johnwilker.com

My Friend wrote a book, buy it.

Last week I was at a book reading/signing for a new friend in Denver, Ron Lewis.

His book ‘Stick it to the Man: How to Skirt the Law, Scam Your Enemies , and Screw Big, Fat, Stupid, Lazy Corporations…for Fun and Profit!’ launched last week, and the party was at a the Barnes & Noble downtown.

Ron is a great guy, truly interested in meeting people and doing what he can to help them succeed. When I first met Ron, I was blown away by his genuineness, he proposed we meet for coffee and was not just looking for one more person to talk about his book to. We talked about 360|Conferences, my Kindle (which I brought with him and showed him).

How John Birmingham lost a reader

I stumbled across John Birmingham’s “Axis of Time series” because book 1 was free in the Kindle store (Great idea, Amazon or John or his publisher).

After thoroughly enjoying ‘Weapons of Choice’ at the gym and while folding clothes in the Kindle’s robot voice, at the car wash, etc. I bought book 2, and added 3 to my Universal Wishlist.

Sunday morning I was getting ready to fold some clothes, so I grabbed my Kindle, went into the menu for ‘Designated Targets’ and what do I see? Start Text to Speach, is grayed out.

WTF?

Why eContent should NEVER cost the same as printed

Beyond the ridiculously obvious “you get nothing physical” there’s a lot of reasons why an eBook shouldn’t cost as much as any printed version.

Let’s look at what goes into the price of a printed book vs. an eBook.

Writing: well yeah that happens for both, kinda a requirement.

editing: ditto, even Steven King has a type-O from time to time.

marketing: sure, though it’s value is varied, depending on your outlook.

printing: not for eBooks.

distribution: only for the dead tree versions.

shelf space, depreciation, discount selling: eBooks don’t suffer that.

The Kindle needs an iTunes app

kindle.amazon.com comes close, allowing you to manage your Kindle library (except you can only see it, not control/change anything) and see your annotations… on purchased content only. Content you’ve put on the device is notably missing. Meaning annotations you’ve placed on ebooks you loaded yourself are still tricky to retrieve/make use of and only available on the Kindle itself.

Guess we’re lucky we have cars and electricity

The Kindle is, as I’ce said before, a game changer for publishing. The wall of books, to impress your friends, will be gone in another 20 years or less. Just like the enormous display of CDs and (largely) DVDs on display near your TV and home entertainment center is already gone. picture-4That’s just how it works. There’s also not a stable in my back yard, not a store room of candles, or a cellar with huge blocks of ice.

My First (well second) creation on the Kindle

The Kindle platform is dope, I’m really excited by it. You can upload HTML, or a PDF (the PDF formatting seems to suck). The HTML options are pretty limited, but then again it’s supposed to be a book, so you know, not a lot of fancy CSS options in your normal paperback.

The biggest downside is Microsoft Word. Well that kinda goes without saying I know, but “saving as HTML” is completely useless in Word, as many of us know. I almost tried it, just to see how it worked, but figured I’d just make myself angry, so I didn’t even try. One look at the HTML output of my story (which is just paraphraphs, no extra formatting, no font size changes, no color, special chars, etc) I was flabberghasted, no thank you. Clean up on aisle nine!

The Airport

Arriving at the airport is always the easiest part: Quick drop off, little to no people interaction. It usually goes very very awry just after that. Check In Check ins keep getting easier and easier, thanks to technology. The Electronic ticket machine is my best friend, most machines are actually, so much easier to deal [...]

826

I heard about the 826 project from David Sedaris, at a reading he did in Orange County a few months back. Now there are 826 projects in numerous cities, includeing seattle, and LA and others. It started in New York as I understand it. It sounds like a really great idea. I there was a [...]

The Commercial Space

Jake had never been to space. That in and of itself wasn’t really all that weird, given that commercial space flight had only really taken off in the last ten years. Still largely the domain of the rich or the sweepstakes winner. In fact this trip wouldn’t have been possible if not for Gram’s untimely [...]

Wrting samples coming soon

I’m hoping this weekend I’ll be able to put up some of the stories I’ve been working on. Hoping. I’ll also be talking about my new lawn mower

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