sell e-books for a buck a pop, and you'll sell a bunch
I think this is the biggest failing of Xlibris (and the other print-on-demand/self/vanity publishers). When I published my Xlibris novel, they were working on the e-book format. When I found out that it was an encypted Acrobat file for $8, I was disappointed. This will never sell.
A better solution would be a text file and a PayPal button. In better news, I think fictionwise.com has got it right. Brand spanking new ebooks are still priced at hardcover levels, but everything else is reasonable, and most things are in palatable formats.
A few years ago, I published a novel with Xlibris. I don't know that I would do it again, but it hasn't been a bad experience. At the time, the entry level publishing cost nothing. Only if you wanted to choose your own cover, or have your book available in hardback did you have to pay. I don't think that's the case anymore. I wouldn't have done it if it cost anything at all. Something about paying for publication strikes me as... Well, it's like paying for cable. Why bother when a splitter off your neighbor's line works fine?
For any prospective writers out there, Xlibris isn't a bad choice, but it's not a good one either. At one point they unilaterally decided to make author payments into a convenient e-cash thing instead of actual cash. ("You can use your whatever.com card at hundreds of participating locations!") Thanks. They reversed this and I've always received payment by check.
Over the years, I have done absolutely no promotion of my novel, and sales have been very poor. It may be because it's just not worth buying, but you can read the whole thing online. (See my sig).
If anyone wants more information about the Xlibris process, send me an email.
Does anyone remember...?
on
High Score
·
· Score: 2
Does anyone remember a robot game from the 1980's that taught hexadecimal and binary math? I think it was published by Broderbund, but I could be wrong. I read a review of it in Byte -- also had a review of Where in the World in Carmen San Diego on the same page. I thought it was a cool idea. The reviewer, IIRC, believed the game was fun enough that children would play it in spite of the educational overtones.
Running RedHat 7.2. Downloaded the gtk version, but apparently I need gtk 2.0 and I only have 1.2. Didn't see anything in the requirements, but whatever. Try the motif version. Works fine, but I wish it hadn't. It's ugly as hell. Create a new project and Hello World. Everything worked fine, but I don't see much difference between this and eclipse 1.0.
I saw this in college. It was hillarious. We were biting out hands to keep from laughing out loud. Highlights include: randomly switching between black & white and color (in Russia, they used what stock was available), a midget trying to escape from a room, and the otherwise mentioned 15 minute driving scene (which would be a good time to get popcorn if it weren't so early in the movie).
BTW, this entire website is "offtopic" so I have no trouble posting this, but feel free to email me direct if you care for more thoughts on the matter.
At least he realised he was completely mad
Sure, but mad or sane, his religion and spirituality oozes through on almost every page. Even discounting his violently anti-abortion (not pro life) short story (The Pre-Persons?), he made no effort to restrain his Christian thinking. Ignore the mind-control stuff. Ignore all of his quirks. He wrote an entire novel about an Episcopal Priest. Mercerism -- from DADOES -- is an incredibly succinct extrapolation of the mystery of Christian faith. This is not preaching from a zealot, but a poetic distillation of something familiar, repackaged and given bakc to us as something unfamiliar. This is the essence of sci-fi and Dick used it to express -- beautifully -- his faith.
And while I'm ranting - Freedom From Religion should be enshrined as a basic human right.
This is fine. I'm not one to push religion in anyone's face and I certainly think men should be free to make rational decisions about the universe, free of superstition and nonsense.
That said, Dick was one of the most spiritual and Christian of all scfi-fi writers. His work simply reeks of Christianity. Don't get me wrong, PKD is one of my absolute favorite writers. I especially love his mainstream stuff. Milton Lumpky territory is unadulterated genius, Mary and the Giant is wonderful, and few novels are as much fun as Confessions of a Crap Artist.
Don't you have trouble reconciling the whole Freedom From Religion schtick with a love for such a blatantly Episcopal writer -- one who practiced in a field where Agnosticism remains cool?
If you read the transcript carefully, you'll see why this won't work. Right now,./ (and OSDN) have to pass up on ads because they won't accept Flash, java, etc... and this leaves the majority of their page views unsponsored. What advertisers are interested in is large portions of screen space to be viewed by a lot of people.
