So for around $250, I have an emergency work computer, an e-book reader on which I can read ANY DAMN FORMAT I WANT, listen to music, surf the net, keep my data, and write.

And I should buy a Kindle/Sony/Nook/JetBook . . . why?

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Are you serious?

As a consumer and producer of ebooks, let me tell you, this is simple crackpot evangelism. EPUB is the future; I do not disagree and I would love to see it come into its own and beat the competition.

HOWEVER

The competition exists for a reason and that’s because there are competing machines out there. Why in the world wouldn’t a producer find and exploit every digital outlet he could while they exist?

Now, I understand it’s perfectly reasonable for a producer of analog music to give up making vinyl records and 8-track tapes when there are few enough record players and 8-track players that it makes no sense to spend the time to do so. But if there is fairly equal money in each format, it would be foolish for the producer to give up producing even one of those formats.

In short, there is no way we would give up any one of the (now) 10 digital formats we publish in unless and until all devices can and will read one format and that the majority of the users of those devices are choosing one format:

AZW (Kindle)

EPUB (any device using Stanza or Adobe Digital Editions)

HTML (a lot of devices, plus any browser)

IMP (eBookWise)

LIT (Microsoft Reader)

LRF (Sony PRS)

MOBI/PRC (any device using Mobipocket)

PDB (Palm)

PDF (any device that reads PDF), and coming soon,

iApp for the iTunes store (iPhone/iTouch)

The fact of the matter is that once you’ve formatted for one of the above, you’ve formatted for over half the rest with minor tweaks. Yeah, it takes time to make each pretty for its own device, but it’s worth it as long as people feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth.

And every single one of those formats has a serious issue or 3 that consumers don’t like. However, each consumer still has the choice of the format with the least number of annoyances for him. Giving me 1 format (or, in the case of a book I really really really wanted to buy) 4 formats that are pure hell on me isn’t going to get me to adopt those formats; it’s only going to jolt me out of my impulse buy and now that I’m not BUYING paper books anymore, I’ll get it at the library.

So, Hachette Book Group. Thanks for saving me some money, ’cause I wasn’t strong enough to withstand the temptation if it had been in a format I could use.

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There’s another book I really really really want to read. However, it’s only available in 4 formats (actually, 3 because 2 formats are identical in nature), none of which I can read on my ebook reader. The format I want is MS Reader (LIT). Why? Because I can break the DRM and put it on my ebook reader. Which, come to think of it, is probably why it’s not offered in that format.

Really, there’s enough GOOD stuff out there in more accessible formats to waste time having to read on the computer. After having had my eBookWise for a mere 7 months, I’ve gotten to where I WILL forgo a title (no matter how badly I want to read it) if I can’t get it in a format that is accessible to me. Otherwise, I’ll just go to the library, where it likely won’t be.

We’re really trying to put The Proviso in as many places as possible in as many formats as we can. It’s not just in the B10 Mediaworx bookstore (8 DRM-LESS formats bundled together in a zip), but at Amazon in both trade paperback and Kindle, at Barnes & Noble, at Books-A-Million, at Powell’s, and now at ebooksjustpublished (which takes you back to the B10 Mediaworx bookstore, but hey, it’s exposure).

Some time next week, The Proviso will be in the iTunes store as an iApp for iTouch/iPhone. Although we’ve formatted it into EPUB for those who’ve downloaded Stanza on their iTouch/iPhones, we really want to present as many options as possible to make it easy for every customer to read it the way they prefer to read it.

Because not being able to read a book I want to read the way I want to read it is beginning to weary me.

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Besides no backlight (my all-time favorite feature), the text was grainy (grainier than my eBookWise’s dot-matrix-on-best-setting text).

That is all.

Er…no, it’s not. I still want Sony to kick Kindle’s ass. I think Amazon has an end-game in mind that’s going to come back to bite consumers in the tokhes.

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THE JEWEL OF MEDINA by Sherry Jones

A resident of the Ivory Tower, who apparently called dibs on A’isha (child bride of Muhammed) as her personal and exclusive domain of study and forgot to send the memo, raised a ruckus about a book she didn’t like and managed to get Random House to pull it after the author had been paid her $100k advance and the presses were rolling. I say it’s an academic hatchet job.

