publishing

Baby Farm Animals and Other Sillinesses

We pulled into Crystal Lake last night after all the usual 1100 miles, with three adult bichons and an eight-and-a-half-week-old puppy in the hold. Redball is looking for two permanent names: A kennel name, and a call name. Kennel names are nominally unique (if often complex and sometimes ridiculous) and are how individual purebred dogs are listed in breed databases. QBit’s kennel name is Deja Vu’s Quantum Bit, and Aero’s is Jimi’s Admiral Nelson. Jackie’s kennel name is Jimi’s Hit the Jackpot. We went through a lot of ideas on the way out (Nebraska is good for such things) and floated possibilities like Jimi’s Morning Cloudscape. As for call names, well, that’s how you call the dog for dinner. Short is good. One of my favorites, after listening to him fuss halfway across Iowa, is Riesling, or Reese for short. Hey, he’s white and he whines. (Ceaselessly.)

We’ll figure it out. The trip was uneventful. We played my mix CDs, and when the thumping hi-hat intro to Barry Manilow’s 1981 cover of “Let’s Hang On” started to rise, I cranked up the volume and yelled, “Let’s disco!” I was being silly, but Carol took me at my word, and for the next 2:57 I watched my spouse do an absolutely pure disco routine without ever leaving the front seat of the 4-Runner. Carol has an amazing gift for dance improv that she almost never gets to exercise. I remember back in 1975 when she stood up to a friend’s wedding, and I watched in awe as she and one of her sorority sisters did a near-acrobatic dance improv to a George M. Cohan medley, all in long dresses and high heels, with the wedding party’s pink parasols for canes, in front of what must have been three hundred people. Thirty-four years later, well, she still has it.

I do need to set something straight here before too much longer. I got a note from one of my long-time readers just before setting out, asking me how it was that I wrote a book about baby farm animals. I’ve been asked this before, and the simple answer seems somehow inadequate: I didn’t. However, if you google “Baby Farm Animals by Jeff Duntemann” you will get plenty of hits on all the new and used book sites. Don’t order it on the strength of my reputation. The book exists, but in fact was written and drawn by the formidable Garth Williams, who is better known for the art in Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. A little digging revealed an error right at the source: Bowker’s ISBN database, which somehow got Williams’ book listed under my name. That single booboo has by now propagated into virtually every significant bookselling site on the Web. I think it’s hilarious, but if I were Garth Williams, I’d be seriously annoyed, or at least I would be if I weren’t dead. I sent a note to Bowker, but don’t expect the error to be corrected any time soon.

Ah, well. As I’ve said before, better Baby Farm Animals than The Story of O.

Odd Lots

Jun 26th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

One of the most remarkable photos of a volcanic eruption ever taken apparently happened by sheer chance, when the ISS passed over the Kuril Islands just as the Sarychev Peak volcano let loose. The rising plume literally punched a near-circular hole in the cloud cover.
Just in case you happen to see a nuclear weapon go off, having one of these in your pocket would be handy to quantify things. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the pointer.)
From Bruce Baker comes a pointer to a NYT article about the perils of being an outsourcee for an unscrupulous publisher. And so much for our textbooks being created by experts with advanced degrees.
John Cleese’s lighthearted but still informative documentary “Wine for the Confused” can now be seen on Hulu, at the cost of a few Toyota commercials. I’m good with that–and in complete agreement with Cleese that knowing good wine from great wine is not automatic, and in fact knowing good wine from bad takes more effort than most would think. Don’t miss it. (Thanks to Roy Harvey for letting me know it was there; I saw it on TV a couple of years ago and much enjoyed it.)
We may gasp at 64 GB thumb drives now, but storage technologies coming to market in the next few years will make 1 TB thumb drives not only possible but commonplace. (Thanks to Frank Glover for the link.)
The annual amateur radio Field Day event happens this weekend, from 1800 zulu on Saturday to 2100 on Sunday. I’ve got the radios boxed up, and will be experimenting with a interesting rotatable dipole made from a pair of AN-45G collapsible military whip antennas, on top of a pipe mast made of four 5′ sections of 3/8″ pipe mounted on my ancient telescope pipe base. The rotator is my right hand, turning a greased 2″ pipe joint on its own threads. I’ll describe the dipole with photos if it works; if it doesn’t work I’ll admit failure and quietly forget about it. But if you’ll be on the air, I’ll be working solo from a nearby campground as K7JPD. Listen for me.
From the Too Weird To Be True but True Anyway File: The woman who may well become our first Hispanic supreme court justice stated quite flatly in her Princeton University senior thesis that “…in Spanish we do not have adjectives. A noun is described with a preposition.” I’m a Polish-German-Irish-French ubermongrel who last took Spanish in 1973, and even I know better than that. So…can I be on the Supreme Court instead?

