Apple should change it for change's sake. It worked so well for Gnome, KDE and Windows 8!
They did, and created a lot of features that were done just badly enough to be annoying. Examples are the war on color and contrast in the favorites sidebar, and the disappearing/reappearing scroll bars that make it a pain to select the bottom item in a window. Others include breaking search on both the desktop (it doesn't default to filename, and the popup for "filename contains..." comes up just slow enough to be really annoying) and in os x mail.
I don't understand why they are suing Amazon -- isn't it only the publishers that decide whether or not a book can be sold without DRM?
Amazon may very well have preferred pricing deals with some publishers (perhaps in part because they do support DRM), but it's still the publishers that are requiring DRM, not Amazon.
My Kindle reads non-DRM files in MOBI format just fine, so if the independents want to sell non-DRM files for Kindle customers, they can.
While Amazon lets publishers publish without DRM, they have no reason to encourage it-- locking people into the Kindle format is great for them. Apple is an anomaly because they're a hardware company-- they use the books and music to sell devices, while Amazon, Kobo, and B&N use the devices to sell books. Yes, Apple would like to have you buy everything from iBooks because they'll make more, but you can get free Amazon, Kobo, and Nook apps for your Apple devices, allowing you to read everything on them. The down side is that the phones are too small, and the iPads are too big (really not handy for reading in bed, or on the train), and power hogs relative to an e-reader. I don't have an iPad mini, but it's a necessary device for them, even if they were reluctant to make it.
It takes a little time, but if you're even minimally competent with html and grep it's generally not that bad. And it takes less to make a decent looking ebook than a decent looking paper book. I see a lot of badly laid out print from small publishers.
It's getting significantly better and cheaper, and even some large publishers are using it, particularly for backlist. If you print 10,000 copies of "this month's copycat paranormal romance" at $1 each and sell 1/3 of them (pulping the rest), you're paying the same per copy sold as if you printed 3333 copies on demand at $3 each (you can probably get a better price if you're doing that kind of volume) and they were only printed when someone said "I want a copy".
Except that it's much, much easier to prepare a book for print than it is to prepare an eBook. Preparing a book for electronic publishing is a bit like designing a web page in the mid-1990s, except that there are a lot more eBook reader vendors than there were browser vendors. Each one has its own set of quirks, some of which are... shall we say rather sizable sets.
For something that's pretty much straight words that's not true-- you can generate an ebook that's the equivalent of a mass-market paperbook pretty easily. Substantially more easily than generating a nice looking paper book. If you want to add a lot of features (images, in particular) that can add some time and energy, but even cross references aren't hard to do with a little grep action.
There are some tools that are missing-- Indesign is just finally getting to where it can export a decent epub once you do the paper layout. Up until Indesign 6 it was easier to just fork into paper and ebook versions and format independently. It would also be nice if git supported epub-- all it needs is zip and unzip in the right place and it could work well. It's probably possible to put a wrapper on it, but I haven't had time to sort that out yet.
There's a huge difference between sales and marketing - engineers commonly don't recognize this.
Sales is all about the tactical - one deal at a time.
For the super simple version, I like to tell people that "Marketing" is creating a need for your product, and "Sales" is filling that need.
Sometimes there's already a need out there (e.g. spreadsheets) and the marketing is more about creating awareness. Other times (e.g. colored sugar water in a fancy bottle) the marketing does a lot more to create the need.
I've watched and experienced many times that for tech people, making a cool, useful product that didn't exist before is much easier than getting people to see it, find it, and buy it.
Narrowing down the people who do external communication for a company of 10k+ people will do wonders. Most people aren't executives or sales people.
I work in a company of about 5000 people, and nearly everyone, from the top to the bottom uses email for external communication. People who aren't executives or salespeople generally have to deal with people at other companies in various capacities. It wouldn't narrow things much at all for us.
I don't want a 60 character email address, either, so I prefer username@domain.com.
My firstname.lastname is 20 characters, but can be reduced to 16 if I use the shortened form of my first name. My employer, however, uses "firstname.mi.lastname-employeenumber"@domain.com, which adds up to a lot of letters. So many letters that it breaks its own systems (and I don't even have the longest name - I think there are a few Indians with longer names). One of the internal ordering systems has an autocomplete, where if you put in my name it autocompletes and then barfs with a "sorry, too long of a name" error. A) the system used to work, and B) they should be using the autocomplete to look up my employee ID (or even better, a separate unique ID that only the database uses, so they can change employee ID schemes) and then use that. And when did disk space get so expensive they have to skimp on characters for names?
