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VolumeOne and you... by Zelchenko · 2000-12-14 13:28 · Score: 1 · on Read To Your Children, Go To Jail (Not Really)

Yawn. Slashdotters get bug up ass, waste precious bandwidth. Story at 10. Let me see if I can clarify what just happened here with a synopsis of events:

~01/1994 Project Gutenberg volunteer types in the text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in ASCII.
~06/1998 I snarf the text and use it over the next several weeks to recreate a precise replica of the original 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as a VolumeOne print-on-demand classic. Of course, I had a long chat with Mike Hart at PG about how to deal with the rights. Mike is very laid back about it, and so am I. (Q1: Of what musical genre is Mike a connoisseur?)
~07/2000 Several companies, including Glassbook, BookVirtual, and Adobe, ask to use my typeset version of the book. See my eBookNet column which started it. (Q2: What major technology-related accomplishments distinguish the founders of Glassbook and BookVirtual from the rest of us weenies?)
~10/2000 Glassbook chooses to flip some weird PDF bit which describes reading aloud, probably a meaningless, never-to-be-used flag which can be ignored by most and hacked around by those of us who care. (Q3: What was Adobe Acrobat's original name, circa 1991?)
~12/2000 Now that the election business is laid to rest, wAr3Z punks and EFF-style maniacs focus on the next thing. They assume the free world is ending because they see a single bit flipped in an obscure Internet file. Sane but technologically unsophisticated human beings read this as Constitutional armageddon. Peter Zelchenko's e-mail spool fills up. (Q4: What two typographical errors did Peter leave in the typeset work, and why?)

My take: The VolumeOne edition of Alice, the first true typographically accurate replica, may be freely read, printed on your laser printer, pumped through a synthesizer, or whatever, as long as you're not making a profit doing it. The creative effort that went into my edition was major; it is the first of its kind in 135 years. Any derivatives of the work, including the ones at the Glassbook, BookVirtual, and eBookNet sites, should also be open for free access.

Don't like the Glassbook edition? My computer can't even read it. Try my original PDF at eBookNet.com.

A1: Mike Hart is an old-time folk music aficionado of the Chicago School (think Old Town School of Folk Music, Earl of Old Town, Gate of Horn, Bonnie Koloc, etc.).

A2: Len Kawell of Glassbook was one of the three original authors of Lotus Notes, which itself is based on the venerable PLATO mainframe product, vintage about 1973. Patrick Ames of BookVirtual was Adobe's first evangelist for PDF. He wrote and designed the classic Beyond Paper manifesto for Acrobat.

A3: Acrobat was originally called Carousel.

A4: I won't tell you. But my original offer remains: the first person to find and report these errors will receive a free print-on-demand edition of this classic and my deep respect for life.

VolumeOne and you... by Zelchenko · 2000-12-14 13:28 · Score: 1 · on Read To Your Children, Go To Jail (Not Really)

Yawn. Slashdotters get bug up ass, waste precious bandwidth. Story at 10. Let me see if I can clarify what just happened here with a synopsis of events:

~01/1994 Project Gutenberg volunteer types in the text of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in ASCII.
~06/1998 I snarf the text and use it over the next several weeks to recreate a precise replica of the original 1865 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, as a VolumeOne print-on-demand classic. Of course, I had a long chat with Mike Hart at PG about how to deal with the rights. Mike is very laid back about it, and so am I. (Q1: Of what musical genre is Mike a connoisseur?)
~07/2000 Several companies, including Glassbook, BookVirtual, and Adobe, ask to use my typeset version of the book. See my eBookNet column which started it. (Q2: What major technology-related accomplishments distinguish the founders of Glassbook and BookVirtual from the rest of us weenies?)
~10/2000 Glassbook chooses to flip some weird PDF bit which describes reading aloud, probably a meaningless, never-to-be-used flag which can be ignored by most and hacked around by those of us who care. (Q3: What was Adobe Acrobat's original name, circa 1991?)
~12/2000 Now that the election business is laid to rest, wAr3Z punks and EFF-style maniacs focus on the next thing. They assume the free world is ending because they see a single bit flipped in an obscure Internet file. Sane but technologically unsophisticated human beings read this as Constitutional armageddon. Peter Zelchenko's e-mail spool fills up. (Q4: What two typographical errors did Peter leave in the typeset work, and why?)

