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An (Ebook) Fate Worse Than Piracy

I’ve had it in mind for some months now to conduct and publish an interview like this one with a backchannel correspondent of mine who calls himself The Jolly Pirate. That’s unlikely; Jolly didn’t like the idea much, and more to the point, he doesn’t pay much attention to pirated ebooks. He is not an ubercracker from the Scene and doesn’t want to be. He knows where the stuff is and he downloads its. He doesn’t upload at all, except for the uploading inherent in torrent downloading.

His motivation and modus operandi are interesting and I will describe them at greater length someday; from a height I’d describe him as a hoarder who downloads all sorts of things under the assumption that they may eventually be harder to come by. He’s read a few computer books downloaded from Usenet, all of them .chm files, and treats them like a sort of third-party help system for the technologies he’s interested in. The thing that makes me grin a little is this: He says he has over 50,000 ebook files on his hard drive, but he doesn’t own an ebook reader. He doesn’t read for fun and I get the impression that he doesn’t read much at all unless he has to. I asked him why he downloaded all those books, and his answer was simple and obvious: “Because it was easy.” Most of you have seen my entry for December 29, 2009. Jolly downloaded 10,000 ebooks in a couple of hours. That scares some authors and publishers a lot, and I’m still trying to get my head around the question. Tim O’Reilly said somewhere that piracy is like a progressive tax on success, and that’s a useful metaphor. I rarely see my own material in the pirate channels. That is not true of Steven King or Ms. Rowling.

And in truth, something else makes me worry more than piracy. This isn’t an original insight, though I don’t recall where I first read it (anybody?) but a major threat to success in writing today is the competition from books that have already been published. There are only so many hours in a life, and with most any popular print book available used but in good shape on ABEBooks for $5 or less, a given consumer never has to buy a new book at all, especially fiction. It’s less true in nonfiction covering emerging issues and technologies, but for last year’s news and mature technologies it’s operative: All the Windows XP books that the world needs have already been published, and you can get most of them from the penny sellers for the (slightly padded) cost of shipping.

My point: Existing books compete for reader chair-time with new books. An enormous number of books have been published in the past twenty years or so, and that’s not old enough for them to crumble into shreds. (Alas, my ’60s MM paperbacks are doing exactly that, reminding me constantly what “pulp” means.) They’re all still kicking around the used and unused remainder market, and will be for decades to come. All the arguing about ebook pricing that I’ve seen so far seems to ignore the fact that new books of either type compete with used print books, and ubiquitous Web access makes finding precisely what you want almost effortless.

Paying $15 for an ebook is a sort of impatience tax. Wait a few months, and used copies of the hardcover will be on ABEBooks for $5 or (probably) less, including shipping. Good books, too. If Big Media ever truly embraces ebooks, it will be as a means of defeating the Doctrine of First Sale and eliminating the used book market. (The legal issues there are still very much in play. Expect much agitation in coming years for new laws forbidding the resale of “used” electronic files.)

This shines some different light on the difficulties Google has had getting authors to sign on to the Google Books settlement. I’m not sure that all authors and (especially) publishers even want the orphan copyright issue to be settled. If it is, suddenly the Google scanning machine will drop what may eventually be hundreds of thousands of additional ebooks into the marketplace, all of them competing for quality chair time with whatever current authors are writing. That may explain why I’ve had so much trouble getting SF publishers to talk to me. People may not be reading less these days, but they’re certainly reading and re-reading things that already exist. The value of what I write now is correspondingly less.

When a pulp becomes an ebook, it becomes eternal. Don’t tell me about death due to storage or container format obsolescence. I still have SF copy I wrote using CP/M WordStar in 1979 and stored to 8″ floppies, now safely on a USB thumb drive in .rtf format. If USB ever becomes obsolete, all my files will follow me to whatever comes next–and will probably take five seconds or less to transfer.

There will always be a reliable if modest supply of book crazies and loyal fans who will pay top dollar for The Latest. Beyond that, market cruelties come into play that will make it a lot harder to break into the writing business for the forseeable future.

Piracy? What’s that again?

