Oh GodEven if Mark Penn is right (which would be a game-changer), it still sucks – more people are incarcerated in our prison systems than earn a living blogging.
Damn the iPod, damnit!My iPod blew on Friday night.
Neither Windows nor iTunes would recognize the damn thing. At first, iTunes was telling me I had a device called "hegsie" that had 1700 gigabytes of space, most of which was taken up by non-audio files. My iPod is very sensibly named "Laura’s iPod", and I don’t know who this ridiculous "hegsie" is coming in and imposing itself on my iTunes.
I rebooted, reinstalled, restored, did all the "R" things. And by Saturday afternoon, "hegsie" had disappeared entirely. But "Laura’s iPod" did not come back.
Because I restored the iPod to its factory settings (following the instructions on the Apple website!), I consequently deleted all the files off it (though they are still on my computer).
So now I have a blank iPod, which my computer will not recognize. I can’t load it with audiobooks and music and videos. My workouts at the gym are…uninspired. That happy place I get to on the elliptical machine? No soundtrack for it anymore.
The iPod is not making the sad face, but I am.
What if they had a layoff and nobody noticed?Tough time of year. And a tough economy for this to happen in. I feel for those who are getting hit – Lord knows it’s happened to me often enough. If anyone wants to get me resumes, I’d be happy to circulate them.
Fooling Around With the KindleJessica McMahon over at LibreDigital sent us this link, wherein the folks at Motley Fool re-think the Kindle (and mirrors the approach that Peter Brantley is taking on the O’Reilly blog as well):
Amazon’s Digital Text Platform is in beta, but it’s an . Anyone can sign up. Anyone can be published. In fact, the only requirements to get an item listed on Kindle are a title, an author’s name, and of course, content.
I wrote a cheesy coming-of-age novel called during my undergraduate days. It’s not my best work. It might be my worst. I’ve let two people read it. OK, I’ve suckered two people into reading it. I had it lying around on my hard drive in MS Word, so I figured I’d serve it to Amazon’s service as a guinea pig.In seconds, Amazon chewed it up and spit it back out in Kindle’s HTML-coded format. All that was left was to price the puppy, from $0.25 to $200. I chose the low end of that scale and clicked the Publish button.Several hours later, it was up on the site, complete with an Amazon-assigned ASIN code. That was too easy.
Indeed. It disturbed me a bit that (a) it wasn’t necessary for the ebook to have an ISBN (b) it didn’t conform to the IDPF’s .epub standard. And yet, if history is any guide, Amazon will set the de facto standard and all that .epub work will kind of fall by the wayside….
However – and this is crucial – so many more people are doing self-publishing these days that this capability to upload and download and distribute your own titles is pretty amazing. I mean, just load your book up on Amazon for anyone to find in their web search. Jaw-dropping!
Giving E-books a bad nameMSNBC’s Red Tape Chronicles has a piece today on credit card theft and e-book companies. Apparently, there was strange coincidence of credit card numbers being used legitimately to buy Equifax jproducts, and then used illegitimately at a couple of disreputable companies who run e-book fronts…and false charges appeared on hundreds of credit-card statements. Small amounts – $4.95 on average – but nevertheless:
It’s not clear when the e-book scam began. A few consumers say they saw fake e-book charges beginning in February, but it appears there was a flurry of activity in September.
Credit card thieves often create fake businesses to process bogus transactions — that’s much easier than using stolen cards to make purchases at legitimate retailers, and one of the quickest ways to turn stolen numbers into cash.
Meaning don’t buy your ebooks from weird little stores you never heard of.
Downloadable audio in librariesAudible, Audiofy, IDG, Overdrive: It’s taking too long. People want to load audiobooks from their libraries onto their iPods yesterday. In fact, they are so over the novelty of that – now they want books from other countries.
I know you can do this.
Is It Really As Drastic As All That?Following is a link roundup for Kindle, but I have to say that when Publisher’s Lunch hit my inbox, I was sort of taken aback at this quote from OUP’s Evan Schnittman:
The risk here isn’t just to Amazon. If Kindle fails, the ebook is over, the theory of the “iPod model” is wrong for eBooks, and publishing must face the reality that consumers just don’t want to read immersive content on electronic screens of any sort…
You know what? No. I just don’t believe it’s as drastic as all that. We’ve been living with books for 500 years, people! To expect us to wake up one day and start reading them on screens – or it’s all over, we’ll NEVER read them on screens – is a little much. The comparisons/expectations regarding the music business are just not apt here – in listening to music, we’ve been accustomed to changing devices every generation or so – from wax cylinders to wax records to vinyl to 8 tracks to cassettes to CDs to MP3s – and the history of listening to personal music (as opposed to the history of reading, for God’s sake) is a lot shorter. Innovation is expected there. But the runway for changing reading formats is a lot longer. Longer than any of us can see. To say it’s now or never is…hysteria.
Which means, of course, that Bezos wins, in terms of whipping some of us up into a frenzy.
Roundup:
Ingram to Forbes: WTF?The Forbes 400 apparently had listed Ingram Books as having a pretty awful year – down 48% in book sales. However, John Ingram begged to differ, as PW reported:
He said that sales in the book division rose modestly in 2006 and are up significantly in 2007….“Not only is our core book wholesaling business steady, but our Lightning Source business continues to grow rapidly, and our Ingram Digital opportunities are extremely exciting,” John Ingram said.
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