I seem to be aging right along with the screen technology--every better smartphone I upgrade to is just at the edge of "goofy-face"--that weird tilt of your head as you try to figure out the best distance and angle to see the screen clearly enough to read. Eventually, I fear my eyes will degrade faster than the screens will get better.
Tablets are handiest to "consume" content and media--look up a factoid, watch a clip, episode, or movie, comfortably read a book (up to a point), or play a little game. Thus returning the PC and laptops to their "work" status while tablets maintain the "convenience" and "entertainment" realms.
Yep. Now you, too, can have a "PR strategy" just like the celebrities! People have always engaged in reputation management and social damage control. It's historically not been as archivable as an internet footprint for the vast majority of us. My feverish teenage fan-fictions of meeting rock stars are safely moldering away in my parents' garage. Today's twentysomethings can find their feverish fan-fictions of meeting rock stars preserved in mint-condition glory with a simple google search, along with embarrassing (or horrific, or incriminating, as with some recent cases) photo evidence of their behavior. They'll have much more to manage--whether it's scrubbing mom's cute little-kid disaster pics, or overcoming the stigma of permanently-archived footage of abuse or humiliation.
The big fall-down for crowdsourcing investigations is that crowds are not trained to investigate. Most people don't know what they're looking for, and are counting on some sort of, "I'll know it when I see it" without the benefit of the awareness of personal or cultural biases that identify things that are "out of place" - if you are used to seeing street mimes, for example, then street mimes won't look out of place in a crowd shot. But if street mimes are a rare occurrence in your purview, they're gonna be hella creepy, even if they turn out to be innocent. By the same token, if you're used to seeing street mimes, you are more likely to be able to point out the mime that's talking (not something mimes do), where someone unfamiliar with mimes would just see the mime--the odd person--and not the odd behavior.
Bad ebooks are often publisher!fail moreso than Amazon!fail. Especially digitized versions of older editions--those are frequently scans of print archived copies, or files that were taken by an unpaid intern and run through macros to get them out there quick before the authors asked for the digital rights back due to out-of-print-ness. A bad ebook for sale negates the oop clause in a lot of legacy contracts, often preventing the author from releasing a better, more updated version of his or her backlist.
Also, Amazon uses the.mobi format where Kobo uses.epub - there are more validation checks and standardization in the epub process than in the mobi.
That's why Amazon's growth focus has been on products like Amazon Prime and the Kindle--both tools for making it worth your while to "one-stop shop" with them, rather than float on over to someone else's webshop.
I will give them props for their prompt shipping--I've gotten stuff far sooner than I expected.
Amazon will eliminate your book reviews if you also happen to be an author, or if their algorithms determine you have any connection to said author, or sometimes randomly, out of sheer algorithmic butthurt. So rather than start your word-of-mouth marketing with friends and supporters, it pays to buy reviews from India or wherever.
"...inventors, who create things because they have the need to create. If it becomes popular and the inventor starts making money because of it, that's only a nice side-effect."
Just like the ability to eat and keep out of the weather are nice side-effects.
The biggest problem with digital resale comes from the fact that the creator only can truly "sell" one thing, before having to compete with the devaluing of his or her own work. I sell one book through amazon, then immediately, *amazon* gets to re-sell that book for half the cost. I never sell another book again, but Amazon makes 11,000 transactions off that single digital unit. Amazon, and 10,999 people who didn't spend a year and a half to write that book. Unless there's a way to compensate the creator for those transactions (and I'm by no means greedy - resell my book. But maybe kick me back enough for another brick of ramen noodles for the money you get back off my original work? I'll do you a solid then, and be able to survive long enough to write another one for you to enjoy and resell down the road), this effectively allows the *store* to sell more goods than they pay the maker of said goods for.
They'd have to at least offer a token kickback to the original creator--broadcast royalties, maybe--and they would *definitely* have to ensure that no more secondhand digital copies are allowed to be sold than the actual total number of original copies that were sold. And for that matter, maybe a serial number-type system where the digital copy released into the wild "devalues" over time based on the number of times it's changed hands. Interesting if they could do it. A type of compensation back to the creator would be access to that data--how many people resold your book, where in the world did it travel to, and how long did it stay in the possession of each person. With the data available via an incentivized "opt-in" system to protect consumers' privacy, it could be very useful to track digital content in the wild.
This. Seems hypocritical to me to say, "sure, anyone can resell any digital goods *that they own* but only as long as they use *my method* (implied "cut me a slice of every transaction) to do it."
What's to stop someone deciding to "resell" the "digital good" of "buying and selling owned digital items [on the internets]."
