This wouldn’t happen at Ooligan…

After reading this article, I couldn’t help but slap myself in the forehead and wonder why, oh, why do publishers do this to themselves?

It’s the 21st-century people. Try something a little new-ish. There are so many wonderful technologies available today that either would have prevented this kind of thing from happening, or fixed it at little to no cost.

Let me ‘splain. First up: email. All you had to do was email (and pay) a few real experts in these areas and have them check the book. All those inaccuracies would have been caught before the book went to press. It’s not as if this is some hot, now topic that had to have a book this very second to hold relevancy.

Next is a little something I like to call “word processing software.” I know it’s a crazy new phrase I’ve just invented for this piece, but stay with me. In the flash-bang future we have software that allows us to edit manuscripts when errors are discovered. This helps to prevent embarrassing things like printing books that are contrary to the facts.

Then we have e-books. I’m sure the word scares you big time publishing houses out there, but try to breathe and don’t panic. When you release an e-book it’s a simple matter to update the files that are sold and edit out errors even after the book is released. It’s not magic, but it’s close.

My personal favorite on this crazy talk train is POD, or print on-demand. There are these wonderful machines that can print a single copy of a book, digitally. You can print as many as you want at a time. How it works is you contact a company that uses POD technology and they will print books for you as the orders come in. There’s also digital short run printing when you want a thousand or so books at a time, for when you have an initial release to get lots of units out there. The great thing about both POD and digital short run printing is you can update the electronic files those books are printed from and edit out any errors that were found in the book.

I know. This is hard. Change is hard to handle. I get it. I once had to change my socks. It hurt. I cried. But thankfully I’ll never have to do it again.

How this all comes together is you can save hundreds of thousands of dollars, and an ass-load of embarrassment by combining the above and fixing the errors that inevitably creep into a manuscript. When you use POD and DSR printing you don’t have tens of thousands of books sitting in a warehouse somewhere that are either bought as a joke or will need to be pulped.

When you print 100,000 copies of a book cross your fingers and hope like hell that the manuscript is damn near perfect. Especially when it comes to things like historical facts. That’s one hell of a costly mistake you guys just made.

There are what, a dozen, a few score people working for your publishing house? And none of them caught this. None of the editors caught the mistakes. None of the production people mentioned any POD or DSR printing. Guess what? I know 100 college kids that would have pounded pavement for you to ferret out every one of those mistakes and given you a manuscript that sung. You could pay them half what your current employees make, and they would thank you for the job.

This is why your business model is failing. The world’s changed under your feet. You thought yourselves eternal. Your old paradigms are simply in the way. New ideas, new blood, new century.

Cronos meet Zeus.

Publishers and ebooks…

Quoted from this article.

“Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. On a twenty-six-dollar book, the publisher receives thirteen dollars, out of which it pays all the costs of making the book. The author gets $3.90 in royalties. Bookstores return about forty per cent of the hardcovers they buy; this accounts for $5.20 per book. Another $3 goes to overhead costs and the price of producing and shipping the book—leaving, in the best case, about a dollar of profit per book.”

What is lacking throughout the entire article, and apparently from the thinking of publishers thought processes, is one simple fact: it’s cheaper to make ebooks.

The margins mentioned in the quoted section, and the original article, are slim as hell. Narrow beyond belief. Yet, when you subtract the cost of returns (quoted above as $5.20 per book), and subtract the cost of producing and shipping the book (listed as $3 per above), the profits for ebooks suddenly explode. An ebook priced the same as a hardback ($26 as above), the publisher earns as pure profit a whopping $9.20 per book. But, publishers are not selling ebooks for $26 each. They’re selling them for $9.99 or $14.99, so are publishers losing anywhere from $2-7 per book, no. They’re not. Why? Because it’s a different model.

Publishers typically pay the author 25% royalties (based on cover price) per book, and pay a 33% of cover price fee to the online storefront that actually sells the books. So when an ebook sells for $10, 58% (or $5.80) of that goes to someone other than the publisher. Now the remaining amount ($4.20) goes to the publisher and from that they pay their staff and earn a profit. So paying editors, marketers, designers, etc all comes from that remaining $4.20 from a $10 book.

That may not sound like much, but it’s a huge improvement. Compare what the publisher gets from each type of book, e- versus physical. For ebooks the publisher gets 77% of the cover price to pay expenses and profit. For hardbacks the publisher gets 50% of the cover price to pay expenses and profit. Even reducing the cost of an ebook to around $10, the publisher would have the same profit margin as a physical book.

