I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you. I'm coming at this from the perspective of a writer rather than a programmer (my last programming experience was in high school over fifteen years ago), but typing is an important skill here.
Now, will being a typist make you a better programmer? Absolutely. But not when it comes to thinking the code out. The place where typing is important is after the code has been thought out - the implementation. A programmer who does not know how to type will think the code out, and then have to find each key in order to input it into the program - it adds an extra step, and it takes longer. A programmer who is also a typist doesn't need to find the keys. The code flows smoothly from his head into the program via his fingers.
When it comes down to it, a good programmer must be skilled at both planning and implementation. Both are required. If you ignore the skill at implementation (aka not learning to type), you handicap yourself. The programmer who can both plan and implement clean and efficient code with speed will ALWAYS be of greater value than the programmer who can plan the code, but is slow to key it in.
You're not the only one - I started computer gaming back around 1990, and today when I have spare time, the only games I play on a regular basis are Legend of the Red Dragon (a BBS door game now online) and Urban Dead (a simple browser zombie MMO) - and that's how I start my day. With five minutes playing those games. Otherwise, my time and money go towards books and movies. I stopped being an avid PC gamer about seven years ago. For me it was a couple of things:
1. PC games went through a period of wild creativity from 1991-2002 - I call it the "golden age." Once that ended, though, games were big business with budgets approaching motion pictures, and they had become very conservative and more dedicated to formula. I'd already stormed the beaches of Normandy with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault...I didn't really feel like repeating the exercise with prettier graphics and better sound.
2. Piracy played a big role in thinning out the "herd" of PC games. I know there are people who want to deny this and claim that it's just unsuccessful companies not being willing to change their business model, but piracy became a lot easier once high speed internet and larger hard drive space made it possible to download entire CD games. And the game companies did adapt as the piracy rates skyrocketed - most moved their efforts to the console, and those who didn't started a DRM arms race. So, console games today are wide and varied, and there is quite a lot to be excited about...and I just don't have the time and money for them, or the interest in going through the learning curve (I prefer a mouse and keyboard). The PC game is very thinned out, with very little to be excited about (unless you're a fan of MMOs) and has a nice big arms race with pirates that just doesn't sit well.
So, I certainly think the biggest problem is that the PC game is not what it used to be. Partly it's a victim of its own success, and partly it's a victim of the pirates. PC gaming isn't dead - there are sections of it, such as the MMO, that are alive and well and growing, but the wild creativity that made it so exciting ten years ago is gone, and unlikely to return. Whether we want to admit it or not, the PC game is now the niche of video gaming, rather than the mainstay.
There is a big difference between fantasy and reality. Playing the game is fantasy. The reality is that tens of millions died in the war the Nazis started, under that symbol.
Taking on their identity in an online game isn't fantasy, it's a very real slap in the face to everybody who fought, suffered, and died under them.
I find tech commentators very funny at times. There are quite a few who are writing good, incisive stories, but at the same time there are a large number who have either disconnected from reality, or just aren't giving credit where it is due. I think it's because some people get a sense of superiority by declaring that "X is a dinosaur business model, and I'm smart enough to see it!" The writer of the original article falls under one of the latter categories.
Here's the thing - most of the suggestions he made were implemented in some at least a year ago. From the article:
"All of NBC Universal's properties should immediately begin offering full episodes in high definition on the web. These episodes should be available online at the same time they air on cable TV. Delaying the posting of these episodes to the website will only drive people to piracy."
This one has been happened for at least two years, by my count. It may not be high-definition, but most shows ARE put on the web the day after they air. Geographical boundaries are enforced, but that probably has more to do with broadcast rights than business models (if you've given your broadcast rights in Britain to the BBC, for example, you're not going to undercut them online).
"Episodes offered via this medium should display no interstitial advertising. Ads should only appear just prior to and just after an episode plays. Interstitial advertising will only drive people to piracy, which shows no interstitial ads."
Already the way it's done.
"No DRM should be used to protect against consumer copying or saving of the episodes from the website to their computers. This will only drive people to piracy."
Can't speak to the DRM side (I've never tried to copy a show, I've only just watched it). But I know that the BBC allows downloads of shows, and it wouldn't surprise me if other stations did too.
"The online episodes should be the same high quality aired on cable TV. Reduced quality will only drive people to piracy. Bandwidth costs can be reduced by leveraging bit torrent."
As far as I know most are offered in at least standard definition. I know that the BBC, for example, also offers downloads in HD, and it wouldn't surprise me if others do too.
"A subscription service should be offered which completely eliminates all advertising for the subscriber and offers other benefits, such as discounted merchandise and other additional services above and beyond the basic TV content without ads."
Well, this might help, and to be fair, as far as I know the television stations don't offer this. And, it's not a bad idea. So, point to the author on this one. But, at the same time, it should be pointed out that what the consumer is interested in is the show, and they're already getting that for free - so there wouldn't be much incentive to use this service in the first place.
"Nothing behind the subscription paywall should be something that can be pirated. Services and physical merchandise cannot be pirated."
Okay - this one needs a reality check. It's a television network - what services precisely is it going to offer? Anything audio-visual in nature can be pirated. And, as far as physical merchandise goes, there is an entire market out there of cheap knock-offs - which is a form of piracy.
"But it's not just NBC Universal. It seems like every major TV company is playing with fire by ignoring the internet."
Um...right. Which is why most networks have websites on which you can watch their programming, as well as launching on-demand services.
So, to sum up - the author of this article is ignoring what television networks are actually doing so that he can prop up a straw man and declare them to be following a dinosaur business model. If he was writing back in 2006, he might have had a point. Unfortunately, he's writing in 2010, and the person who is behind the times in this case is him.
The problem is that most of the vanity press industry is very much a scam. They tell writers that they will be professionally edited and published, for a nice low fee of $5000, or something like that. Then, if they even do an editing pass, it's a very limited and cursory one. They're already thousands of dollars in the black for the book, so there isn't any real need to make it more successful.
So, the author - who even though s/he was told there would be a professional editor involved, probably didn't have any real editing help at all - gets his/her book, and it appears on Amazon, where it usually sells less than ten copies. The authors who manage to sell more than that are the ones who have busted their hindquarters marketing and moving the book. But, when people generally talk about "self published" authors, vanity press authors are what the term has referred to for years.