You can't maintain the copyright integrity on your creation, but I can maintain it on mine due to stupid patent laws?
...that none of the items on your list requires you to demonstrate an ability to safely operate that M16, or even have eyesight good enough that you don't mistake a brown couch for a sneaky buffalo that's broken into your home to steal your TV. Where is the harm in requiring someone to step up and take personal responsibility to prove they have the ability, skill, and knowledge to operate dangerous equipment safely?
Reducing the number of "guns freely available" (used in a general sense) will reduce the amount of gun-related (used in a general sense) violence. It's simple statistics, good, bad, left, right, whatever. And it's specific. Fewer guns at hand means fewer incidents where someone picks up a gun in a heated moment *because the gun is there* and shoots someone else with it. Fewer accidents *because the gun is there* will happen. This is math, not politics.
If you're looking at "why the 2nd" it's because the "tools" are the most protected elements of the whole deal, rather than the actual citizens. My uterus is more regulated than the "tools" used in the 2nd. We have individual responsibilities when it comes to Free Speech (not allowed to say "fire" in a crowded theater), voting (provide proof of residence and citizenship), assembling (peaceful, and you sometimes need a permit), press (you get in trouble for printing lies, although that one seems to be eroding under the "it was editorial/an infomercial" artful dodge these days), and religion (your right free exercise of your religion stops when it runs up against someone else's right to life/liberty/pursuit in that you can't stone people to death for apostasy or offer up unsuspecting co-eds as sacrifices for Great Cthulhu).
Yet even though the 2nd even states that "a well-regulated militia" is what predicates the citizen's right to keep and bear arms, there is a powerful force actively working to erase the whole idea of regulation of any sort, even if it's just to demonstrate you have the personal responsibility to operate said tools without infringing on some other citizen's "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." And the mere mention of maybe having some of that personal responsibility turns people hysterical.
It's not just in the wake of a tragedy that this happens, either. The difference is that the tragedy brings to light a situation that's been successfully suppressed up until tragedies like Newtown happen and people are shocked enough to break out of the "these are not the droids you're looking for" hand-waving that the Powers That Be regularly engage in.
I think nitpicking down to the type of gun or the type of ammo is a bit of a distraction in that it focuses on the minutia of what is a conceptual problem. Although, for the record, if you need 30 high-speed rounds to hit your target, maybe that makes its own case for the whole "demonstrate that you know how to use your tool" thing. Either that, or you need to sign up for Stormtrooper duty.
Try Bodhi Linux ( bodhilinux.com ) - it runs under an Ubuntu and uses Enlightenment 17. I've got it on my T61p now and it goes beautifully where the poor graphics card couldn't handle KDE without getting overheated and Unity got on my nerves. Bodhi's pretty light, but does the job.
I used my R42's keyboard so much that all the letters wore off. I wrote them back on with a silver metallic sharpie marker, then painted over them with clear nail polish and used them until they were starting to wear off again and the second hard drive failed and damaged the motherboard in the process. Had that sucker for 5 years and it survived cross-country trips, falls, drops onto a slate floor, and extreme weather conditions when I left it in my trunk during a blizzard overnight. That sucker could *go.*
I've used 3 or 4 Thinkpads in the past 10 years and been deliriously happy with them--and the little thumbstick trackpoint in the middle--consistently. My T61p is still going strong, if running a tad hot, on Bodhi Linux and E17 (it was bought new by a business, used by a road warrior for 4 years, then "retired" to me and I've had it for 3 or 4 years. Ubuntu's 12.x kernel runs thinkpads a tad bit hot, and I think the cat hair might be encouraging ol' Sparky towards his ultimate end, but the thing is a workhorse.
The only Thinkpad I've been less-than-overjoyed with is the little netbook I bought 2 years ago that was supposed to replace/upgrade from the T61p. The X100e (in a wild and crazy move, Lenovo offered them in a tasteful lipstick red, too) is a little netbook that had a problem with random shutdowns (again with an overheating thing). I suspect--but never confirmed because I wiped Windows on receipt--that it might have been a hardware thing. It's got win7 on it now and is used by my daughter for Minecraft fun (and it still occasionally shuts down randomly).
Thinkpad keyboards are the bee's knees. Trackpoints are something that never should have gone away. But where the Thinkpad really truly shines is in those hardworking metal hinges.