I generally give out my email address as username@domain.com, because I got there long enough ago that usernames were limited to 8 characters, and they haven't changed it since, and it's way easier to do over the phone.
Depends on the desired temperature, where you are in space, and where you have to move the heat from and to, and how much heat you have to move. Peltier coolers are indeed used in space, along with many other cooling technologies. All active coolers in space get tied to passive radiators to dump the waste heat.
I've known more than a few USians who left and went to Singapore because the funding situation is a lot less hassle-- no more proposals to underfunded agencies with low hit rates for small pots of money. Singapore sets them up with a nice lab and stable funding so they can do the things they went into science for in the first place. It doesn't sound bad, but I wouldn't really want to live in Singapore.
If you RTFA and download the docs, the API doesn't sound like much. They could probably get someone to hack it together in a week, including sticking a bunch of recipes in a database in some reasonably searchable way. And once you read what they're asking for and start thinking of what you would do in response, it very quickly seems to make more sense to roll your own, as they don't make it sound like the API is backed with a ton of data. It took only a few seconds to come up with a bunch of ideas that would be implementations of what I do anyway when I'm playing "what's for dinner" and don't have ideas.
Peer review is part of the job of an academic- they're not paid by the journal to do it, but it's something you're expected to do as part of your job if you're an academic.
The same way as at present. Reviewers are not paid, they are basically volunteers.
The traditional model works like this: 1) a paper is written (no one gets paid)
A minor correction to this-- the authors are typically paid (often poorly, especially in the case of mathemeticians) by their institutions to do some combination of research and teaching, and writing papers falls under the research part of things. They don't get paid specifically to write any paper, but it's part of the general job.
A smart phone can work just fine as an e-reader, and you can read stuff from any of the stores on them using free apps. Overdrive (the main library software and ebook provider) also has an app that runs on iOS and Android that's free.
Why, o why? I made the experience that having a Phd in physics while the partner struggles to finish a bachelor in a quite simple and non-demanding subject is an indicator for problems to come, even if you may love each other otherwise. So is a speed difference in reading of a factor of about 5 or more. Beyond some self-esteem issues of the partner:
1) Mobility. Its better if both persons have the same degree of mobility
Similar mobility and PhD in physics? That often means very little mobility and a lot of time apart- the two-body problem is far from a thing of the past. My partner and I are both physicists and have been fortunate in have some very long periods where we've been able to live together, and when we've had jobs apart have had the resources to be able to travel to see each other. But it's still not easy for a dual PhD couple unless one of them wants to take a job they don't want (and that may not particularly want them). I know many people who have done things like split a job between two people (and usually not that great of a job) or one of them basically drops their career for the other. As well as seen departments try to foist of trailing spouses on other departments. We've always done our employment completely independently It's better if at least one partner has a great deal of mobility (e.g. MD or electrician) if the other has limited mobility.
And as far as the similar education requirement-- I know people with PhDs who are idiots, and people who didn't finish high school who are quite smart, articulate, and well read, just not very formally educated.
On tablets and phones (including the iOS devices) there is competition-- all the major sellers with their own proprietary DRM systems offer readers for all the major devices. Some of the sellers also do mark books below publisher list-- it's really up to them once you've delivered the books and assigned a standard list. I have readers for Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Overdrive on my iOS devices, so I can read books from any of those, plus Adobe DRM stuff on my devices. Apple has actually been a little foolish in their implementation of their bookstore-- they have the nit-pickiest requirements on files that you supply them, demand a non-standard cover size and aspect ratio, and have software that's a pain to use to maximize the distribution of your book to all their markets. And they're the slowest to approve titles. Meanwhile, everybody has a free Kindle reader on their iOS devices so if apple is too much of a pain, a publisher can just distribute via Amazon (and B&N, and Kobo), so people will can still read on their iThing, but Apple doesn't get a cut.
Interestingly, e-books has actually made OLDER people interested in reading books again...