There is a very large difference between that and an author who has learned the business and decided to go it alone. Those people get business licenses, found their own publishing house, get the help of a good editor, and deal with the printer directly. But, they are in the smallest minority compared to the thousands of would-be writers who get sucked into vanity publishing.
Well, that really depends on the genre, and how good your book is.
For example, as far as I know, mysteries tend to move pretty quickly. Fantasy glutted itself after the Lord of the Rings movies to the point that response times went from months to years (and even in science fiction there were apparently cases of established authors from the "golden age" deciding not to submit new books because it was taking so long that they didn't know if they'd live long enough to see them in print), and it's only now just getting back to where it should be.
Really, though, the response time varies from publisher to publisher, and from genre to genre.
From what I've seen, Amazon is trying to create a monopoly, and they've ruffled quite a few feathers - and caused a couple of lawsuits - while they do it. One of the earlier things they did was try to move all the smaller publishers like myself onto their own print-on-demand service (a company called Booksurge known for very poor quality printing), threatening to remove the buy button for those who didn't. That started a lawsuit. There was a lawsuit over e-book prices, although as I recall that was because Amazon was trying to lock the major publishers into an agreement where they had to offer the lowest prices to Amazon and nobody else (and Amazon talked it up as publishers being greedy and just wanting to charge more in general).
Speaking as a publisher, though, the thing that keeps me from ever supporting the Kindle is the sheer level of secrecy involved. Amazon refuses to announce sales figures, and the one time they did talk about their e-book sales, they did it in such a way that the comparison was meaningless (comparing sales from one of the cheapest formats against the most expensive format tells you very little, and even there, considering the prices, to match up the actual money it would have to be around 3 e-books sold for every hardcover, not 1.6). In business, success means a lot, and if Amazon really was having the success they claim, there should have been a lot more openness on the numbers. The implication is that the Kindle and their e-books are not performing to expectations. When you're running a small publishing company, you have to choose your markets carefully, and when the answer to "How big is the Kindle market?" is "Millions, just trust us," it doesn't tend to look like a good way to move.
Well, that really depends on the skill of the people editing him, but it should take away from that problem, yes. The ideal editor is somebody who is very good at editing, and who did not have any connection with the creation of the book. But, ultimately, the results tell the tale, so to speak.
Promotion might be crowd-sourced, to a degree. One of the things I count on for my promotion when I launch a book is that people have this strange habit of downloading just about anything free, regardless of if they have any interest in it at all. So, I rely a lot on free samples on file-sharing sites, etc. But, the more directed the approach, very frequently, the better the results. No argument there.
Okay, I read at least part of his blog, but the impression I got was that he was comparing e-books currently in print to printed books currently out of print. Now, I could be wrong, and there is plenty of room for somebody with a pre-existing fan base to have a successful e-book career, or even for lightning in a bottle. One of the problems with taking the macrocosm and trying to draw conclusions about the microcosm from it is that the macrocosm is general trends, and there will be plenty of examples that are the exception to the rule.
As far as e-readers growing and printed books diminishing, I very much doubt that. And the reason I doubt that is that there is something REALLY odd going on with e-book sales figures. And I'm not talking about Amazon refusing to reveal Kindle sales numbers. I'm talking about what the publishers see and report about their sales.
The book market has very large peaks and valleys. The difference between the highest peak and the lowest valley, for example, can be over a billion dollars. The main peaks seem to be December and July/August, and the main valleys seem to be March and October. There is, of course, variation from year to year.
The e-book sales, however, do NOT have these peaks and valleys. If you were to plot them on a graph, you'd see the books appearing to be a sort of sin wave, and the e-book sales would be straight line with a very small upwards slant. Occasionally, there seems to be bump where the e-book gains some ground, but then it returns to the straight line - just a higher one. Now, if this was just two different formats in the same market, you would expect to see the peaks and valleys reflected to a smaller degree in the e-book sales (the exception being December, as e-books are quite difficult to give away as Christmas presents). But this just isn't present.
The implication is that e-books are actually a related, but a separate enough market that the market forces impacting the printed book do not impact the e-book. The more I look at it, the more I'm convinced that these just aren't part of the same market to begin with, as strange as that sounds.
Um, no - ONLINE sales are a large part of the future. But even your claim of bookstores closing every day doesn't take a couple of things into account:
1. The North American economy has not yet recovered from the recession, so sales are down across the board. Five years from now, it will be a different story (I hope).
2. In over a decade, the e-book has barely managed to carve out 5% of the total book market, and it only manages that on months where book sales are low.
E-books will have a place in the future of the book, but they are not going to replace the printed book. Now, you can legitimately ask me why I say this, and I do, in fact, have an answer.
Way back when, the VHS won the format war with BETA, and dominated the home video market. A new, better optical format that had superior video and sound, and even special features, was developed. And for 15 years, the laserdisk struggled to make some impact on the home video market, and failed. Around ten years ago, a new, better optical format that, like the laserdisk, had superior video and sound, and even special features, was developed. And within 5 years of the DVD hitting the market, the VHS became an endangered species.
So, why was this? Why did the DVD succeed, while the laserdisk failed? Both were better technology than VHS.
But, there was a difference between the laserdisk and the DVD. The laserdisk was about 30 cm in diameter, and could only hold around 45 minutes of video per side. So, it was better on a technology level, but when it came to convenience, a VHS was smaller, and you didn't have to interrupt the movie you were watching to flip it over. The DVD was both better AND more convenient - it was smaller than a VHS, and it could hold the entire movie on a single side.
Now, apply the lesson to the printed book and the e-book: the e-book is more technologically advanced than a printed book - no disputing that. But, it's not more convenient. With an e-book, you will always need a reader, and to deal with file formats, and a shorter shelf life. A printed book is about as simple an object as you can get - unlike the e-book, the printed book has NO technological requirements for the consumer. So, if market domination is based on creating a product with more convenience to the consumer, the e-book just does not have what it takes to supplant the printed book.
Now, if something did come along that was more convenient than the printed book, you'd see the DVD vs. VHS situation repeat itself, and the printed book would become an endangered species within five years. But, in the comparison, the e-book is the laserdisk, not the DVD.