When you include the utter lack of expense in producing an ebook, remember that returns are all but non-existent, there’s no shipping or warehousing, no taxes on warehoused stock, no return shipping and pulping involved in ebooks the profit margin skyrockets and suddenly the fight for $14.99 instead of $9.99 looks like what it really is: pure unmitigated greed.

Now, publishers have struggled for years and we all have to admit that. They’ve done good work for little money for a really long time. But, we’re in the 21st century. Ebooks are here, and they’re the future of publishing. The big media companies are still floundering to get in on the “new thing” of ebooks. Publishers don’t want to struggle with narrow profit margins any more. Ebooks offer publishers a way to renegotiate the terms of their service to the world. And more power to ‘em. They deserve to make more for their hard work, and the authors too.

Here’s the catch: you can’t beat free. Without getting into the piracy conversation, there’s a near infinite amount of free content available on the web, legal or otherwise. Paying $26 for a hardback of a book is something that’s difficult to swallow when you’re poor. Which is why paperbacks do so much better. Paying $8 for a paperback version of a book is still hard for some people to accept. Asking people to pay $14.99 for a book they can’t even hold, that might be censored (Moby Dick story about iTunes censoring the free book), that might be erased in a Orwellian irony (as 1984 was from the Kindle), is just plain stupid.

Publishers are in the business of books. Business. The goal of business is to make money, as much of it as possible at all times. Publishers should be paid, and they should be paid more than they are now. Accepted. However, asking readers to pay $5 more for the same ebook is plain retarded. Amazon will come over to the pricing model used by iTunes. Great. Guess what? That prediction that publishing is dead or dying is slowly coming true. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point because industry that let retailers walk all over them is finally taking the moral stance at the worst possible time.

Now, when the industry is at it’s weakest. Now, when the industry has never been more transparent. Now, when there’s a near infinite amount of free content to compete against. Now, when publishers are folding, when magazines and newspapers are dying in the streets. Now, when self-publishing is easier than ever with the internet. Now, you decide to stand up and demand more money?

Considering the state of things it has come to this. It really is now or never for publishers. I wonder if this is what it looked like when Beta Max took its last gasp.

iPad: Screen and typing…

So I ventured to the local Best Buy to test pilot the iPad. Luckily they only had display models so I wouldn’t be tempted to take one home, that and those security cords are too thick to chew through while being subtle.

Typing on the iPad is as awkward as most people are saying. But somehow I think people are forgetting the old days of typing on a typewriter. The iPad is a computer, but you have to type like you did on a typewriter. High arched fingers coming straight down on the keys, you can’t touch type on it. You might be able to get used to it enough to touch type, you know if you’re a relatively normal person, not that guy who set a world record on the iPad.

The display model also had the Marvel app on it. Holy shit. Comics look awesome on the iPad screen. I don’t know how other apps will display comics, but the Marvel app fit the height of the page to the screen in portrait mode. That added even more black to the edge of the screen. Not good, but not that big of a deal really.

While at the Best Buy I have the misfortune of being near a few rather smelly people who were also trying the iPad. I don’t mean “haven’t washed in weeks” or “hair so greasy it’d catch fire” kind of dirty / smelly. I’m talking just smoked a cigarette they stubbed out and relit hours later, years long smoker stank, haven’t washed their ‘smoking clothes’ in days, and just put out the cigarette right before walking up to me. Ignore that the iPad display was at the back of the store. These people were still breathing out smoke as they walked through the store.

Also, GoodReader is only $0.99. It reads PDFs and you can transfer them via the USB instead of being forced to go wireless. Big bonus yes, but… unless you’re going to convert your library of comic files it’s still worth it to drop the $15 for one of the comic apps.

Apple iPad: Neat or Need?

I’m still struggling with justifying the purchase of an iPad but I thought I’d throw some resources together that I’ve found.

The iPad only natively (and for free) supports the ePub format. No PDFs without an app and no CBR/CBZ files without an app.

I’m a gamer and comic geek so those file types are very important to my reading habits on computers. Without those, it’s a complete loss. There are ways to get these file types on the iPad though. A good conversion program for PDFs is Calibre. It’s listed on several sites as the best out there. I haven’t tried them all so I’ll have to take their word for it.

