Month: July 2005

This is hugely embarassing. This is restoring dignity to the Presidency?

Charlie Stross writes a Q & A about his free ebook editions… and I can’t help but feel a little proud, as I was talking about this stuff before there were even web browsers.

Synchronistically, I just got a request from Mark McGarry, who’s writing a piece for the International Herald Tribune, on my take on ebooks nowadays. Here’s what I sent him:

Electronic publishing and the Internet has completely and irrevocably changed traditional publishing. It’s a given in everything except what people expect an electronic book to be, a little gimgaw that has books on it.

Consider:

* There are no major newspapers or weekly magazines that do not have an online component. Many of them are more widely read than their paper editions, and may be more profitable. Readership and revenues for paper editions are plunging. (How many of your readers are reading this on a screen right now?)

* They stopped publishing a paper edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica a few years back. Most people didn’t even notice. Many other magazines have died or cut back from weekly to monthly, because their timeliness has been obliterated.

* Google has announced that they’re digitizing the libraries at Stanford, UMich, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library.

* It took less than twelve hours after release for the latest Harry Potter book to be placed online in a bootleg edition. Similarly, approximately 75% of all comic books ever published in the US have been scanned and distributed online illegally. And you’re as aware as I am of the thousands of books floating around online nowadays.

Sales are comparatively small, yes– but sales aren’t the only way to make money. Ad revenue has increased dramatically across the board, and people have discovered that giving copies of the book away online rarely hurts sales, if ever– indeed, it’s helped Cory and Charlie tremendously. And Bruce Sterling. And Baen. And so on. Most authors have found out that the number of people that read their weblog can dwarf the numbers who read their books– and blog readers come back day after day after day.

More, think of all the times that you’d go to look up something in a book and you go to Wikipedia or Ask Jeeves instead. Or hundreds of other different websites that in another time would be books– recipe sites, how-to sites, medical research, gardening, and thousands of subjects that just can’t fit in a bookstore.

So what’s the biggest problem? Finding the right price point. People clearly have no problem staring at computer screens for hours, but there’s so much free stuff available online, and it’s very hard to compete with free. But not impossible.

The bigger problem, to my mind, is demands on time– there’s just too much information and entertainment coming at us nowadays to absorb. If you can’t read everything in your RSS reader, or view everything in your PVR, or have a year’s worth of movies in your NetFlix cue, you begin to see the problem of adding just one more book to the pile– electronic or otherwise.

One of these days, I’m going to get around to reprinting the e-publishing columns I did for the SFWA Bulletin and see how they aged. I suspect they’ll age quite well, if my old revolutionary ideas have now become conventional wisdom.

An asteroid, headed our way:

Humans live in a vast solar system where 2,000 feet seems a razor-thin distance.

Yet it’s just wide enough to trigger concerns that an asteroid due to buzz Earth on April 13, 2029 may shift its orbit enough to return and strike the planet seven years later.

The concern: Within the object’s range of possible fly-by distances lie a handful of gravitational “sweet spots,” areas some 2,000 feet across that are also known as keyholes.

The physics may sound complex, but the potential ramifications are plain enough. If the asteroid passes through the most probable keyhole, its new orbit would send it slamming into Earth in 2036. It’s unclear to some experts whether ground-based observatories alone will be able to provide enough accurate information in time to mount a mission to divert the asteroid, if that becomes necessary.

So NASA researchers have begun considering whether the US needs to tag the asteroid, known as 99942 Apophis, with a radio beacon before 2013.

Timing is everything, astronomers say. If officials attempt to divert the asteroid before 2029, they need to nudge the space rock’s position by roughly half a mile – something well within the range of existing technology. After 2029, they would need to shove the asteroid by a distance as least as large as Earth’s diameter. That feat would tax humanity’s current capabilities….

Based on available data, astronomers give Apophis – a 1,000-foot wide chunk of space debris – a 1-in-15,000 chance of a 2036 strike. Yet if the asteroid hits, they add, damage to infrastructure alone could exceed $400 billion. When the possibility of the asteroid passing through two other keyholes is taken into account, the combined chance of the asteroid hitting the planet shifts to 1 in 10,000, notes Clark Chapman, a senior scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

“A frequent flier probably would not want to board an airliner if there’s a 1-in-10,000 chance it’s going to crash,” he says.

One in 10,000 chance? Those are the odds for the daily Pick 4 games. And yet, we’ll have a hard time convincing people who bet on that to pay for the mission– even though the payoff is going to be much higher. Sigh…

Useless trivia for the day: that’s also about the odds that you’re going to die in a bathtub. If we can prepare for that, we can prepare for this.

