Why, Publishers, Why?
I am trying so hard to like ebooks, really I am. The Kindle is the first e-reader that makes any sense to me at all as something to actually read for long periods on, and it achieves one of its design goals in that it disappears and you stop noticing the device.
Except when the text is mangled by the conversion process.
Two examples from today.
- the last three chapters or so of Martin Middlebrook’s First Day on the Somme are center-justified for no apparent reason
- Barbara Tuchman’s flowing prose in the opening of Guns of August hit a brick wall when she switched to French while quoting Czar Alexander III on Kaiser Wilhelm: “un garçon mat élevé”. My print edition confirms that the quote is “un garçon mal élevé” (he is a badly educated man).
So, am I being nitpicky? Well, the fifty cent paperback copy of Guns of August is flawlessly proofread. And the eight dollar Kindle edition isn’t. The maps and the footnotes in the Kindle edition of Middlebrook are unreadable; haven’t checked the print edition yet, but it was published before 1970, so I’m guessing the proofreading was pretty good also and that the maps make sense for the size of the book.
Every time something like that happens, it jars me out of my peaceful reading reverie and reminds me that I have a device in my hands. Every time I spend money on a badly done ebook it makes me less likely to buy more.
So my request to publishers is this: Please spend the time editing your electronic editions that you do on your print ones. Otherwise you’re charging me full price for a crummier product, which makes me unhappy. I’m a librarian—I have lots of options, personally and professionally, for books with even worse profit margins for you.
I want this to work. I want to buy ebooks from you. Please sell me a product you have a right to be proud of.
Not a resolution, but an encouragement to have fun taking photos, to take more of them, and to try things I haven’t tried before.
Important sights in Prague
Wenceslas Square
Plinth of the Stalin Statue. That is, everything on the flat space and more you can’t see used to be hundreds of tons of stone statue of Stalin; it was finished shortly after his death and was difficult to remove when the winds changed under Khruschev. Ultimately they had to use dynamite. In Letna Park, where the demonstrations which brought down the regime happened.
John Lennon Wall. The US Ambassador put this under his personal protection in 1989. Peace and freedom-themed graffiti from every part of the world.
Secret police prison. Now a hostel. If you ask for the Presidential Suite you get Vaclav Havel’s 8 x 8 cell.
Velvet Revolution
When I was in Prague in 2005 I went for a walk, following the route of the protesters who were ambushed by the police on November 17th, 1989.
The protest started out as a legal assembly in honor of a Czech student who died during the German occupation in World War II, at the Visegrad cemetery just outside of town. This is the cemetery where Czech heroes like Smetana are buried. The group decided to head to Wenceslas Square (that’s “Vaclav” in Czech) to demonstrate for democracy. Most of the group of students walked down to the Vltava and along the river, but other groups went in different directions. Map of routes—I followed the green route.
View of Prague from cemetery
Smetana’s gravesite
Down the hill
Cobblestones by the Vltava. Prague Castle is on the hill at top right.
Railway bridge over the Vltava
When the students got to the National Theater they turned downtown
Narodni Street
When they got to this intersection they realized the police had surrounded them. Hundreds were injured when the riot police attacked them with clubs.
Memorial
A few doors down is a jazz club, which President Havel took Bill Clinton to when he visited in 1994.
Blue Christmas
- Porky Pig
My favorite Christmas song. It’s funny as-is, but the engineer in the background is what makes this the Best Thing Ever.
Don't Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog)
Hey Tumblr! Let me pay you. Otherwise I’m just waiting for the day when your VC’s insist you do advertising, which will not fill me with joy. I don’t want to be a product here, and I’ll never buy enough custom themes to make up for the subscription I’d be happy to sign up for.
What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn’t take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.
So, today I recorded a future episode of the podcast about this very theme (before I saw this post). I’m a happy paying user of Pinboard, one that even pays the extra money for the archiving feature. Not only do I believe this idea to be true but, as I announce in that upcoming show, I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is by sending, anonymously, cash to a service I use and love daily that has no outward discernible business model.
Here is my idea:
What if, 1% of the users of a particular free service of 36 million clients and growing, were to decide to drop $10.00 cash every month into an envelope and mail it to said service? What if that envelope had no return address? Perhaps there was an note inside that begged them to create a model to let us pay them to use the service. To make sure the service continued on once the bubble inevitably bursts and the VC’s take their payout and fly to the Grand Caymans.
My guess is that such a service would have to keep the money. Perhaps they would go through a couple of months of having their offices flooded with 300,000+ ten dollar bills. This might get to be a hassle so, perhaps, maybe, they finally get the hint and have a few million dollars of starting cash to launch a way for us to pay directly for this thing we use and love.
Crazy, right? Yep.
So, here is the address I’m sending my unmarked cash with the note in the envelope with no return address.
Tumblr, Inc., 35 East 21st Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY, 10010
I welcome those that care as much as I do to do the same.
Update: Forgot to mention, and I never ask this… Please reblog the shit out of this one.
U.N. Says Death Toll In Syria Has Surpassed 4,000 : The Two-Way : NPR
In related Syrian news, the BBC reports that two major opposition groups have decided to join forces. The Syrian National Council, the main opposition group and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), made up of Syrian army defectors, said the FSA would cut down on its attacks on government forces and use force only to protect civilians.
That’s an important move, says the BBC, because it could stop the conflict from sliding into all-out civil war.
The story opens with a UN official describing the situation in Syria as a civil war. And ends with what I’ve quoted, in which the BBC suggests that a decrease of attacks on the Syrian army by defectors from that army may prevent civil war.
My question, again, is: Is it not a civil war when thousands of people in a country attempt to kill each other in systematic ways? Why so reluctant to refer to it that way?
OCD Saturday
I am presently engaged in doing battle with iTunes to clean up my classical music collection, slowly re-ripping from CDs to get all my bitrates at the same decent level. I continue to be impressed by the insanity of the Gracenote data for most classical music. Certainly pop music works better and has a larger market, but iTunes has not gotten better with classical stuff over time. Presumably I’m supposed to have an expensive stereo.
Of the main approaches, the make individual works an album with tracks approach is superficially appealing but annoying in practice. The invent a classification system based on abbreviations approach is a little over the top, even for a working librarian; I get the appeal, really I do, but it’s too much for me.
I have returned to my default, which is to rip concerti and symphonies and string quartets by joining the tracks into a single track which contains the whole piece. Sometimes I care who the performers are, mostly I don’t.
I am seriously tempted by a friend’s suggestion to just skip iTunes altogether and listen to CDs. Except that Vivaldi is soothing in Boston traffic.
Armed Groups Are on Rise in Syria, as Are Civil War Fears
I believe I have touched on this before, but…how many months of a government and its people killing each other before it’s OK to call it a civil war? If you’re talking about defections from the army, there are at least two armed groups. I think it qualifies.
Hey guys, make sure you install the latest upgrade.
The server’s down, but I hope to be able to download this after I get this eyelash out of my eye