Not the least of which is that the rights which the publisher has for every book, and the terms of their licensing of those rights from the author is different. There are hundreds of older titles that publishers technically own the digital rights to (under some "future delivery system" clause in the contract) and are attempting to recreate/exploit (sometimes from an archaic printer's file or even hard copies scanned in by poorly-paid interns--and no, the printer's file is not the same as the ebook files).
The other (bigger) reason is the way book sales are structured in paperland versus ebookworld. And it's what got the big 6 publishers in trouble. When you're dealing with a physical product, the retail stream goes like this: Publisher produces the book->Distributor purchases the item from publisher at wholesale price->Retailer purchases the item from Distributor at retailer discount->Consumer purchases the item from Retailer at cover price (or more likely, discount). In that revenue stream, the Publisher gets paid 40% of the cover price of the book, no matter how much or how little the Consumer ends up paying for it (it's why you can find hardcovers at four bucks on the bargain table).
The big publishers negotiated with Amazon, at the dawn of the digital book age, to treat their digital content like physical content. Amazon purchases X copies at 60% discount of cover price, then turns around and sells the ebooks for whatever they want. But then things changed, and the publishers did not want electronic sales cutting into the more lucrative hardcover or paperbacks, so they turned around and re-negotiated something called 'Agency pricing' where the publishers got to set the price of the ebook, and Amazon could not discount at its discretion (but the publisher could). Since discounting is usually done to shift inventory, and digital inventory doesn't exist, and the publishers didn't get paid until the ebooks actually sold on Amazon, the publishers wanted their percentage of the full cover price. But because they all colluded, the US DOJ found that a bit of a no-no.
So as a result, you see deep discounts of hardbacks to move inventory out of a warehouse, but an ebook stays the same price because there is no physical inventory.
On the other end (the content-provider end, aka the "pay the author" end), many book contracts were negotiated to offer authors a royalty percentage of cover price *no matter what actual price the book sold at* and very quickly, ebooks became an albatross around the necks of traditional publishers because they tried to fit a digital product into a physical business model.
Us indie authors do things directly. We pay up front for author services like formatting, editorial services, art licensing for covers, and the covers themselves. We upload our ebooks direct to retailers like Amazon or B&N or to distributor-retailers like Smashwords (which can get you into a myriad of smaller/foreign to USA/or Apple retailers). The retailers take their cut first (about 30% or so) and we get the rest. We set our own prices, discount when we want to, and retain our publication rights. When you buy an ebook from an indie author, you're mostly supporting the person who did most of the work, with a little tip to the infrastructure that hooked you up with the book. And on the "book creation" end, it's still the same amount of work that goes into crafting a story for digital consumption as much as physical consumption.
They are actually pretty good at figuring that out. Buyers at the retail and wholesale level will pre-order books in advance. Lean manufacturing keeps the physical books in the warehouse for as little time as possible.
Retailer pre-orders books from distributor (at 40% discount of cover price) Distributor informs publisher of preorder numbers before printing goes into effect Printing happens to come as close to pre-order numbers as possible Distributor receives books from printer (at 60% discount of cover price) Turns around and fulfills Retail preorders Books sit on Retail shelves until sold or remaindered/returned for distributor/publisher credit via stripped covers sent back to publisher and the rest of the books chucked into a dumpster.
Shipping, warehousing, and shelf space costs are all the costs of doing retail business (also, for the upthread poster, those shelf end caps, middle tables, face-outs are *all* marketing real estate for sale to the highest bidder. Books on the middle tables are there because the publishers spent extra money to buy them space).
Digital books must all be housed on servers, and while the cost and space for a book is negligible, there's the storage of all that customer data, security both physical and virtual for payment/cart information, digital delivery costs, backup/redundancy, power to keep the servers running, etc. Ebooks don't cost "nothing" to sell any more than print books do.
"If a book is too heavy for you to hold with one hand on the couch, maybe it's time to do some pushups, seriously. I'm assuming you're reading a novel, not a medical dictionary."
Anyone with carpal tunnel or repetitive stress injury can tell you that even holding a paperback can cause pain if you're sitting or lying and holding it up in one hand. My mother in law can't hold up a paperback for very long at the angle and distance she needs to be able to read it. She can hold a kindle with one hand and resize the text so she doesn't have to stretch her arms out or hold them up in the air. And I think Game of Thrones is really close in weight to your average abbreviated medical dictionary.;)
Quite bluntly, not every book is the Divine Comedy.
It's fun to settle in with a nicely illustrated classic sometimes, but when I'm standing in line at the Post Office, I want to read a few paragraphs of the latest romance or fantasy or science fiction or literature that I'm reading. I know the book might not be a keeper. I know the book might not be something my descendants want to read. I'm good with that. Not every little brain leaving of mine needs to be advertised on my shelves or left to my future grandkids.