Souls in Silicon on Amazon at Cover

Jun 6th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Boy, I sure wasn’t expecting this: An email this morning from Lulu informed me that my SF story collection Souls in Silicon was now being offered through Amazon Marketplace at its $11.97 cover price–not cover plus 30%, as I reported in my May 29, 2009 Odd Lots entry. It’s evidently a test program of some kind, and not all Lulu books are included; in fact, of the eight Copperwood Press titles, Souls in Silcon is the only one in the program. Somebody’s giving up significant margin here, and odds are it’s not Amazon.

But this is an awesomely good thing. I have a hunch that Lulu heard that POD publishers like me were going with other systems (like Amazon’s own BookSurge) to get into the Amazon database somehow and started to worry. Hey, I’d worry too. All Copperwood books would probably be on another system (probably BookSurge) by now had the assembly book project not taken over my life last November. I would not have pulled them off Lulu, but everybody knows that Amazon is the first place people go looking for books online.

I want this program to continue and go mainstream, not just for me but for everybody, so I’m going to make a slightly weird request: If my writeups on the book piqued your interest and you figured you might order Souls in Silicon someday, now is the time to do it–if you do it through Amazon. I’m about to order a few here, and if I could scare up a couple more orders from elsewhere it could support the test and convince them that the decision could pay off for them, by generating higher unit sales even at obviously lower margins.

Here’s the Amazon sales link. (The same link is on the cover image above.) And if you know any other Lulu books in the same program, consider buying them as well. If Lulu’s going to survive it has to be able to get its products into the Amazon database. This may be their best shot, at least until they allow me to use ISBNs from my own set.

UPDATE: I just discovered that within the past hour, all the rest of my Copperwood Press titles were updated on Amazon to their Lulu cover prices. Dare we hope that the test program succeeded?

UPDATE: Chris Gerrib wrote to tell me that his Lulu SF novel The Mars Run is also in the program, which in fact includes the top 100,000 Lulu titles by sales rank. Even my slowest seller, The Pope and the Council, is at #37,303, which makes me wonder how many copies the bottom two million Lulu titles have sold…

Odd Lots

May 29th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

The Atlantic tells us that a growth industry in NYC and other crowded cities is training dogs to sniff out…bedbugs. Dogs who can tell live bedbugs from dead earn as much as $325 an hour, and work for kibble. I got some peculiar bites on one side of my right leg while we were down in Champaign-Urbana last week for Matt’s graduation, and while I can’t prove that bedbugs did it, that side of my right leg is the side that contacts the bed while I sleep (as I nearly always do) on my right side.
From Chris Gerrib comes word that The Espresso Book Machine has finally been installed in a bookstore, where it prints from a selection of half a million books on the attached server. No word on whether these are all out-of-copyright titles or what, but after what seems like decades of screwing around (I first reported on the Espresso Book Machine, originally called the PerfectBook 080, in 2001) we’re finally getting somewhere.
I’ve heard tell recently that Vista doesn’t play nice with the Xen hypervisor. Anybody had any crisp experience there?
William Banting’s Letter on Corpulence is now available from the Internet Archive, and it’s interesting as the very first detailed description of the effects of low-carb diets. Way back in 1864 Banting lost weight by eating protein and fat, and seemed surprised enough by his results to write up his experiences in detail. The more I research this, the more I’m convinced that carbs are what’s killing us, and this is not new news.
Lulu recently cut some kind of deal with Amazon to put all their books (I think; it certainly includes all of mine) in the Amazon database. However, they added five or six bucks to the cover price. Will people buy Carl & Jerry books for $21? Don’t know, but somehow I doubt it.
Machines can often see things that we can’t (which is one reason that we build machines) and they’re willing to share what they see with us. Sure don’t look like this in an 8″…
Ars Technica published a good article on how DRM actually makes the piracy problem worse–an insight I had years ago, and a painfully obvious one after thinking about it for a nanosecond or two.
No rest for the weary; several people wrote to ask what I would be writing next. Not sure. I still have to get our butts back to Colorado, but once I do, I want to finish my second SF story collection, and work on Old Catholics. You can bet that I’ll be posting more on Contra too, if that counts. Further than that I won’t venture, though I think I’ll be leaving computers alone for a little while.

The Google Books Settlement

Apr 19th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

No comments yet

My miscellaneous low-priority do-it list has gotten mighty long since January, and every so often I set aside some time to knock off a few items. This morning something interesting bubbled up to the top of the stack: Claim my books under the Google Books Settlement. I’ve known about this for quite some time and haven’t had the mental bandwidth to look into it deeply, but having been roused by rowdy dogs this morning a little earlier than I’d like, I sat down here and read the material.