In testing Calibre it does a great job of taking plain (text only) PDFs over to ePub, but in converting even a small game PDF, each image was on a separate page, the corresponding text on another page, and the frequent call-out boxes were on separate pages as well (and yes, any background images etc were on a separate page). So for the best out there, it just doesn’t work in a useful way for layered game PDFs. A simple scanned comic PDF would work just fine though. Calibre also works great for CBR/CBZ comic files. It converted over easily without any formatting issues. It does take a few moments to convert a 25mb file over though, so batch these up if that’s the route you want to take. However, the conversion turned the color comic into black and white. Messing with the settings on Calibre might do the trick, but I couldn’t find a b&w or color option for the output.

For fully layered PDFs your best bet is still to shell out a few more bucks for a proper app. Really though, you just dropped $500+ on an iPad, another $15 for a decent app shouldn’t be stopping you. And since we’re at the point of buying apps, why not shell out for a proper CBR/CBZ reader while you’re at it. If you only do black and white manga, Calibre is cheaper (it’s free), but for the full color comics it’s only another $15 or so for a proper reading app. Currently Marvel is the only one available, but in the coming days or months, you’ll see many more pop up.

Several places and people have recommended GoodReader – Tablet Edition. They’re running a $0.99 special on the app now. It’s listed as a limited offer. Don’t know because the regular iPhone version is only $0.99.

This story from NPR is apropos.

Star Trek Online, cancelled…

Damn. And even in my attempts to cancel my subscription to the game Cryptic shows it’s true colors. I had to poke around their entire site and reload the subscriptions page six times before the “cancel subscription” option appeared on screen. Then I had to confirm a dozen times to get it to actually cancel.

All this experience does is make me want a good Star Trek video game, or table top RPG, even more. Too bad. This could have been great.

Who knows, maybe they’ll iron out all the bugs in six months so the fans can come back. Maybe they’ll redesign it too. Maybe…

Star Trek Online…

Okay, so I bit the bullet and picked up Star Trek Online to see what it was all about. That may not surprise those who know me, but those who know this game’s PC only and I’m a hardcore MacHead will recognize the dilemma immediately. Boot Camp you say. Nope. A virtual machine of some kind? Nope. How the hell then? Simple. A google search.

This thread.

This gamer girl / program geek whipped out a Wine shell for installing Star Trek Online (a PC only game) on a Mac without installing Windows. It took her a few hours to do. Hmmm… wonder why the actual game company couldn’t have done that… oh well.

So, how’s the game. It’s good and bad actually.

The Good. It’s Star Trek. They get the feel of being a Starfleet or Klingon Captain down really well. The missions feel like regular episodes of the shows. Some of the missions are simple MMO placeholders like kill x or find x of y item, but that’s to be expected. The customization is outstanding (more on this later). The graphics (even on the hacked Mac version I’m using) are great. The sound effects are a nice touch to put you in the mood.

The Game play. Ground and space combat fell completely different, as they should, but it’s almost like two completely different games hacked into each other. The UI is vaguely similar in space and on the ground, but everything else is different. The animation on the ground is not so hot though. Some neat moves by the Captain and bridge officers, but lots of little bugs, literal coding bugs and pet peeves for gamers bugs.

One mission involved fighting your way through the halls of a mining station only to be trapped inside and having to blast your way back out again. Not bad for a mission, except you have to target the blast doors and destroy them to continue. When the targeting glitches and you can’t fire on the door that stops you dead. Had to abort the mission due to that. Not a happy 20 minutes for me.

There’s lots of button mashing going on here. Between keeping track of your engine output to various systems, the cooldowns of your abilities (along with those of each of your various bridge officers), as well as your equipment options that help in combat, the speed of your ship, the shield strength of your ship, the hull integrity of same, the firing arc of your many weapons, and all this for the one enemy you’re targeting at the time plus the same for all the other ships in the combat… it gets to be a bit much. I have a full set of digits as an adult (not for lack of trying on my brother and his friends’ part while I was growing up), but I need a few more fingers to keep track of all these buttons.

And that’s just the space combat. It’s the same with ground combat, only there’s more to it. One of my biggest pet peeves about ground combat is the targeting and movement. When you have an enemy targeted how you move changes from the no target mode. Nothing overtly changes about the UI or anything else, but the same buttons for movement suddenly change. For example, the turn left or right buttons become strafe buttons, even though there already are strafe buttons, so to actually turn your side to an enemy you have to un-target them. Bizarre choice that.