I read to read. I don't care where it comes from or what I'm reading it on. And I read more ebooks now than I have in the past ten years. Most of them, I don't honestly care if their format dissolves or they magically disappear from my device. If I want to keep it, I'll get arsed to download it and back it up on my server. Most of it's not worth the effort, though. I read, I enjoy, and I move on.
"...the digital don't cost shit to make or ship..."
I hope you don't think a book springs fully-formed, formatted, and edited from the mind of an author the same way the morning deuce drops from the arse of an author.
Format=/=product in this case. Pricing digital higher than paper doesn't make sense, agreed, but most of the work of a book happens long before ink hits paper or pixels hit screen. Are you paying for random pixels or are you paying for an entertainment experience you might enjoy for several hours or days, perhaps repeatedly. Because I could shit you out some random pixels for free, but it takes me months to craft a good story.
"... never underestimate the greed of publishers to cock things up."
On that we can heartily agree. Enough time is passing so that publishers are taking notice, and the ones that aren't, well...there are other publishers out there. Smaller publishers and independent authors are rushing to meet the needs of readers looking for good, cheap reads, and it's not all that hard to find good, modestly priced books to read about just about any subject.
Publishing is changing rapidly. There's no DRM on my books on Amazon or anywhere else. Smashwords actually lets you download the file itself (free of DRM), and if a publisher ever made me an offer, I'd offer the print rights only as some recent big name publishers have agreed to. But I have a self-publishing print option as well. If I were doing well enough for a NY publisher to take notice, I would probably still stay self-published because the terms are much better.
How many gun owner names and addresses does the NRA have in its database? To whom do they sell that information? How about Dick's Sporting Goods' customer database?
Just trying to determine the level of appropriate sensitivity over gun ownership information.
Possibly because to admit that we need a civil defense force like this is to admit that we live in a dangerous society where people should expect their lives to be threatened. It's embedded in the Constitution that we have a right to walk around and reasonably expect to do so unmolested. To suggest otherwise would probably make a lot of people uncomfortable. And still others would see a civil defense as a step towards a police state.
"Better Security" is not always the answer. Better security works great when you live in a war zone or a volatile society. The US is not supposed to be a volatile society. After all, the most secure places in the country are prisons, and no one wants to live in a prison (although from some of the suggestions I've seen here and elsewhere along the lines of "arming the teachers" and "security guards at the entrances" are stopping just short of concertina wire around the playground. But the day's still young).
Drunks still drive cars. Why bother with drunk driving laws? They just harass sober people who can't drive on their own side of the road.
To compare guns and illegal drugs, you have to look at them from a societal perspective. Enough members of our society, when presented with the choice of avoiding engaging in controlled substances, versus risking their freedoms by breaking laws, choose the controlled substances. Their possible incarceration is an acceptable risk, to both them and society at large. Otherwise, we'd change things. And maybe we are, slowly, as the cultural taboos surrounding the illegality of behaviors around marijuana break down through widely acceptable use by all strata of society.
By the same token, right now at this minute, enough members of society, when presented with the choice of limiting widespread access to guns, or risking the possibility that those guns will be used in the slaughter of innocents, have thus far chosen to define the *level* of mass killings experienced thus far as acceptable risk.
Neither of these activities are entirely victimless. People's need for controlled substances engenders a worldwide trade, regardless of the legality. The drug war spawned a global criminal culture. And individually, people's lives still get fscked up because of their addictions. Thus far, people in homes where guns are owned are twice as likely to be involved in gun injuries or deaths than people who are in homes without guns. The illegal gun trade seems to be thriving in the midst of an entirely legal gun trade (explain that one), and the massive amount of cash flowing to and from government from the gun lobby has engendered the societal notion that to even suggest putting a few caveats between a hand and the gun it wants to hold is tantamount to treason. it is easy to get a gun, and the gun goes from "in case of emergency" to "pick me first."
Thing is--the right controls *do* work. Other countries have restricted sales on weapons and seen a drop in mass shootings. Rehab works for many people whose addictions have taken over their lives. And yes, gun registrations have helped solve crimes. Seat belts save lives without diminishing your enjoyment of the open road.
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I seem to be aging right along with the screen technology--every better smartphone I upgrade to is just at the edge of "goofy-face"--that weird tilt of your head as you try to figure out the best distance and angle to see the screen clearly enough to read. Eventually, I fear my eyes will degrade faster than the screens will get better.