No, I'm sorry, I'm afraid you're the one making the assumption. You're assuming that it's an either/or when it comes to e-book and print book editions, rather than an "and." The figures I'm working from are for the entire market, and in a lot of places and genres, there are concurrent print and e-book editions (in fact, these days that's in many cases the rule rather than the exception).
So, if a thousand people want the book as an e-book and not a printed book, then they buy the e-book instead of the printed book, and it gets reflected by the figures. So, sorry, but what you mention is already built into the statistics.
That is a part of it, and large publishers can do much more on that than smaller publishers. However, there is advertising out there. Every time my publishing company publishes a book, I pay for an advertisement that goes out to tens of thousands of bookstores and libraries (I also do a decent amount of advertising with free online samples, book reviews, etc.).
But, actually, that's not the big problem with self-publishing a book.
Self-publishing tends to have a stigma against it, but that stigma is there for good reason - and that reason is that 95% of self published books are utter crap that didn't get past the gatekeepers in the major publishers due to basic quality control. There is, unfortunately, an entire industry based on publishing writers who have more money than brains or talent - these are called vanity presses. Most of these books are terrible, and the publisher in question makes thousands of dollars on the fees they charge to the writer before so much as a single copy is printed.
(Just as a rule, the money flows to the author, not the other way around.)
Another problem with self publishing is that most authors are not the best editors of their own work. In fact, very few writers can both write and edit - they're different enough skillsets that there is that little overlap. But even when a writer can, they tend to be workmanlike at best. This is because if a writer writes paragraph X, that is supposed to say Y, that writer will always know that Y is the message. Unfortunately, paragraph X might not have actually said Y, and because the writer automatically reads Y into the paragraph, s/he doesn't catch the error. In short, the author is just too close to their own work to be the best editor of that work.
Those are actually the biggest problems with self-publishing, and why most self-published books fail. If you look at the self-published market, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the majority of the people who managed to make both self-publishing and e-book publishing successful are the ones who started in traditional publishing, built a readership there, learned the business as they did it, and then transitioned.
Well, for a book that is only an e-book and for the labour that went into it (as Konrath describes), it sounds about right - he'll probably hit a good price point to move plenty of copies with that.
There is a correlation between price and perceived value, but when you're dealing with the online, there is also a history of what you could term as "free swag." When it comes to the 'net, the cheaper you can move something, the better. The big question is how much does it cost you, and how much do you have to make back to break even?
Taking any major publishing company as an example, most of the cost involved in bringing a book into print is labour. A major publisher has editors, typesetters, copyeditors, cover artists, etc. Production is one of the smallest costs (particularly when the print run is thousands of copies).
A small publisher like mine, or what the authors in the article are doing, reduces most of the labour costs to zero. That leaves you with figuring out the profit margin. So, to take a $10.00 cover price book as an example, going through the usual channels to bookstores, the breakdown of where that cover price is as follows:
$4.00 goes to the bookstore. $1.50 goes to the wholesaler. $3.50 goes to the publisher (and the author - for the sake of simplicity, we'll put the royalties in here). $1.00 goes to the printer (these last two are very rough - I've only dealt with PoD print runs rather than large ones, so I don't have solid figures on the price per book of a large print run).
Or, to look at it another way, the wholesaler buys the book for 55% off the cover price, and sells it for 40% off the cover.
So, the calculation of what will be profitable comes down to how many units you need to sell to break even at X cover price. If you have no labour costs, no print costs, and 70% (approx. $2.10) is going to you, that's pure profit, and right in line with what you'd see in the breakdown above.
I never like articles like this - it reminds me a bit too much of the earlier adopter chatter back in 2000 when my own e-book was published (and, despite having everything going for me except not being Stephen King, proved to have an almost non-existent market). Certainly Konrath is describing some benefits to self publishing, so long as you have the savvy and editing skill to pull it off. But when it comes to trumpeting e-books as a better way in general than the printed book, he's giving a very skewed picture.
Will he get a greater percentage of the royalties by self publishing an e-book through Amazon? Absolutely. Part of self publishing is keeping all the profits. Will he make more money than he would releasing a printed book?
That, however, is a much different question. And for that, you have to run the numbers.
Depending on the time of year, the total American book market (net sales) can be anywhere from around $450 million to $1.5 billion per month (there are large peaks and valleys, which is why you get the huge variations). The e-book market occupies around $22 million of this per month (it, oddly enough, has a general but very slight upwards slope, and does NOT have large peaks and valleys). As far as I recall, the audio book will take up around $15 million or so per month, but that's not a number I pay too much attention to, so don't quote me on it. So, for every dollar earned by an e-book, print books will earn anywhere from $20 to $65, depending on the time of year.
Now, these are all very rough figures. The Association of American Publishers tracks this in far more detail on a month-by-month basis. The point is, though, that while a well-established author with a loyal fanbase can mitigate a large portion of this disparity, an average book published only as an e-book can deprive itself of over 90% of its potential income.
(That, for example, is why in my business I use e-books mainly for promotional stuff - they just don't have a large enough market base to support them outside of marketing for what I do.)
So, will Konrath keep a greater percentage of the profit per book? Absolutely. Will he make more money than he would publishing a print volume? Highly unlikely.
I think there's an assumption you're making here that isn't necessarily valid.
I have little doubt of what you say about your observations of the developing world today. But, you're also making the assumption that as the 3rd world nations develop, the issues that keep books too expensive and difficult to come by there will remain the same. I don't think that's necessarily going to be the case.
What I think is more likely is that as the 3rd world nations develop, the standard of living, earnings, and the literacy rate will rise. So, where before a publishing market wasn't feasible, it will become so, and somebody will found publishing companies and printers to fill that gap. Paper books will no longer be as prohibitively expensive, and that market will grow - and because it's a product not associated with requiring the consumer to use technology, it will have a wider reach than the electronic book will. After all, an e-reader or a computer is far more expensive than a book. If you've barely got a disposable income in the first place, what are you going to spend your money on? A $150-$300 electronic device, or a $10 book?
(That's one of the problems I've actually got with the OLPC program. I'm all for raising literacy and promoting reading among the disadvantaged, but we're talking about areas that frequently aren't too far away from subsistence economies. Giving laptops to poor villages in Africa is nice, but what that village probably needs is help to keep from starving. A starving kid with a laptop is still starving - s/he just now gets to play with a laptop as s/he goes hungry. We in the developed world may have gained far more from the program than the developing world ever has, or is likely to. Solving the hunger, the African energy crisis, and the political corruption endemic to the developing world is far more important. Now, I'm not going to say that OLPC won't help - for all I know, there could indeed be a very positive ripple effect. But in a lot of places, it's going to be little more than a gimmick, particularly if you put the laptops in places where the infrastructure isn't in place to support them.)
