Depends on where you stand... right now, from an independent writer's perspective, eBook prices are plummeting - couple of years ago most people were at $2.99 and $0.99 was the 'magical free marketing ride', then last year going $0.00 was the key and everyone was trying to get on the Amazon free bandwagon to get some exposure... I expect soon that writers will be _paying_ people to read their book. In the race to the bottom, it seems we're going to punch through and start digging our own graves. We've personally actually stopped ourselves and put our eBooks back to $1.49~$2.99, there's nothing wrong with asking people to pay $2.99 for a 40k~100k word book, hell that's less than a small coffee.
Watch each day and see what eBooks Amazon puts out for free, won't be long and you'll have enough material to last you a lifetime. Of course, if you're wanting eBook editions of a Big-6 published new release, then yes, you'll be lucky to get $0.50 off the price.
It's already a nightmare trying to cover all the bases as a book writer/publisher, adding more to the mix just makes things more annoying, confusing and likely to pop up crazy formatting mistakes. The forums are already filled with people having enough grief getting a decent looking eBook generated (though I blame them for using MSWord... tsk tsk *hugs LaTeX*). A lot of us would LOVE it if Amazon simply supported ePub, though that would in many ways erode their empire, at least in their view. Right now a lot of publishers are pushing out mobi / ePub / pdf as the main 3 formats to support, at least along with print publishing, unfortunately even within ePub there's a few quirks and you have to generate slightly different versions for iPad, Nook and 'everything else'.... reminds me of the bloomen browser wars at their worst... and to think I switched to doing novels / writing / publishing to try avoid this sort of crap *maniacal laugh*.
Anyone else notice that the fuselage has a passing similarity in appearance to the Howard Hughes Herculese (Spruce Goose as it was insultingly called too).
From what I recall, goats will eat a lot of things but they -way- they eat the grass tends to leave it intact/alive to resprout, however sheep gnaw it down so far that it kills the grass.
This is something that has had a lot of discussion in the past on various e-book forums. The publisher sets the price, not Amazon. When you submit a book for resale on Amazon they take their 75% or 32% cut depending on what you select (books under $2.99 are generally only eligible for the 75% cut).
A lot of independents have been working the 99c book sale pricing but lately we've been finding that it's just about impossible to make any sort of sane living at those levels, so we're gravitating more to the $1.99 and $2.99 brackets, sometimes pushing to $4.99 if it's a book from a popular series (Amanda Hocking, David Dalglish etc).
I'd be very surprised if any action is taken against Amazon, while they do have a strong hold on the distribution market of eBooks they aren't (yet!) controlling the publishing prices.
Most of us are just self-publishers in the eBook market, it's almost like the whole OpenSource software movement all over again.
At least a lot of non-Big6 writers are publishing without DRM on Amazon (and other platforms).
There's a new thread almost weekly on places like Kindleboards.com about DRM and it still always goes the same way though, lots of arguing on either side. In the end at least, more and more writers are explicitly choosing NOT to DRM.
We have several books out under a few pen-names, none of them are DRM'd and we're not the only ones ( http://elitadaniels.com/ ).
About the only time I'm appreciative of PT on a board is if I'm trying to route a power rail and I can use the leg/pin as an implied via, but overall, yep... PT is a PITA.:D (not to mention how it slows up assembly so much!)
The trouble with this sort of reporting is that it betrays the work done daily by people who really -are- dealing with complicated stuff. Reminds me of parents rabbling on about their "genius child" because the kid installs software O_o.
Really, SMD is not hard to solder, you just use different techniques with your old tools.
Sure, BGA is out of the picture for most people, but SOIC, TQFP, SSOP/MSSOP and parts down to 0402 are still hand-solderable. You just have to make the mental shift away from thinking "OMGZ, It's surface mount, I'll never be able to solder that!". In many ways SMD is a lot easier and simpler, because surface tension becomes your friend.