The only real complaint I have about space combat is the naval ships in space physics, but that’s an SF trope that will never die. The controls for space flight are typical for air simulators, you can invert the axis if that’s your preference. But, something that did bug me is there’s a limit to your pitch (the nose of the plane going up or down for the rest of you). Enemies and objects can be drastically above or below you, but you can’t pitch straight up or down, much less perform loops.

The customization is downright amazing. You can change damn near anything about your ship, colors, config, components, mix-and-match everything. Same goes for the characters you play. Most of the aliens you’d want are preset as standard species available to play. Some are unlocked as you level (Klingons for one). And some are straight up sold for real cash money by the company (liberated Borg and Ferangi in Starfleet for example). You can customize your uniform in all kinds of ways, but for the Original Series uniform, the TOS movie era uniforms, or the Next Gen series era uniforms you have to pay cash money.

The leveling process is fairly straight forward. You earn skill points and spend those to level. You can’t save ‘em up cause you won’t level until you actually spend them. You earn bridge officer points to spend as you will also. Great many options for skill points (more on this later too).

In all there’s a lot going good for this game.

The Bad. The customization is an utter nightmare. There’s so much to change around and fiddle with that you can either not get started because you want to see what you can do, or with every new option (i.e. gaining skill points) you have no idea where to spend them in all the options. This goes into another huge issue for STO. Information. There is almost none about the game right now. It’s less than two weeks out of the gate so there’s a good reason for the lack of info on which skills do what, what the options are, decent builds, detailed mission walkthroughs, etc. So all the little habits you might have coming from WOW to STO you can forget. No wiki to check real quick for a heads up on an item or mission. No head for a complete list of all items or anything like that. Hell, there’s barely any info from Cryptic (the game company) about the game. What we know from them is essentially this: it’s a great game; it’s an MMO; it’s based on Star Trek. Full stop.

This lack of info really plays badly for the game. When you’re stuck the only place to go is other noobs like yourself in game or to post something on the forum asking for help. You’ll get a real quick response on the forum, too bad it’s likely to be some version of vitriol spewed by the typical pre-teen lifeless MMO player that berates every other honestly asked question on every other forum for every other game out there. I think it’s just one guy being a dick all over, but that’s just me. So back to the customization and skills…

There’s a lot of options, which is typically good. But there’s so many options that you need a guide book just to sort them out. But, there isn’t a guide book because the fans haven’t gotten around to it and apparently Cryptic doesn’t feel the need. Minor stuff: you only get 2 character slots until you unlock the third (they’ll likely sell more for real cash money later), and the chat channels are already flooded (holy fuck, I mean FLOOOODDED!) with gold sellers. You can’t even ask a question in game it’s so bad.

A few tricks I’ve learned. You can buy extra bridge officers. You can use a BO in your assignments tab to train up a BO already stationed to your ship. You can train up a BO by purchasing a skill replacement at the starbase. One note, if you’ve already spent skill points on the one you’re replacing, those points are lost (but still count toward advancement for some reason).

Oh… I almost forgot. There’s one server for everyone playing STO. And it goes down “unexpectedly” every 4-6 hours, on the hour. Yes, literally on the hour. “Unexpectedly.” Last two days it’s gone down at least 6 times that I counted.

Two aspects of STO that have me really worried: 1) Lifetime memberships; and, 2) Charging cash money for in game items.

I’ll handle the second one first. Bullshit. I know lots of other MMOs do this now, but it’s still bullshit.

As for the lifetime membership thing, the only way that can be a viable business model for Cryptic is if they’re not expecting the game to last long enough for the lifers to earn out their estimated cost of playing. A lifetime membership runs about $250, or 18-some months of normal pay-to-play time. After that is up the lifer is playing on the company’s dime. Not good. I can’t imagine WoW still being around if it offered lifetime memberships. The fans would all buy them and Blizzard would stop making money after 18 months. Again, not good. The only way this works is if Cryptic is planning for the game to fail immediately, or in the very near future.

To wrap up. There’s some good and bad here. But your best bet would be to give it at least six-months for the price of the game to drop, the fans to rally the information support needed for a game like this, Cryptic to get its act together on the bugs and server front, or for the game to disappear (if it’s going to).

ePub and iPad…

So I’m looking over the various information we have about Apple’s new iPad and the potential it has for ebooks.

The default reader for ebooks on the pad is for the epub format. Having checked out the features available, how-to guides, and other sundry bits associated with this format, I’m not sure it’s going to work all that well for one of the biggest potential markets for the device and store: textbooks.