My nearly 70 year old mom reads ebooks on her phone, and just got a kindle for xmas that she'll likely use quite a lot.
I recently went to an "ebooks everywhere" event at the local library, which was a class on how to get ebooks onto whatever it is you choose to read them with. It was late on a weekday evening, and I think the only people under 50 were me and my partner, who were there as publishers seeing who shows up for those kind of things.
so yes, there are plenty of older people happy to use e-readers, phones, and tablets to read (there were people with every combination of devices)
and whole categories of books are far better in printed form than digital —footnote-heavy books, anything where large pages are useful, and anything where having two full pages visible at once is helpful, to name a few.
I find that if the footnotes are bidirectionally linked I prefer ebooks-- you tap the reference indicator and it goes to the footnote and you tap the ref indicator there and it goes back to the reference point. Unless the same ref is being called from wildly disparate places, it's easy to generate that sort of behavior in an epub with grep. With a little thought, even the pathological cases can be dealt with reasonably elegantly.
For a big publisher, they need to sell about 10K copies in about 8 weeks for a paper book to be worthwhile.
They can print very cheaply, but unless you're sure it's going to sell a lot of books there may be only a slight price advantage over print on demand-- suppose you only sell 1/3 of the copies that were printed at $1 each. The cost is effectively $3/copy sold (plus ~$0.20 each for shipping if they were shipped with a bunch of other books). That's only a little cheaper than POD, where it might cost $4.50 per copy for the same book, with POD but the risk of a warehouse full of unsold copies is much smaller, and you don't have a bunch of money tied up in printed copies for a long time. For backlist titles, even the big publishers are starting to print on demand.
I'm not sure 30% of the sales price is that extreme when comparing to a brick and mortar shop and a distributor network (I'm unsure of actual price examples, does anyone know?).
Standard price of a dead-tree book to a bookstore is 50% off the cover price if they get it through the publisher (which most prefer, to get that discount). Discounts through distributors usually are from 30% to 50%, depending on what discount the distributors get from the publisher. In most cases the publisher or distributor pays shipping, and accepts returns (usually not resellable).
It's not hard to open an eshop to sell ebooks, and you can even add DRM if you want (licensed through Adobe, but it won't work on Kindle) or put in a DIY watermark system so each reader's copy is personalized (which is also easy to remove, if you really want to), similar to what Oreilly and Pragmatic do. For a small publisher DRM is often not worth the trouble.
If I were allowed to have my own ebook store app on OS X and Android devices, I would complain a lot less, because there would be natural competition and users could price-shop. As it is, there is no competition, and frankly charging 30% is outrageous, and only possible because of anti-competitive practices.
You *can* have your own ebook store on apple and Android. I do. It's not as mobile friendly as it could be right now because of the version of the basic store software that I'm using (and had to modify), and that I'm half the company and have other things to do besides build the webstore, in addition to a day job. But it works reasonably well on both flavor devices, and will be better in a few weeks when I update the store code behind it to one that has a better mobile display. I also sell through all the various other major distributors, including some obscure ones you're not likely to know, but that have their own niches.
You can even choose to DRM or not, or watermark or not. Adobe will license you the DRM for your store, and the code I did in my store has hooks for adding watermarks (similar to what Oreilly and Pragmatic do), but I didn't bother with either. DRM isn't worth the hassle- it's more work to put in than to take out, and restricts how you can read things. Given that we're selling ebooks for about the price of the coffee you're going to drink while reading it, it's easier for most people to buy the book than to try to find a pirate copy.
We're a small publisher with about 150 titles (fiction and non-fiction) that we distribute largely DRM free. We purchased/inherited the catalog of another early e-book publisher and sell those titles DRM free on our own site, but Amazon doesn't have an easy switch to change them to DRM free on their site, so they're available in mixed DRM-state. All our new titles are DRM free, except for library loan (for what I hope are obvious reasons). Unlike other ebook publishers, we sell to libraries at the same price as to individuals, and we actually sell to libraries (a few of the big ones still refuse to sell ebooks to libraries).
Beaten, no. Pepper sprayed, yes. There's plenty of video of police officers pepper spraying trespassers who are doing nothing more violent than sitting there trespassing.
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Apple should change it for change's sake. It worked so well for Gnome, KDE and Windows 8!