Daywander

Not having much luck making Workstation 6 function, and two conversations and numerous emails with VMWare’s tech support people hasn’t helped. I install the product, I enter the serial number as requested, and get this error message. Has anybody else ever seen this? Or can anybody even explain it? I emailed the screenshot to VMWare, and that’s about the time they clammed up.

I hate to abandon Workstation entirely. VMWare’s snapshot system is far superior to that of VirtualBox, and I use it a lot. I’ll miss it. Boy.

And while I’m asking peculiar things, let me ask the multitudes here how you pronounce “iodine.” I have always said eye-oh-dyne, but Bob Thompson, who knows more than a little about chemistry (and certainly more than I) pronounces it eye-oh-deen. This lines up with the rest of the halogens; we don’t, after all, say “broh-myne.” So? Which is it?

I edited another half a chapter of FreePascal From Square One yesterday morning, and in laying out the edited material got up to page 136. The book I’m adapting it from is 800 pages long, but don’t look for anything that size. To be workable on Lulu, the book is going to have to stop at or before page 400. A lot of the material in Borland Pascal 7 From Square One just doesn’t apply anymore…who’s called the Borland Graphics Interface lately, or done text output by poking word values into the video display buffer? The BGI chapter was 100 pages all by itself, and when I slice out that and other things like overlays and DOS/BIOS calls, I’m really pulling 400 pages out of no more than 600 pages of useful material, maybe less. Should be done by June. I hope.

The issue of whether Amazon imposes DRM on Kindle publishers is complicated, and I’ll back away some from my statement to that effect on Monday, and will hold off until I try to get one of my own titles into the system. This article suggests that recent policy changes have made DRM optional. Having to face the DRM issue square-on has kept me putting off publishing on the Kindle for some time. As a very small publisher I’ve made this promise to my readers: No DRM of any kind, on anything, ever. I’m willing to forgo Kindle sales if the DRM decision is not my own, but from what I’m reading now, I think that won’t be the case.

As for Amazon caving, well, that’s more complex too. I see that Nancy Kress’s new book Steal Across the Sky is listed on the Amazon Web store, and her publisher, Tor, is one of Macmillan’s imprints. However, you can’t order it from Amazon at this time. (Third-party affiliates are offering it, but Amazon itself is not. Note the double dashes under “Amazon Price.”) Ditto Nancy’s Beggars and Choosers, another Tor book. Yesterday morning’s Wall Street Journal had a story explicitly stating that Amazon had conceded the price issue to Macmillan. But Amazon isn’t selling the books yet, so clearly the struggle goes on.

Off to church, to install an SX270 in place of a doddering old E-Machines box that is four times the size and probably a third the capability.

Kompozer Explained, in Recto-Verso

While checking to see if Kaz (Fabien Cazenave) has released Kompozer v0.8 (not yet!) I ran across a very nice free user guide to Kompozer written by Charles Cooke and released under Creative Commons. I’ve been using Kompozer for a couple of years now for all my new Web content, and although definitely unfinished, what’s there works very well. I figured it out by beating my head against it, but Cooke’s manual will obviate a lot of the beating if you’re coming to it for the first time. (The document is available in both English and German.)

And in downloading the PDF, I ran across a term I hadn’t seen in quite awhile: recto-verso. Most people use the term “mirror margins” these days, and that’s pretty much what it means: You lay out a book so that the wide margin is alternatively left and right on the printed sheet. Page 1 has the wide margin on the left, page 2 has the wide margin on the right, page 3 on the left, and so on. What this allows you to do is print the book on both sides of the sheet, so that the wide margins all end up on the left and form the “gutter” through which you punch the book for binding.

If you lay the book out in 2-page spreads, how this works is obvious, and most desktop-publishing templates for duplexed material take it into account. If you’re laying it out as single pages in something like MS Word, you have to specify “Mirror Margins” in the File | Page Setup menu and give yourself some space in the Gutter field. Cooke’s book is also available with wide margins on the left of every page, for printing on one side of the sheet only. The two versions are separate PDFs available from the same Web page; make sure you download the correct one.

