Author Archives: talkingtothecan

Training again

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Going to run the Wellington marathon again this year. Have been quiet on the running since our second son arrived in August; and quiet on the blogging since I got a Garmin GPS watch. So it’s all logged and graphed and mapped to death over here.

Ran a half recently around the Wellington bays in 1:39:30. A slight improvement on the last half, and not bad given the lack of focused training. Should be able to go under 3:30 for the full marathon if I can stick to the training and avoid injury. Using Matt Fitzgerald’s beginners programme on top of regular commute runs into work. (It’s about 7k one way and I’m trying to do it five or six times a week.)

Ticker tape

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I’m currently reading a very long post about Wikileaks, a rant by Bruce Sterling (The Blast Shack). Sterling specialises in rants, though for rants I find them pretty readable. It’s long, and apparently it’s generated a lot of comments. Now maybe I should have checked first but I’m part-way through and I’d like to know how much of Sterling’s writing I’ve got left before the comments start (which I’ll probably only skim). So how do I check without losing my place?

It’s got me thinking about something I’d like to see in web design to help long-form reading: a graphic ticker tape-like bar on the side of the screen that shows the proportion of the page that’s the story and the proportion that’s comments, plus a marker to show where I’m up to. That can’t be too hard can it?

Vaguely related reading: if:book’s a defense of pagination.

Back to school: Digital rights management

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My final post to the discussion forum for the Whitireia Diploma in Publishing.

On Digital rights management (DRM)

DRM makes me queasy. Whichever way you cut it it’s a hard one to know really which way to go. Ultimately I feel drawn to the DRM-free side of the argument, merely for the sake of making life easy on consumers. They are after all the last people that publishers want to get off-side with. If I were a publisher I’d give DRM-free a shot and see how it went; it just seems like a suck-it-and-see kind of thing. At the very least follow some of John Noring’s suggestions to keep the DRM as light and the file as flexible for the reader as possible.

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Back to school: Territorial rights

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Another post I made to the discussion forum for the Whitireia Diploma in Publishing.

On Territorial rights

Well, I’m not entirely clear what the big threat to local publishers is, nor even to the big ones. And if there is a problem, I think it could be worse for the big publishers who have come to rely on revenues streams by buying and selling territorial rights. Large publishers are already dominant – that’s been the case in New Zealand for years – but maybe the end of territorial rights breaks one of their strangleholds if it mean New Zealand publishers can go straight out to other markets. Learn from the French and Spanish publishers and retain world rights, as Edward Nawotka suggests.

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Back to school: Pricing ebooks

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Another post I made to the discussion forum for the Whitireia Diploma in Publishing.

On Pricing ebooks

This seems like one of the trickiest bits of the emerging publishing reality, how to price ebooks, and what effect it has on the entire chain of marketing and distribution. And what effect on the print books? That may be one of the keys to the discussion – does the ebook only exist in relation to a printed equivalent and how many print equivalents are there? For publishers today, it seems the ebook doesn’t exist without a printed book, and for many there’s both a hard cover and paperback to consider.

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Literary agents

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Interesting to see a literary agent getting into the ebooks game, justified on the basis that publishers aren’t offering enough money to authors (or the agent?) and that digital rights weren’t negotiated for OOP titles. I wonder though whether the publisher should still get a cut based on the original editing, setting, marketing and popularising of the book that the agent and author could now profit from?