Thus spake Taco:
Also its simply a matter of eyeballs. An accepted story submission is seen by 300,000 people. A Score:-1 comment is seen by a few hundred. A Score:5 comment, perhaps a few thousand. ... more then [sic] half of Slashdot's readers NEVER read a comment.
If you can read past the atrocious grammar, you'll see the difficulty in selling data from a small number of people. Sponsors want more of the big stuff, not more of the small stuff. Sure, a creative and determined salesperson might be able to sell a poll or a clever ask./, but that effort represents a significant cost. Easier and better to stick with what can actually work.
How much do you pay for a 'service' such as three-way-calling? It probably costs the telco a nickel per month to provide that 'service'! Gravy profit.
Where else do you expect them to find profit? Should they provide only commodities (dial tone and local service) and simply raise prices to accomodate the rate they would like to grow?
802.11b is really the only hope to drive a wedge into the monopolies control.
This makes no sense to me. How will 802.11b provide an alternative to telcos?
I agree with everything you said... but they scrapped OS 9 and started -- not from scratch -- but from proven technology and a proven codebase and built on that.
They still made the mistake of spending _years_ developing their very own "we invented it" operating system in Copland that was never released or completed. With my quip about things turning out badly, I mean the time wasted with Copland can't be recovered and cost them dearly in their competition with Windows. OS X is a great example of this. It's a great operating system but no one cares because they've been using Windows so long they don't even think about it anymore.
Actually, they did just the oppostite... and things turned out badly. For years they worked on the Copland project which was a from scratch rewrite of the OS, but finally canned it, bought a fully functional OS and wrote a GUI, emulator, and API. Even so, the years of delay took them right out of the market.
The goal of document retension policy and procedure is not to guarantee the deletion of every email or document, but instead to demonstrate a standard practice for handling these things. Lotus Notes mail isn't special in that regard. My mail file is set to keep everything on the local copy. If I delete something from my server replica or if document retension deletes something, it still is in my local copy.
But the company is insulated. If sub peonaed (sp?) they could produce a year of email, demonstrate the policy and the practice that implements the policy, and -- I believe -- their obligation would be fulfilled. IANAL. TINLA.
The point of my post was just to show _how_ the policy was implemented from a technical standpoint. It would be very difficult to guard against local archives or stop people from printing everything out and storing it at home or in their desk drawer.
I work at a Fortune 100 company and documents and emails older than one year are automatically deleted. The email is pretty easy to enforce because we use Lotus Notes. The deletion takes place on the server copy and the deletes are replicated down to the local copy.
Document files are a little more difficult. Everyone is encouraged to store files on the server in secure folders. This is enforced culturally because if a hard drive fails and the user wants data back, they are told it should have been on the server where it is backed-up (and deleted at the appropriate time).
BTW, these procedures have proven very important as the company has defended itself in against anti-competitive suits as well as race-discrimination suits.
What if you have decades of banal email to dig through when a lawsuit comes up? All that data will be thrown back at you in court, which means you have to potentially prepare a defense for all of it -- even if it's never used against you. Legal expenses can be costly.
I posted this against another thread, but I just have to repeat myself. Heaney's translation bad. Even given the excuse that it is an interpretation not translation, it's bad.
If you want to see the side-by-side text, go for Chickering, but for a drop-dead wonderful translation Rebsamen is the only choice.
Heaney's translation is not excellent in any sense. If you want to see the side-by-side text, go for Chickering, but for a drop-dead wonderful translation Rebsamen is the only choice.
They'll do what all manufacturer's do when they increase the warranty: raise the price. By increasing the cost a few dollars, multiplied by the number of units they think they can sell, this will give them the cash to handle the increased claims. In some industries (car batteries) for example, the 10yr and 5yr products are exactly the same, you -- the consumer -- just pay more for the warranty (i.e. insurance).
Thankfully, you clever Eropeans figured all this out and regulated accordingly.