One interesting thing about Cooke’s guides is that the PDFs are in color, with color highlighting, pale blue tips boxes, full-color screen shots, and colored arrows on screen shots to point out UI features. I guess it makes sense; almost everyone I know has a color laser by now, and I bought my first only about a month ago. I duplexed the recto-verso PDF, and made myself a duo-tang manual. I have quibbles with the layout, in that he packs way too much material on each page…but then again, with the cost of color laser and inkjet ink, printing only 61 pages is a lot cheaper than printing 150.

This was the first significant duplexed color job I’ve run on my new HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni. My one gripe is that there’s no fold-down single-sheet/duplexing tray in the front of the printer, as there is on the LJ2100 line. You can feed single sheets through a slot in the front of the printer, but for duplexing a stack, you have to pull the main paper tray and place the stack in the tray after you run the first side.

I guess that’s a nuisance, but the quality of the printing is very good, and in as dense a layout as Cooke hands us, the use of color does help a little.

Recommended.

Authors Get 70% Royalty from Kindle Sales

Wow. This is big: Amazon just opened up an option for Kindle author/publishers under which royalty rates are 70%. (Some analysis here; ignore Jeff Bezos’ open mouth.) We’re now closing in on the sort of royalty structure that reflects the realities of ebook economics: No paper, no ink, no physical warehousing. (Server space is way cheaper than maintaining pallet loads of print books out in meatspace somewhere. Trust me on that one!)

To qualfy for the new royalty rate, author/publishers (funny how the two are now blurring together!) must satisfy a few requirements:

  • Ebooks must list for between $2.99 and $9.99
  • The ebook list price must be at least 20% below the cover price for the printed book.
  • The ebook is made available everywhere that the author/publisher has rights.
  • Author/publishers must agree to accept the full list of Kindle features–current and to come–without quibbles, pointedly including text-to-speech.
  • Although Kindle won’t demand an exclusive, an ebook’s price at the Kindle store must be at or below the price at other ebook retailers from which the ebook is available.
  • The 70% rate applies to in-copyright works only. Reprints of public domain material do not qualify.

It’s no secret what’s going on here: Apple’s not-quite-top-secret tablet is really a game-changer ebook reader, and having seen how Apple basically created and still rules the market for individual music tracks, Amazon wants to make sure it retains its hard-won early lead in ebook retailing. This is certainly the reasoning behind Point #4, which basically prevents author/publishers from cutting sweeter deals with other ebook stores like Nook and whatever retail mechanism Apple eventually puts together.

If I hadn’t had to update my assembly book, my SF titles would be available for the Kindle by now, and this makes the effort all the more urgent. Looks like I have a lot to do this year–and maybe now I can expect a little more money in the bargain.

FreePascal (And Lazarus) From Square One

About two years ago I started piecing together a book on FreePascal based on my 1992 Bantam book, Borland Pascal 7 From Square One. I set the project aside in part because I needed to get my assembly book updated and back into print–something that took most of a year and all of the personal energy I could summon. But there was another problem: The text-mode IDE included with FreePascal is erratic in the extreme, and crashed constantly on me, especially under Windows. I had hoped that there was an easy fix, but apparently not. I installed the new 2.4.0 release of FreePascal yesterday, and the IDE hasn’t changed a bit. Try to set the text display resolution to anything at all (25 X 80, 43 X 80, whatever) and it crashes. One wonders why the damned thing is still there.

I’ve been following the Lazarus project since it had been the Megido project, back in 1998. The idea was to create an open-source alternative to Delphi, by writing a GUI front end for FreePascal. It’s possible to create ordinary console apps in FreePascal using Lazarus as the IDE, but I hesitated to use Lazarus as the example IDE in the book because it’s only available for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. (There’s a Mac port, but I’ve heard it’s less complete and much less robust than the others.)

Pascal and VDM readers, feel the irony: Jeff Duntemann hanging back from a RAD environment because he’d hoped to have a more broadbly applicable (read here: portable) book. Wow.

Heh. I changed my mind. I’ll have to go back to the beginning and pull out all the references and screenshots involving the text-mode IDE, but Lazarus is a much better IDE, even if you’re not actually doing any RAD work….yet.

“Yet” is key. If this first book works out, I hope to adapt some of my material from The Delphi 2 Programming Explorer into an intro book for Lazarus as a RAD tool. So getting readers familiar with the editing and project management machinery built into Lazarus is a good thing, even if the bulk of the app goes to waste while people learn the fundamentals of Pascal.