Tablets are handiest to "consume" content and media--look up a factoid, watch a clip, episode, or movie, comfortably read a book (up to a point), or play a little game. Thus returning the PC and laptops to their "work" status while tablets maintain the "convenience" and "entertainment" realms.
Yep. Now you, too, can have a "PR strategy" just like the celebrities! People have always engaged in reputation management and social damage control. It's historically not been as archivable as an internet footprint for the vast majority of us. My feverish teenage fan-fictions of meeting rock stars are safely moldering away in my parents' garage. Today's twentysomethings can find their feverish fan-fictions of meeting rock stars preserved in mint-condition glory with a simple google search, along with embarrassing (or horrific, or incriminating, as with some recent cases) photo evidence of their behavior. They'll have much more to manage--whether it's scrubbing mom's cute little-kid disaster pics, or overcoming the stigma of permanently-archived footage of abuse or humiliation.
The big fall-down for crowdsourcing investigations is that crowds are not trained to investigate. Most people don't know what they're looking for, and are counting on some sort of, "I'll know it when I see it" without the benefit of the awareness of personal or cultural biases that identify things that are "out of place" - if you are used to seeing street mimes, for example, then street mimes won't look out of place in a crowd shot. But if street mimes are a rare occurrence in your purview, they're gonna be hella creepy, even if they turn out to be innocent. By the same token, if you're used to seeing street mimes, you are more likely to be able to point out the mime that's talking (not something mimes do), where someone unfamiliar with mimes would just see the mime--the odd person--and not the odd behavior.
Bad ebooks are often publisher!fail moreso than Amazon!fail. Especially digitized versions of older editions--those are frequently scans of print archived copies, or files that were taken by an unpaid intern and run through macros to get them out there quick before the authors asked for the digital rights back due to out-of-print-ness. A bad ebook for sale negates the oop clause in a lot of legacy contracts, often preventing the author from releasing a better, more updated version of his or her backlist.
Also, Amazon uses the .mobi format where Kobo uses .epub - there are more validation checks and standardization in the epub process than in the mobi.
That's why Amazon's growth focus has been on products like Amazon Prime and the Kindle--both tools for making it worth your while to "one-stop shop" with them, rather than float on over to someone else's webshop.
I will give them props for their prompt shipping--I've gotten stuff far sooner than I expected.
Amazon will eliminate your book reviews if you also happen to be an author, or if their algorithms determine you have any connection to said author, or sometimes randomly, out of sheer algorithmic butthurt. So rather than start your word-of-mouth marketing with friends and supporters, it pays to buy reviews from India or wherever.
"...inventors, who create things because they have the need to create. If it becomes popular and the inventor starts making money because of it, that's only a nice side-effect."
Just like the ability to eat and keep out of the weather are nice side-effects.
The biggest problem with digital resale comes from the fact that the creator only can truly "sell" one thing, before having to compete with the devaluing of his or her own work. I sell one book through amazon, then immediately, *amazon* gets to re-sell that book for half the cost. I never sell another book again, but Amazon makes 11,000 transactions off that single digital unit. Amazon, and 10,999 people who didn't spend a year and a half to write that book. Unless there's a way to compensate the creator for those transactions (and I'm by no means greedy - resell my book. But maybe kick me back enough for another brick of ramen noodles for the money you get back off my original work? I'll do you a solid then, and be able to survive long enough to write another one for you to enjoy and resell down the road), this effectively allows the *store* to sell more goods than they pay the maker of said goods for.
They'd have to at least offer a token kickback to the original creator--broadcast royalties, maybe--and they would *definitely* have to ensure that no more secondhand digital copies are allowed to be sold than the actual total number of original copies that were sold. And for that matter, maybe a serial number-type system where the digital copy released into the wild "devalues" over time based on the number of times it's changed hands. Interesting if they could do it. A type of compensation back to the creator would be access to that data--how many people resold your book, where in the world did it travel to, and how long did it stay in the possession of each person. With the data available via an incentivized "opt-in" system to protect consumers' privacy, it could be very useful to track digital content in the wild.
This. Seems hypocritical to me to say, "sure, anyone can resell any digital goods *that they own* but only as long as they use *my method* (implied "cut me a slice of every transaction) to do it."
What's to stop someone deciding to "resell" the "digital good" of "buying and selling owned digital items [on the internets]."
You can't maintain the copyright integrity on your creation, but I can maintain it on mine due to stupid patent laws?