It's even worse than that in this case. According to the article, he was compromising other people's accounts using fake websites, and then using those accounts to send his spam so that it would appear to be from their friends. So, it's not just spam in this case - it's fraud and identity theft.
If it were up to me, he would also be going to jail.
And I think you're an asshole just looking to pick a fight. If you don't believe me, try it out and judge for yourself. In any event, I'm done with this discussion.
No "feels" about it. It loads in about 1/4 the time of XP, it brings up programs in about half the time of XP, and it can use all 6 GB of RAM that I have. To top it off, it's easier to use than XP, has extra features that are more useful than what is in XP, and it doesn't have the security holes of XP.
So, yes, Windows 7 is better than Windows XP. Microsoft actually got it right this time. If you have a problem with this, then that's your problem.
"No, no it's not. Not even slightly. Unless you are comparing XP32 to Win7 64 bit."
That's pretty much exactly the comparison. XP doesn't have a lot of support for 64-bit - there was a version of Windows Server that was the XP equivalent, but it was not something with wide distribution or driver support.
Windows 7 does have a 64-bit version with proper driver support, and yes, I have found it around twice as fast as XP on my system.
"It's a shame that more people don't just build their own computers and save money, rather than buying a pre-built with pre-installed garbage (software and such, that is). As for Windows 7, there's simply no groundbreaking reason(s) for people to upgrade."
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. My experience has been that between the streamlining and the extra speed (on a dual core 64-bit Athlon with 6 GB of RAM, Win7 is faster than XP is), and the extra security features, Windows 7 is heads-and-shoulders above XP. It IS better.
However, at the same time, Windows XP is a good system that does what it needs to, and generally does it well. And, I can understand why somebody would keep using it rather than upgrade when they don't need to.
Aside from which, building your own system does require a decent amount of knowledge, and time. For a lot of people, buying a pre-built system is the better way to go. Uninstalling the garbage is easier than building the system from scratch.
First off, I used to be a dedicated XP user. It was a very good operating system, and I didn't have any urge to upgrade until I bought a new laptop with Windows 7 on it. I liked what I saw enough that I made the decision to upgrade then and there, and Windows 7 has been my primary OS ever since (I found it faster and streamlined in intelligent and useful ways). But, your mileage may vary.
However, it makes sense that we'd be seeing this trend in the marketplace. One of the problems with holding what is effectively a monopoly position is that you become your own biggest competitor. Windows 7 isn't really squaring off against Linux or Mac (although those are competitors), it's squaring off against Windows XP. The same thing has happened multiple times on versions of MS Office.
It seems to me that what will happen is that the main driver of increasing the market share will be new computers with Windows 7 pre-installs, particularly since Win7 did not see the sort of backlash that Vista did. So, given a couple more years, Windows 7 will have a much larger market share.
"There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?"
It's all about perception. Nobody is going to see it that way. What they're going to see is Intel selling them a crippled chip, and then demanding money to uncripple it. Then there's Intel's competitor, who will be perceived as selling them a chip that is exactly as advertised.
When I got into business, I didn't have a business degree, or formal training, so I had to figure a lot out for myself. I realized, after a great deal of thought, that a good, growing business ultimately came down to three rules:
1. Produce a good product that customers will want. 2. Make it as easy as possible for customers to buy your product. 3. Never give customers a reason NOT to buy your product.
Intel's move directly violates rule #3 in a pretty big way. I'd almost call it corporate Darwinism in motion, considering the PR hit Intel is about to receive.
Um...you really don't know much about the book industry, do you?
"The main difference is that for physical books, the book can't be lent out to more than one person at a time. With e-books, this is an artificial barrier that makes absolutely no sense except as life support for a dying publishing industry."
Right - that argument makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. First off, the print book industry is in no danger from e-books - if you do an analysis of the sales figures you'll find that they act like different markets, and the print book market is quite healthy. But, even if that wasn't the case, particularly with large publishers, any time a library loans out a book, a small royalty is paid to the publisher, and the author. In short, the library is a revenue source.
So, in fact, it is not in the best interests of publishers to have a cap on how many people can take out a book at a time. In fact, it would be in the best interests of the publishing industry if these library e-books had no caps whatsoever.
And, frankly, speaking as an author, a publisher, and a grad student, having the cap makes no sense to me at all. If the benefit of an e-version of a book in a library is the ability for the book to always be available, making it artificially unavailable defeats the purpose of having an e-version in the first place.
I used to work in the public sector. A few months before I left to return to school, we changed computer consultants to a new guy, and to this day I swear he was deliberately creating problems so he could bill us for solving them.
It started off with a computer audit. Now, I'm not a professional computer consultant, but I've been around computers pretty much my entire life, and my father used to be a consultant. My idea of an audit is to generate a list of what programs are running, what anti-virus programs are in place, what firewall is in place, what processes are running, etc. So, when I found out that my computer was about to be audited, I was prepared to be away from it for half an hour to an hour.
Instead, he checked the Windows version, and moved on.
Now, to understand this story, one of the things you have to understand is that I was an unofficial IT guy in the office. And, I had taken a couple of steps for basic security (this was back around 2003), such as moving everybody away from Outlook Express and onto Netscape mail. It was a small Windows 2000 network in a small office, and so long as it was kept behind a hardware firewall and nobody did anything terribly stupid, it was fine aside from the occasional software glitch.
The first recommendation that he put in, and management enforced, was to take everybody off Netscape and put them back onto Outlook Express. Massive infection of the entire network followed. Then, as I was the guy who started complaining that something was wrong here, he tried to blame me for hacking the system.
Now, this wasn't the main reason I left to go back to school (one of the problems with working in social services is that it can be very soul destroying work, and I had reached the point where I just couldn't continue any further), but it definitely gave me a good dose of snake oil before I left...
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I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you. I'm coming at this from the perspective of a writer rather than a programmer (my last programming experience was in high school over fifteen years ago), but typing is an important skill here.
