I zapped the link scanner on my laptop & PC, but to my surprise when I went to disable the same thing on my wife's computer she stopped me. She was more than happy to have the web a little bit slower if it meant her google results were tested & filtered for her.
I too am not happy with AVG 8. I don't like the fact it displays a critical error if I disable scanning of outbound email, I don't like the link scanner and I certainly don't like the speed or the UI. The only reason I upgraded was because v7 kept popping up ads for v8, which pissed me off even more.
On a $10 paperback the printing cost is only about $1 or so in large quantities. Distribution and retail are by far the biggest chunk (60-70% of the selling price.) If you supply the ebook as a PDF it's identical to the printed version, and already laid out which means no additional expense reformatting it, then your only expense is bandwidth and the cost of the transaction, whether that's paypal fees, card service fees, etc.
40-60% of the final price of a printed book goes to the retailer and distributor. When the publisher sells an ebook directly, there's no such payment - they pocket the lot (minus author royalties).
Therefore, ebooks SHOULD sell for 40-60% of the price of the printed version, just as a starting point.
And that's why I believe full price ebooks are a ripoff, whether fiction or non-fiction. Yes, you're buying the information and not the pretty covers, but the publisher is making three times more out of you than if you buy the same title as a printed book through Amazon, B&N or whatever.
(Earlier this month I put my money where my mouth is on this one... I talked my publisher into giving away the ebook of my first Spacejock novel for free.)
That's not every author and every corporation. There's another problem to consider as well: rights. Some publishers buy world English rights, but when they release the book they might put out a hardback in the US followed by a paperback a year or so later. At some stage they might release the book in the UK or Australia as a paperback. If they put the thing on the web as a free download around the time the US paperback is coming out (and long before there's a UK or Australian paperback), then people in the UK and AUS who can't get hold of the actual book will just download the freebie ebook instead.
My publisher released the first book in my SF series as a free ebook download a week ago, the same day book 4 in the series hit the shops.
Despite being publicised on some well-known blogs, and despite being available as a completely free, DRM-free, download to anyone worldwide, there are still more copies of the printed book in circulation than there have been downloads of the ebook. (And we're talking multi thousands in both cases.)
My point is this: if a legit, proofed ebook copy of a bestselling book - right out there in plain sight - will only attract a few thousand downloads, then how much impact is a dodgy hand-scanned knockoff - available only by trawling through the sewers of the internet - going to have on sales of the real thing?
Here in Australia they're selling once-mainstream DVDs for $6-$8 all over the place. If shoppers would just exhibit a little patience instead of rushing out to buy the latest shiny, they too would benefit from the eventual lower prices.
I saw the first full page ad for Blu-Ray disks in a supermarket catalogue today. If the shops keep pushing those, DVDs are only going to get cheaper and cheaper.
As the programmer of a share marketing charting app I'd love to see more data freely available. Surely exchanges recognise that more data = more casual trading, and charging pennies to a small number of people isn't the same as brokerage fees from a much bigger number.
I agree. I'd been selling PCs since 1989, despite being a closet ST fan, but Win 95 and the closure of the last Atari ST shop within 3-4000 miles tipped me over the edge. I sold my entire Atari ST setup for over $3000 and used the cash to buy a 16mb P90 with Windows 95.
Ditto. I pretty much stopped buying games two/three years ago. Oblivion was my last purchase. GT Legends (with Starforce) was the one before that. Now I buy boxed sets of DVDs and watch those in the time I used to spend gaming (AFTER magically transferring them to my NAS.)
Same reason I'm not interested in Blu-Ray. I don't WANT to hunt down one disk out of hundreds and hundreds. It can easily take me longer to find the damn disk than I want to spend playing the game/watching the show.
The solution? Something like Steam, but a bit cheaper. Let me pay up, download the whole game, play it without a disk. And if Steam starts selling unencrypted AVIs of TV shows - look out.
Worth a look. Features a group blog by established authors and up-and-comers in the SF field: SF Novelists. You'll find links to new and previous releases, and the sidebar contains sample chapters and so on.
(Disclaimer: I'm a member of the group, but firmly in the up-and-coming category. So to speak.)
... my DVR doesn't support it. They've put in a skip but it does about five minutes, or ten, or thirty (seems to be a percentage of the total) and it's right next to the button which leaps ahead to live, deleting all the paused recording in the process.
Yes, and good on them for listening. Of course, over time publishers will try and slip in more and more net-based checks, but it's great to see a huge amount of bad publicity can have an effect on their decisions.
I'm tempted by the Sony but not the Kindle. I'd never buy a device so comprehensively tied to one supplier.
