Finally, a decent epub reader for Mac

Epub is an open standard for ebooks. It's very popular, used in iBooks and by the Barnes and Noble Nook, and it's fast emerging as the lingua franca of ebook systems - even some versions of Sony's e-reader are said to read them. Why, then, are there so few epub reader options for Mac users? I've talked about this before, in this very blog, and I'll not rehash that whole discussion here. The point I'm making here is that I think I've finally found a decent epub reader for mac. It's called Lucifox and it's a plugin for Firefox. All the details you'd want are here. There appears to be a standalone version as well (dependent on the Mozilla XUI runner) which I've not played with yet.

-JRS

My new favorite font

Gputeks has two major things going for it. First, it's an attractive font at almost any scale, and just what I was looking for for the title page of On Gossamer Wings. Second, it's OFL licensed. That's Open Font License. As in Open Source. Free as in Freedom, and all that. You can get both here: http://www.fontspace.com/gluk/gputeks What gputeks means, I have no earthly clue. Nor do I particularly care. :)

-JRS

AnomalyCon

For those in the Denver metro area, I will be appearing at Anomaly Con on the 26th and 27th of this month, in support of Cooperwood Press's Copperwood Double #1. This book contains two stories set in Jeff Duntemann's Drumlin world, which I've talked about before. On Side one is Jeff's novella Drumlin Circus and side two of the double-book is my novella On Gossamer Wings.

If you've never seen one of the old Ace doubles, double novels work like this:
On side one of the book, you have cover art, and a short-ish novel. Flip the book so the spine printing is now upside down, and instead of the back cover, you have different cover art, and a different novel. The two novels meet in the middle, one upside down from the other so you know where one ends and the other begins. Page numbers go from the side you started on toward the center. In the center was a catalog of other titles from the same publisher. Double novels often contained abridged versions of the novels within, so they'd both fit in the relatively small number of pages allowed. (Neither Drumlin Circus nor On Gossamer Wings has been abridged in any fashion, as they were written with this format in mind.)

Novellas run, according to Wikipedia, somewhere in the huge span between 10,000 words and 70,000 words. Novellas are fun to write. They're middle-length stories where you can experiment with writing style, with story lines, with characters, without the screamingly tight word constraints of short fiction, and yet without committing the time and intricate story telling of a novel. They're fun to read too, since you can read them at one sitting and still have time to do other things the same day.

Unfortunately, novella length fiction is typically impossible to sell. Publishers usually want either short fiction of less than 7000 words for print in magazines, or they want 90,000 to 110,000 word novels - or longer if you're Stephen King. Double Novels give you /two/ novella length pieces in one cover. If you've never read a novella before, you're in for a treat.

As for working with Jeff on this one, it's been a pleasure. Jeff's an old hand at Science Fiction, and a damn good one. He's been on the final ballot for a Hugo (twice) and he's been selling short science fiction since 1974. His first novel, The Cunning Blood came out in 2006. He's also a good friend. You've seen his name in my blog before.

We're still hammering out the final details of the book, and the deadline is tight, but we should have copies in hand to sell at the con. Look for the guys in the top hats. Our panel reading is Sunday, the 27th, at 1:00pm. I'll put up another posting here when I know where in the con the reading will be.

-JRS

Off Topic: The Politics of Suck

I got a letter from the Democratic National Committee a couple days ago. In it, I was advised that the time to prepare for the 2012 election is now, and that above all we must work to keep Republicans out of the White House. It went on for some length about the matter, in fact, how any Republican President would pull a "George Bush" and "run this country right into the ditch."

Now, as folks might have guessed from my post entitled "That was the decade that was," I was not and am not George W. Bush's biggest fan. If one is paying attention, one might guess that this has something to do with why the DNC is asking me for money, in fact. But as I read this letter, one thing got on my nerves.

It said nothing about what the President and Democrats in Congress are doing. The entire letter was about Republicans, in the most harsh tones, though remarkably without many facts to look at. The letter basically distilled down to this: Republicans suck. Give us money so we can keep them out of power.

So um. I take it the whole Civility in Politics thing didn't reach Governor whatsisnuts who wrote the letter?

