Digital Publishing with Adam Engst

Digital Publishing with Adam Engst, podcast.
(Download link is near the bottom of the page.  If you don't want to wait for the longish download, you can also find this on iTunes.)

If you are interested in ebook publishing at all, I think you'll like this. Adam is always entertaining, and is one of the few people who are actively a writer, and a publisher, and an editor. He is also the co-founder of Take Control ebooks, which so far as I know, is one-of-a-kind. Run by Adam and his wife Tonya, they do it all, with a small bunch of writers. And they put out excellent and accessible ebooks on technical subjects. They are also friendly to deal with, and put costumer service up front.

Tonya and Adam Engst

And Take Control are one of the few publishers to have the insight and guts to fully embrace not using Digital Rights Management (DRM) to block users from copying their books, and they are proven right in their belief that not only does this prevent all the technical problems that DRM makes for the customers, but the audience responds positively and respectfully when they are treated as ethical beings rather than being seen as probably-criminals up front.

By the way, another concept which Adam talks about in this interview and is fully behind, is promoting a full money-back guarantee, and supporting it strongly with action. This is counter-intuitive to most of us, we feel we'll be robbed blind if we do that. But I'll tell you, I have had hundreds of thousand of costumers over the years, and my refund percentage is less than 0.3%! And it is very, very few of them where I get the feeling that they are taking advantage of me. A vanishingly small number of people.
But the upside, the support to the trust it takes to buy something from a company you don't know, is huge. It's not easy measuring it, but I'm pretty sure it is something on the order of at least thirty extra sales being made for each one which has to be refunded. I not only give the guarantee, I put it high on the page in big letters, and repeat it at the bottom. (I learned this from the Make Your Site Sell ebook, which helped my business no end (this book is free now too), it boosted my sales by over 50%, permanently.)

Comic strips and Kindle format

I made a post on my main blog about Doonesbury, which includes some notes on the Kindle formatting of those.

In Choosing a Tablet, First Try It On for Size

In Choosing a Tablet, First Try It On for Size, article.

This has much good advice on choosing the size of your tablet.
Just like with cameras, houses, and cars, no size is perfect, they all have their pros and cons.  I generally go with: as small as is practical.

...some smaller publishers simply port their magazines to tablets by producing what is basically a facsimile of a print page. When shrunk, these pages are nearly impossible to read on smaller tablets, whether they have high-definition screens or not, without zooming in.

That is true. But for me, the same is true of the full-sized tablets, you generally have to zoom in on those too, so it doesn't matter. When you zoom in, magazine pages are perfectly readable on the iPad Mini, and in addition you get the wonderful lightness of that device. We waited for 2.5 years to get a lighter iPad, and it was worth the weight, I think the Mini is delightful to use. (And I don't have problems hitting the buttons, despite my large hands (span of 8.5 inches).

I like magazines in Zinio's format (PDF type pages, fixed layout, but live text, not just a scan), and I think it's a challenge to do it better, even if you design for tablets from the start. I like the rich pages, and I don't find it a hassle to zoom in on each column.

Below, a Zinio mag (Amateur Photographer) on iPad Mini:

Same as above, only zoomed in (this takes just a second, literally):

(Clickable) (The interference patters do not exist in reality, of course)

This will be even more true once the Mini also gets a Retina display, but as I've said before, to me the difference is merely cosmetic, if you even notice it.

Anorexic iMac (and my dilemma)

Despite what some say, there's such a thing as "too thin". (Too rich I'm less sure about.)
Who needs a razor thin iMac?  It's a desktop computer, not a portable. And it's only that thin at the edges.

And worse, the smaller (21") model uses a laptop harddisk, and upgrades like a full solid-state drive costs hundreds of dollars more than the competition's, because the iMac is so compact that it has to use the super-compact SSD drive designed for the Macbook Pro Retina.
They don't often do it to a great extent, but this time (as with the former super-tiny iPod Nano), I think that this time Apple let their design aesthetic overrule function.

