The Link
They’re about the first regular NY publisher to shift, but one doubts they’ll be the last. Look at the rate at which this news is hitting the world.
The Link
They’re about the first regular NY publisher to shift, but one doubts they’ll be the last. Look at the rate at which this news is hitting the world.
Rats jumping off a sinking ship?
Oh, I think the ratlines are going to be aswarm soon. People in the industry are going to be very, very worried, and let me say, the first really big NY publisher to do it, and to start marketing their own INSTEAD of going through Amazon—it’s going to get interesting. The problem is, most publishers only computerized 10 years or so ago—and they do not have an in-house can-do culture of people who know the ins and outs of publishing AND computers. People who hold administrative authority do not, not, not want to cede decision-making to some geeky kid who actually knows what he’s doing: they’ll hold committee meetings for a year and talk about a program until it’s been entirely outmoded by the fast-moving market: they’ll be translating for the eldest of reader-devices, because that’s the pace at which they decide things. Or worse, they’ll hire somebody to work two more years to create their own ‘uncrackable’ DRM, and put out a bunch of Edsels that will be hacked in a week once in distribution. Or they’ll talk about designing their own reader, when what they need to do is invite the geek kid into the committee meeting and listen to him.
A few years ago plans came to the very brink of completion for Tor Books to participate with Baen in the Webscriptions plan. The Tor editors were all on board with it. Then at the last minute the corporate bean-counters of the German company (NOT a publishing house) that owns Tor got their knickers in a twist about letting their books out into the world at a reasonable cost with no DRM, and put the kibosh on the whole thing.
Yep: didn’t hear that, but corp-rats (to paraphrase Meg) will kill us all.
That’s exciting! I’m not on their reading list, but seems to be the direction I hope things go. I’d like to be able to buy ebooks of everything, but also do print-on-demand for my favorite authors since I am still a collector for certain people.
All-digital? What about the readers who want actual in-print books on real paper? That would seem to miss a big portion of the market.
All-digital is OK, unless you don’t have electricity or batteries, and you need some way to back up your purchases so you can still access them later, along with reader software.
Distribute a downloadable file? Yes, good. But some people will still want the printed copy, or a disc or card or stick of some kind to give and keep. (Or the coupon or digital coupon for the digital file, at least.) (Yes, sentence fragments.)
The basic problem is that most people are not yet ready to move to the ebook world. They may not have a computer or ebook reader. They may be very unskilled or uncomfortable with computers. They may simply prefer printed books.
Yes, more and more people, myself included, would like, or even prefer, ebooks — but I’d bet many of them (us) want the option of getting a printed book too… or they (we) prefer printed books but like the option of taking ebooks with them (us). (Stsho Phase crisis going there, you (me) ? LOL.)
IMHO, it’s still way too early for digital ONLY, but ebooks plus in-print guarantees both markets.
— My own preference is going much more toward ebooks, but the caveats I mentioned worry me. That, and yes, I DO want printed books for some long-term favorites.
Two cents and change.
They are going to use print-on-demand and have a printer lined up for book club sales. Or so says the news release.
Well, and the interesting thing is—this is principally a Romance press. Romance, and to a certain extent classic mystery readers are not, as a group, I would guess, as computer savvy as sf readers. Most Romance readers of my acquaintance aren’t at all the computer type.
Oh, I dunno … I’m partial to a Romance novel and absolutely adore mysteries, particularly English ones.
And Katharine Eliska Kimbriel is re-issuing her Nuala series as e-books on Book View Cafe. I had that from the author’s mouth … I’d heard a rumour on facebook or somewhere and emailed her to check out the rumour. And it’s true! So more backlist is coming to light. Just as well as my copies of that series are decidedly tatty.
Ha. Then SOME romance and mystery readers are definitely with it!