I’m not quite sure what to think. Google is helping to create a registry of old books that are still in copyright but no longer in print. This is a very good thing, and I signed up to support that effort if nothing else. What Google intends to do is create a legal framework for making those old books available as paid ebooks, and give authors (and where publishers still have rights, publishers) a portion of the take. Google has already scanned a great many books, including a few of my own, and if I can pick up a few quarters by buying in to the system, I will. (Alas, I doubt my 1987 work Turbo Pascal Solutions is going to be a hot seller.)

Mostly, I want the problem of orphan books to be finessed, and I want it finessed without Big Media’s copyright lobby shaping it so that it routes all the money to them and leaves the rest of us penniless in the dust. People gripe about Google’s interest in the whole thing–they could make an enormous amount of money here if this thing catches on, and in essence become the planet’s largest publisher–but the idea is sound and Google may be the best that we can do.

If anyone has any interest in this, go to the Google Books Settlement Site and read the sizeable FAQ. I especially encourage any of my author friends who have published books to decide what they think about the whole thing, and either sign in or opt out. Signing up can be done until January 5, 2010, but opting out must be done by May 5, 2009. I’m guessing that popular authors and their heirs will opt out, figuring they may be able to get a better deal somewhere, and the great starving writer masses (who know that there are no deals on their horizon) will sign on. And that’s actually a good thing: The great starving writer masses deserve a way to get whatever scraps may fall from the ebooks publishing table, as the publishing industry generally becomes more and more of a “winner takes all” kind of business.

The framework has not yet been completely created, but it’ll happen over time, and it will be very interesting to see if anything comes of it long-term. I’m watching the whole business closely and will report here from time to time, especially once I finish the Book That Ate 2009.

Odd Lots

Feb 23rd, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

I’m 77,241 words into the revision, of which about 25,000 words are new. So I now have a little less than 100,000 words to go, and I’ll have a book. More has to be rewritten than I thought, but mercifully, not all of it. This is going to be almost my sole project for the next four months or so. Maybe I should get one of those writers’ progress bars for WordPress, if such exists.
I finished the second ASCII chart, for the IBM-850 code page.
The glyph for the German sharp-s (esset) character is not called “szlig” except within HTML pages, where it appears to be a name invented for the glyph by people who do not speak German, perhaps from “sz ligature.”
Bright green Comet Lulin whistles past us today, at its closest a still-comfortable 38 million miles off, but it’s apparently a fine object in even a small telescope, and can be seen with the naked eye if you’re out past city lights. It’s very close to Saturn in Leo. Space Weather has a nice map showing where to look, and when.
This may be the hoax of the decade.
And while we’re talking digital TV, I’ve been wondering if those little USB TV receiver thingies are digital-ready–but not wondering hard enough to go research. (I watch almost no TV, but you knew that.)
David Stafford and Jim Mischel informed me that there is an audiobook of someone reading my story “Drumlin Boiler” in what we think is Russian. (“Dramlinkskiy Kotel”) It’s a 50 MB MP3, so think twice about downloading it, but I would like some confirmation as to the language. Sure, it’s a pirate edition, but these days I’m happy someone is reading me, even if aloud.
Bruce Baker sent me a link to an intriguing article by Rudy Rucker on self publishing. The problem: Only your friends will buy your book. The solution: Work hard at having a lot of friends.

A Chart, If You Can Read It

Feb 20th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

The last couple of evenings I’ve been working at fulfilling a promise I reneged on ten years ago. Somewhere in the text of the second edition of Assembly Language Step By Step (which I was writing in the summer of 1999) I promised readers an ASCII chart as one of the appendices. I then plum forgot, and the book appeared in 2000 without that appendix. I still get emails from people asking me where they could find the chart, and have to reply in my best sheepish email voice that no chart exists anywhere in the book.

So this time I thought to put things right. I sat down in front of InDesign and figured out an ASCII chart format for the full 256-character extended set, and drew me an ASCII chart. For the encoding I used Code Page 437, which is what they now call the IBM PC ROM character set. Whether they could name it or not, CP437 was much beloved of DOS text-mode programmers, with all four card suits and more box-draw characters than anybody ever knew what to do with. The chart will fit comfortably (if snugly) on a single page in what we in publishing call “computer trim,” and I consider it a complete success, at least if you have good eyesight or a set of readers within easy reach.