Now, will being a typist make you a better programmer? Absolutely. But not when it comes to thinking the code out. The place where typing is important is after the code has been thought out - the implementation. A programmer who does not know how to type will think the code out, and then have to find each key in order to input it into the program - it adds an extra step, and it takes longer. A programmer who is also a typist doesn't need to find the keys. The code flows smoothly from his head into the program via his fingers.
When it comes down to it, a good programmer must be skilled at both planning and implementation. Both are required. If you ignore the skill at implementation (aka not learning to type), you handicap yourself. The programmer who can both plan and implement clean and efficient code with speed will ALWAYS be of greater value than the programmer who can plan the code, but is slow to key it in.
You're not the only one - I started computer gaming back around 1990, and today when I have spare time, the only games I play on a regular basis are Legend of the Red Dragon (a BBS door game now online) and Urban Dead (a simple browser zombie MMO) - and that's how I start my day. With five minutes playing those games. Otherwise, my time and money go towards books and movies. I stopped being an avid PC gamer about seven years ago. For me it was a couple of things:
1. PC games went through a period of wild creativity from 1991-2002 - I call it the "golden age." Once that ended, though, games were big business with budgets approaching motion pictures, and they had become very conservative and more dedicated to formula. I'd already stormed the beaches of Normandy with Medal of Honor: Allied Assault...I didn't really feel like repeating the exercise with prettier graphics and better sound.
2. Piracy played a big role in thinning out the "herd" of PC games. I know there are people who want to deny this and claim that it's just unsuccessful companies not being willing to change their business model, but piracy became a lot easier once high speed internet and larger hard drive space made it possible to download entire CD games. And the game companies did adapt as the piracy rates skyrocketed - most moved their efforts to the console, and those who didn't started a DRM arms race. So, console games today are wide and varied, and there is quite a lot to be excited about...and I just don't have the time and money for them, or the interest in going through the learning curve (I prefer a mouse and keyboard). The PC game is very thinned out, with very little to be excited about (unless you're a fan of MMOs) and has a nice big arms race with pirates that just doesn't sit well.
So, I certainly think the biggest problem is that the PC game is not what it used to be. Partly it's a victim of its own success, and partly it's a victim of the pirates. PC gaming isn't dead - there are sections of it, such as the MMO, that are alive and well and growing, but the wild creativity that made it so exciting ten years ago is gone, and unlikely to return. Whether we want to admit it or not, the PC game is now the niche of video gaming, rather than the mainstay.
No moral dilemma at all.
There is a big difference between fantasy and reality. Playing the game is fantasy. The reality is that tens of millions died in the war the Nazis started, under that symbol.
Taking on their identity in an online game isn't fantasy, it's a very real slap in the face to everybody who fought, suffered, and died under them.
Ah, okay. Up here (Canada), Space and Comedy Network don't insert ads at all, as far as I know, and I think the same goes with Global and CTV.
I find tech commentators very funny at times. There are quite a few who are writing good, incisive stories, but at the same time there are a large number who have either disconnected from reality, or just aren't giving credit where it is due. I think it's because some people get a sense of superiority by declaring that "X is a dinosaur business model, and I'm smart enough to see it!" The writer of the original article falls under one of the latter categories.
Here's the thing - most of the suggestions he made were implemented in some at least a year ago. From the article:
"All of NBC Universal's properties should immediately begin offering full episodes in high definition on the web. These episodes should be available online at the same time they air on cable TV. Delaying the posting of these episodes to the website will only drive people to piracy."
This one has been happened for at least two years, by my count. It may not be high-definition, but most shows ARE put on the web the day after they air. Geographical boundaries are enforced, but that probably has more to do with broadcast rights than business models (if you've given your broadcast rights in Britain to the BBC, for example, you're not going to undercut them online).
"Episodes offered via this medium should display no interstitial advertising. Ads should only appear just prior to and just after an episode plays. Interstitial advertising will only drive people to piracy, which shows no interstitial ads."
Already the way it's done.
"No DRM should be used to protect against consumer copying or saving of the episodes from the website to their computers. This will only drive people to piracy."
Can't speak to the DRM side (I've never tried to copy a show, I've only just watched it). But I know that the BBC allows downloads of shows, and it wouldn't surprise me if other stations did too.
"The online episodes should be the same high quality aired on cable TV. Reduced quality will only drive people to piracy. Bandwidth costs can be reduced by leveraging bit torrent."
As far as I know most are offered in at least standard definition. I know that the BBC, for example, also offers downloads in HD, and it wouldn't surprise me if others do too.
"A subscription service should be offered which completely eliminates all advertising for the subscriber and offers other benefits, such as discounted merchandise and other additional services above and beyond the basic TV content without ads."
Well, this might help, and to be fair, as far as I know the television stations don't offer this. And, it's not a bad idea. So, point to the author on this one. But, at the same time, it should be pointed out that what the consumer is interested in is the show, and they're already getting that for free - so there wouldn't be much incentive to use this service in the first place.
"Nothing behind the subscription paywall should be something that can be pirated. Services and physical merchandise cannot be pirated."
Okay - this one needs a reality check. It's a television network - what services precisely is it going to offer? Anything audio-visual in nature can be pirated. And, as far as physical merchandise goes, there is an entire market out there of cheap knock-offs - which is a form of piracy.
"But it's not just NBC Universal. It seems like every major TV company is playing with fire by ignoring the internet."
Um...right. Which is why most networks have websites on which you can watch their programming, as well as launching on-demand services.
So, to sum up - the author of this article is ignoring what television networks are actually doing so that he can prop up a straw man and declare them to be following a dinosaur business model. If he was writing back in 2006, he might have had a point. Unfortunately, he's writing in 2010, and the person who is behind the times in this case is him.
It isn't - it really isn't.
The problem is that most of the vanity press industry is very much a scam. They tell writers that they will be professionally edited and published, for a nice low fee of $5000, or something like that. Then, if they even do an editing pass, it's a very limited and cursory one. They're already thousands of dollars in the black for the book, so there isn't any real need to make it more successful.
So, the author - who even though s/he was told there would be a professional editor involved, probably didn't have any real editing help at all - gets his/her book, and it appears on Amazon, where it usually sells less than ten copies. The authors who manage to sell more than that are the ones who have busted their hindquarters marketing and moving the book. But, when people generally talk about "self published" authors, vanity press authors are what the term has referred to for years.