Despite the fact that CJ is completely right, romance readers are not as computer literate as say SF readers; everything I have seen says that ebook adoption by genre put mystery and romance at the top of the list — right up there with SF. Why? Three main reasons: 1. storage space, most romance and mystery readers read lots; and electrons take up very little shelf space; 2. Nobody can see what you are reading, an ebook reader is the ultimate brown, paper wrapper; and 3. series distribution, a lot of mystery and romance readers have for years basically subscribed to authors or series, now they get their new offerings instantly instead of whenever the post office gets around to it.
At least, that is the story I’ve heard.
Elaine
Norman, OK
Right on, Elaine. And after a hard day at work debugging a b…h of a program that some nincompoop made into spaghetti there’s nothing like a slushy romance and a glass of wine to iron out the kinks. Not too much wine, however, or you’ll be hung over at 3am when the midnight shift calls to say it bombed once again and you’re on call because said nincompoop left on vacation!!!
One reason why I’m retired.
You’re absolutely right, Elaine. And don’t cut the romance writers short. They’ve been at the head of the pack with marketing for years. The turnover for romance is huge. They’re generally superfast reads as opposed to the good SF, which makes you take your time and think. It’s flow through consumption. The rewards for writing it are equally huge (I know a couple of very good writers who would love to write SF, but they don’t want to take the salary cut…and their work is mid to low list.) The biggest section of any used book store is romance. I’m not at all surprised they leapt into the deep end with ebooks. Also, on the ebook conversion sites, you see a lot more romance writers than anything else.
I love that “ultimate brown paper wrapper” analogy! 😀 😀
Here are Amazon’s numbers for Fiction on the Kindle. I don’t know if their Genre Fiction category includes Romance, SF, etc but even without that Romance and Mystery are way up there.
# Fiction
# Action & Adventure (23,207)
# Children’s Fiction (25,647)
# Comic Fiction (33)
# Contemporary Fiction (54,488)
# Drama (7,789)
# Erotica (17,713)
# Fantasy (10,065)
# Fiction Classics (64,800)
# Genre Fiction (124,891)
# Historical Fiction (16,263)
# Horror (8,300)
# Literary Fiction (19,665)
# Mystery & Thrillers (28,022)
# Poetry (8,150)
# Religious Fiction (3,977)
# Romance (36,361)
# Science Fiction (13,269)
# Short Stories (18,507)
# World Literature (12,537)
Is there a genre you are less likely to re-read than others? For me it’s romance, so buying a romance ebook makes more sense to me than a hard copy since I’m likely to pass it on anyway. My favorite travel books are biographies or 400+ pages books. I don’t suppose there are any imprints that just publish biographies?
With the introduction of more capable reading devices, such as Apple’s iPad, it is finally time for the industry to standardise on the .PDF, as the de-facto standard for publishing. It is true that alternatives, such as e-pub, etc., do provide a good quality reading experience, for simply formatted publications, but that experience is bedeviled by the vagaries of the end user’s means of reading a publication. For example: the not too sophisticated format scheme of a screenplay, is beyond the capabilities of e-pub and/or its counterparts.
And PDF is a lot easier to prepare. A cinch to prepare, versus ePub or Mobi.
No, no, no, no, no! PDFs are page images. A pdf page simply will not fit on a small screen unless the type is tiny. The very best thing about my reader is that if I forgot my reading glasses and am forced to hold it at arm’s length from my face, I can enlarge the type so that I can still read it. THere may be only a few words on a line, but they are visible. Even if your reader will let you enlarge the pdf, you will then have to scroll back and forth sideways on every line. No, no, this is a BAD idea.
TOTALLY AGREE! Pdf is the final fall back, until they figure out how to do flowable type. I’d vote for ebook.
And I’m betting I could make a screenplay format properly. 😀
I don’t know, when I try to read .pdf files on my Sony Reader, they’re rarely formatted at a text size where you can read – they do look prettily laid out though. If I then try to increase the fontsize to be actually able to read, it totally breaks the layout and the text formatting.
Give me an epub-file any day. Some savy publishers can mimic the reading layout of their printbooks pretty closely (the last two Celta series sf romances by Robin D. Owens or the Naamah books by Jaqueline Carey for example).