...that none of the items on your list requires you to demonstrate an ability to safely operate that M16, or even have eyesight good enough that you don't mistake a brown couch for a sneaky buffalo that's broken into your home to steal your TV. Where is the harm in requiring someone to step up and take personal responsibility to prove they have the ability, skill, and knowledge to operate dangerous equipment safely?
Reducing the number of "guns freely available" (used in a general sense) will reduce the amount of gun-related (used in a general sense) violence. It's simple statistics, good, bad, left, right, whatever. And it's specific. Fewer guns at hand means fewer incidents where someone picks up a gun in a heated moment *because the gun is there* and shoots someone else with it. Fewer accidents *because the gun is there* will happen. This is math, not politics.
If you're looking at "why the 2nd" it's because the "tools" are the most protected elements of the whole deal, rather than the actual citizens. My uterus is more regulated than the "tools" used in the 2nd. We have individual responsibilities when it comes to Free Speech (not allowed to say "fire" in a crowded theater), voting (provide proof of residence and citizenship), assembling (peaceful, and you sometimes need a permit), press (you get in trouble for printing lies, although that one seems to be eroding under the "it was editorial/an infomercial" artful dodge these days), and religion (your right free exercise of your religion stops when it runs up against someone else's right to life/liberty/pursuit in that you can't stone people to death for apostasy or offer up unsuspecting co-eds as sacrifices for Great Cthulhu).
Yet even though the 2nd even states that "a well-regulated militia" is what predicates the citizen's right to keep and bear arms, there is a powerful force actively working to erase the whole idea of regulation of any sort, even if it's just to demonstrate you have the personal responsibility to operate said tools without infringing on some other citizen's "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." And the mere mention of maybe having some of that personal responsibility turns people hysterical.
It's not just in the wake of a tragedy that this happens, either. The difference is that the tragedy brings to light a situation that's been successfully suppressed up until tragedies like Newtown happen and people are shocked enough to break out of the "these are not the droids you're looking for" hand-waving that the Powers That Be regularly engage in.
I think nitpicking down to the type of gun or the type of ammo is a bit of a distraction in that it focuses on the minutia of what is a conceptual problem. Although, for the record, if you need 30 high-speed rounds to hit your target, maybe that makes its own case for the whole "demonstrate that you know how to use your tool" thing. Either that, or you need to sign up for Stormtrooper duty.
This guy pwned the entire shareholder-oriented business system.
He beat them at their own game.
Well played, sir. Well played indeed.
Elsewhere in the Star Wars universe you also have plenty of Velveeta in your flirt options.
The majority of players did not seek out a Star Wars action/MMO game looking for a Dating Sim. It's a commercial product. It's not custom software.
"The software industry was the first to get away with shipping product known to be defective" ;)
You've clearly never built a house...
Try Bodhi Linux ( bodhilinux.com ) - it runs under an Ubuntu and uses Enlightenment 17. I've got it on my T61p now and it goes beautifully where the poor graphics card couldn't handle KDE without getting overheated and Unity got on my nerves. Bodhi's pretty light, but does the job.
I used my R42's keyboard so much that all the letters wore off. I wrote them back on with a silver metallic sharpie marker, then painted over them with clear nail polish and used them until they were starting to wear off again and the second hard drive failed and damaged the motherboard in the process. Had that sucker for 5 years and it survived cross-country trips, falls, drops onto a slate floor, and extreme weather conditions when I left it in my trunk during a blizzard overnight. That sucker could *go.*
I've used 3 or 4 Thinkpads in the past 10 years and been deliriously happy with them--and the little thumbstick trackpoint in the middle--consistently. My T61p is still going strong, if running a tad hot, on Bodhi Linux and E17 (it was bought new by a business, used by a road warrior for 4 years, then "retired" to me and I've had it for 3 or 4 years. Ubuntu's 12.x kernel runs thinkpads a tad bit hot, and I think the cat hair might be encouraging ol' Sparky towards his ultimate end, but the thing is a workhorse.
The only Thinkpad I've been less-than-overjoyed with is the little netbook I bought 2 years ago that was supposed to replace/upgrade from the T61p. The X100e (in a wild and crazy move, Lenovo offered them in a tasteful lipstick red, too) is a little netbook that had a problem with random shutdowns (again with an overheating thing). I suspect--but never confirmed because I wiped Windows on receipt--that it might have been a hardware thing. It's got win7 on it now and is used by my daughter for Minecraft fun (and it still occasionally shuts down randomly).
Thinkpad keyboards are the bee's knees. Trackpoints are something that never should have gone away. But where the Thinkpad really truly shines is in those hardworking metal hinges.