Could someone smart explain this quote to me
on
Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 2
What is more, software is increasingly a service delivered over the Internet, meaning that operating systems are no longer central.
Is there a computer that I could buy that doesn't need an OS?
It's not that simple. What happens when MS refuses to license new editions of Word, Excel, on W2K? What if you want to open a new office and the only Windows computers come with XP?
I'm at work typing on a Win95 computer, but the company that owns it pays a price: vendor software expects a certain standard, and right now Win95 can cut it, but eventually people will laugh the same way they'd laugh if it were Win 3.1.
There's a price for falling behind the technology curve. You can skip an upgrade, or you can get off the boat altogether, but you can't stop.
MS has to find the point where people will stay on the boat. Right now they seem to be pushing the limit, but I don't think they're even close. They're very good at this.
Slashdot Mirror
Go, Georgia!
I think this is the biggest failing of Xlibris (and the other print-on-demand/self/vanity publishers). When I published my Xlibris novel, they were working on the e-book format. When I found out that it was an encypted Acrobat file for $8, I was disappointed. This will never sell.
A better solution would be a text file and a PayPal button. In better news, I think fictionwise.com has got it right. Brand spanking new ebooks are still priced at hardcover levels, but everything else is reasonable, and most things are in palatable formats.
A few years ago, I published a novel with Xlibris. I don't know that I would do it again, but it hasn't been a bad experience. At the time, the entry level publishing cost nothing. Only if you wanted to choose your own cover, or have your book available in hardback did you have to pay. I don't think that's the case anymore. I wouldn't have done it if it cost anything at all. Something about paying for publication strikes me as... Well, it's like paying for cable. Why bother when a splitter off your neighbor's line works fine?
For any prospective writers out there, Xlibris isn't a bad choice, but it's not a good one either. At one point they unilaterally decided to make author payments into a convenient e-cash thing instead of actual cash. ("You can use your whatever.com card at hundreds of participating locations!") Thanks. They reversed this and I've always received payment by check.
Over the years, I have done absolutely no promotion of my novel, and sales have been very poor. It may be because it's just not worth buying, but you can read the whole thing online. (See my sig).
If anyone wants more information about the Xlibris process, send me an email.
Speaking of which... whatever happened to Jon Katz?
I thought the same thing when I saw it.
Anyone?
Running RedHat 7.2. Downloaded the gtk version, but apparently I need gtk 2.0 and I only have 1.2. Didn't see anything in the requirements, but whatever. Try the motif version. Works fine, but I wish it hadn't. It's ugly as hell. Create a new project and Hello World. Everything worked fine, but I don't see much difference between this and eclipse 1.0.
I saw this in college. It was hillarious. We were biting out hands to keep from laughing out loud. Highlights include: randomly switching between black & white and color (in Russia, they used what stock was available), a midget trying to escape from a room, and the otherwise mentioned 15 minute driving scene (which would be a good time to get popcorn if it weren't so early in the movie).
At least he realised he was completely mad
Sure, but mad or sane, his religion and spirituality oozes through on almost every page. Even discounting his violently anti-abortion (not pro life) short story (The Pre-Persons?), he made no effort to restrain his Christian thinking. Ignore the mind-control stuff. Ignore all of his quirks. He wrote an entire novel about an Episcopal Priest. Mercerism -- from DADOES -- is an incredibly succinct extrapolation of the mystery of Christian faith. This is not preaching from a zealot, but a poetic distillation of something familiar, repackaged and given bakc to us as something unfamiliar. This is the essence of sci-fi and Dick used it to express -- beautifully -- his faith.
This is fine. I'm not one to push religion in anyone's face and I certainly think men should be free to make rational decisions about the universe, free of superstition and nonsense.
That said, Dick was one of the most spiritual and Christian of all scfi-fi writers. His work simply reeks of Christianity. Don't get me wrong, PKD is one of my absolute favorite writers. I especially love his mainstream stuff. Milton Lumpky territory is unadulterated genius, Mary and the Giant is wonderful, and few novels are as much fun as Confessions of a Crap Artist.
Don't you have trouble reconciling the whole Freedom From Religion schtick with a love for such a blatantly Episcopal writer -- one who practiced in a field where Agnosticism remains cool?