There is a very large difference between that and an author who has learned the business and decided to go it alone. Those people get business licenses, found their own publishing house, get the help of a good editor, and deal with the printer directly. But, they are in the smallest minority compared to the thousands of would-be writers who get sucked into vanity publishing.
Well, that really depends on the genre, and how good your book is.
For example, as far as I know, mysteries tend to move pretty quickly. Fantasy glutted itself after the Lord of the Rings movies to the point that response times went from months to years (and even in science fiction there were apparently cases of established authors from the "golden age" deciding not to submit new books because it was taking so long that they didn't know if they'd live long enough to see them in print), and it's only now just getting back to where it should be.
Really, though, the response time varies from publisher to publisher, and from genre to genre.
From what I've seen, Amazon is trying to create a monopoly, and they've ruffled quite a few feathers - and caused a couple of lawsuits - while they do it. One of the earlier things they did was try to move all the smaller publishers like myself onto their own print-on-demand service (a company called Booksurge known for very poor quality printing), threatening to remove the buy button for those who didn't. That started a lawsuit. There was a lawsuit over e-book prices, although as I recall that was because Amazon was trying to lock the major publishers into an agreement where they had to offer the lowest prices to Amazon and nobody else (and Amazon talked it up as publishers being greedy and just wanting to charge more in general).
Speaking as a publisher, though, the thing that keeps me from ever supporting the Kindle is the sheer level of secrecy involved. Amazon refuses to announce sales figures, and the one time they did talk about their e-book sales, they did it in such a way that the comparison was meaningless (comparing sales from one of the cheapest formats against the most expensive format tells you very little, and even there, considering the prices, to match up the actual money it would have to be around 3 e-books sold for every hardcover, not 1.6). In business, success means a lot, and if Amazon really was having the success they claim, there should have been a lot more openness on the numbers. The implication is that the Kindle and their e-books are not performing to expectations. When you're running a small publishing company, you have to choose your markets carefully, and when the answer to "How big is the Kindle market?" is "Millions, just trust us," it doesn't tend to look like a good way to move.
Well, that really depends on the skill of the people editing him, but it should take away from that problem, yes. The ideal editor is somebody who is very good at editing, and who did not have any connection with the creation of the book. But, ultimately, the results tell the tale, so to speak.
Promotion might be crowd-sourced, to a degree. One of the things I count on for my promotion when I launch a book is that people have this strange habit of downloading just about anything free, regardless of if they have any interest in it at all. So, I rely a lot on free samples on file-sharing sites, etc. But, the more directed the approach, very frequently, the better the results. No argument there.
Okay, I read at least part of his blog, but the impression I got was that he was comparing e-books currently in print to printed books currently out of print. Now, I could be wrong, and there is plenty of room for somebody with a pre-existing fan base to have a successful e-book career, or even for lightning in a bottle. One of the problems with taking the macrocosm and trying to draw conclusions about the microcosm from it is that the macrocosm is general trends, and there will be plenty of examples that are the exception to the rule.
As far as e-readers growing and printed books diminishing, I very much doubt that. And the reason I doubt that is that there is something REALLY odd going on with e-book sales figures. And I'm not talking about Amazon refusing to reveal Kindle sales numbers. I'm talking about what the publishers see and report about their sales.
The book market has very large peaks and valleys. The difference between the highest peak and the lowest valley, for example, can be over a billion dollars. The main peaks seem to be December and July/August, and the main valleys seem to be March and October. There is, of course, variation from year to year.
The e-book sales, however, do NOT have these peaks and valleys. If you were to plot them on a graph, you'd see the books appearing to be a sort of sin wave, and the e-book sales would be straight line with a very small upwards slant. Occasionally, there seems to be bump where the e-book gains some ground, but then it returns to the straight line - just a higher one. Now, if this was just two different formats in the same market, you would expect to see the peaks and valleys reflected to a smaller degree in the e-book sales (the exception being December, as e-books are quite difficult to give away as Christmas presents). But this just isn't present.
The implication is that e-books are actually a related, but a separate enough market that the market forces impacting the printed book do not impact the e-book. The more I look at it, the more I'm convinced that these just aren't part of the same market to begin with, as strange as that sounds.
Um, no - ONLINE sales are a large part of the future. But even your claim of bookstores closing every day doesn't take a couple of things into account:
1. The North American economy has not yet recovered from the recession, so sales are down across the board. Five years from now, it will be a different story (I hope).
2. In over a decade, the e-book has barely managed to carve out 5% of the total book market, and it only manages that on months where book sales are low.
E-books will have a place in the future of the book, but they are not going to replace the printed book. Now, you can legitimately ask me why I say this, and I do, in fact, have an answer.
Way back when, the VHS won the format war with BETA, and dominated the home video market. A new, better optical format that had superior video and sound, and even special features, was developed. And for 15 years, the laserdisk struggled to make some impact on the home video market, and failed. Around ten years ago, a new, better optical format that, like the laserdisk, had superior video and sound, and even special features, was developed. And within 5 years of the DVD hitting the market, the VHS became an endangered species.
So, why was this? Why did the DVD succeed, while the laserdisk failed? Both were better technology than VHS.
But, there was a difference between the laserdisk and the DVD. The laserdisk was about 30 cm in diameter, and could only hold around 45 minutes of video per side. So, it was better on a technology level, but when it came to convenience, a VHS was smaller, and you didn't have to interrupt the movie you were watching to flip it over. The DVD was both better AND more convenient - it was smaller than a VHS, and it could hold the entire movie on a single side.
Now, apply the lesson to the printed book and the e-book: the e-book is more technologically advanced than a printed book - no disputing that. But, it's not more convenient. With an e-book, you will always need a reader, and to deal with file formats, and a shorter shelf life. A printed book is about as simple an object as you can get - unlike the e-book, the printed book has NO technological requirements for the consumer. So, if market domination is based on creating a product with more convenience to the consumer, the e-book just does not have what it takes to supplant the printed book.
Now, if something did come along that was more convenient than the printed book, you'd see the DVD vs. VHS situation repeat itself, and the printed book would become an endangered species within five years. But, in the comparison, the e-book is the laserdisk, not the DVD.