Not the least of which is that the rights which the publisher has for every book, and the terms of their licensing of those rights from the author is different. There are hundreds of older titles that publishers technically own the digital rights to (under some "future delivery system" clause in the contract) and are attempting to recreate/exploit (sometimes from an archaic printer's file or even hard copies scanned in by poorly-paid interns--and no, the printer's file is not the same as the ebook files).
The other (bigger) reason is the way book sales are structured in paperland versus ebookworld. And it's what got the big 6 publishers in trouble. When you're dealing with a physical product, the retail stream goes like this: Publisher produces the book->Distributor purchases the item from publisher at wholesale price->Retailer purchases the item from Distributor at retailer discount->Consumer purchases the item from Retailer at cover price (or more likely, discount). In that revenue stream, the Publisher gets paid 40% of the cover price of the book, no matter how much or how little the Consumer ends up paying for it (it's why you can find hardcovers at four bucks on the bargain table).
The big publishers negotiated with Amazon, at the dawn of the digital book age, to treat their digital content like physical content. Amazon purchases X copies at 60% discount of cover price, then turns around and sells the ebooks for whatever they want. But then things changed, and the publishers did not want electronic sales cutting into the more lucrative hardcover or paperbacks, so they turned around and re-negotiated something called 'Agency pricing' where the publishers got to set the price of the ebook, and Amazon could not discount at its discretion (but the publisher could). Since discounting is usually done to shift inventory, and digital inventory doesn't exist, and the publishers didn't get paid until the ebooks actually sold on Amazon, the publishers wanted their percentage of the full cover price. But because they all colluded, the US DOJ found that a bit of a no-no.
So as a result, you see deep discounts of hardbacks to move inventory out of a warehouse, but an ebook stays the same price because there is no physical inventory.
On the other end (the content-provider end, aka the "pay the author" end), many book contracts were negotiated to offer authors a royalty percentage of cover price *no matter what actual price the book sold at* and very quickly, ebooks became an albatross around the necks of traditional publishers because they tried to fit a digital product into a physical business model.
Us indie authors do things directly. We pay up front for author services like formatting, editorial services, art licensing for covers, and the covers themselves. We upload our ebooks direct to retailers like Amazon or B&N or to distributor-retailers like Smashwords (which can get you into a myriad of smaller/foreign to USA/or Apple retailers). The retailers take their cut first (about 30% or so) and we get the rest. We set our own prices, discount when we want to, and retain our publication rights. When you buy an ebook from an indie author, you're mostly supporting the person who did most of the work, with a little tip to the infrastructure that hooked you up with the book. And on the "book creation" end, it's still the same amount of work that goes into crafting a story for digital consumption as much as physical consumption.
They are actually pretty good at figuring that out. Buyers at the retail and wholesale level will pre-order books in advance. Lean manufacturing keeps the physical books in the warehouse for as little time as possible.
Retailer pre-orders books from distributor (at 40% discount of cover price)
Distributor informs publisher of preorder numbers before printing goes into effect
Printing happens to come as close to pre-order numbers as possible
Distributor receives books from printer (at 60% discount of cover price)
Turns around and fulfills Retail preorders
Books sit on Retail shelves until sold or remaindered/returned for distributor/publisher credit via stripped covers sent back to publisher and the rest of the books chucked into a dumpster.
Shipping, warehousing, and shelf space costs are all the costs of doing retail business (also, for the upthread poster, those shelf end caps, middle tables, face-outs are *all* marketing real estate for sale to the highest bidder. Books on the middle tables are there because the publishers spent extra money to buy them space).
Digital books must all be housed on servers, and while the cost and space for a book is negligible, there's the storage of all that customer data, security both physical and virtual for payment/cart information, digital delivery costs, backup/redundancy, power to keep the servers running, etc. Ebooks don't cost "nothing" to sell any more than print books do.
Well gosh, if just anybody could read, there's no telling what rubbish might fall out of their heads.
"If a book is too heavy for you to hold with one hand on the couch, maybe it's time to do some pushups, seriously. I'm assuming you're reading a novel, not a medical dictionary."
Anyone with carpal tunnel or repetitive stress injury can tell you that even holding a paperback can cause pain if you're sitting or lying and holding it up in one hand. My mother in law can't hold up a paperback for very long at the angle and distance she needs to be able to read it. She can hold a kindle with one hand and resize the text so she doesn't have to stretch her arms out or hold them up in the air. And I think Game of Thrones is really close in weight to your average abbreviated medical dictionary. ;)
Quite bluntly, not every book is the Divine Comedy.