You can read the prologue here and then you may come weep with me that we won’t get to read the rest of it unless someone else picks it up. I like midrash-ish treatments like The Red Tent (although I haven’t read Card’s series on Rebekah, Sarah, Rachel and Leah yet).

I’m not going to wade in on all the outrage and outcries of what normal Muslims do and don’t think (’cause I ain’t one), but naturally, they’d be offended that their prophet is written about in a secular and therefore, profane, way. Catholics were offended by Dogma and The DaVinci Code. Jews were offended by The Passion of the Christ. Christians were offended by The Last Temptation of Christ and Piss Christ. Mormons, well, you know the drill. Anyhoo, my question is this: Why does a major publisher pull “offensive” material about one religion’s sacred icon but nobody else’s?

Update from today’s Galleycat: The dude who wrote Prophets & Princes: Saudi Arabia from Muhammed to the Present opined:

“I agree with [the aforementioned Ivory Tower resident]…You don’t turn scripture into soft core pornography.” While admitting that he hadn’t read any of Jones’s novel…

WTF?!?!? These people are scholars?

eBOOKS, iTUNES, iPHONE, eREADER, and STANZA

So Teddypig of The Naughty Bits blog has a most excellent article on epublisher website design, which I use as a guideline when I’m building and coding. I may not always get it right, but I’m working on it. Anyhoo, he directed Smart Bitches toward a functionality of iPhone to set up ebooks as applications in the iTunes shop for download to iPhone. Apparently, the process is a little whacked (because it’s an application, not a text/data file), but I’m all for getting ebooks out there via iAnything. Steve, I shall ask again: Where is your iBooks store? I don’t want the Kindle to be the only game in town and it looks like Sony’s all but given up the ghost.

Fictionwise’s eReader was downloaded on 130,000 iPhones in a month and Stanza is apparently only a little behind that as the ereading software alternatives to downloading ebooks-as-applications on your iPhone. I am a-quiver.

NEWSPAPER BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS and THOSE DIRTY BLOGGERS FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS

So the LA Times book section shut down amidst weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. Color me clueless. I never read book reviews before Smart Bitches and Dear Author (which sites I read religiously). The elites got all in a tizzy because review sites whose reviewers obviously don’t know what they’re doing started popping up all over the place.

Hey. Newspapers. Publishers. You can’t go home again.

FIGHT AUTHOR ABUSE

What is it about publishing accounting I don’t understand? I mean, I was a college student once and pretended to take accounting 101 for an entire semester. I get it. First, there’s reserves against returns. Second, there’s returns (aka consignment, tyvm, and say, how’s that Breaking Dawn return-don’t-burn campaign coming along?). Third, there’s the actual tallying which seems to be done by typing monkeys. You know, the ones who can’t count.

On a different front, there’s the copyright and plagiarism issue, which seems to be thought of in PublishingVille as the crazy aunt in the attic of intellectual property law. What, publishers, you don’t have enough stake in seeing that your property is stolen that you can’t do something about it?

In the most egregious and outrageous case I know of (aside from Cassie “The Ferret” Edwards), Janet Dailey stole from Nora Roberts. Thieved. As in, took something that wasn’t hers and got off with a slap on the wrist. Ms. Roberts calls it “mind rape.” Indeed. So if that weren’t enough (I don’t even think I can bear this, but I’ll take one for the team), Jane of Dear Author writes:

Nora was also subjected to many people arguing that she shouldn’t have gone public with the copying (although it was a fan who had made the case publicly in the first place); that she, Nora, was being petty and vindictive.

Crabs in a bucket, I tell you. One attempts to climb out, but the rest just pull her back in. Yes, I used “her” on purpose.

So I was amused to note on Charles Bock’s copyright page of Beautiful Children (also the result of Random House’s research into how DRM doesn’t work and passing out free ebooks without it does), the following notice: This is our intellectual property, so kindly don’t fucking steal it. I haven’t read this book yet (I got a copy when it was hot off the interwebz), but it’s in my queue somewhere up front because his last name begins with B.

And finally…

LOVABLE ASSHOLE WHO NEVER ENDED ON AN UNSTRESSED SYLLABLE

Lots of profanity here, which of course means that I like it. A London restaurant reviewer seems a wee bit testy about the way his articles are randomly edited by People Who Don’t Get It.

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed “a” so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable.

You know, I only love this guy because I don’t work for him.

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