Except…

As best I can tell, there is no encoding option available for Konsole (or any other Linux terminal emulator that I have) for Code Page 437. As close as I’ve come is IBM-850, which has fewer box-draw characters and more non-English alphabet glyphs. Of course, once you have a chart, it’s no big deal to find a new set of glyphs and sub them in, which is what I’ll be doing in coming days. In the meantime, if you have any use at all for a CP437 ASCII chart, here it is. I’ll post the one for IBM-850 when I finish it. Ten years late, I guess, but better late than never.

Odd Lots

Feb 3rd, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

The United States has overtaken Germany as the world’s lead producer of wind energy, measured in total kilowatts. Way to go–keeping in mind that Germany still beats us all hollow with kilowatts per capita. I’m a big believer in NWS, in that order, and part of the reason N comes before W is that over the past few years, when Carol and I have passed giant wind turbines along I-80 on our way to and from Chicago, they were only turning about a third of the time. Wind energy is great, but it does not stand alone.
Small children should be allowed to get dirty as a way of building their immune systems. I was digging in the back yard since before I can remember, and never had much trouble with allergies. There may be a downside to our dirt- and germ-averse culture that has nothing to do with the risk of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. (With Gretchen’s approval, I think I’m going to buy our nieces a couple of garden trowels next Christmas…)
Few people today remember that Apple Computer was once a Pascal shop, and had a promo poster in the late 70s incorporating a classic “railroad” diagram of Pascal language syntax. Yes, the 70s really did look like that. (At least it wasn’t all done in Harvest Gold.) Thanks to Paul Santa-Maria for the link. Paul created his own version of the poster in black and white, which I hope he makes available at some point. The Waite Group sold (or gave away; not sure if it was a boom promo) a similar card in the same era, but it’s long since vanished from my collection.
Has anyone here ever read any of the Very Short Introduction books from Oxford University Press? Are they useful? I just ordered several, and I’m curious as to the quality of the series. I’ll report here once the books show up and I’ve had a chance to read them. There are many subjects I’m interested in sufficiently to read 150 pages on, but not 600 pages.
A German publisher wrote an article claiming that cheaper ebooks will put them out of business. (The article is in German; take what you can from the English summary or if you know the language, click through to the original.) The gist is that there are special costs associated with e-publishing that more than balance the special costs associated with print publishing. My take: If true, it’s only until we get up to speed. (I also think it may be true that many publishers don’t really understand all the forces that bear on how they make their money. Many things lead up to the cash-register’s beep, not all of them obvious.
I’m a lot less sanguine about the OLPC than I used to be, but the recent unveiling of future designs intrigues me: The next-gen OLPC will have two displays, and can be held and read portrait-style, like a book. When a keyboard is needed, rotate the device 90, and one of the two displays becomes a keyboard. Very cool, and something like that should be sold worldwide by every electronics retailer. (Their peculiar distribution mechanism will eventually be the end of them.)

Odd Lots

Jan 12th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Don Lancaster sent me a link to the Draganfly, a mighty cool RC/GPS guided helicopter for
aerial photography or police/military applications. MIT has worked out an algorithm for swarming these things, which isn’t too
mind-blowing when you have three or four…but how about a few thousand?
On the other end of the scale for flying machines, Wired
reports the opening of the Jumbo Hostel, a pulled-from-service 747 jumbo jet that was gutted and fitted out with (small) rooms for Stockholm airport travelers who simply can’t get enough claustrophobia.
And if you’re looking for something that will not only fly but fly high, there’s the unfortunately named Skylon, to which I call your attention because it reminds me of those Bonestell drawings of the canonical 50’s three-stage orbital rocket, particularly the nose section. Alas, we won’t see it for ten years, which is about how far into the future such things always are. (The only thing farther out is commercial nuclear fusion.)
Here’s another very spooky atmospheric phenomenon described on Spaceweather. This is not a sundog but a subsun, which is much brighter and I’m guessing a lot more startling.
Fractal woodburning, anyone?
While American technical and scientific magazines seem to be cratering right and left, Steve Moulding writes to tell us that Elektor Electronics , a longstanding European publication catering to hobby electronics, will be launching a printed North American edition. It’s unclear how this will differ from the UK edition (which is the only one I’ve ever seen) but anything that helps promote hands-on electronics here is welcome. (There’s not much left on the home front but QEX and Nuts & Volts .)
And if the loss of paper magazines depresses you, consider that just a few days ago, the last paper player-piano music roll came off the assembly line in Buffalo. Interestingly, brand new player pianos of this sort were being sold well into the 1960s; the family down the street where I grew up had one when I was tweve or so.
A Japanese chap built himself an automated book scanner using Lego. (!!!) It’s a delightfully Goldbergish contraption that basically holds the scanner upside down and presses an opened book up against the inverted scanner glass, dropping the book between scans to turn the pages. (Watch the video!) Big Pub seems excessively worried about ebooks and feels that their refuge still lies in paper. Maybe not. (I’ll bet I could do up something like this in Meccano, of which I have much. Just another three hours in the day, fersure…)