Another thing, reading off an LCD screen irritates my eyes when doing it too long, so the iPad would be great for video-viewing but unless they develop dual eInk and LCD screen, I’ll stay with a dedicated ebook reading device which allows me to increase font size.
PDFs don’t flow text very well at all. I hope the format doesn’t take off. I prefer having every book look essentially the same on my Kindle. I am very particular with layouts so I’d rather have a plain standard one than someone attempt something fancy and fail. Especially as more newbies try their hand at page layout there will be lots of fail. Remember websites in 1995? It will get ugly. Whatever format takes off it will have to be compatible to the settings of each reader’s device. There are font hacks for Kindle and eventually customization will probably be standard. May the day come soon.
When we started, we made pdfs off our WP docs, without really thinking. Ended up really small print on readers because our default page size was for manuscripts. We have to make a special page size (6×9) in formatting commands for our pdf books.
These arguments against .pdf do have merit within the context of the peculiarities and/or limitations of the end user’s reading device. However, the advantages of .pdf vastly outweigh the disadvantages. In addition, the primary advantage of e-publishing is lost for an author, if the author has to spend a huge amount of time and effort to satisfy all the possible reading options, when they could be writing new material, which is why they are an author, in the first place. My experience of iPad–and I am not advocating for that particular device–is that the reading experience is more than satisfactory, in comparison to Kindle, for example.
I’d guess that the primary advantage of e-publishing is even further lost for an author if the reader doesn’t come back, because the ebook was unreadable to the end user (customer) due to peculiarities and/or limitations of the end user’s reading device.
I’m against .pdf, too, because of the aforementioned formatting problems (you can screw really up formatting during pdf-creation, too, btw) and because it’s a proprietary format, you’ll always be dependent upon Adobe.
And lets not forget that Apple has a tiff with Adobe’s programming, so no Flash for the iPad (has the nice side effect, that you are even more dependent upon Apple’s app store). Same could happen with .pdf.
An iPad is also much larger than the average eBook, no wonder you have no problem with pdf turning unreadable
From Jane’s and my point of view, if all we had to do was .pdf and .prc and .ePub, things would be a lot less confusing and we could get a conversion done in one sitting, easy. But we also have to go through a lot more gymnastics for .lit, .txt, .rtf, .lrc (or whatever that other l is—and 4 more types, which require you to very carefully switch off certain toggles (but not the same ones) and that are very touchy about how they handle, say, special characters, or fonts (some won’t handle font change at all) or line spacing. All of these can be handled by toggles. But if you miss a switch, you’ve screwed it; and each one has to be gone over as best we can read them (in some cases we can convert to it but we can’t display it) for errors.
Complicating matters immensely, particularly the small devices do much better if there’s a TOC (table of contents) so that the reader can re-find his place. A TOC is created by a special routine within the process, which relies on CSS(flowable text)’s header codes. Plus an end of page command creates a new file, a little detail that become important in the basic structural files of ePub: ePub is essentially a zipped file that, without those EOP commands, becomes one massive bloc of a file folder. Putting them in at chapter-ends is important for ePub. That structure is one reason why ePub is a good format for navigation. My early attempts do not have a TOC. Jane’s, and I believe Lynn’s, do. We will be creating files that do in my subsequent books. And fixing the early files.
One thing you get with CC is a promise that you can always get the latest update of a file you’ve bought. If functionality increases, if a feature is added, we know who bought what, and you’re covered.
And because we handle all that nasty technicality, you don’t have to do a thing but click on the file on your computer or your reader/device, and it just comes up and (ideally) behaves itself.
We long for the day, anent the above discussion, when the multiplication of formats calms down. I fear that publishers who get into this are probably going to hear (in their board rooms) “Gee, JB, I think we should devise our own format, and DRM the daylights out of it. We’ll offer our own reader, too.” …..Riiight……Penguin’s gone one round of e-book publication, it didn’t work; now they’re on another; it’s still not optimum, and they don’t get all their titles out. “We just push a button, right, and it converts…” Nope. That’s not all of it.