Of course, failing that, go get a skillet and some solder-paste or convert a pizza oven into a reflow chamber. I for one am happy to never deal with pin-through again.
I guess the subsequent point will be - what does Apple do when they find themselves blacklisting legitimate phone owners that simply have had the GUID lifted by a 3rd party ?
Very true words... health is one of those things that gets stolen away from you almost literally overnight and from there it's a major struggle to get back to normality. Most of us as kids would screw up our faces when our parents would say "You've got your health" when we moaned about not having anything - sadly, as with so many things, you don't realise how true that is until you're older.
The trouble is, you trip up with something, that later causes something else...and so on... you find yourself snowballing down into the pit of death .
Never thought that their "lower end" gear was too expensive, like their Opteron workstations, but that said, I'm probably biased because I was with the Sun Developer program for my software - so the hardware was likely strongly discounted.
Indeed, the "generous donation" of hardware and/or cash would be a viable option for Microsoft - I can see them going for that (sincerely). Of course, there may well end up being limits beyond which they can't push that method but who knows, it'll be up to the bean-counters to determine how much it's worth to ensure they keep people inside the MS Ecosystem.
It is their game plane, because it means bigger profits through lower expenses. As a traded corp that's what they have to do. Of course, I think the move was still a little over the top.
LyX v2 is quite good these days. It still has -some- hiccups on the LaTeX generation and mingling TeX directly into LyX can mean a few things are missed on the exports (for some reason it doesn't always seem to get exported if you're not going with PDF), however overall from a writer's perspective, LyX v2 is a nice compromise. As a side note, we're using the Memoirs style package, which in itself is a whole extra world of reading:)
Ooh, we're also a bit of a lutantic asylum here - we use LyX / LaTeX for our fiction-novel works, though the PDF output is brilliant for printing - we still have to export to HTML and import to Calibre to get it to Kindle.
I live in the Northern Australia parts and if there's one thing we certainly don't have a shortage of, it's damned hot weather with a lot of sunshine, so solar really is easy for us to use/access, wish more of us were doing so.
Almost 100km/hr is quite a decent rate, note that it's the speed-limit for most of the roads in Australia (some places allow 110km/hr, Northern Territory has some "unlimited" zones but that's a bit of a misnomer).
Now, I wonder if they'll start adding new demands on the cars such as "Must run air-conditioning" or similar loads.
Well, I facebook'd it - and to this day I still write a lot of C code, for open-source, commercial and even embedded systems now. It's been over 20 years and I'm still finding it a useful tool a lot of the time.
Amongst the independent publishers the 99c -is- the norm, in fact now a lot of people are ditching it and going back to a sane pricing model. The end result now is that many series writers will put the first book (or two) at 99c as a bit of a loss leader and then put the rest at $2.99~$3.99.
What REALLY burns at 99c (well, below $2.99) is that Amazon gives you only 35% cut, but at $2.99+ you get 70%.
I've seen a lot of writers have good success at 99c but it runs out after about 6 months; then you're left high and dry until you can score another success - having the first success is no guarantee that your next book will be as popular (though you will have a certain degree of market following at least).
I've used touch-screen page turning and I also use the K3 bezel-button page turning systems, I know when it comes to reading a book the bezel mounted side buttons are a lot nicer than having to constantly move your finger and tap the screen just to turn the page.
Sure, when it comes to typing out stuff the non-touch is a bit of a PITA, but I spend more time reading books than trying to type out things.
The $79 kindle is a great development, strips away the bits that a lot of people use infrequently, drops the price, size and weight - all good.
I've wondered that myself, would LOVE a 24" eInk display for slow updating data. Of course, the devil is likely in the details, as with all great electronics.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on where you stand... right now, from an independent writer's perspective, eBook prices are plummeting - couple of years ago most people were at $2.99 and $0.99 was the 'magical free marketing ride', then last year going $0.00 was the key and everyone was trying to get on the Amazon free bandwagon to get some exposure... I expect soon that writers will be _paying_ people to read their book. In the race to the bottom, it seems we're going to punch through and start digging our own graves. We've personally actually stopped ourselves and put our eBooks back to $1.49~$2.99, there's nothing wrong with asking people to pay $2.99 for a 40k~100k word book, hell that's less than a small coffee.