... Sure, it looks nice. But if a few millimetres thicker could have made it compatible with faster and cheaper drives... It's silly when a desktop computer uses a harddisk at only 5400 RPM because the design doesn't have space for a 7200 RPM one.

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... My Mac Pro is running out of disk space, and it's also getting slower, something is wrong. I need a 3TB drive and a fast machine and lots of screen space. I'm in a confusion regarding all my options: install a bigger drive and make a fresh software install on that? Should that be Snow Leopard again, or Mountain Lion, which will force me to get new software I don't like? Should I get a big iMac? With a second screen? Or wait for the next Mac Pro, in the hope I'll like that? Oooooh, headache.

Panasonic 4K 20-Inch Tablet

OK, so this is not intended as an ereader primarily, will surely be a bit expensive and a little on the heavy side (though no more than many laptops). But with the right stand and software it could be used for reading graphics-heavy books in super-high resolution (It is "4K", the new goal for high-def, twice the resolution of HD linearly, four times area-wise.)

 

Of course there's a chicken and egg-situation, there are not many books scanned and sold in such high resolution. But: I know that mainstream comic books now are sold in quite high resolution, and on my iPad I can zoom in a lot and see more detail, so I would like to see how they look on this. (One question is if the Comixology app is or will be made for Windoze 8?)

Anyway, I think there's no doubt that big tablets are coming now, and it would be quite surprising if they do not become cheaper and lighter over the next few years like things tend to do.

eReaders saved me

I think that the web slowly killed serious reading for me. From roughly 2005 til 2010 I didn’t buy so many books anymore (particularly not fiction), and magazines tended to stack up unread.

The iPad (and later the Paperwhite and text-to-speech on Kindle Fire HD) actually re-kindled serious reading for me. The speed and flexibility of the Net, combined with the comfort of being able to read leaned back (particularly after I got a tablet stand by my bed), were pretty revolutionary. I read more now, and I read “better”.

When I get a paperbook in my hands by mistake, I look all over for the font-size controls and try in vain to do searches.

Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad

TidBITS have now done two of four planned presentations called Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad.
I recommend them. They are entertaining, and though I know more about iPads than most, there were and are many useful things to learn there about iPad and Work, and beyond that it is cool to get a bit of overview of some of the great things you can do with the iPad, beyond what little areas we may be used to individually at the moment.

Qualcomm's insane CES 2013 keynote in pictures and tweets

Qualcomm's insane CES 2013 keynote in pictures and tweets, article.
The cognitive dissonance reached an all new high when Big Bird was followed by archbishop Desmond Tutu on the big screen. He was praising Qualcomm's involvement in world health initiatives.

I guess this is what happens when a big faceless corporation (I don't even know what Qualcomm does, beyond that it owned my favorite email app Eudora for a while and then abandoned it) decides that times are so desperate that no amount of Edginess can be too much in order to reach today's young and hip. By definition, big corporations don't understand edginess. It's like a whale trying to understand mountaineering.

Update: here is the video of it. They did not exaggerate the badness of the three actors in the beginning. (Actually I mean the script; the poor young actors did a good job of a very bad gig. I hope this will not haunt them too much.) It's like a parody of a parody, without self-consciousness. OhMahGawd.

Apple has to make a big-phone

[Update: somebody really should make an economical 5/6-inch tablet (with a good screen). It ridiculous that you have to pay many hundreds for a Galaxy Note if you only need the tablet/ereader part.]

Apple Refuses to Make the Device That's Taking Over the World, article.
One category of mobile device will blow away all others in the pace of its growth, expanding 70% in each of the next three years and yielding a $135 billion market by the end of 2015. Vendors will move 142 million units of this device in 2013 and up to 402 million by 2015, project analysts at Barclays. That's more than three times the number of iPhones sold in 2012.

Now, that is a very bold prediction indeed, and I don't have the balls to join in. But I will say that this is a very important mobile size area, and Apple should make one, and I have said so more than once before.

I got the first one, Samsung Galaxy Note 1, right from the beginning, and sharp readers will recall that I loved it, and still do (though it runs Android, which I'm still vaguely lukewarm on). It's a joy to hold and use.

It's very simple: we all love our smart phones. Actually, we don't all. I've also said for years: the iPhone is simply too small to be really useful for web and reading use. I got an iPod Touch before I got an iPhone, and the Touch quickly got put in the drawer. Too small.

That's the miracle of the big-phone (almost as bad a word as "phablet", I admit): it is almost as portable as a regular phone, but it is vastly more useable for the majority of tasks which we may use it for, not the least the web and e-reading (video too). In fact it is fantastic for those, and yet it fits in a medium-sized pocket or in any purse. It's the best possible e-reader which is really portable. (OK, it's backlit, but the screen is way sharper than even the Kindle Paperwhite's updated resolution.)

When I go out I "have to" bring both my iPhone and my iPad (Mini). I would bet that if and when Apple makes a 5-6 inch phone, that will often be the only one I need and want to bring. And indeed there are already rumors of the next iPhones coming in two sizes, "Large" and "Cheaper". We'll see.

By the way, the iPhone's Retina display is 326 pixels per inch. But Sharp is already making a big-phone screen which is an incredible 440 ppi, and it's selling like hotcakes, reportedly. I don't really get it, I think anything over 300 ppi is overkill (the iPad Mini's is 'only' 163 ppi, and it is very good), unless you have eyes like an eagle and needs like an ace programmer. (On a phone?) But there you have it. At least it joins the arrows pointing to the big-phone category being very important. (Oh: the Samsung Note sold 10 million in the first year, and the Note 2 is doing even better!)

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By the way, why are phones so much more expensive than tablets? 7-inch tablets are now under $200, but contract-free high end phones like iPhone and Note are still over $500 (450 Pounds Sterling here in UK). Is a talk chip really that much more expensive than a data chip? 

Panasonic 20-incher

A probably upcoming Panasonic 20-inch tablet, Win8.

While the specs are very impressive (230 PPI, almost 4,000 pixels on one side, that is Retina-display resolution on a display much bigger than any Apple has presented so far.), it is barely on-topic for this site, I think these things are for production. I feel that for reading, a tablet should be small and light enough to be comfortably held at least in the lap. I'd say... 13 inches, and less than two pounds or even lighter (in the future). That would be nice for graphics-rich reading, textbooks, comics, etc.

Heck, if they can just make it light enough, 15 inches might be even better. But bigger than that, I think it begins to get redundant for reading. Newspapers are bigger, sure, but that's only useful because you tend to skim them, and only really usable because you can fold them when you hold them and because they are light.

Also, we can only really read rather short lines comfortably (a rule of thumb is about 65 characters or less), so bigger than ten inches is only really an advantage with complex-layout reading material, not pure text. In other words, a bigger tablet will only gain wide use once they can make it so light that the bigger size is not a downside.

"Why I chose a crappy Kindle over the iPad for my kid"

Why I chose a crappy Kindle over the iPad for my kid, article.
But the real lure of the Kindle Paperwhite – at least for me as a parent ­– is that it is so mono-dimensional. No apps, no games, no music. ... all she can do on this particular Kindle is read.

I did the same thing a year or two ago, gave a Kindle (coincidentally also to a 9-year-old girl), for the same reasons. We should encourage reading, and I hope that such single-use devices continue to be sold, even as tablets become cheaper.

Alternatively, as I've suggested, tablets may be fitted with software which the user, or a parent, can hobble for a specified time so it can only be used for reading in that time. I'm actually a bit surprised this hasn't appeared yet.

Get blog as ebook, EbookGlue

You can now get a collection of post from this blog as an ebook via EbookGlue. (Choose .mobi for Kindles and .ePub for other readers.)
Tell me how you like it. I find the formatting nice and clean. (And the links still work.)

So far you cannot select how far to go back, the software just takes maybe twenty posts or so and makes a book from them. But he's still working on it (interview), and I see this as promising both for authors and readers. (You don't have to be the author of a blog to use it.)

Quality pays

One of the things I like about Apple under Jobs and Ive is that they are one of the companies which don't enable the public from-fear-and-poverty mindset that the cheapest is always the best choice. 

It can happen that it is, but often it isn't. 

Most people have a little of this. It's partly why the economy is bad, I think, if your mental ability to pay if frigged, probably your ability to earn is too. (If you can't give, you can't receive.)

I guess the populations most traumatized by powerty have it most. 

But even Danes, affluent on a global scale… in my early twenties I bought a fancy hand-built English bicycle, at three times the price of a normal bike. Most people thought I was crazy. 

I found a way to get many to understand: 

“What things do you know well?” 

“Motorcycles.” 

“Would you use a cheap wrench on one?” 

“No, they break soon… Ah, I see what you mean now.” 

Of course one has to have money to spend them, so it can be an evil cycle to have to always buy the cheapest, which then break soon and has to be replaced, and so forth. Really good shoes may cost three times as much, but last five times as long and be more comfortable along the way. It is well worth it to somehow raise oneself above that trap. 

Obviously one has to observe well, also. When I go to Amazon to buy some household item, I don't just sort on price and take the most expensive. I sort by customer reviews and look at the top couple of items. If they fit my needs and have many high reviews, they'll generally be good for me. The price then is usually not the cheapest, but it needs not be the highest either.

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By funny koinkidink, just before I got the email which sparked these thoughts, I had to apply it to myself on a new level. I've been irritated that the carpet protector mats I get for my office chair wears down in 1.5 years. They crack and turn to mush. And this is no matter where I bought them. This time I used the method from above (rank by reviews), and it turned out that the best reviewed were much higher priced than I'd expected (45 Pounds Sterling instead of 15-20). But they were praised and the reviews seemed to hint that durability would be good too, so I sprung for them. We'll see in two years if I'm good, or I also had to start putting gaffa tape on these ones...

The Neo is on sale

One of the most seminal writing devices in the world, Alphasmart Neo2, is now on sale for only $119. This is a good deal, it has the best keyboard I have tried on any portable device. It was designed for students/kids, but many writers use it and love it. It  doesn't do email or Words With Friends, it's just for typing, and many see that as a distinct advantage.

Some speculate a new model is on the way. I would love a Neo 3. My main wish would be an e-ink screen, front-lit like in the Kindle Paperwhite. The dark screen/low contrast is my biggest problem with the Neo (it may be my eyes, who knows), and it was also with the Kindle until the Paperwhite, that made a night/day difference for me, it made long-form reading much more accessible to me. (Since iPad year one I don't really like reading on paper anymore.)
Or anyway some display with higher contrast, an LCD/LED would be fine. Sure, it would cut down the famous battery life, but it's literally over 500 hours on four AA batteries, surely we could make do with less.

An important aspect of tablets

Tablets: smaller, lighter, simpler.
But also: much easier to use. It strikes me that a very big part of the "post-PC" revolution is a brave, big, and pretty successful attempt to make computing much easier. It'll get better yet. But already iPad are being used by toddlers and octogenarians much more widely than PCs/Macs ever were.

Apple already attempted that with the Mac, of course, and they went far, as evidenced by the wide imitation. But it only went so far. For example, on a Mac even to this day, to install an app, you have to go through a process of queries and decisions and other steps, and after, you have to delete the left-over files and mounted virtual disks...

On the iPad, it's one-click process. What a difference!
(Apple has realized that, and have imitated it pretty well with the newish App Store for Mac.)

Geeks tend not to like to lose control. They like to fiddle whit things themselves. I can sympathize with that. But 98% of people have very real issues with computers. Many, many people are just lost once just one thing go wrong, and they then typically have to wait until a more knowledgable family member or friend can come by, to get their email to work again or whatnot.  All this is not necessary, should not be.