Thus spake Taco:
Also its simply a matter of eyeballs.
An accepted story submission is seen by 300,000 people.
A Score:-1 comment is seen by a few hundred.
A Score:5 comment, perhaps a few thousand.
... more then [sic] half of Slashdot's readers NEVER read a comment.
If you can read past the atrocious grammar, you'll see the difficulty in selling data from a small number of people. Sponsors want more of the big stuff, not more of the small stuff. Sure, a creative and determined salesperson might be able to sell a poll or a clever ask ./, but that effort represents a significant cost. Easier and better to stick with what can actually work.
Where else do you expect them to find profit? Should they provide only commodities (dial tone and local service) and simply raise prices to accomodate the rate they would like to grow?
802.11b is really the only hope to drive a wedge into the monopolies control.
This makes no sense to me. How will 802.11b provide an alternative to telcos?
I agree with everything you said... but they scrapped OS 9 and started -- not from scratch -- but from proven technology and a proven codebase and built on that.
They still made the mistake of spending _years_ developing their very own "we invented it" operating system in Copland that was never released or completed. With my quip about things turning out badly, I mean the time wasted with Copland can't be recovered and cost them dearly in their competition with Windows. OS X is a great example of this. It's a great operating system but no one cares because they've been using Windows so long they don't even think about it anymore.
I hope Apple does well.
Actually, they did just the oppostite... and things turned out badly. For years they worked on the Copland project which was a from scratch rewrite of the OS, but finally canned it, bought a fully functional OS and wrote a GUI, emulator, and API. Even so, the years of delay took them right out of the market.
But the company is insulated. If sub peonaed (sp?) they could produce a year of email, demonstrate the policy and the practice that implements the policy, and -- I believe -- their obligation would be fulfilled. IANAL. TINLA.
The point of my post was just to show _how_ the policy was implemented from a technical standpoint. It would be very difficult to guard against local archives or stop people from printing everything out and storing it at home or in their desk drawer.
Document files are a little more difficult. Everyone is encouraged to store files on the server in secure folders. This is enforced culturally because if a hard drive fails and the user wants data back, they are told it should have been on the server where it is backed-up (and deleted at the appropriate time).
BTW, these procedures have proven very important as the company has defended itself in against anti-competitive suits as well as race-discrimination suits.
What if you have decades of banal email to dig through when a lawsuit comes up? All that data will be thrown back at you in court, which means you have to potentially prepare a defense for all of it -- even if it's never used against you. Legal expenses can be costly.
If you want to see the side-by-side text, go for Chickering, but for a drop-dead wonderful translation Rebsamen is the only choice.
Heaney's translation is not excellent in any sense. If you want to see the side-by-side text, go for Chickering, but for a drop-dead wonderful translation Rebsamen is the only choice.
You can always tell a Charlie Rose interview. He does all of the talking. Another great job, Charlie. Next time, ask some questions.
For those using a sophisticated os, just type pkg_add -r xrobots.
Too bad the game blows.
They'll do what all manufacturer's do when they increase the warranty: raise the price. By increasing the cost a few dollars, multiplied by the number of units they think they can sell, this will give them the cash to handle the increased claims. In some industries (car batteries) for example, the 10yr and 5yr products are exactly the same, you -- the consumer -- just pay more for the warranty (i.e. insurance).
Thankfully, you clever Eropeans figured all this out and regulated accordingly.
Is there a computer that I could buy that doesn't need an OS?
It's Java.
It's not that simple. What happens when MS refuses to license new editions of Word, Excel, on W2K? What if you want to open a new office and the only Windows computers come with XP?
I'm at work typing on a Win95 computer, but the company that owns it pays a price: vendor software expects a certain standard, and right now Win95 can cut it, but eventually people will laugh the same way they'd laugh if it were Win 3.1.
There's a price for falling behind the technology curve. You can skip an upgrade, or you can get off the boat altogether, but you can't stop.
MS has to find the point where people will stay on the boat. Right now they seem to be pushing the limit, but I don't think they're even close. They're very good at this.