They did, and created a lot of features that were done just badly enough to be annoying. Examples are the war on color and contrast in the favorites sidebar, and the disappearing/reappearing scroll bars that make it a pain to select the bottom item in a window. Others include breaking search on both the desktop (it doesn't default to filename, and the popup for "filename contains..." comes up just slow enough to be really annoying) and in os x mail.
I don't understand why they are suing Amazon -- isn't it only the publishers that decide whether or not a book can be sold without DRM?
Amazon may very well have preferred pricing deals with some publishers (perhaps in part because they do support DRM), but it's still the publishers that are requiring DRM, not Amazon.
My Kindle reads non-DRM files in MOBI format just fine, so if the independents want to sell non-DRM files for Kindle customers, they can.
While Amazon lets publishers publish without DRM, they have no reason to encourage it-- locking people into the Kindle format is great for them. Apple is an anomaly because they're a hardware company-- they use the books and music to sell devices, while Amazon, Kobo, and B&N use the devices to sell books. Yes, Apple would like to have you buy everything from iBooks because they'll make more, but you can get free Amazon, Kobo, and Nook apps for your Apple devices, allowing you to read everything on them. The down side is that the phones are too small, and the iPads are too big (really not handy for reading in bed, or on the train), and power hogs relative to an e-reader. I don't have an iPad mini, but it's a necessary device for them, even if they were reluctant to make it.
It takes a little time, but if you're even minimally competent with html and grep it's generally not that bad. And it takes less to make a decent looking ebook than a decent looking paper book. I see a lot of badly laid out print from small publishers.
Print on Demand
It's getting significantly better and cheaper, and even some large publishers are using it, particularly for backlist. If you print 10,000 copies of "this month's copycat paranormal romance" at $1 each and sell 1/3 of them (pulping the rest), you're paying the same per copy sold as if you printed 3333 copies on demand at $3 each (you can probably get a better price if you're doing that kind of volume) and they were only printed when someone said "I want a copy".
There are many such devices. If you want low error rates and pages that don't get torn, they're not cheap.
Except that it's much, much easier to prepare a book for print than it is to prepare an eBook. Preparing a book for electronic publishing is a bit like designing a web page in the mid-1990s, except that there are a lot more eBook reader vendors than there were browser vendors. Each one has its own set of quirks, some of which are... shall we say rather sizable sets.
For something that's pretty much straight words that's not true-- you can generate an ebook that's the equivalent of a mass-market paperbook pretty easily. Substantially more easily than generating a nice looking paper book. If you want to add a lot of features (images, in particular) that can add some time and energy, but even cross references aren't hard to do with a little grep action.
There are some tools that are missing-- Indesign is just finally getting to where it can export a decent epub once you do the paper layout. Up until Indesign 6 it was easier to just fork into paper and ebook versions and format independently. It would also be nice if git supported epub-- all it needs is zip and unzip in the right place and it could work well. It's probably possible to put a wrapper on it, but I haven't had time to sort that out yet.
There's a huge difference between sales and marketing - engineers commonly don't recognize this.
Sales is all about the tactical - one deal at a time.
For the super simple version, I like to tell people that "Marketing" is creating a need for your product, and "Sales" is filling that need.
Sometimes there's already a need out there (e.g. spreadsheets) and the marketing is more about creating awareness. Other times (e.g. colored sugar water in a fancy bottle) the marketing does a lot more to create the need.
I've watched and experienced many times that for tech people, making a cool, useful product that didn't exist before is much easier than getting people to see it, find it, and buy it.
There's probably already a CPAN module for solving it...
Narrowing down the people who do external communication for a company of 10k+ people will do wonders. Most people aren't executives or sales people.
I work in a company of about 5000 people, and nearly everyone, from the top to the bottom uses email for external communication. People who aren't executives or salespeople generally have to deal with people at other companies in various capacities. It wouldn't narrow things much at all for us.
I don't want a 60 character email address, either, so I prefer username@domain.com.