As for ebooks, Cory Doctorow posted an article just days ago in which he states that ebooks should be more like dandelion seeds than babies. Chuck out as many as possible and hope they survive. (Okay, so some parents do this anyway, but you get the idea.)
I have a Sinclair Spectrum +3 and a batch of Amstrad 3" floppies. Last time I checked (a year or so ago), they worked just fine.
I also have an Atari ST and a bunch of old 3.5" disks from the late 80's. The first handful I tried all worked.
I know they're vulnerable, and I do have backups on my PC (thank you, emulator programmers!), but those 3" disks the OP has might not be completely ruined just yet.
I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux, spending 95% of my time in the former (MS Visual Studio and my own novel writing software), and 5% in the latter. What I'd really, really like is a way to make the KDE or Gnome desktop font as similar to Windows XP as possible.
I've searched the web and found a few solutions, but I don't want a theme which adds a Windows start button to KDE, and I don't care about the system tray. It's the desktop font - resolution, type face and size - which I find really distracting. Firefox also seems to do its own thing, despite me juggling fonts & sizes in the options.
It's like reading novels in 11pt Times New Roman all day, and then picking one up set in MS Comic Sans or Courier New. The difference is like a smack to the eyeballs.
(For the record, I've been importing and configuring TTF and Bitmap fonts into Linux since, I think, the Redhat 4 days, including converting the MS Sans Serif system font to some other oddball format. I just haven't hit on the right setup.)
For security reasons my email prog doesn't render html, nor display images of any kind. Therefore, to verify you really ARE eBay, please post me a $100 note. On receipt of this note, I promise to post it back along with the information you're requesting from me.
Until this year I'd have bought the XP version just to run Visual Studio 97 on it (and specifically the VB6 IDE)
Now I'm running VS2008, and good luck getting THAT moving on an eeePC. I'm already cursing the 1.8ghz laptop for being incredibly sluggish with the IDE.
OT, but I remember the first time the game 'Black and White' whispered my name in a ghostly voice. It scared the bejeesus out of me, and I can still remember the way my hackles went up. Cute trick though.
Slashdot Mirror
I zapped the link scanner on my laptop & PC, but to my surprise when I went to disable the same thing on my wife's computer she stopped me. She was more than happy to have the web a little bit slower if it meant her google results were tested & filtered for her.
I too am not happy with AVG 8. I don't like the fact it displays a critical error if I disable scanning of outbound email, I don't like the link scanner and I certainly don't like the speed or the UI. The only reason I upgraded was because v7 kept popping up ads for v8, which pissed me off even more.
I still have floppies with Windows 286 and Windows 386. Where do they fit in?
On a $10 paperback the printing cost is only about $1 or so in large quantities. Distribution and retail are by far the biggest chunk (60-70% of the selling price.) If you supply the ebook as a PDF it's identical to the printed version, and already laid out which means no additional expense reformatting it, then your only expense is bandwidth and the cost of the transaction, whether that's paypal fees, card service fees, etc.
40-60% of the final price of a printed book goes to the retailer and distributor. When the publisher sells an ebook directly, there's no such payment - they pocket the lot (minus author royalties).
... I talked my publisher into giving away the ebook of my first Spacejock novel for free.)
Therefore, ebooks SHOULD sell for 40-60% of the price of the printed version, just as a starting point.
And that's why I believe full price ebooks are a ripoff, whether fiction or non-fiction. Yes, you're buying the information and not the pretty covers, but the publisher is making three times more out of you than if you buy the same title as a printed book through Amazon, B&N or whatever.
(Earlier this month I put my money where my mouth is on this one
Seconded. Mind you, they cost me about five months of my childhood, and I STILL didn't get past Deadly on the ZX Spectrum.
That's not every author and every corporation. There's another problem to consider as well: rights. Some publishers buy world English rights, but when they release the book they might put out a hardback in the US followed by a paperback a year or so later. At some stage they might release the book in the UK or Australia as a paperback. If they put the thing on the web as a free download around the time the US paperback is coming out (and long before there's a UK or Australian paperback), then people in the UK and AUS who can't get hold of the actual book will just download the freebie ebook instead.
My publisher released the first book in my SF series as a free ebook download a week ago, the same day book 4 in the series hit the shops.
Despite being publicised on some well-known blogs, and despite being available as a completely free, DRM-free, download to anyone worldwide, there are still more copies of the printed book in circulation than there have been downloads of the ebook. (And we're talking multi thousands in both cases.)
My point is this: if a legit, proofed ebook copy of a bestselling book - right out there in plain sight - will only attract a few thousand downloads, then how much impact is a dodgy hand-scanned knockoff - available only by trawling through the sewers of the internet - going to have on sales of the real thing?