My take: The VolumeOne edition of Alice, the first true typographically accurate replica, may be freely read, printed on your laser printer, pumped through a synthesizer, or whatever, as long as you're not making a profit doing it. The creative effort that went into my edition was major; it is the first of its kind in 135 years. Any derivatives of the work, including the ones at the Glassbook, BookVirtual, and eBookNet sites, should also be open for free access.

Don't like the Glassbook edition? My computer can't even read it. Try my original PDF at eBookNet.com.

A1: Mike Hart is an old-time folk music aficionado of the Chicago School (think Old Town School of Folk Music, Earl of Old Town, Gate of Horn, Bonnie Koloc, etc.).

A2: Len Kawell of Glassbook was one of the three original authors of Lotus Notes, which itself is based on the venerable PLATO mainframe product, vintage about 1973. Patrick Ames of BookVirtual was Adobe's first evangelist for PDF. He wrote and designed the classic Beyond Paper manifesto for Acrobat.

A3: Acrobat was originally called Carousel.

A4: I won't tell you. But my original offer remains: the first person to find and report these errors will receive a free print-on-demand edition of this classic and my deep respect for life.

Re:PDF Publishing on the internet! by gl2nn · 2000-03-24 02:47 · Score: 1 · on Biting The Bullet: Publishing And The Net

At least the encryption is wide open now. I did some extensive research and my editor interviewed Glassbook, SoftLock and Adobe, then wrote a long article about the crack (hint: the PDF that was cracked came from Glassbook):

http://www.ebooknet.com/story.jsp?id=1671

Re: Rocket-Library.com is a good site by gl2nn · 2000-03-21 09:11 · Score: 1 · on Biting The Bullet: Publishing And The Net

Anyone can publish for the Rocket eBook on the Rocket-Library.com site. Already more than 3000 titles there published by site visitors. First you download "eRocket" (a virtual Rocket eBook for your PC) from http://www.rocket-ebook.com/eRocket. Install the RocketLibrarian software. Drag your HTML file over RocketLibrarian window, and poof, you just ePublished. For more info about ebooks: http://www.ebooknet.com

Re:The numbers... by mahlen · 1999-08-31 05:54 · Score: 1 · on Fatbrain's eMatter Self Publishing

As someone who's owned a Rocket eBook since last December, i can say that I certainly thought that moving bits, not atoms, would be cheaper. As have a lot of other people. However, there have been some long discussions among people in the current publishing industry and the eBook world (see eBookNet, for example), and the conclusion seems to be that books are priced like CPU's; that is, you pay based on how much you want it, not on how much it cost to make (which for books, is not that much, maybe a buck). If you want that Pentium III 600MHz chip RIGHT NOW then you will pay a much higher price for it than if you wait six months. Likewise, buying a hardback book when it first comes out will cost you more than waiting until the paperback or cheap used editions become available. So, the fact that most eBooks are the same price as the current print edition makes some twisted sense, in that light.

The publishers are the ones setting prices. The only explanation i can see for the fact that some eBooks cost more than hardbacks is that publishers figure that they can screw the early adapters.

The other thing keeping eBook prices high is the small size of the market. The non-zero conversion costs must be amortized over a very small number of people, and with not many titles available, there's not much competitive price pressure yet.

That said, i love my Rocket eBook. It's a sweet chunk of hardware, and it's wonderful for reading long web pages or Project Gutenberg texts away from the computer. I'm reading "Open Sources" on it right now.

See the Rocket Library for gobs of free text. They can even be read on an onscreen Windows simulator of the eBook, called the eRocket.

mahlen

During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished.
--Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist"