and ready to go a while later. She’d be riding Jake, Mike’s horse. I’d be riding Cherokee.
By this time, we’d attracted the attention of our neighbor’s dogs, Trixie and the 6-month-old Charlotte. Charlotte had gone for her first ever ride with us about two weeks before and other than getting lost once for about 10 minutes, she did fine. Trixie always follows us. Jack, of course, lives to go out on the trail. And we had Maggie, too. So that was four dogs with two horseback riders.
The hills around our home were green with new grass and really pretty. We don’t get much rain in the desert so we don’t have much green anything. When it does rain, the grass grows quickly, seizing life to produce seed for the next generation in record time. The green stuff out there was mostly about four inches long and looked like a carpet. It would be nice to ride through all that green.
We headed out up the hill to our house and down the trail beside my neighbor’s property into the state land. Cherokee started acting up right away and we had to do a little rodeo routine before he agreed to follow Jake down the trail. Cherokee is lazy and, for some reason, he thinks he can get away with crap like that with me. He tries half heartedly to throw me off but I hang on, give him a good slap on the side of his neck, and we get back to the business at hand. Cherokee is not the kind of horse you put a “dude” on.
We took a trail that headed out toward the golf course at Rancho de los Caballeros, then way back out into the desert. The dogs ran around, chasing rabbits and each other, but always coming back within sight within a few minutes. Janet and I chatted about various things, moving along at a moderate pace along the trails. Janet was leading and each time she came to an intersection, I’d call out “left” or “right” to guide us along the way.
We were at the base of the trail that climbed to the top of a mountain ridge — we call it the “Ridge Trail” — when we realized that Maggie was missing. Janet said she often catches the scent of another animal and takes off after it but she’s usually back within fifteen minutes or so. We climbed the trail and stopped at the top to admire the view (which is spectacular), give the horses a rest and a chance to nibble at the grass, and do a dog head count. Maggie was still missing.
Janet was sure she’d catch up to us, so after about ten minutes, we continued on our way. We took a trail down the back side of the ridge that wound through a wide canyon — we call that one “Deer Valley” because we often see deer there. That dumped us out at a big trail intersection and I chose another trail that would bring us home. Our total ride was only about 4 miles, but I thought that was enough for Charlotte.
Maggie was still missing.
Search for the Missing Dog
She was also missing when we got back to my house. By that time, Janet was worried. I told he we’d take the Jeep out to Los Caballeros, as close as we could get to the point we’d last seen Maggie. I gave her every indication of confidence that we’d find Maggie. I felt confident, but I don’t know why. There were thousands of acres of empty desert out there.
We unsaddled, brushed out the horses, and dropped them off in their lower corral. We watched them do some synchronized rolling in the sand, then walked back up to the house to check with Mike about Maggie. No, she hadn’t shown up. I called Los Cab and left a message at the wrangler’s office. We thought there was a possibility that Maggie might have hooked up with other horseback riders out there and followed them back to the ranch.
We climbed into the Jeep and headed out. The ranch was our first stop. Two people had just come in for a ride and were brushing off their mules. No, they hadn’t seen a dog out there. We headed out to the skeet shooting range, which is one of the points accessible by car that was close to the trail we’d been on. Not that close, obviously, but within a half mile. There was no one there, so I parked and we got out. We called and whistled.
Janet caught sight of two riders out in the distance. For some reason, they kept stopping on the trail. Janet thought that maybe Maggie was with them, but we couldn’t see that far (or low) and they were well out of earshot.
We got back into the Jeep and after a few wrong turns, made our way to a little junkyard I’ve seen from the air a few times. I’d actually ridden through it years ago on my first horse and I knew it was pretty darn close to the bottom of the Ridge Trail’s climb. I drove through it, as far as I could before the two-track road ended. Then we parked and got out. We climbed a nearby hill and saw the trail we’d been on right on the other side of a fence. The barbed wire was hanging low in one spot and I gingerly stepped over it to get a better view out toward the wash.
We called and whistled and called. At this point, I started realizing the futility of the situation. If the dog was out there and she heard us, our voices and whistles would be echoing off all the hills around her. How would she know which way to go?
I was on my cell phone, calling the local police to see if the dog catcher had picked up a dog when I caught sight of something moving in the distance. The color was right. It was Maggie, running toward us. I told Janet I saw her, then told the policeman who’d answered the phone why I’d called and that the dog had been found. By the time I hung up, Maggie was with us.
We walked back to the Jeep where I had a dog dish and some water. Maggie seemed glad to have it. She didn’t seem the least bit concerned that she’d been away from us for close to two hours. We loaded her into the Jeep and went home.
The Garage Project, Part I
Mike was already working on the project we were supposed to be doing that day: cleaning out half the garage and putting in shelves to neatly store our accumulated crap. (Who’s law is it that says your collection of junk will always expand to fill the available space to store it?) He was very surprised to see us return with Maggie. He stopped what he was doing — pulling junk out of the garage and piling it on the driveway — and kept us company while we ate lunch. Then Janet and Maggie left and we had no excuse not to get back to work.
Well, we actually did have an excuse. Mike had called the owner of a pickup truck for sale in town. The truck, a 1994 Ford with 4WD and an extended cab, was exactly what we wanted to get as a spare truck we can leave at Howard Mesa. The price was within range. Just as we’d pulled all our junk out of the garage, the owner called, ready to meet with us. So we climbed in Mike’s pickup and headed into town. We drove the truck, agreed that it needed a new transmission, and told the owner we’d have our mechanic call him later in the week. Then, after two quick stops at the local Alco store, we went home and got back to work.
Mike had the idea of setting up a camera to do a timelapse movie of our setup. This was a great idea and easy enough. I brought my MacBook Pro out, set up EvoCam software to take a shot every minute and turn it into a movie, and pointed the camera at the blank wall where the shelves would go. Then we got to work.
The shelves were an Ikea product with a typically cryptic name. We’d used them before, in our house in New Jersey, and Mike had bought some new pieces so we’d have enough to cover the wall. What we discovered is that Ikea doesn’t make these things as heavy-duty as they used to. The wood was thinner throughout. Even the bolts were smaller. But they were still sturdy, and went up quickly, despite interruptions by my neighbor’s kids and numerous dogs.
Here’s the video:
Day’s End
It was pretty much dark by the time we finished. Since the forecast didn’t call for any rain, we just left most everything outside, closed the garage door, and came in for supper.
Mike grilled up some elk hamburgers, which tasted excellent with American cheese on them. With that, we had the ratatouille he’d cooked up earlier in the day. We stowed the dishes in the dishwasher and headed upstairs.