Here in Australia they're selling once-mainstream DVDs for $6-$8 all over the place. If shoppers would just exhibit a little patience instead of rushing out to buy the latest shiny, they too would benefit from the eventual lower prices.
I saw the first full page ad for Blu-Ray disks in a supermarket catalogue today. If the shops keep pushing those, DVDs are only going to get cheaper and cheaper.
As the programmer of a share marketing charting app I'd love to see more data freely available. Surely exchanges recognise that more data = more casual trading, and charging pennies to a small number of people isn't the same as brokerage fees from a much bigger number.
did they lose the station wagon the tapes were being transported in?
The best thing about Windows 3.1 was that you could exit back to Dos and run stuff. A GUI on top of a shell - that's such a great idea.
I agree. I'd been selling PCs since 1989, despite being a closet ST fan, but Win 95 and the closure of the last Atari ST shop within 3-4000 miles tipped me over the edge. I sold my entire Atari ST setup for over $3000 and used the cash to buy a 16mb P90 with Windows 95.
Ditto. I pretty much stopped buying games two/three years ago. Oblivion was my last purchase. GT Legends (with Starforce) was the one before that. Now I buy boxed sets of DVDs and watch those in the time I used to spend gaming (AFTER magically transferring them to my NAS.)
Same reason I'm not interested in Blu-Ray. I don't WANT to hunt down one disk out of hundreds and hundreds. It can easily take me longer to find the damn disk than I want to spend playing the game/watching the show.
The solution? Something like Steam, but a bit cheaper. Let me pay up, download the whole game, play it without a disk. And if Steam starts selling unencrypted AVIs of TV shows - look out.
Worth a look. Features a group blog by established authors and up-and-comers in the SF field: SF Novelists. You'll find links to new and previous releases, and the sidebar contains sample chapters and so on.
(Disclaimer: I'm a member of the group, but firmly in the up-and-coming category. So to speak.)
... my DVR doesn't support it. They've put in a skip but it does about five minutes, or ten, or thirty (seems to be a percentage of the total) and it's right next to the button which leaps ahead to live, deleting all the paused recording in the process.
You've just reminded me why I prefer DVDs.
Yes, and good on them for listening. Of course, over time publishers will try and slip in more and more net-based checks, but it's great to see a huge amount of bad publicity can have an effect on their decisions.
I'm tempted by the Sony but not the Kindle. I'd never buy a device so comprehensively tied to one supplier.
As for ebooks, Cory Doctorow posted an article just days ago in which he states that ebooks should be more like dandelion seeds than babies. Chuck out as many as possible and hope they survive. (Okay, so some parents do this anyway, but you get the idea.)
I have a Sinclair Spectrum +3 and a batch of Amstrad 3" floppies. Last time I checked (a year or so ago), they worked just fine.
I also have an Atari ST and a bunch of old 3.5" disks from the late 80's. The first handful I tried all worked.
I know they're vulnerable, and I do have backups on my PC (thank you, emulator programmers!), but those 3" disks the OP has might not be completely ruined just yet.
I dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux, spending 95% of my time in the former (MS Visual Studio and my own novel writing software), and 5% in the latter. What I'd really, really like is a way to make the KDE or Gnome desktop font as similar to Windows XP as possible.
I've searched the web and found a few solutions, but I don't want a theme which adds a Windows start button to KDE, and I don't care about the system tray. It's the desktop font - resolution, type face and size - which I find really distracting. Firefox also seems to do its own thing, despite me juggling fonts & sizes in the options.
It's like reading novels in 11pt Times New Roman all day, and then picking one up set in MS Comic Sans or Courier New. The difference is like a smack to the eyeballs.
(For the record, I've been importing and configuring TTF and Bitmap fonts into Linux since, I think, the Redhat 4 days, including converting the MS Sans Serif system font to some other oddball format. I just haven't hit on the right setup.)
For security reasons my email prog doesn't render html, nor display images of any kind. Therefore, to verify you really ARE eBay, please post me a $100 note. On receipt of this note, I promise to post it back along with the information you're requesting from me.
The cash is tempting, but Arizona is a bit far for me. Have you thought about running regional meetings for the distance-challenged?
I thought the lyrics were funny, but the paperweight you had to attach to the bottom really takes the cake.
It's still in post-production - they're busy adding a 'Blue Danube' soundtrack.
Until this year I'd have bought the XP version just to run Visual Studio 97 on it (and specifically the VB6 IDE) Now I'm running VS2008, and good luck getting THAT moving on an eeePC. I'm already cursing the 1.8ghz laptop for being incredibly sluggish with the IDE.
OT, but I remember the first time the game 'Black and White' whispered my name in a ghostly voice. It scared the bejeesus out of me, and I can still remember the way my hackles went up. Cute trick though.