Watch each day and see what eBooks Amazon puts out for free, won't be long and you'll have enough material to last you a lifetime. Of course, if you're wanting eBook editions of a Big-6 published new release, then yes, you'll be lucky to get $0.50 off the price.
It's already a nightmare trying to cover all the bases as a book writer/publisher, adding more to the mix just makes things more annoying, confusing and likely to pop up crazy formatting mistakes. The forums are already filled with people having enough grief getting a decent looking eBook generated (though I blame them for using MSWord... tsk tsk *hugs LaTeX*). A lot of us would LOVE it if Amazon simply supported ePub, though that would in many ways erode their empire, at least in their view. Right now a lot of publishers are pushing out mobi / ePub / pdf as the main 3 formats to support, at least along with print publishing, unfortunately even within ePub there's a few quirks and you have to generate slightly different versions for iPad, Nook and 'everything else'. ... reminds me of the bloomen browser wars at their worst ... and to think I switched to doing novels / writing / publishing to try avoid this sort of crap *maniacal laugh*.
http://elitadaniels.com/
Anyone else notice that the fuselage has a passing similarity in appearance to the Howard Hughes Herculese (Spruce Goose as it was insultingly called too).
From what I recall, goats will eat a lot of things but they -way- they eat the grass tends to leave it intact/alive to resprout, however sheep gnaw it down so far that it kills the grass.
It's only that big a cut on books under $2.99. Over $2.99 it's back down to 35%, which is actually a bit lower than some other distributors.
This is something that has had a lot of discussion in the past on various e-book forums. The publisher sets the price, not Amazon. When you submit a book for resale on Amazon they take their 75% or 32% cut depending on what you select (books under $2.99 are generally only eligible for the 75% cut).
A lot of independents have been working the 99c book sale pricing but lately we've been finding that it's just about impossible to make any sort of sane living at those levels, so we're gravitating more to the $1.99 and $2.99 brackets, sometimes pushing to $4.99 if it's a book from a popular series (Amanda Hocking, David Dalglish etc).
I'd be very surprised if any action is taken against Amazon, while they do have a strong hold on the distribution market of eBooks they aren't (yet!) controlling the publishing prices.
Most of us are just self-publishers in the eBook market, it's almost like the whole OpenSource software movement all over again.
http://elitadaniels.com/
At least a lot of non-Big6 writers are publishing without DRM on Amazon (and other platforms).
There's a new thread almost weekly on places like Kindleboards.com about DRM and it still always goes the same way though, lots of arguing on either side. In the end at least, more and more writers are explicitly choosing NOT to DRM.
We have several books out under a few pen-names, none of them are DRM'd and we're not the only ones ( http://elitadaniels.com/ ).
About the only time I'm appreciative of PT on a board is if I'm trying to route a power rail and I can use the leg/pin as an implied via, but overall, yep... PT is a PITA. :D (not to mention how it slows up assembly so much!)
The trouble with this sort of reporting is that it betrays the work done daily by people who really -are- dealing with complicated stuff. Reminds me of parents rabbling on about their "genius child" because the kid installs software O_o.
Really, SMD is not hard to solder, you just use different techniques with your old tools.
Sure, BGA is out of the picture for most people, but SOIC, TQFP, SSOP/MSSOP and parts down to 0402 are still hand-solderable. You just have to make the mental shift away from thinking "OMGZ, It's surface mount, I'll never be able to solder that!". In many ways SMD is a lot easier and simpler, because surface tension becomes your friend.
Of course, failing that, go get a skillet and some solder-paste or convert a pizza oven into a reflow chamber. I for one am happy to never deal with pin-through again.
I guess the subsequent point will be - what does Apple do when they find themselves blacklisting legitimate phone owners that simply have had the GUID lifted by a 3rd party ?