One of the limitations of epub is that it’s essentially a web document in XML-based format. Now, this isn’t an issue for most fiction which would reflow quite easily as they are not exceedingly design intensive. However, many (re: most) textbooks are just that, extremely designed with callouts, sidebars, images, and lots of other bric-a-brac that clutters up the design. Now these elements are great in a printed book or even a PDF, but these same elements are a nightmare to format correctly for epub. Essentially amounting to a complete redesign of the book specifically for this format.

One of the potentially great things about Apple jumping into the ebook business is their standardizing of ebook format. If Apple does manage to standardize the ebook format into epud that will result in an enormous amount of extra work for designers. Producing a PDF from InDesign (the default standard for layout in publishing) is a simple click or two of the mouse and like magic there’s a PDF of the book with the formatting exactly as laid out with InDesign. Exporting an epub file from InDesign is much more complicated.

Here are a few resources (note they’re all in PDF) about the process.

Basically what they say is the images must be anchored into the text in the right spot as part of the paragraph and any callouts or sidebars have to be reflowed into the main body of the text. This is an utter nightmare scenario for designers of textbooks because they rely so much on these types of elements.

I have nothing against the epub format personally, but it’s a glorified HTML document which isn’t that great for the more detailed design necessary for textbooks. Unless there’s a lot of work put in by the textbook publishers or Apple allows PDFs to be viewed on the pad there could be an awful thud when this one falls flat on its face.

There is some good news though, according to MacRumors.com the pad will allow for external display support and “[a] shared file directory is provided that will mount on your Mac or PC. This is presumably how files such as iWork documents will be transferred to and from the iPad. iPad applications will be able to access this shared directory.” This last bit is good to know for a few reasons. 1) Apple recognized the lack of this feature in iPods and iPhones and has corrected it, and; 2) We know that the pad itself has to have another computer to synch to or have files pushed from, the pad can’t pull files itself. Which kills my dream of having a pad that’s networked to a Time Capsule for storage purposes, at least not according to what we know right now.

So, to round that all up, Apple iPad is still a potentially great thing for publishing but epub puts a whole lot of work out there for the designers. And hopefully PDFs will be supported without the restriction of having to email them to yourself.

Apple iPad…

Okay. So the day has arrived and the announcement made. Apple will release the iPad in 60-90 days.

This device, for those interested enough to find this blog, but not actually, you know interested enough to read the real news all over the web today about it, is somewhere between a laptop and a smartphone on the gadget scale.

As has been said elsewhere, there’s really nothing new here to get super excited about on the face of it, but since I’m a book geek, I’m jazzed about this one. With this announcement Apple has officially entered the ebook business and will provide access to text content through their new iBooks store. This (hopefully) will not be limited to just the new device but also spill over to the iPhone and iPod family of products.

It is a bit pricey, starting at $499 for the basic 16GB model, with no 3G access. But that’s all you’d need really. This device isn’t intended to replace anything you already have. This isn’t the iPod coming in to lay the smack down on the Walkman. This thing isn’t going to replace your phone or laptop. But, it will replace a few other things… maybe.

The iPad might be used to replace the endless reams of paper used by kids to draw on in a given day. The pad comes with a drawing tool that will hopefully allow files to be saved and swapped between it and your desktop for easy sharing.

The pad might replace (or prevent you from buying) an in car DVD player. You can hand this thing to the older kids in the back seat for long drives that require a movie or two to save your sanity.

The pad might (fuck I hope so) replace the several pounds apiece school textbooks that every student is forced to lug around for classes. Even if the prices of the ebook versions of textbooks are only slightly cheaper than the physical copies themselves this little gadget would make the sore shoulders and back strain go away. Of course replaced by the pocket book strain, but come on, college kids with credit cards and a fat student loan disbursement check sitting in their bank just begging to be spent.

The pad might help to replace entire personal libraries. Lost both of you just then didn’t I? Yeah, thought so. Akin to the lugging tons of books to and from class all the time, I’ve moved a lot in my life and have a substantial book collection. Roughly half of which is still sitting in boxes because I simply don’t have room to keep them all close on shelves. Now, just like the Kindle hasn’t caused any avid book geeks to replace their entire collection with a single device, I don’t think the pad will either. The Kindle does have the advantage of eInk in lieu of the backlit screen on the pad, but, the pad has the capacity to read many more formats and does a lot of other entertainment related functions as well.