No, I'm sorry, I'm afraid you're the one making the assumption. You're assuming that it's an either/or when it comes to e-book and print book editions, rather than an "and." The figures I'm working from are for the entire market, and in a lot of places and genres, there are concurrent print and e-book editions (in fact, these days that's in many cases the rule rather than the exception).
So, if a thousand people want the book as an e-book and not a printed book, then they buy the e-book instead of the printed book, and it gets reflected by the figures. So, sorry, but what you mention is already built into the statistics.
That is a part of it, and large publishers can do much more on that than smaller publishers. However, there is advertising out there. Every time my publishing company publishes a book, I pay for an advertisement that goes out to tens of thousands of bookstores and libraries (I also do a decent amount of advertising with free online samples, book reviews, etc.).
But, actually, that's not the big problem with self-publishing a book.
Self-publishing tends to have a stigma against it, but that stigma is there for good reason - and that reason is that 95% of self published books are utter crap that didn't get past the gatekeepers in the major publishers due to basic quality control. There is, unfortunately, an entire industry based on publishing writers who have more money than brains or talent - these are called vanity presses. Most of these books are terrible, and the publisher in question makes thousands of dollars on the fees they charge to the writer before so much as a single copy is printed.
(Just as a rule, the money flows to the author, not the other way around.)
Another problem with self publishing is that most authors are not the best editors of their own work. In fact, very few writers can both write and edit - they're different enough skillsets that there is that little overlap. But even when a writer can, they tend to be workmanlike at best. This is because if a writer writes paragraph X, that is supposed to say Y, that writer will always know that Y is the message. Unfortunately, paragraph X might not have actually said Y, and because the writer automatically reads Y into the paragraph, s/he doesn't catch the error. In short, the author is just too close to their own work to be the best editor of that work.
Those are actually the biggest problems with self-publishing, and why most self-published books fail. If you look at the self-published market, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the majority of the people who managed to make both self-publishing and e-book publishing successful are the ones who started in traditional publishing, built a readership there, learned the business as they did it, and then transitioned.
Well, for a book that is only an e-book and for the labour that went into it (as Konrath describes), it sounds about right - he'll probably hit a good price point to move plenty of copies with that.
There is a correlation between price and perceived value, but when you're dealing with the online, there is also a history of what you could term as "free swag." When it comes to the 'net, the cheaper you can move something, the better. The big question is how much does it cost you, and how much do you have to make back to break even?
Taking any major publishing company as an example, most of the cost involved in bringing a book into print is labour. A major publisher has editors, typesetters, copyeditors, cover artists, etc. Production is one of the smallest costs (particularly when the print run is thousands of copies).
A small publisher like mine, or what the authors in the article are doing, reduces most of the labour costs to zero. That leaves you with figuring out the profit margin. So, to take a $10.00 cover price book as an example, going through the usual channels to bookstores, the breakdown of where that cover price is as follows:
$4.00 goes to the bookstore.
$1.50 goes to the wholesaler.
$3.50 goes to the publisher (and the author - for the sake of simplicity, we'll put the royalties in here).
$1.00 goes to the printer (these last two are very rough - I've only dealt with PoD print runs rather than large ones, so I don't have solid figures on the price per book of a large print run).
Or, to look at it another way, the wholesaler buys the book for 55% off the cover price, and sells it for 40% off the cover.
So, the calculation of what will be profitable comes down to how many units you need to sell to break even at X cover price. If you have no labour costs, no print costs, and 70% (approx. $2.10) is going to you, that's pure profit, and right in line with what you'd see in the breakdown above.
I never like articles like this - it reminds me a bit too much of the earlier adopter chatter back in 2000 when my own e-book was published (and, despite having everything going for me except not being Stephen King, proved to have an almost non-existent market). Certainly Konrath is describing some benefits to self publishing, so long as you have the savvy and editing skill to pull it off. But when it comes to trumpeting e-books as a better way in general than the printed book, he's giving a very skewed picture.
Will he get a greater percentage of the royalties by self publishing an e-book through Amazon? Absolutely. Part of self publishing is keeping all the profits. Will he make more money than he would releasing a printed book?
That, however, is a much different question. And for that, you have to run the numbers.
Depending on the time of year, the total American book market (net sales) can be anywhere from around $450 million to $1.5 billion per month (there are large peaks and valleys, which is why you get the huge variations). The e-book market occupies around $22 million of this per month (it, oddly enough, has a general but very slight upwards slope, and does NOT have large peaks and valleys). As far as I recall, the audio book will take up around $15 million or so per month, but that's not a number I pay too much attention to, so don't quote me on it. So, for every dollar earned by an e-book, print books will earn anywhere from $20 to $65, depending on the time of year.
Now, these are all very rough figures. The Association of American Publishers tracks this in far more detail on a month-by-month basis. The point is, though, that while a well-established author with a loyal fanbase can mitigate a large portion of this disparity, an average book published only as an e-book can deprive itself of over 90% of its potential income.
(That, for example, is why in my business I use e-books mainly for promotional stuff - they just don't have a large enough market base to support them outside of marketing for what I do.)
So, will Konrath keep a greater percentage of the profit per book? Absolutely. Will he make more money than he would publishing a print volume? Highly unlikely.
I think there's an assumption you're making here that isn't necessarily valid.
I have little doubt of what you say about your observations of the developing world today. But, you're also making the assumption that as the 3rd world nations develop, the issues that keep books too expensive and difficult to come by there will remain the same. I don't think that's necessarily going to be the case.
What I think is more likely is that as the 3rd world nations develop, the standard of living, earnings, and the literacy rate will rise. So, where before a publishing market wasn't feasible, it will become so, and somebody will found publishing companies and printers to fill that gap. Paper books will no longer be as prohibitively expensive, and that market will grow - and because it's a product not associated with requiring the consumer to use technology, it will have a wider reach than the electronic book will. After all, an e-reader or a computer is far more expensive than a book. If you've barely got a disposable income in the first place, what are you going to spend your money on? A $150-$300 electronic device, or a $10 book?