Genuine question... couldn't you just get the GUIDs of existing valid iPhones?
Very true words... health is one of those things that gets stolen away from you almost literally overnight and from there it's a major struggle to get back to normality. Most of us as kids would screw up our faces when our parents would say "You've got your health" when we moaned about not having anything - sadly, as with so many things, you don't realise how true that is until you're older.
The trouble is, you trip up with something, that later causes something else...and so on... you find yourself snowballing down into the pit of death .
Never thought that their "lower end" gear was too expensive, like their Opteron workstations, but that said, I'm probably biased because I was with the Sun Developer program for my software - so the hardware was likely strongly discounted.
Indeed, the "generous donation" of hardware and/or cash would be a viable option for Microsoft - I can see them going for that (sincerely). Of course, there may well end up being limits beyond which they can't push that method but who knows, it'll be up to the bean-counters to determine how much it's worth to ensure they keep people inside the MS Ecosystem.
It is their game plane, because it means bigger profits through lower expenses. As a traded corp that's what they have to do. Of course, I think the move was still a little over the top.
Except in this case, it's the actions of a 1%'er bringing the 99% to its knees.
The "boss" (Alan Joyce) just had his pay upped to $5m/yr yesterday... now he's grounded the fleet. Either a genius or a mad-man, maybe both.
LyX v2 is quite good these days. It still has -some- hiccups on the LaTeX generation and mingling TeX directly into LyX can mean a few things are missed on the exports (for some reason it doesn't always seem to get exported if you're not going with PDF), however overall from a writer's perspective, LyX v2 is a nice compromise. As a side note, we're using the Memoirs style package, which in itself is a whole extra world of reading :)
Ooh, we're also a bit of a lutantic asylum here - we use LyX / LaTeX for our fiction-novel works, though the PDF output is brilliant for printing - we still have to export to HTML and import to Calibre to get it to Kindle.
Oh thanks for the update on the NT speeds - when we used to live there (1979~1981) it was a nice "what ever" speed (Jabiru to Darwin etc) :)
I live in the Northern Australia parts and if there's one thing we certainly don't have a shortage of, it's damned hot weather with a lot of sunshine, so solar really is easy for us to use/access, wish more of us were doing so.
Almost 100km/hr is quite a decent rate, note that it's the speed-limit for most of the roads in Australia (some places allow 110km/hr, Northern Territory has some "unlimited" zones but that's a bit of a misnomer).
Now, I wonder if they'll start adding new demands on the cars such as "Must run air-conditioning" or similar loads.
Well, I facebook'd it - and to this day I still write a lot of C code, for open-source, commercial and even embedded systems now. It's been over 20 years and I'm still finding it a useful tool a lot of the time.
Amongst the independent publishers the 99c -is- the norm, in fact now a lot of people are ditching it and going back to a sane pricing model. The end result now is that many series writers will put the first book (or two) at 99c as a bit of a loss leader and then put the rest at $2.99~$3.99.
What REALLY burns at 99c (well, below $2.99) is that Amazon gives you only 35% cut, but at $2.99+ you get 70%.
I've seen a lot of writers have good success at 99c but it runs out after about 6 months; then you're left high and dry until you can score another success - having the first success is no guarantee that your next book will be as popular (though you will have a certain degree of market following at least).
IAAIWP - I am an independent writer-publisher
I've used touch-screen page turning and I also use the K3 bezel-button page turning systems, I know when it comes to reading a book the bezel mounted side buttons are a lot nicer than having to constantly move your finger and tap the screen just to turn the page.
Sure, when it comes to typing out stuff the non-touch is a bit of a PITA, but I spend more time reading books than trying to type out things.
The $79 kindle is a great development, strips away the bits that a lot of people use infrequently, drops the price, size and weight - all good.
I've wondered that myself, would LOVE a 24" eInk display for slow updating data. Of course, the devil is likely in the details, as with all great electronics.