The big thing for the pad, to me at least, is in the realm of comic books and children’s books. Given the predominant need for color in either medium (yes, I know there are black and white comics, and yes I read them) there has been almost no ereader support for those types of books until now. Well 2-3 months from now… you know what I mean. As long as Apple has corrected their earlier mistakes of the iPods and iPhones being unable to swap files easily with any computer it’s docked to this could be a real big market for comics and kids books. Currently there are several comic companies that have ecomics (still can’t use that because I think it’s a misspelling of economics, dammit) available, but they’re not that big.

Now, just like the iPod jumped onto the scene and ran to the bank with the mp3 format, I think the pad could do the same with epub, cbr, and cbz. The epud format is an ebook format that’s easily created from Adobe InDesign (yeah for publishers), that is much easier to replicate than the bizarre Kindle format. That ease of creation (from the publishers’ side) and ease of use (from the consumers’ side) might just be a home run for ebooks.

The cbr and cbz formats are a bit of a sticky widget though. The iPod went with the mp3 format which was (and still is, cough) the pirated music file type of choice. For comics the cbr and cbz formats are the choice illegal download file types. If the pad offers access to comics through these two formats, the comic nerds will rage. In a good way I think. The first developer to release a cbr or cbz reader for the pad would make a killing. Or the programmer who released one free would gain the undying respect and admiration of the pirate comic community. Either way, it won’t be long before the pad is used for comics. After all, it is almost the perfect size.

Another boon of the iPad is the iWorks suite being available and the connectivity of the device to external displays to show off the work you do, i.e. make presentations and bring them in on your iPad and show them on the over head projector that likely already has a computer of some type near it… but this is in Keynote instead of PowerPoint so that’s better… right?

So to recap, the iPad is a more productive iPod Touch with a larger screen. It’s touch screen not physical keyboard. And it’s designed as a display device more than a storage device. If you wirelessly connect your iPad to a time capsule or large external hard drive you could forgo laptop, but spending that kind of money, you’re probably better off just getting a Macbook. If you have a smartphone and a laptop, you likely don’t need the iPad. But if you have neither of these things, you’re probably not going to run out and drop $500 on this thing either.

I think it’s a really neat device and would love to have one. I don’t know if I can justify dropping $500 on it though.

Books vs ebooks…

In recent years there’s been an increasing amount of time given to the discussion of print books versus ebooks. There are sound and reasonable arguments on both sides for the benefits and costs involved in publishing books no matter the format. As a graduate of the publishing program at PSU (Ooligan Press), a current MLS grad student, and lifelong reader I can honestly say mine is a life of books. I love books in all their various formats. More than books though, I love stories. Short stories, long stories, novels, novellas, blogs, anything. And my love of stories is not limited to a genre, I’ll read anything: horror, sci-fi, thriller, mystery, non-fiction, history, biography, memoir, anything at all that strikes my fancy at the moment and I’ll devour it. All that being said, I can see the changes coming, just like anyone else with a few synapses firing in the old brain case.

Publishing is changing. There is a struggle going on right now. Paper versus electronic. Again, many good arguments exist for each choice. For the supporters of the traditional book, the arguments are typically one of these:

1) Paper books have been around 500 years, why change that now.
2) If electronic books replace paper books, bookstores will close, distributors will close, and on down the chain until thousands of people are out of jobs.
3) Paper books are simply better than ebooks. Paper books don’t run out of batteries and you can read them by candlelight.

For the supporters of ebooks, the arguments are usually something like this:

1) Technology is the future, join up or be left behind.
2) Paper books are too expensive, ebooks are cheaper.
3) Paper books degrade, ebooks can last forever.

Now, of all the important things I learned about publishing in the program, the most important was this: publishing is a business. Whether us bibliophiles like it or not, the publishers and authors need to make money so they can eat and continue to produce our particular drug of choice. Harsh reality, yep. Crass capitalism, maybe. But, it’s still true. They gosta eat.

I’ve been reading various opinions about this, but so far the most over-the-top, ridiculous screed on the topic is this one. This blogger actually compares technology and those that champion it to Nazis and the book (and therefore publishing in general) as the Jews going up the smoke stacks. (Yes, that actual analogy is used.)

I’m typically in the corner of technology. But lately I’ve been feeling a bit of internal push-back on this. Technology is only a tool. A means to an end. For some, it’s an end unto itself. Not for me though, and certainly not for a lot of other people. That doesn’t mean innovation should be avoided. I’ve never been one to think that the whole of society should move at the slow pace that is most comfortable for the most people. Things change. You don’t have to agree with those changes, but they’re happening anyway and there’s nothing to be done about it. No amount of hand wringing is going to stop ebooks from slowly finding their way into acceptance by the masses. It’s also true that no amount of progress is going to bring the luddites on board.

And newer is not always better. The paper book has many distinct advantages over the ebook right now. Emphasis on the right now part. As ereaders become cheaper and more functional, as the Apple Tablet comes closer to being a reality, as smaller and cheaper technology allows us to eventually wear an internet connection and surf the web through enhanced reality interfaces or HUDs there will be a point at which the book as a mass media will cease to exist. On that day we will mourn. But, that will not happen in the near future. Likely not in our lifetimes. But that day is coming. Just as one day each of us will stop moving, stop breathing, wither, and die. Life is change.

Until that far off day when the book finally dies, we can enjoy reading our paperbacks and hardbacks. Well, paperbacks at least for me because I can’t afford hardbacks. Which is one of the driving forces behind the ebook movement. The reality is that without the considerable expense of physically printing books, the prices of ebooks should be significantly cheaper than their physical counterparts. However, the old guard of publishers seems to disagree in large part. Many traditional publishers price their ebooks at or near trade paperback prices (somewhere between the hardback and paperback pricing).

Now this has two effects: readers simply ignore the ebook because they can buy the paperback for less, and the reader thinks a little less of that particular publisher. Most avid readers know enough about the business to understand that without a physical product to schlep through the distribution channels ebooks should cost less than physical books. This is something that many traditional publishers don’t seem to understand. The new publishers, the ebook publishers understand this, which is why they are flourishing while the traditional publishers are starting to panic.

I know a little secret as to why. Would you like me to share it with you? Well too bad, here goes anyway: traditional publishers think they are in the printing business, not the publishing business. Now, let me parse that a bit. Printing is the physical production of a traditional book. Publishing is the act of making information available to an audience. They are very much related and quite different activities. Ebook publishers are not in the printing business, they’re in publishing. Traditional publishing houses are tied up in the printing business. And as printing books falls by the wayside, so too will many traditional publishers, or should I say printers.

It’s not the story, or the novel that is dying. It’s the physical book. I’m a book person. But I’m more of a story person. I need my stories. I want books. If I can get my stories on a small electronic device that will allow me to carry 1000 titles in something the size of an iPhone then great, if not, I still have stacks of books to read through. Either way, my addiction is fed.

That really is the question here: Is it the physical object that matters or the content?

D&D and minis…

I’ve been a geek all my life. I’ve played D&D since I was 8-years-old. I learned to read with comic books and I’ve studied mythology since I was young. I have no idea how long or when it started, or how young I was. Most likely shortly after I started playing D&D. I passed notes in junior high written in runes. I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by junior high. I’ve played just about any RPG I could get my hands on since then.

My brothers got me into D&D. We’ve played since I was a kid. I also picked up the hobby of painting miniatures for our games. Of the three painters in our group I was the second best. I still have a few of the minis that I painted. They’re mostly the later paint jobs. I actually had the vast majority of my minis “stolen” from me a few years ago. I say “stolen” because, like most things in life, it depends on who you ask. The result is the same, my years worth of painting were gone. Sad me.

In the last few weeks my brother has set up a regular game of D&D for us to play. In that time the desire for my old minis back has grown again. I had really wanted them back at first, but like most pains, it subsided over time. The last few weeks have really brought this back up and I’m practically chomping at the bit to get my stuff back.

The leg work for this wild-goose chase is mostly being done by my brother as my stuff is being held by one of his friend-of-a-friend connections. My brother wasn’t in on the heist. He was a victim too. His minis were stolen as well. By the same person at the same time. The first contact was made tonight that could lay the ground work for the return of our stuff in the near future. I’m over-joyed about this and I really can’t wait to see all these minis from my childhood. It’s almost surreal.

I haven’t painted in the years since these pieces were taken, under the guise of various excuses. I’ve picked up the brushes now and then, but my heart hasn’t really been in it. With the thought of these old minis coming back, the desire to sit down and paint again has come back. But, more than anything, I just want to look at all these old pieces, hold them in my hands, turn them over, squint at the paint job with my older eyes and give an honest appraisal of, “Not bad.”