I’m going to try something new with this book. I’m going to pull a Cory Doctorow and give away the complete PDF version for free, and sell the printed version on Lulu. The book will be yet another descendant of Complete Turbo Pascal (in fact, it will in essence be the 25th Anniversary Edition!) and I’ve been paid for the work many times over. So I won’t be losing much by giving it away, and I’m very curious to see how many paid print sales I’ll make based on a free ebook.

Most of the work lies in the early chapters, where I introduce people to the Lazarus RAD environment. After that, well, it’s all basic Pascal, and while Delphi has extended Pascal fantastically in the last fifteen years, CASE statements are still CASE statements.

Unlike my earlier books, I intend to post regular PDFs of the work in progress, so you can follow the project as it happens. (There’s a 2008-era PDF out there now, and you can get it from my FTP area using HTTP.) I’ll post an updated PDF as soon as I untangle all the existing references to the text-mode IDE. Watch this space for more details.

10,000 Pirated Ebooks

Ebook-related items have been gathering in my notefile lately, and this is a good time to begin spilling them out where we can all see them. The triggering incident was a note from the Jolly Pirate, telling me that one of my SF stories was present in a zipfile pirate ebook anthology that he had downloaded via BitTorrent. That people are passing around pirated versions of my stories is old news. “Drumlin Boiler” was posted on the P2P networks a few months after it was published in Asimov’s in 2002, and my better-known shorts have popped up regularly since then. No, what induced a double-take was the name of the pirate anthology: “10,000 SciFi and Fantasy Ebooks.”

10,000? You gotta be kidding!

But I’m not. Jolly sent me the 550K TOC text file, which is 9,700 lines long, with one title per line. Not all are book length, and many, in fact, are short stories. Still, the majority of all book-length SF titles I’ve read in the last thirty years are in there, and so was “Borovsky’s Hollow Woman,” albeit not under my byline. (I wrote the story with Nancy Kress, who is listed as sole author.) The only significant authors I looked for but did not find were George O. Smith and Charles Platt. (One howler: Bored of the Rings is said to be by J. R. R. Tolkien. Urrrrp.)

The collection is 4 GB in size. The Jolly Pirate said that he had downloaded it in just under three hours. He attached the file for “Borovsky’s Hollow Woman,” which was a plain but accurate 57K PDF. Intriguingly, the date given under the title is January 28, 2002. The damned thing has evidently been kicking around for at least seven years, if perhaps not in its full 4 GB glory. This suggests that the anthology is not entirely ebook piracy but mostly print book piracy. (“Borovsky” was never released in ebook form.)

Some short comments:

  • I verified the existence of the anthology from the Pirate Bay search engine. It really does exist. (So, evidently, does the Pirate Bay, which surprised me a little, considering recent efforts to take them down.)
  • 10,000 ebooks do not take a great deal of space by today’s standards. (Admittedly, better files with cover scans would be larger.) No one will think twice about a 4 GB download for size reasons, when 750 GB drives are going for $69.95.
  • The PDF is ugly. The lines are far too wide for easy readability and (since this is not a tagged PDF) not reflowable. That said, I did not find a single OCR error.
  • The Windows pathname of the text file from which the PDF was generated is shown at the top of every page. The pathname includes the full name of some clueless Dutch guy, from whose Mijn Documenten folder the file came. Ebook piracy clearly belongs to the common people, not some elite cabal skilfully dodging the **AA.
  • I’ve used a scanner to rip a couple of print books (plus ten years of Carl & Jerry print stories) and it is horrible hard work. However, the anthology demonstrates that if print is a form of inadvertent DRM (which I have long thought) it is not a particularly strong one. After all, as Bruce Schneier has said about DRM systems generally, they only have to be broken once.

