I understand why they went with their own standard at the time (although i may have personally preferred if they had contributed to the standards process), but now that epub is mature, the clear winning standard, and possibly superior technology
Most writers I've seen give numbers say that 70-90% of their sales come from Amazon. So why would Amazon want to switch to using a standard that encourages people to buy from other stores?
Format lock-in sucks for a user, but it's great for a retailer who owns most of the market.
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.
Which is odd, because the indie writers I know are increasing their prices and getting more sales. Probably because many people now see $2.99 and below as the swamp of crap.
True: the only tablet I've used is the Asus Transformer, and that felt heavy enough that I wouldn't want to have to hold it for half an hour. The Kindle isn't much heavier than a paperback.
I guess you don't read much, or you'd know how much better an e-ink screen is for reading books.
Not to mention that I only have to recharge my Kindle every few weeks, so I just leave it plugged in when I connect it to my computer every now and again to download non-Amazon books to it.
There isn't a problem with Federal bailouts when you consider that the Fed *are* the Banks. The Banks *are* the economy. Banks fail, so does the economy.
If a bank failed, the remains would probably be bought up by more competent management.
Do you really think that everyone would just stop doing anything if a bank failed? God knows how the human race managed to survive for thousands of years without them.
The reality is that bankers were paid big bonuses for making loans to people who couldn't pay the money back, and knew that the government would bail them out when they went bust. They had absolutely no incentive to behave sensibly.
It took them a while (probably relating to them catching on that the media wasn't understanding them at all), but I think they finally stabilized on protesting the "socialized risk, privatized profit" sort of thing that modern businesses were getting away with (redundant emphasis on think).
So why were they protesting outside Wall Street rather than Congress and the White House?
It would have made a lot more sense; regardless of what one may think of him, he's had far more impact on the world than a bunch of deluded 'protestors' and now he's dead he won't be able to win it another year.
My phone cost $25. It makes phone calls and sends and receives text messages.
I'm still trying to figure out why I supposedly need to be connected to Facebook 24 hours a day. Constant mobile internet connections were cool... in 1990. Today they're a sign of a lack of real life.
If he's right, maybe kids are finally figuring that out.
According to that, it's only because of 32-bit limits on Windows. Real operating systems have been 64-bit for years.
Compiling the software I'm working on needs more than 4GB of RAM, so I don't see why that should indicate anything more than C++ being a hugely bloated language.
Mach 6 at 60,000 feet gives you 6% of the energy you need to to orbit. A carrier airplane isn't worth the effort.
Uh, yes it is. I don't know about this specific design, but the two usual reasons for wanting to start from high altitude are to use vacuum-rated nozzles which have a significantly higher ISP, and to avoid drag early in the flight.
This is very little to do with altitude or velocity, it's primarily air pressure.
And public transit sucks because so few people use/demand it.
For public transit not to suck it would have to travel every two minutes between where I live and where I work and not stop along the way. That would mean running about a million times as many buses as we currently have.
Oh, the other thing I forgot about public transit is that it's where I catch most of my coughs, colds and flu. The number of work days lost because of public transit infections must be enormous.
Giving the driver the opportunity to pull over and answer a call would also be unacceptable.
The main thing I noticed after Britain introduced a cell phone ban while driivng was that the idiots who used to talk on their phone while driving now stopped wherever they were on the road in order to answer the call, even when that meant that all the cars behind them now had to pass them on a blind bend.
I'm amazed that people are still so passionate about driving themselves to work and so vehemently opposed to public transit.
That's because public transit sucks.
If I take the bus to work I get to stand outside at -40 waiting for it, then it takes half an hour to get to the depot, then I stand in the cold for a few minutes waiting to change to another bus, then it takes an other half hour to get to work. Then I get to do the same on the way back, except for the days when it's really cold and snowy and the bus is half an hour late so I have to wait at the bus stop and hope that it's going to turn up before I get frostbite because if I go inside to warm up then I can be sure that the bus will arrive right then.
Alternatively I can drive and it takes fifteen minutes.
The majority of accidents I've seen in Canada are because people think that leaving three feet between them and the car in front at night in fresh snow at 60km/h is perfectly safe.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand why they went with their own standard at the time (although i may have personally preferred if they had contributed to the standards process), but now that epub is mature, the clear winning standard, and possibly superior technology
Most writers I've seen give numbers say that 70-90% of their sales come from Amazon. So why would Amazon want to switch to using a standard that encourages people to buy from other stores?
Format lock-in sucks for a user, but it's great for a retailer who owns most of the market.
Ah well, don't complain when you're blind by the time you're forty.
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.
Which is odd, because the indie writers I know are increasing their prices and getting more sales. Probably because many people now see $2.99 and below as the swamp of crap.
True: the only tablet I've used is the Asus Transformer, and that felt heavy enough that I wouldn't want to have to hold it for half an hour. The Kindle isn't much heavier than a paperback.
With a tablet I see no use for an e-reader.
I guess you don't read much, or you'd know how much better an e-ink screen is for reading books.
Not to mention that I only have to recharge my Kindle every few weeks, so I just leave it plugged in when I connect it to my computer every now and again to download non-Amazon books to it.
There isn't a problem with Federal bailouts when you consider that the Fed *are* the Banks. The Banks *are* the economy. Banks fail, so does the economy.
If a bank failed, the remains would probably be bought up by more competent management.
Do you really think that everyone would just stop doing anything if a bank failed? God knows how the human race managed to survive for thousands of years without them.
The reality is that bankers were paid big bonuses for making loans to people who couldn't pay the money back, and knew that the government would bail them out when they went bust. They had absolutely no incentive to behave sensibly.
He's talking about 1-3$ books and you're talking about 25$ orders. Do you really think people buy 20+ books per order?
He's talking about print books that cost $8-15. Do you really not think that people buy 2+ print books per order?
It took them a while (probably relating to them catching on that the media wasn't understanding them at all), but I think they finally stabilized on protesting the "socialized risk, privatized profit" sort of thing that modern businesses were getting away with (redundant emphasis on think ).
So why were they protesting outside Wall Street rather than Congress and the White House?
... they could have picked Steve Jobs.
It would have made a lot more sense; regardless of what one may think of him, he's had far more impact on the world than a bunch of deluded 'protestors' and now he's dead he won't be able to win it another year.
You mean some people still run a 32-bit OS?
... that Windows phone runs Windows?
So Windows phones aren't running Windows? Do they have Windows on the front so you can see through them? Nice curtains, maybe?
Think of it like this: Android phones don't run Ubuntu.
That's because they're not Ubuntu phones.
iPhone and Android are ripe for played-out cultural saturation, just like Facebook.
If people are tired of smart phones, they're not going to suddenly rush to buy one that runs Windows.
My phone cost $25. It makes phone calls and sends and receives text messages.
I'm still trying to figure out why I supposedly need to be connected to Facebook 24 hours a day. Constant mobile internet connections were cool... in 1990. Today they're a sign of a lack of real life.
If he's right, maybe kids are finally figuring that out.
Firefox development has gotten so bad they are currently having issues compiling
According to that, it's only because of 32-bit limits on Windows. Real operating systems have been 64-bit for years.
Compiling the software I'm working on needs more than 4GB of RAM, so I don't see why that should indicate anything more than C++ being a hugely bloated language.
Mach 6 at 60,000 feet gives you 6% of the energy you need to to orbit. A carrier airplane isn't worth the effort.
Uh, yes it is. I don't know about this specific design, but the two usual reasons for wanting to start from high altitude are to use vacuum-rated nozzles which have a significantly higher ISP, and to avoid drag early in the flight.
This is very little to do with altitude or velocity, it's primarily air pressure.
You can get to anywhere in the universe at 1m/s if you have enough fuel and time.
Uh, you do realise that comparing Three Mile Island to Chernobyl is like comparing spilling your coffee to burning your house down, right?
So far the US has granted extensions like this to more than SIXTY reactors. How many has Russia given out so far?
To be fair, no US reactor has yet exploded, caught fire and spread radiation across half of Europe.
And public transit sucks because so few people use/demand it.
For public transit not to suck it would have to travel every two minutes between where I live and where I work and not stop along the way. That would mean running about a million times as many buses as we currently have.
Oh, the other thing I forgot about public transit is that it's where I catch most of my coughs, colds and flu. The number of work days lost because of public transit infections must be enormous.
The problem is that people ignore the ban.
Then it's pointless. Either enforce it or forget it.
The goal is to reduce accidents, not to ensure that sensible people act sensibly, because that's what sensible people do anyway.
Good science does not rely on post hoc fallacies.
So you're saying that cellphone use is so dangerous that it must be banned, yet accident rates don't actually drop after it's banned?
Giving the driver the opportunity to pull over and answer a call would also be unacceptable.
The main thing I noticed after Britain introduced a cell phone ban while driivng was that the idiots who used to talk on their phone while driving now stopped wherever they were on the road in order to answer the call, even when that meant that all the cars behind them now had to pass them on a blind bend.
I'm amazed that people are still so passionate about driving themselves to work and so vehemently opposed to public transit.
That's because public transit sucks.
If I take the bus to work I get to stand outside at -40 waiting for it, then it takes half an hour to get to the depot, then I stand in the cold for a few minutes waiting to change to another bus, then it takes an other half hour to get to work. Then I get to do the same on the way back, except for the days when it's really cold and snowy and the bus is half an hour late so I have to wait at the bus stop and hope that it's going to turn up before I get frostbite because if I go inside to warm up then I can be sure that the bus will arrive right then.
Alternatively I can drive and it takes fifteen minutes.
The majority of accidents I've seen in Canada are because people think that leaving three feet between them and the car in front at night in fresh snow at 60km/h is perfectly safe.
Lesson would seem to be not to text while driving, and definitely don't text while driving in front of multiple school buses with bad brakes.
Surely the lesson would seem to be: make sure school buses have working brakes?