My firstname.lastname is 20 characters, but can be reduced to 16 if I use the shortened form of my first name. My employer, however, uses "firstname.mi.lastname-employeenumber"@domain.com, which adds up to a lot of letters. So many letters that it breaks its own systems (and I don't even have the longest name - I think there are a few Indians with longer names). One of the internal ordering systems has an autocomplete, where if you put in my name it autocompletes and then barfs with a "sorry, too long of a name" error. A) the system used to work, and B) they should be using the autocomplete to look up my employee ID (or even better, a separate unique ID that only the database uses, so they can change employee ID schemes) and then use that. And when did disk space get so expensive they have to skimp on characters for names?
I generally give out my email address as username@domain.com, because I got there long enough ago that usernames were limited to 8 characters, and they haven't changed it since, and it's way easier to do over the phone.
Depends on the desired temperature, where you are in space, and where you have to move the heat from and to, and how much heat you have to move. Peltier coolers are indeed used in space, along with many other cooling technologies. All active coolers in space get tied to passive radiators to dump the waste heat.
I've known more than a few USians who left and went to Singapore because the funding situation is a lot less hassle-- no more proposals to underfunded agencies with low hit rates for small pots of money. Singapore sets them up with a nice lab and stable funding so they can do the things they went into science for in the first place. It doesn't sound bad, but I wouldn't really want to live in Singapore.
If you RTFA and download the docs, the API doesn't sound like much. They could probably get someone to hack it together in a week, including sticking a bunch of recipes in a database in some reasonably searchable way. And once you read what they're asking for and start thinking of what you would do in response, it very quickly seems to make more sense to roll your own, as they don't make it sound like the API is backed with a ton of data. It took only a few seconds to come up with a bunch of ideas that would be implementations of what I do anyway when I'm playing "what's for dinner" and don't have ideas.
Peer review is part of the job of an academic- they're not paid by the journal to do it, but it's something you're expected to do as part of your job if you're an academic.
The same way as at present. Reviewers are not paid, they are basically volunteers.
The traditional model works like this:
1) a paper is written (no one gets paid)
A minor correction to this-- the authors are typically paid (often poorly, especially in the case of mathemeticians) by their institutions to do some combination of research and teaching, and writing papers falls under the research part of things. They don't get paid specifically to write any paper, but it's part of the general job.
A smart phone can work just fine as an e-reader, and you can read stuff from any of the stores on them using free apps. Overdrive (the main library software and ebook provider) also has an app that runs on iOS and Android that's free.
Why, o why? I made the experience that having a Phd in physics while the partner struggles to finish a bachelor in a quite simple and non-demanding subject is an indicator for problems to come, even if you may love each other otherwise. So is a speed difference in reading of a factor of about 5 or more. Beyond some self-esteem issues of the partner:
1) Mobility. Its better if both persons have the same degree of mobility
Similar mobility and PhD in physics? That often means very little mobility and a lot of time apart- the two-body problem is far from a thing of the past. My partner and I are both physicists and have been fortunate in have some very long periods where we've been able to live together, and when we've had jobs apart have had the resources to be able to travel to see each other. But it's still not easy for a dual PhD couple unless one of them wants to take a job they don't want (and that may not particularly want them). I know many people who have done things like split a job between two people (and usually not that great of a job) or one of them basically drops their career for the other. As well as seen departments try to foist of trailing spouses on other departments. We've always done our employment completely independently It's better if at least one partner has a great deal of mobility (e.g. MD or electrician) if the other has limited mobility.
And as far as the similar education requirement-- I know people with PhDs who are idiots, and people who didn't finish high school who are quite smart, articulate, and well read, just not very formally educated.
To add a little more to the reply...
On tablets and phones (including the iOS devices) there is competition-- all the major sellers with their own proprietary DRM systems offer readers for all the major devices. Some of the sellers also do mark books below publisher list-- it's really up to them once you've delivered the books and assigned a standard list. I have readers for Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and Overdrive on my iOS devices, so I can read books from any of those, plus Adobe DRM stuff on my devices. Apple has actually been a little foolish in their implementation of their bookstore-- they have the nit-pickiest requirements on files that you supply them, demand a non-standard cover size and aspect ratio, and have software that's a pain to use to maximize the distribution of your book to all their markets. And they're the slowest to approve titles. Meanwhile, everybody has a free Kindle reader on their iOS devices so if apple is too much of a pain, a publisher can just distribute via Amazon (and B&N, and Kobo), so people will can still read on their iThing, but Apple doesn't get a cut.