DDJ Ascending Into Heaven–Or At Least the Cloud

Jan 7th, 2009

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Back in the spring of 1976, my friend Gus Flassig showed me an issue of a new magazine called Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, a thin but sprightly fanzine-ish item full of articles on programming the Altair, the Kim-1, and other primordial micros. The opcodes were thick as flies, but it was very cool in a slightly goofy bit-hippie way that none of us would appreciate yet for a number of years. I subscribed off and on for a long time, though I gave away a lot of the mags when I left Rochester NY in early 1985. In early 1989, I became a DDJ columnist myself, and wrote “Structured Programming” for over four years, focusing on Pascal but occasionally Modula 2 and related issues like database techniques. I had to give it up after I started my own publishing company and that quickly became several full-time jobs, but I will always be proud to have had that slot when I did, and will always cite Jon Erickson as one of the best technical media editors who has ever lived.

This is starting to sound like a euology, right? And that’s my point for this entry: DDJ is going all-Web with the January 2009 issue. The news was broken on the blog of Herb Sutter, a C++ force and long-time DDJ columnist. The entry is notable because Herb speaks of many other “ascent into the Cloud” events within the physical media world. It’s happening a lot. The big question remains: Is this a death sentence? It certainly was for Byte, and I can’t imagine that it won’t be for PC, though I could and would like to be wrong.

I’ve always liked magazines, as both a reader and a publisher, and if the magazine business model were still viable I would still be running one. Herb Sutter doesn’t say much about why magazines are fading away. Most people probably think it’s because of the cost of the paper, the cost of mailing, and so on. That’s certainly part of it, but we shouldn’t forget the following things:

Computer technology has gotten fearsomely complex in the last ten or fifteen years. It’s very difficult to treat a programming topic usefully at magazine length. I was confronting this issue as early as 1995.
As a corollary to the previous point, people are increasingly becoming specialists, of increasingly narrow specialties. This used to break down by languages (“I’m a C/C++ guy”) but ballooning complexity is cutting out niches much finer than that. (“I’m a client-side .NET IL guy.”) There simply isn’t enough time nor mental bandwidth to learn everything, and a magazine’s reader base can only be so small and remain economically viable.
The community elements of magazines (letter columns, Q/A columns, columnists treating reader requests, etc.) are now handled very capably by online forums, blogs, and other social networking mechanisms.

Money of course, remains an issue. Paper and postage cost money, which print ads traditionally provided. (Subscriber revenues are useful but not sufficient to float a decent mag, and this was true even in 1998.) It’s an issue for Web content as well. Authors and editors need to be paid, and server space is cheap (compared to paper channels of comparable bandwidth) but it is not free. I almost hate to say this, but the transition from commercial software to free software makes an ad-based model very difficult. My magazines lived on smallish ads from smallish tool companies, and the sorts of things they used to sell are now free downloads. This is in part a consequence of the fact that personal computing is now mature, and software tools that used to become obsolete in six months can now be used for years and perhaps indefinitely without regular, radical rewrites.

We forget sometimes what made magazines so compelling: The element of surprise. Magazines exposed us to ideas and technologies and products that we might not have discovered on our own. (This is precisely why broadcast radio is important to the music industry.) The Web world is a search-engine world, and we generally ascend into the Cloud looking for something very specific, and it is in the nature of clouds to make things difficult to see unless they’re right in your face. Search engines encourage us to become better and better at what we already know, further accelerating the natural trend toward specialization in the face of increasing complexity. Magazines tended to broaden our horizons, and they were useful bathroom reading too. Pervasive home Wi-Fi is eroding even this ancient bastion of print publishing, and once a decent convertible (tablet-like) netbook matures, well, the bathroom magazine rack may vanish, and be replaced by an EEEEEEE PC in a wall-mounted charging dock.

So I would like to see DDJ continue as a viable entity, and it may, but it has to be done very carefully. It also has to be done well. One way for them to proceed is to look around the Cloud and see what’s already there and works. Make, Lockergnome, and Slashdot may already be “magazines,” and Cloud portal platforms like Mambo and Joomla can work well when intelligently configured. We still need to figure out where the money will come from, and we must remind ourselves that reading outside our core preferences is a powerful intellectual advantage. There’s a pony up there somewhere. Let’s all of us, readers and editors alike, keep looking.