2008 - Page 4 of 5 - All the Billion Other Moments

Amazon vs. Print-On-Demand

Apparently Amazon is making moves to drop any POD books not printed by their own BookSurge service. I’m not sure how long this was brewing, but stories are popping up all over.

I can see how this makes sense, from a certain point of view. Asking Amazon, who is now in the POD business, to sell POD books from LuLu (for example) could be seen as similar to asking Wendy’s to sell you a Whopper.

Unintended Consequences

To me this sends a message to all other book sellers that it’s ok to not consider POD books as real products, and refuse to carry them. I can envision all the major chains having their own in-house POD setups at some point, and they’ll follow suit by refusing to carry anything “not printed here”. This will include those books printed by Amazon’s BookSurge service.

Maybe I’m missing something more obvious, but it really seems that Amazon has set back the legitimacy of a certain class of books based solely on how they were printed and bound. I’m fully aware that there’s a lot of junk out there, because with POD anyone can “publish” their own book, but at the same time there are some wonderful works that perhaps would not be available in print any other way.

As a consumer, books in this situation might as well be mythical creatures. If I like to shop at a big chain, and they tell me “We don’t have a listing for that. We can’t order it,” then that’s it. Anything more requires jumping through hoops, meanwhile there are thousands of other books I can walk home with right now. Online it’s even worse. If a book isn’t up for order at your preferred online book seller it might as well not exist at all. And to many consumers, it won’t.

A Business Opportunity?

I foresee a lot of gloom and doom while this shakes out. There’s a change it will come to nothing in the end. It’s also possible Amazon is hoping to use this to get more favorable agreements out of POD houses before letting them back in. As such I’m just speculating here.

What if things play out like I suggested earlier, with each book seller having their own POD house, and not taking books from other POD houses. Assuming that the different POD services don’t have exclusivity agreements, the best option would be to offer you book through all of them. It’s obvious. Then wherever folks are they can get your book.

Simple, right?

No, not really. Having put together one book for LuLu I know it can take a great deal of time to prep the book to look good when they print and bind it. I’m sure other services have their own pitfalls. The idea of learning them all fills me with dread. Who has time for that?

But what if a someone started up some sort of aggregated POD service, where you get them your manuscript and they go through the process of getting it up on all the POD services for you? Could such a thing work? If you’re a POD author, would you use such a thing?

I’d be interested to hear other folks thoughts, so please comment.

Download Scott Sigler’s “Infected”

Your first hit is free

On April 1 Scott Sigler‘s thriller novel Infected will be released in hardcover to bookstores. But why wait? Thanks to a special arrangement with Scott and his publisher you can download the entire novel in PDF right now, but only until March 31.

Infected is the first major print release from Internet phenom Scott Sigler, whose podcast-only audiobooks have drawn an immense cult following, with more than three million individual episodes downloaded. Now Sigler storms the bookstore shelves with this cinematic, relentlessly paced novel that mixes and matches genres, combining horror, technothriller, and suspense in a heady mix that is equal parts Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King.

Does that sound at all interesting? Go on, give it a try. Just this one time. Download it already, and tell your friends to do the same. There’s no risk here, unless you’re afraid you’ll like it so much you’ll feel compelled to purchase the book. Go on, risk it.

But wait there’s more

Want to learn more about Scott Sigler? You’re in luck. J.C. Hutchins just released the latest episode of his UltraCreatives interview series with Scott as his guest. Yeah, that’s free too. Old One-eye Jack knows how to treat you.

Another Moment: “At the End of the Day”

So I joined Bitstrips...

X-UA-Compatible: Sensible Defaults

I’ll keep this short((well, short-ish)), because last time I rambled, and basically failed to make clear what I thought the problem was. In the end, my problem with the whole X-UA-Compatible concept was really in what IE8 planned to do when it was absent, which was to pretend it was IE7.

Writing Updates: February 2008

Another month gone by all ready? Yikes!

I made it all the way through the month without missing a day of writing, which if you remember my plan from last month means I didn’t have any weeks were I wrote more than five thousand words. I did write 14,732 words this month though, which is a few hundred more than last month.

Links of Interest (January 31st 2008 through February 19th 2008)

Crime podcast novel gets HUGE boost in advertising: Video of a digital billboard advertising for Seth Harwood’s “Jack Wakes Up”

Tags: [tag]podiobooks[/tag], [tag]podcast[/tag], [tag]audiobooks[/tag], [tag]Seth Harwood[/tag], [tag]Jack Palms[/tag], [tag]Jack Wakes Up[/tag], [tag]Video[/tag],
The parseInt gotcha: I’m pretty sure once you’ve been hit by this parseInt() behavior in javascript you never forget it, but if you haven’t you should learn about it now before you do.

Tags: [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]parseInt[/tag],
CSS Tools: Reset CSS: Eric Meyer’s Reset style-sheet (now in its permanent home, with versions numbers). Including this should reduce browser inconsistencies, and help you not to rely on undefined default behaviors.

Tags: [tag]css[/tag], [tag]tools[/tag], [tag]reset[/tag], [tag]development[/tag], [tag]Eric Meyer[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag],
CSS Tools: Diagnostic CSS: Eric Meyer’s diagnostic.css (now in its permanent home). Including this stylesheet will highlight elements that are incomplete and may be degrading the user experience.

Tags: [tag]css[/tag], [tag]testing[/tag], [tag]tools[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag], [tag]diagnostics[/tag], [tag]Eric Meyer[/tag],
Jason Bateman Confirms “Arrested Development” Movie Talks: I cannot begin to express how much I hope this comes to pass.

Tags: [tag]Arrested Development[/tag], [tag]tv[/tag], [tag]movie[/tag],
Amazon acquires Audible for $300 million: This caught be by surprise. Hopefully it will remain mostly unchanged, although adding stereo support to all the stereo BBC programs they carry would be nice.

Tags: [tag]Amazon[/tag], [tag]audiobooks[/tag], [tag]Audible.com[/tag],

Just a Reminder: Audiobooks = Reading

This comes up now and again, so I’m just going to take the time to remind everyone that if I’ve listened to an unabridged audiobook of something, I’ve read it. You may wish to exclude me in some way from up upon your high horse, but you can’t take away from me the fact that I have read the book (more here).

Writing Updates: January 2008

I’m going to strive to be a bit more transparent about my writing this year. It’s something I have a hard time with, which might date back years to when I learned answering “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with “Be a computer programmer” seemed to be a more acceptable answer to most people than “Be a writer”. So to start I’m going to talk about the past month, and provide a bit of an info dump into what I think the future holds.

Links of Interest (January 28th 2008 through January 30th 2008)

jQuery Validation plugin overview: Examples of how to use the jQuery Validation plugin 1.2 to provide unobtrusive Javascript validation to forms.
Tags: [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]jQuery[/tag], [tag]validation[/tag], [tag]development[/tag], [tag]unobtrusive javascript[/tag],
The Dissing of SF: Ever have someone ask you for a favor and simultaneously insult your career? Science Fiction author Robert J. Sawyer had this happen twice in one hour, and he posted his responses.
Tags: [tag]Robert J. Sawyer[/tag], [tag]science fiction[/tag],
JavaScript Pretty Date: John Resig has released a prettyDate Javascript library that can take strings like “2008-01-28T20:24:17Z” and turn them into “2 hours ago”. It works standalone or as a jQuery plugin.
Tags: [tag]John Resig[/tag], [tag]jQuery[/tag], [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]date[/tag], [tag]formatting[/tag],
JavaScript Memory Leak Detector: Paolo Severini of Microsoft’s Global Product Development team has released a utility to help find Javascript memory leaks in IE. It can be set to detect things that would leak in IE6, things that would leak in IE7, or actual leaks.
Tags: [tag]Paolo Severini[/tag], [tag]debugging[/tag], [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]IE7[/tag], [tag]webdesign[/tag], [tag]memory leak[/tag], [tag]browser[/tag],
Getting HTML 5 styles in IE 7+: Possibly the most interesting thing to come out of the X-UA-Compatible discussions was this method for allowing IE7+ to apply styles to elements it doesn’t support.
Tags: [tag]css[/tag], [tag]IE7[/tag], [tag]Javascript[/tag], [tag]html5[/tag],
Write to Done: A friend (thanks Kate) recommended this spin off of zenhabits.net which is billed as “Unmissable articles on writing. Twice weekly.” So far it’s living up to it’s promise.
Tags: [tag]articles[/tag], [tag]writing[/tag], [tag]productivity[/tag], [tag]howto[/tag],
MD044 – Stan Lee Interview: Veronica Belmont interviews Stan Lee on Mahalo Daily. I never get tired of seeing interviews with Stan Lee. Maybe it’s his voice.
Tags: [tag]interview[/tag], [tag]Stan Lee[/tag], [tag]Veronica Belmont[/tag], [tag]video[/tag],

Links of Interest (January 9th 2008 through January 25th 2008)

Playing for Keeps Characters – Set 1: Three of the character cards Natalie Metzger produced for Mur Lafferty’s “Playing for Keeps”. Shown side by side with the black and wite ink versions.
Tags: [tag]artwork[/tag], [tag]Natalie Metzger[/tag], [tag]Mur Lafferty[/tag], [tag]Playing for Keeps[/tag],
Fresh Pics of Mulder & Scully: Slice of Sci Fi has three photos of Mulder & Scully from the new X-Files movie. There nothing super special, but seeing these I’m a lot more excited about seeing this when it comes out.
Tags: [tag]X-Files[/tag], [tag]David Duchovny[/tag], [tag]Gillian Anderson[/tag], [tag]movie[/tag],
Scott Brick Presents: One of my all time favorite audiobook narrators, Scott Brick, has launched a blog. If you’ve never heard one of his productions I recommend you seek one out and give it a listen.
Tags: [tag]audiobooks[/tag], [tag]Scott Brick[/tag],
New PDF reading software for Sony Reader: Reflowing and resizing will help cope with small-screen issues: Apparently Sony Reader is going to have a way to reflow and resize PDFs for reading. My opinion is the PDF is the single worst e-book distribution method, but this would at least make them usable. Hopefully other devices follow suit.
Tags: [tag]PDF[/tag], [tag]Sony Reader[/tag], [tag]e-books[/tag],