It's fun to settle in with a nicely illustrated classic sometimes, but when I'm standing in line at the Post Office, I want to read a few paragraphs of the latest romance or fantasy or science fiction or literature that I'm reading. I know the book might not be a keeper. I know the book might not be something my descendants want to read. I'm good with that. Not every little brain leaving of mine needs to be advertised on my shelves or left to my future grandkids.
I read to read. I don't care where it comes from or what I'm reading it on. And I read more ebooks now than I have in the past ten years. Most of them, I don't honestly care if their format dissolves or they magically disappear from my device. If I want to keep it, I'll get arsed to download it and back it up on my server. Most of it's not worth the effort, though. I read, I enjoy, and I move on.
"...the digital don't cost shit to make or ship..."
I hope you don't think a book springs fully-formed, formatted, and edited from the mind of an author the same way the morning deuce drops from the arse of an author.
Format=/=product in this case. Pricing digital higher than paper doesn't make sense, agreed, but most of the work of a book happens long before ink hits paper or pixels hit screen. Are you paying for random pixels or are you paying for an entertainment experience you might enjoy for several hours or days, perhaps repeatedly. Because I could shit you out some random pixels for free, but it takes me months to craft a good story.
"... never underestimate the greed of publishers to cock things up."
On that we can heartily agree. Enough time is passing so that publishers are taking notice, and the ones that aren't, well...there are other publishers out there. Smaller publishers and independent authors are rushing to meet the needs of readers looking for good, cheap reads, and it's not all that hard to find good, modestly priced books to read about just about any subject.
Publishing is changing rapidly. There's no DRM on my books on Amazon or anywhere else. Smashwords actually lets you download the file itself (free of DRM), and if a publisher ever made me an offer, I'd offer the print rights only as some recent big name publishers have agreed to. But I have a self-publishing print option as well. If I were doing well enough for a NY publisher to take notice, I would probably still stay self-published because the terms are much better.
How many gun owner names and addresses does the NRA have in its database? To whom do they sell that information? How about Dick's Sporting Goods' customer database?
Just trying to determine the level of appropriate sensitivity over gun ownership information.
Guns don't kill people, newspapers do?
Gun ownership != Effective defense
Possibly because to admit that we need a civil defense force like this is to admit that we live in a dangerous society where people should expect their lives to be threatened. It's embedded in the Constitution that we have a right to walk around and reasonably expect to do so unmolested. To suggest otherwise would probably make a lot of people uncomfortable. And still others would see a civil defense as a step towards a police state.
"Better Security" is not always the answer. Better security works great when you live in a war zone or a volatile society. The US is not supposed to be a volatile society. After all, the most secure places in the country are prisons, and no one wants to live in a prison (although from some of the suggestions I've seen here and elsewhere along the lines of "arming the teachers" and "security guards at the entrances" are stopping just short of concertina wire around the playground. But the day's still young).
Drunks still drive cars. Why bother with drunk driving laws? They just harass sober people who can't drive on their own side of the road.
To compare guns and illegal drugs, you have to look at them from a societal perspective. Enough members of our society, when presented with the choice of avoiding engaging in controlled substances, versus risking their freedoms by breaking laws, choose the controlled substances. Their possible incarceration is an acceptable risk, to both them and society at large. Otherwise, we'd change things. And maybe we are, slowly, as the cultural taboos surrounding the illegality of behaviors around marijuana break down through widely acceptable use by all strata of society.
By the same token, right now at this minute, enough members of society, when presented with the choice of limiting widespread access to guns, or risking the possibility that those guns will be used in the slaughter of innocents, have thus far chosen to define the *level* of mass killings experienced thus far as acceptable risk.
Neither of these activities are entirely victimless. People's need for controlled substances engenders a worldwide trade, regardless of the legality. The drug war spawned a global criminal culture. And individually, people's lives still get fscked up because of their addictions. Thus far, people in homes where guns are owned are twice as likely to be involved in gun injuries or deaths than people who are in homes without guns. The illegal gun trade seems to be thriving in the midst of an entirely legal gun trade (explain that one), and the massive amount of cash flowing to and from government from the gun lobby has engendered the societal notion that to even suggest putting a few caveats between a hand and the gun it wants to hold is tantamount to treason. it is easy to get a gun, and the gun goes from "in case of emergency" to "pick me first."
Thing is--the right controls *do* work. Other countries have restricted sales on weapons and seen a drop in mass shootings. Rehab works for many people whose addictions have taken over their lives. And yes, gun registrations have helped solve crimes. Seat belts save lives without diminishing your enjoyment of the open road.