This last item is key. A printed book is a worst-case challenge for an ebook pirate. Compared to cutting off the binding and making sure the paper pages all feed straight through the scanner ADF and then fixing the inevitable OCR errors, stripping out an ebook’s DRM is trivial. If ebook piracy is not yet a big deal, it isn’t because it’s difficult. It’s still because reading ebooks is borderline painful. I may not be typical, but if I can buy a used copy of a recent hardcover of interest for $10 or less, I’ll choose the hardcover rather than an ebook at any price. Sooner or later the readers will catch up to paper, and by then, well, we may see a 4 TB file called “10,000,000 EBooks About Everything” on the file-sharing networks, and it won’t even take an objectionable chunk of our 80 TB hard drives.

You think I’m kidding? Let’s compare notes in five or six years.

Vintage Kids’ Books: Look Quick

I don’t feel particularly good today, for no easily identifiable reason, but I did want to call attention to a blog I happened by while browsing around for gifts for my godchildren. The author (unnamed except as “Scribbler”) has reviewed an old children’s picture book most weekdays since mid-2007. The books are generally pre-1990, and many are a great deal older than that. I spent most of an hour skimming the site, and happened upon a lot of kid books I don’t think I’ve thought about since I got my first library card at age 6 and quickly exhausted the Edison Park branch of the Chicago Public Library.

The reviews are affectionate and honest, and reflect my own reactions, what little I recall of them. Among the books it brought to mind are the highly understated Georgie’s Halloween, about a little boy ghost who makes Casper look manic; Dinny and Danny, about a dinosaur and his caveboy; Little Galoshes, about a farm boy who is known to the farm’s animals by the sounds his boots make; Ola, in which a Norwegian boy goes down the mountain to cavort with girls, trolls and other strange creatures; Sam and the Firefly, about a firefly who learns how to write persistence-of-vision messages in the night sky, several tales of Babar the Elephant, and a canonical host of others.

She can’t and doesn’t list everything. I didn’t see any of the Otto books, nor Space Cat, but that’s OK. I already know that stuff, and was looking for things I might have forgotten.

I have to act fast, I think. Your Wonderful Beneficial Federal Government has all but banned children’s books printed prior to 1985, under the assumption that they might have been printed with ink containing traces of lead. So countless copies have already been burned as hazardous waste, and it’s more or less illegal to sell them. Never mind than an almost unthinkable portion of world culture will pretty much vanish over the next few years due to CPSIA. The most popular books will be reprinted with modern inks; most will not, and will eventually be forgotten.

The law will not be enforced until early next year, but after that, you will be risking a $100,000 fine and jail time for selling Dinny and Danny to an adult at a yard sale. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat: Your party is at fault. The only member of the House who voted against this thing was Ron Paul.

On second thought, I know why I feel lousy.