.PDF is an open standard, so Adobe does not have any strangle hold over publishers. Nor will the iPad be the only such device on the market. It is true that .PDF is not a silver bullet per se, since the author/publisher must take some care over how they format the originating document before it is converted to a .PDF. The iPad and its 9.7 inch screen is what e-books have been waiting for, not a 2 inch mobile phone screen, even if it can be used for that purpose. And the point of e-publishing is to make books available which traditional publishers will not make available, and consequently can never be read.
I hope I’m not just being all “do the file that I need, and everybody else can just go jump in the lake,” when I say, can’t you just do plain text, prc, epub, and pdf (which is, even on the larger iPad, unreadable for those with older eyes), and provide Calibre and instructions for the few readers still in use which don’t handle any of those? If I am beating a dead horse, and you already found out there are a significant number of people who need the other formats, please just ignore this comment.
Charles_Smyth, carrying around an iPad or a kindle DX is like carrying a hardback. the 6″ or 5″ e-ink screen devices are the paperbacks of the ereader world, and there are always going to be more paperbacks, I think. And if you format a pdf to fit on a 6″ screen with 14 point text for older eyes to read, the iPads are going to have teeny little pages that only take up a quarter of the screen. Silly. One of the MAJOR advantages of electronic text over ink on paper is the reflowing capability, and pdf pages just waste that. Better to just have a plain ascii file with no formatting, than that.
The problem is that some of our potential buyers tell me they have older readers/devices, so they still need these, and we don’t know if we offered ONLY those key formats if they’d be cut out. Calibre is a great program, but it’s not the world’s easiest to manipulate. It’s a good suggestion, though: maybe we should run some polls on the blogs and on CC to see what file types are actually being used. We did this at the start, but not in poll format, and while we’ll run a conversion if there’s only one person who really needs it, we’d like to phase out a few of the 11 formats.
In my attempts with .pdf, I’ve found it has a very bad tendency to convert things to images. An entire poem done up for poster display, with a shadow/glow effect to the letters… all converted so the shadow/glow was an image and the text was layered over that, which meant the text might “slip” in positioning or reflow/resize… aarrgh. Other experiments with conventional use of type might suffer if there was an illustration or table beside the text, or if a font was only partially included or went missing. Quite annoying for me, quite incomprehensible for clients, but (usually) understood by service bureaus or printers.
I would therefore vote, “NAY, begone, thou churlish varlet!” …if only it were not an industry standard and expected as such. That, and people would look at me funny for using Shakespearean English. 😉 “Mais non, quitter loin d’ici, toi, tu varlet insidieux!” (Hmm, only a distant approximation, as I didn’t look up “churlish.”) Eh bien.
A US letter size page (8.5 x 111.0 inches) with 2.54 cm top and bottom and 3.9 cm left and right, with Times Roman at 14 pt and 20 point spacing, provides an excellent reading experience, with plenty of room to zoom without exceeding the page margins. For those who require unlimited amounts of zoom, Adobe’s Reader has a reflow option. This option is not available on all.PDF readers. But the iPad in landscape mode, with pages as per the aforementioned format, should be readable by almost anyone.
A complication with plain text files, is that not all plain text readers and editors support the same character set, which frequently results in quotation marks, etc., not being rendered, or are converted into strings of odd characters.
You keep, it seems to me, assuming that everyone is going to have a 9 or 10 inch screen like an iPad or Kindle DX. There are many 5″ and 6″ devices out there, including mine, and many people also reading on Palms, phones, iPod Touches, etc. Now I would never ever try to read a book on a 2″ or 3″ phone screen, but many people do. And while you may be right about a formatted page, minus its margins, fitting on an iPad, it WILL NOT fit on a 6″ screen. I am not going to go get a 1-1/2 pound iPad with a glowy screen, when I have a very nice Cybook that weighs 6 oz and has a comfortable-on-the-eyes e-ink screen. But at my preferred settings, by actual count in an early part of Ring of Lightning, it shows 80 words. Maybe 2 paragraphs. I really depend on free-flowing text, not preformatted pages.
Oh, and Jane- your cover is WONDERFUL. And properly uses the full page to display. Some books – a bunch, though not all, of my Webscription books, display the cover only as a little 2″ picture. Yours is gorgeous. and of course the three guys are pretty, too 😉
Don’t get me wrong, I think the iPad is a really neat device. If I didn’t have several other higher priorities for a spare half a grand, I would get one. But compared to my reader, it’s HEAVY. I wouldn’t just routinely carry it around in my purse, like my cybook reader or a paperback book.
I recently read an opinion (on the E-reader group on Baen’s Bar) that in another year or so, as the market shakes down and competition and demand grow, that e-ink readers may get to be around $80-$90. That would be great. The Kindle apparently has a new one, with WiFi rather than the 3G capability, that will be $139. So while, for a portable computer, the iPad plus a bluetooth keyboard is going to be very attractive, it is not going to take over the whole e-reader market, pretty as it is. The e-book formats must continue to allow for the smaller-screened devices.
It may be that screenplays cannot be formatted well for a smaller screen. That is a rather specialized and niche portion of the market, those who need to read them may very well require larger devices. But the overall standard formats, and I do think they are going to eventually get narrowed down, are definitely going to have to include formats useful on small screens.
Thank you! 😀 I try!
I’ll tell her you said that. 😉
Actually, secretly, I have to work on an 8 1/2 x 11 because it’s the way I think when I’m writing, but sometimes I’ll reformat to a book-sized page because I actually can’t stand to read on an 8 1/2 by 11.
But that difference of opinions is the reason we supply more than one format. Though CSS (flowable type) will adapt itself.
Lynn (Threadbender) Abbey prefers PDF, because it lets her control how the reader will view the text, which is kinda important to us writer-types, but Jane and I have finally thrown up our hands and said CSS is the way it’s got to go and anything we do in typeface that’s not friendly to CSS is going to be a pita, so hereafter we probably will consider that—we’re writers, after all, and can’t control what a book designer does anyway.
What’s a real pita is the typefaces. You can get additional types embedded, but it requires first getting into the conversion file’s guts, and secondly, being sure you’re not using a copyrighted font—many are copyrighted, ergo can’t be used without a fee, which we can’t afford: some of the fees for online use are 300.00, and we just haven’t got it.
The things we learn trying to be honest while getting you a readable product!
What’s more, if the target devices don’t have multiple fonts installed, your efforts may be wasted. I know it is POSSIBLE to put more fonts on my cybook reader, but I am not planning to spend my time figuring out how to do it. It seems to have Courier, Georgia, and Verdana on it; whether it can display more than one of them in one document I don’t know. It does, as far as I can tell, properly use italics (as in the Ring of Lightning prologue).
I know that, especially in science fiction where you may have some REAL issues of trying to get across multiculturality, using differet typefaces is important. I see that PDFs would defintely help with this. But trying to define pages when the target readers are so diverse is, I am afraid, futile.
Even web-pages run into problem of page-size for different devices and different eyes. I am frequently frustrated these days by blog templates that don’t reflow text if the font size is increased. LJ is bad at this. And some templates in WP, including this one, when you use browser commands to enlarge the text, expand the sidebars to keep all the lines the same there, and shrink the center (important) column to where, at the extreme, you get a little 3″ column of nice big readable words in very short lines! (I know, I should go put on my contact and then my reading glasses, so that my natural nearsighted eye and my cataract-surgery farsighted eye both agree to read normal text at a normal distance. But I haven’t)
embedding fonts is, overall, a luxury, and in some ways (I admit it) a vanity. It’s pretty. And in some cases, gives a visual cue to something like the mindset of the person writing the note. But overall, the prose should handle such details. Embedding works in epub, and pdf but not much else. I like doing it. I’m glad to know how to do it. But it’s far from a necessity. Even italics seem to be just an added benny. If Real Readers like the book, what they want are the words. Flowable type is the one absolute, IMO, not only for the variety of readers, but for the different sizes of type readers need. That ability to change the type size has changed lives of older readers whose eyes are just flat giving out.
As for defining pages, Lynn had a good observation. Having page numbers in a ToC that are based on the page numbers of a standard hardcover makes a bit of a bridge between the two worlds so you have something of a baseline on which to judge on a gut level where you are in the book.
If you can read Ring, either your cybook is compensating or it is using those other fonts. When you ’embed’ a font in a file, it includes the data/software necessary to display it, which is why you can’t use a copyrighted font. The fonts themselves are old, some of them (Trajan) really old, taken from a Roman monument…but the enabling software/package is what’s copyrightable, so that’s why we have to find a non-proprietary version of it. Legally speaking.
Sorry about that shrinking middle column. I’ll be on the lookout for a plugin that handles the CSS better, as in losing the sidebars for some devices.
Well, I haven’t really (re)read it yet — I just downloaded it onto the reader this morning, so it was sitting there handy to inspect the first pages of to get a wordcount, etc. Currently I am in the middle of a series of LONG books by Dave Freer, Eric Flint, and Mercedes Lackey (the Heirs of Alexandria), so I’ll get there in a while.
I’m pretty OK with the shrinking column, don’t worry about it unless a fix just leaps into your lap.
When you embed the font, your css includes both the name of the font and a default “style” such as serif or sans-serif. That clues the ebook reader what to use if it can’t handle embedded fonts. It’s important to make sure that dual information is included in the css, or you will have just blank spots. Not conducive to a good reading experience! 😀
Carolyn, that side bar problem likely deals with the fact that sidebars have to be a certain size to handle the widgets. They’re probably a fixed size in your theme, but the overall page is set to a percentage of the screen. (looks to be 100%) This is as opposed to those themes where the overall width is fixed, as well as the width of the sidebar. You’ll zoom into the whole mess and get scroll bars instead of making it all fit on the screen at the same time. You might actually have a fixed width option in Atahualpa. I’ll go look…
Note for observers: Atahualpa is not a resort in Mexico nor a Conquistador-age monarch. It’s the name of the template I use for this blog. 🙂 Thought I should clarify that.
Well, if you have time to mess with this … here is a composite screenshot showing what I see at three levels of browser-set type size (Firefox in Mac OS 10.6)
http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/3/10/871458//WWaS.screenshots.png
Oops. Yeah. Theme. Tho a resort in Mexico might be nice right about now…But the fishies would starve…
Carolyn, under “theme options” and layout, you’ll see an option for width. right now, it’s at 99%. You can put in, say 1240px and it will remain fixed at 1240.
You can also set a minimum width for the 99% style you’ve got, which you might prefer. Right now your sidebars are set at 200px. If you wanted the squashing of the center to stop when the center is, say, equal to the total of the sidebars, you’d set that minimum at 800px. 200 for each sidebar and 400 for the center. Make sense?
As for the conversion business…I vote for all readers to be able to handle, in addition to their native format, pdf, epub, mobi(prc) or, for the truly desperate, txt.
C-S, I didn’t realize pdf had “reflow” until you said something. I went and checked out our adobe pro and it can. (woo-hoo) Since they can do that, they can darn well figure how to do it along with a two page up display. 😀 And make flowable type a widely available option. Then I’ll start to consider it a viable alternative. 😀 Until it can do that on all readers, it’s very much a second choice for me, for all it is by far the easiest for us to produce. That ability to enlarge the type and keep everything on the screen is way too valuable for readers. 😀
And I wish they’d all figure a way to auto resize image to fit the page, whenever they’re displayed. I hate seeing pictures in bits and pieces. 😀 Don’t ask for much, do I?
I certainly never realized there was any possibility of flowable type in pdf. I thought the whole thing about pdf was that you got your whole page looking just like you wanted, and then locked it into a page image, so that if you went to a printing service who didn’t have, for instance, your fonts installed, it didn’t matter. You give the service your page, your page comes out.