(That's one of the problems I've actually got with the OLPC program. I'm all for raising literacy and promoting reading among the disadvantaged, but we're talking about areas that frequently aren't too far away from subsistence economies. Giving laptops to poor villages in Africa is nice, but what that village probably needs is help to keep from starving. A starving kid with a laptop is still starving - s/he just now gets to play with a laptop as s/he goes hungry. We in the developed world may have gained far more from the program than the developing world ever has, or is likely to. Solving the hunger, the African energy crisis, and the political corruption endemic to the developing world is far more important. Now, I'm not going to say that OLPC won't help - for all I know, there could indeed be a very positive ripple effect. But in a lot of places, it's going to be little more than a gimmick, particularly if you put the laptops in places where the infrastructure isn't in place to support them.)
It's even worse than that in this case. According to the article, he was compromising other people's accounts using fake websites, and then using those accounts to send his spam so that it would appear to be from their friends. So, it's not just spam in this case - it's fraud and identity theft.
If it were up to me, he would also be going to jail.
And I think you're an asshole just looking to pick a fight. If you don't believe me, try it out and judge for yourself. In any event, I'm done with this discussion.
No "feels" about it. It loads in about 1/4 the time of XP, it brings up programs in about half the time of XP, and it can use all 6 GB of RAM that I have. To top it off, it's easier to use than XP, has extra features that are more useful than what is in XP, and it doesn't have the security holes of XP.
So, yes, Windows 7 is better than Windows XP. Microsoft actually got it right this time. If you have a problem with this, then that's your problem.
"No, no it's not. Not even slightly. Unless you are comparing XP32 to Win7 64 bit."
That's pretty much exactly the comparison. XP doesn't have a lot of support for 64-bit - there was a version of Windows Server that was the XP equivalent, but it was not something with wide distribution or driver support.
Windows 7 does have a 64-bit version with proper driver support, and yes, I have found it around twice as fast as XP on my system.
"It's a shame that more people don't just build their own computers and save money, rather than buying a pre-built with pre-installed garbage (software and such, that is). As for Windows 7, there's simply no groundbreaking reason(s) for people to upgrade."
I'm not sure I'd agree with that. My experience has been that between the streamlining and the extra speed (on a dual core 64-bit Athlon with 6 GB of RAM, Win7 is faster than XP is), and the extra security features, Windows 7 is heads-and-shoulders above XP. It IS better.
However, at the same time, Windows XP is a good system that does what it needs to, and generally does it well. And, I can understand why somebody would keep using it rather than upgrade when they don't need to.
Aside from which, building your own system does require a decent amount of knowledge, and time. For a lot of people, buying a pre-built system is the better way to go. Uninstalling the garbage is easier than building the system from scratch.
First off, I used to be a dedicated XP user. It was a very good operating system, and I didn't have any urge to upgrade until I bought a new laptop with Windows 7 on it. I liked what I saw enough that I made the decision to upgrade then and there, and Windows 7 has been my primary OS ever since (I found it faster and streamlined in intelligent and useful ways). But, your mileage may vary.
However, it makes sense that we'd be seeing this trend in the marketplace. One of the problems with holding what is effectively a monopoly position is that you become your own biggest competitor. Windows 7 isn't really squaring off against Linux or Mac (although those are competitors), it's squaring off against Windows XP. The same thing has happened multiple times on versions of MS Office.
It seems to me that what will happen is that the main driver of increasing the market share will be new computers with Windows 7 pre-installs, particularly since Win7 did not see the sort of backlash that Vista did. So, given a couple more years, Windows 7 will have a much larger market share.
"There's no bait-and-switch here. People are getting exactly what is advertised. Where's the problem?"
It's all about perception. Nobody is going to see it that way. What they're going to see is Intel selling them a crippled chip, and then demanding money to uncripple it. Then there's Intel's competitor, who will be perceived as selling them a chip that is exactly as advertised.
When I got into business, I didn't have a business degree, or formal training, so I had to figure a lot out for myself. I realized, after a great deal of thought, that a good, growing business ultimately came down to three rules:
1. Produce a good product that customers will want.
2. Make it as easy as possible for customers to buy your product.
3. Never give customers a reason NOT to buy your product.
Intel's move directly violates rule #3 in a pretty big way. I'd almost call it corporate Darwinism in motion, considering the PR hit Intel is about to receive.
Um...you really don't know much about the book industry, do you?
"The main difference is that for physical books, the book can't be lent out to more than one person at a time. With e-books, this is an artificial barrier that makes absolutely no sense except as life support for a dying publishing industry."
Right - that argument makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. First off, the print book industry is in no danger from e-books - if you do an analysis of the sales figures you'll find that they act like different markets, and the print book market is quite healthy. But, even if that wasn't the case, particularly with large publishers, any time a library loans out a book, a small royalty is paid to the publisher, and the author. In short, the library is a revenue source.
So, in fact, it is not in the best interests of publishers to have a cap on how many people can take out a book at a time. In fact, it would be in the best interests of the publishing industry if these library e-books had no caps whatsoever.
And, frankly, speaking as an author, a publisher, and a grad student, having the cap makes no sense to me at all. If the benefit of an e-version of a book in a library is the ability for the book to always be available, making it artificially unavailable defeats the purpose of having an e-version in the first place.
I can vouch for that...
I used to work in the public sector. A few months before I left to return to school, we changed computer consultants to a new guy, and to this day I swear he was deliberately creating problems so he could bill us for solving them.
It started off with a computer audit. Now, I'm not a professional computer consultant, but I've been around computers pretty much my entire life, and my father used to be a consultant. My idea of an audit is to generate a list of what programs are running, what anti-virus programs are in place, what firewall is in place, what processes are running, etc. So, when I found out that my computer was about to be audited, I was prepared to be away from it for half an hour to an hour.
Instead, he checked the Windows version, and moved on.
Now, to understand this story, one of the things you have to understand is that I was an unofficial IT guy in the office. And, I had taken a couple of steps for basic security (this was back around 2003), such as moving everybody away from Outlook Express and onto Netscape mail. It was a small Windows 2000 network in a small office, and so long as it was kept behind a hardware firewall and nobody did anything terribly stupid, it was fine aside from the occasional software glitch.
The first recommendation that he put in, and management enforced, was to take everybody off Netscape and put them back onto Outlook Express. Massive infection of the entire network followed. Then, as I was the guy who started complaining that something was wrong here, he tried to blame me for hacking the system.
Now, this wasn't the main reason I left to go back to school (one of the problems with working in social services is that it can be very soul destroying work, and I had reached the point where I just couldn't continue any further), but it definitely gave me a good dose of snake oil before I left...