Odd Lots

  • We broke a new cold record for December 3 last night, when it went down to -3 here. (The previous record was +3, so that’s a significant margin.) Cheyenne Mountain is covered with snow, and it’s a wonderful wintry-Christmasy scene out my office windows, though I have to get out there and clear the walks when the temps eventually get up into double digits.
  • My prediction: We will not quite break 2008’s record for sunspotless days this year. Why so sure? Well, we’re already at 255 days (and just passed 1912’s count of 253) but a sunspot appears to be forming on the back of the Sun, and it will rotate around the far side and come into view in about a week. If it’s a big enough spot, it may be visible for the rest of December. So add 7 to our current 255 and you get 262, which is in cigar territory for 2008’s 266 sunspotless days, but not quite lit. Of course, if the spot lives and dies over the next week or so (which I’ve seen happen for smallish spots) we may still beat 2008. Either way, we’re in the thick of the deepest solar minimum in 150 years.
  • I just ordered a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbook, after spending some quality time with Julian Bucknall‘s slightly older and smaller Dell netbook at the Meetup-less Delphi Meetup last night. The keyboard is surprisingly usable, and I don’t expect to be writing any 180,000-word computer books on it. I was looking for compactness, not cheapness (there’s a larger toy budget this year, much thanks to Assembly Language Step By Step and other things) and so I loaded up with a GPS receiver, higher-res display, faster CPU, and (obviously) a bigger battery. All that, and it still runs XP. Windows 7 was an option, but why burden a pocket machine any more than it’s already burdened by just being a pocket machine?
  • Intel has unveiled a novel 48-core x86 processor, arranged as 24 dual-core CPUs communicating through a mesh network with up to 256GB/s bandwidth. Cores no longer need hardware cache coherence machinery, which cuts the complexity and power consumption of the (huge: 567 mm2!) part. I’m still wondering howinhell we’re gonna program these things.
  • Does anybody my age or older remember the TV series Men Into Space? It ran for one season in 1959-1960, and was created by Ziv TV, the firm that also did Science Fiction Theater, Sea Hunt, and Highway Patrol. Remarkably, I don’t remember it at all, even though Broderick Crawford’s iconic “10-4!” is crystal clear in my head. There was supposedly some Bonestell backdrop art in the show, and a solid attempt at factual accuracy, within the limits of weekly TV production of the time. Thanks to Roy Harvey for the link.
  • People who are familiar with my novel The Cunning Blood should take a look at these 3-D renderings of the Mandelbulb. This is almost precisely what I had in mind when imagining Magic Mikey’s views of chaos signatures using the Femtoscope. (Chapter 12, p.196ff.)
  • In a dance-around-it sort of way, Slate admits that there’s no compelling reason to use Office 2010…or 2007…or any version past the one that meets all your needs. Duhh.
  • From Neil Rest comes a pointer to a puppet show dramatizing the Bohr-Einstein debates over spooky-action-at-a-distance. Einstein is played by a stuffed bichon. (What else? You’d cast a Chihuahua?) BTW, this is for real; it’s not a parody but an actual physics lesson.
  • Borders is closing about 200 of its Waldenbooks mall stores in January. Here’s a PDF list of stores to be closed. I’ll admit that I haven’t bought anything at a Waldenbooks store for many years, simply because they don’t have the selection of the “big” Borders stores. (I also don’t go to shopping malls that often.) This may be good news, if it means that fewer of the big stores will have to go down too.

Get The Cunning Blood for 10% Off

In honor of the debut of the TV series FlashForward (based on a novel by Robert J. Sawyer) ISFiC Press is having a sale until November 10:

  • Buy Sawyer’s collection Relativity and any one other ISFiC Press book direct from the publisher, and deduct 10% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping);
  • Buy Relativity and either two or three other ISFiC Press books, and deduct 25% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping);
  • Buy Relativity and four or more other ISFiC Press books, and deduct 40% from your order total (before sales tax and shipping).

ISFiC Press is, of course, the publisher of my novel The Cunning Blood , and here’s your chance to pick it up at a discount.

About FlashForward I can’t tell you much, since I don’t watch TV, but the concept is intriguing: Everyone on Earth blacks out for 137 seconds, and experiences a kind of timeslip, each seeing visions of his or her own future. The blackout itself causes mayhem on a grand scale (though I wonder if it would be as grand as the premise suggests) and government agents begin searching for Suspect Zero, who was caught on tape awake during the blackout and might, therefore, have had something to do with it.

But about The Cunning Blood I can tell you a lot: It’s a hard SF future action/adventure, featuring a prison planet where electrical devices don’t work, due to the presence of a pervasive bacterium-sized nanomachine that homes in on the magnetic fields around electrical conductors and literally chews the conductors until the circuit fails. Hell’s inmates do all right in spite of not having electricity, as there are a lot of different ways to build a technological civilization, and even a few ways to get around those pesky nanobugs. (Think wires made of liquid mercury flowing through hoses.) But the bugs on Hell are kid stuff compared to what’s lurking in the bloodstreams of selected individuals on Earth: highly intelligent distributed nanocomputers, supposedly under the complete control of the secret societies of engineers that created them–except for The Sangruse Device, which has a slightly different concept of “control.”

I’m guessing that my long-time readers have already heard most of this, but if you’re new here, the novel has reviewed well and might be worth a look. Here’s a sample chapter. And another sample chapter, which I just carved out of the novel to post for the first time. (It will make more sense if you read the older sample first.) If you like action, ideas, and cultures completely unlike our own, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition

ASMSBS3ECoverSmall.jpgA few minutes ago, UPS left my author’s carton of Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition on the front porch. So after ten months of work (and another month of anxious waiting around), it’s really and truly real.

100% Linux. Certified DOS-free. It turned out pretty well, all things considered. And having (finally) held it in my own hands, I think I won’t ask anything more from today.