(Found in the draft folder, thought I’d lost it, sending it out for historical reasons. Yeah, like this is the Dead Sea Scrolls or something. Dial back 13 days or so…)

Sitting on the runway for two hours, now finally up in the air. This will post whenever I get to a net connection. Here’s hoping I make the connecting flight in Phoenix.

Saw the movie Fever Pitch while on the plane, a nice little diversion. Very much in the key of other Nick Hornby films like High Fidelity, but without the running internal monologues. And you quite literally couldn’t have asked for a better Hollywood ending than the 2004 World Series.

Found out, by amazing coincidence, that an old friend from high school is already in San Diego this week for work, and we’re going to meet up. (For a self-claimed geek, she was surprised that there was a convention, and she couldn’t understand at first why she was having such trouble getting a hotel room– hers is in La Jolla. According to her, there are no rooms to be had in a 50 mile radius. And I’ll bet that includes Tiajuana.) We’ll probably drag her to the CBLDF Mirrormask party tomorrow.

There are other things to write about, but they’re probably going in separate posts and I’m try ing to conserve battery power. I’m incredibly glad I bought a new battery for the iBook; the old one was dying after 20 minutes. This one’s been giving me about four hours a charge.

Russia’s Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment:

Created: 25.07.2005 13:14 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 16:29 MSK, 5 hours 8 minutes ago

MosNews

Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.

Kushnir, 35, headed the English learning centers the Center for American English, the New York English Centre and the Centre for Spoken English, all known to have aggressive Internet advertising policies in which millions of e-mails were sent every day.

(Via Warren Ellis.)

Panasonic Prototypes eBook Reader Able to Display Full-color Pictures — Tech-On!:

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. has exhibited a prototype of an eBook reader that can view full color pictures at an exhibition being held in Tokyo. The prototype is equipped with a 5.6-inch TFT LCD XGA panel with a resolution of approximately 210 ppi.

(Via Satire (NSFW).)

All right, let’s get this straightened out once and for all.

The David Mack on the left is the guy who does Kabuki, Daredevil, Alias, and other neat things with a paintbrush.

The David Mack on the right is the fellow who does Deep Space Nine episodes, lots of Star Trek novels, the Starfleet Survival Guide, co-wrote the DS9 miniseries “Divided We Fall” for Malibu Comics, and is supposed to have a Wolverine novel out for next year.

They are two different people. They have been seen together in San Diego in the same place, at the same time. And as you can see, they do not annihilate each other when the two of them touch.

We’re happy to clear up this little misunderstanding in comic book land.

Doug Forrester for New Jersey Governor:

Forrester: Homeland Security Must Always Be a Priority

(Trenton, NJ) At a press conference at the Trenton train station today, gubernatorial nominee Doug Forrester expressed his commitment to the security of New Jersey citizens and criticized Jon Corzine and his party for their Homeland Security failures in the Garden State.

“We were reminded again today by the events in London that there is no greater priority than our security,” said Forrester. “When I’m governor there will be no more Golan Cipels and homeland security funds will be awarded on the basis of vulnerability, not partisan politics.”

Oh, really? Then please explain how just a month ago, you had a fundraiser headlined by Karl Rove. If you’re really concerned about Homeland Security, why are you having a man who leaked the identity of a CIA agent raise money for you?

I called Mr. Forrester’s office and they didn’t have a canned response, but they took my name and said they’d get back to me. Let’s see how long it takes, shall we? Since I never heard back from them about Rove’s comments about 9/11 last month, I expect to be waiting a while.

First the business news:

It’s a cram-down, Silicon Valley style. Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd announced a restructuring (read: mass firing) today.

Among the components of the bold visionary plan: simplifying H-P’s structure, cutting 14,500 jobs, and changing the company’s retirement plans “to better match industry benchmarks.”

(Via Daniel Gross.)

Then the perspective: I flew on America West the past week, and the entire company employs 14,000 people. So that’s the equivalent of a major company wiped out in a stroke. Yikes.

Just one of those oddities of scale. Don’t mind me.

Illegal Copies Of Half-Blooded Prince Already Online…:

The sixth book in the Harry Potter series, the fastest-selling book of all time, has become among the quickest to fall prey to Internet piracy, with illicit copies available online within hours of its release.

Tech-savvy fans of the boy wizard teamed up to scan the entire 607 page book into digital form, with unauthorized e-book copies appearing online less than 12 hours after “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” went on sale on Saturday.

(Via The Huffington Post.)

We say this like we’re surprised. Personally, I’m surprised it took this long.