Interestingly, e-books has actually made OLDER people interested in reading books again...
My nearly 70 year old mom reads ebooks on her phone, and just got a kindle for xmas that she'll likely use quite a lot.
I recently went to an "ebooks everywhere" event at the local library, which was a class on how to get ebooks onto whatever it is you choose to read them with. It was late on a weekday evening, and I think the only people under 50 were me and my partner, who were there as publishers seeing who shows up for those kind of things.
so yes, there are plenty of older people happy to use e-readers, phones, and tablets to read (there were people with every combination of devices)
and whole categories of books are far better in printed form than digital —footnote-heavy books, anything where large pages are useful, and anything where having two full pages visible at once is helpful, to name a few.
I find that if the footnotes are bidirectionally linked I prefer ebooks-- you tap the reference indicator and it goes to the footnote and you tap the ref indicator there and it goes back to the reference point. Unless the same ref is being called from wildly disparate places, it's easy to generate that sort of behavior in an epub with grep. With a little thought, even the pathological cases can be dealt with reasonably elegantly.
For a big publisher, they need to sell about 10K copies in about 8 weeks for a paper book to be worthwhile.
They can print very cheaply, but unless you're sure it's going to sell a lot of books there may be only a slight price advantage over print on demand-- suppose you only sell 1/3 of the copies that were printed at $1 each. The cost is effectively $3/copy sold (plus ~$0.20 each for shipping if they were shipped with a bunch of other books). That's only a little cheaper than POD, where it might cost $4.50 per copy for the same book, with POD but the risk of a warehouse full of unsold copies is much smaller, and you don't have a bunch of money tied up in printed copies for a long time. For backlist titles, even the big publishers are starting to print on demand.
I'm not sure 30% of the sales price is that extreme when comparing to a brick and mortar shop and a distributor network (I'm unsure of actual price examples, does anyone know?).
Standard price of a dead-tree book to a bookstore is 50% off the cover price if they get it through the publisher (which most prefer, to get that discount). Discounts through distributors usually are from 30% to 50%, depending on what discount the distributors get from the publisher. In most cases the publisher or distributor pays shipping, and accepts returns (usually not resellable).
It's not hard to open an eshop to sell ebooks, and you can even add DRM if you want (licensed through Adobe, but it won't work on Kindle) or put in a DIY watermark system so each reader's copy is personalized (which is also easy to remove, if you really want to), similar to what Oreilly and Pragmatic do. For a small publisher DRM is often not worth the trouble.
If I were allowed to have my own ebook store app on OS X and Android devices, I would complain a lot less, because there would be natural competition and users could price-shop. As it is, there is no competition, and frankly charging 30% is outrageous, and only possible because of anti-competitive practices.
You *can* have your own ebook store on apple and Android. I do. It's not as mobile friendly as it could be right now because of the version of the basic store software that I'm using (and had to modify), and that I'm half the company and have other things to do besides build the webstore, in addition to a day job. But it works reasonably well on both flavor devices, and will be better in a few weeks when I update the store code behind it to one that has a better mobile display. I also sell through all the various other major distributors, including some obscure ones you're not likely to know, but that have their own niches.
You can even choose to DRM or not, or watermark or not. Adobe will license you the DRM for your store, and the code I did in my store has hooks for adding watermarks (similar to what Oreilly and Pragmatic do), but I didn't bother with either. DRM isn't worth the hassle- it's more work to put in than to take out, and restricts how you can read things. Given that we're selling ebooks for about the price of the coffee you're going to drink while reading it, it's easier for most people to buy the book than to try to find a pirate copy.
We're a small publisher with about 150 titles (fiction and non-fiction) that we distribute largely DRM free. We purchased/inherited the catalog of another early e-book publisher and sell those titles DRM free on our own site, but Amazon doesn't have an easy switch to change them to DRM free on their site, so they're available in mixed DRM-state. All our new titles are DRM free, except for library loan (for what I hope are obvious reasons). Unlike other ebook publishers, we sell to libraries at the same price as to individuals, and we actually sell to libraries (a few of the big ones still refuse to sell ebooks to libraries).
Beaten, no. Pepper sprayed, yes. There's plenty of video of police officers pepper spraying trespassers who are doing nothing more violent than sitting there trespassing.
Like UC Davis, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident