Frustration Level To Eleventeen

Watching Other People Use a Computer

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Advice From Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos: Regret Minimization Framework

So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.” I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

The Best eBook Reader Doesn’t Exist

@jane_l I want a KiKoSo Reader — Kindle book selection, Kobo cuteness, Sony touchscreen. Make it so!Wed Sep 22 14:30:31 via webMike Cane
mikecane

Cellrunner

Cellrunner — Fiction by Nick Belardes

A true cellrunner can take to the streets with an iPhone, a cord and a plot.

Go read.  You’ll identify.

Jerry Pournelle To Direct Publish eBooks

Computing At Chaos Manor: September 20, 2010

The major problem with getting one’s older works into electronic print is that few have electronic copies of the books. Having them scanned and edited can be expensive – not terribly so, but the costs can be significant, and usually involves destroying a printed copy so that it can be fed to a scanner. Multiple scans with comparisons can get copies arbitrarily similar to the printed copies; of course the printed copies will contain some typographical errors, so the author probably ought to do a final scan before reformatting for Kindle and iTunes publication. The temptation of course will be to do revisions: I don’t know, but I suspect that “Revised edition” with a new introduction by the author would increase sales.

Norman Spinrad has discovered Amazon and iTunes publication, and tells how he found clean copies of many of his works on pirate sites. Eric Flint has often said that pirates are more helpful than harmful; many authors have disagreed, but this is a clear example of how some pirates can be useful. Of course in Norman’s case there were pirates who undertook the work as a labor of love because they wanted to see his books in print, and they took care to do quality scans; many pirate copies of books are horribly done.

Meanwhile, Eric Pobirs and Peter Glaskowsky have been busy finding me clean copies of my fiction and some non-fiction, and I’m going through those to see what I can come up with for Kindle publication.

At some point, I expect he will announce what he’s made available.

Previously here:

Welcome Norman Spinrad To eBooks!

Welcome Norman Spinrad To eBooks!

He made me soooo damned angry. Really, I wanted to reach through the screen and physically throttle him, in spite of his illness and age!

You won’t find my Comments there now, because he combined all three posts that angered me into one: The complete THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL, parts 1,2,&3 in order

It was part three that got me and Henry Baum both Commenting at him. Well, me yelling at him in exasperation a few times. Those Comments are now gone and The Wayback Machine isn’t helping, either.

This is about as much of an acknowledgment either me or Henry will get — if he even remembers either of us:

I had no idea that I was going to write this until some of the people commenting on THE PUBLISHING DEATH SPIRAL put two ideas in my head:

First, many people suggested I put my backlist books on ebook publishing sites.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

At the time, I was going to do a post about his obstinacy, but decided it just wasn’t worth it. He wasn’t open to anything, period.

Subtraction.com: The Times Has a New Opinion

On the other hand, all was not smooth sailing. To give you some idea of what it takes to pull this kind of thing off, work on The Opinion Pages started sometime in the second half of 2009, and what you see on the site today isn’t even everything that was intended at the start. Right now only some of the articles that appear in the section, you’ll notice, receive the same design treatment and branding as the front page.

All of that is due to the complexity of managing a publishing system that serves many different kinds of content, and, I’ll put it diplomatically, some institutional reluctance to fully accommodating all those different kinds of content. There are good and valid reasons why this stuff takes so long to get done at a company like The Times, but taking a year to launch something that’s not even complete was not among the top reasons I enjoyed my old job.

via Subtraction.com: The Times Has a New Opinion

Sony Made The New Pocket Reader PRS-350 Muscular

The impressive part is around 6:30, where he states the next PDF is “about 90 megabytes” in size.

The PRS-350 seems to handle it very well. I wonder what a PDF from Google Books would be like? These are the two PDFs I ask people to try: Success, A Novel and The Great God of Success.

Not because they are large PDFs, but because their typesizes look like they are large enough to be read without going through Zoom contortions.

Here’s that second one tried on an iPad via mobile Safari (PDF downloading to save and open locally wasn’t available in those early days).

MediaPost Publications Big Media May Be Dwarfed By Internet, Streaming Options 09/21/2010

A team of industry analysts at Credit Suisse led by Spencer Wang is troubled enough by what they see to have downgraded the entire U.S. entertainment sector to “underweight.” That’s in response to a forecasted economic slowdown and increased risk from Internet-delivered video to conventional television and film. This is being driven by Netflix’s expansion to stream a wide array of video to consumers wherever they are, and the competition about to explode between Apple TV and Google TV.

via MediaPost Publications Big Media May Be Dwarfed By Internet, Streaming Options 09/21/2010

Oh hai, print publishers.  You’re next! kthxbai

Why your site might be crashing Safari on the iPad | Lift Interactive

Safari only crashes if you’ve used more than one weight from a particular font family. The more weights per font family, the more often Safari crashes.

via Why your site might be crashing Safari on the iPad | Lift Interactive