See, here's the problem. Starting with the Reagan era, politics has become less and less about ideas and more and more about how the other guys suck. The results of this have been devastating. The parties have grown more and more polarized, lest anyone in party A admit that they suck by admitting that party B might have a good idea there. When party A is in power, they feel they have a "mandate from the people" to do things that suck. And verily, they do. And finally, and most importantly, they drive the civility out of the business of democracy where it is most needed - in the people who vote.

The tragic shooting in Tucson is the final result of this last problem. You can argue, as I was prepared to, that Sarah Palin knew exactly what she was doing when she set up the target reticles on her website to intimidate the candidates she was targeting. She certainly should have. The Operation Rescue web campaign against Dr. George Tiller of Wichita certainly netted similar success for that organization. Certainly, Palin should have known that her website put people's lives in danger. But the bottom line is that both those websites were inappropriate for mainstream politics, bordering on terrorism, and should have been roundly denounced by the sensible people of America. They were not so denounced. The level of normal violence was raised. Bloodshed and lives lost were the result.

Until our civilization refuses to sanction the violent undertone in our politics, blood will continue to be spilled. I, for one, will no longer sanction it. So no, Governor DNC. Not one fucking dime for you and your party. Not until you admit that the other party can be simply wrong instead of evil. I have had enough of the politics of suck, sir. And until you learn some manners, I don't want to see you or yours in the White House either.

-JRS

Off Topic: A Thank-You Note to Apple Computer

Dear Apple Computer:

I am a computer geek, and I have been for 30 years. My mother, by contrast, is not. She called me yesterday to tell me that her late 2005 G5 iMac/iSight was showing blue horizontal bands instead of booting. I have to say I cringed when she said it. It's never good to have severe video distortion on a computer, but particularly on an all-in-one machine like an iMac.

Worse, she was trying to power the machine up to write a paper for a class she's taking. The paper is due monday. This is the lady who gave me such grief for leaving things to the last minute. I suppose she could have waited until Sunday afternoon. I suggested, without much hope, that she call the Apple store nearest her for a genius bar appointment and take the iMac in to see what could be done.

I suggested she take her time machine disk to the store with her, just in case.

She went to the Apple store in Albuquerque, NM, and there her old iMac was indeed pronounced dead of a logic board failure. Pretty much what I expected from her description, and from the age of the machine. The G5 macs just didn't last as well as previous generations, and her imac outlasted all the other powerMacs in the family.

This was, however, the Apple store. The folks there are not inclined to throw up their hands and say "Sorry." No. The genius bar employee handed her off to a salesman. I suggested that she think about laptops, mac minis, and iMacs if she had to get a new machine. With the salesman's help, she did. Together they reached the conclusion that for her needs, a new iMac was the best deal in terms of performance per dollar and that it best suited her computing habits.

The machine she selected was the 21.5 inch iMac 3.0ghz core i3 with 4gb of RAM. In terms of raw clock speed, it's the fastest mac in the family. I'm trying hard to keep the lyrics from "Little Old Lady from Pasadena" out of my head. My mother would /not/ appreciate the comparison.

Looking at the specs, it's a hell of a computer. It probably doesn't really have enough video RAM for a hardcore gamer, but then my mother really isn't into EverQuest, World of Warcraft, or Eve Online anyway. Don't laugh too hard. I know some people's moms who are.

What she did not do was have the folks at the store restore her system from time machine. There was an extra charge for this, and more classes she didn't really want to attend anyway. She took the new machine home, set it up on her desk, marveled at the wireless keyboard and mouse, and then called me again.

She was at the part of the automatic setup process where Setup Assistant asked her if she'd like to recover data from another mac or a time machine backup. Yes, I assured her, that's what we wanted to do. Did she want to select everything? Again, yes, I assured her that's what she wanted to do.

18 minutes later, she went through the registration pages, and after that, her desktop was back, and everything was where she expected it to be. I suggested we probably should make sure time machine was set up on the new computer, so she opened time machine, threw the switch, and it asked if she wanted to use the existing time machine drive for the new computer. We heartily agreed.

And that was it. When we hung up the phone, the computer was busily creating its new time machine backup, she was busily reading email and checking her bank account. Oh, and thinking about starting her paper, since it is due Monday and all.

Now, I have nerd friends who have other brands of computers, and when they have a total hardware failure, or a total reload situation, they're down for a day, at least, and there's some tinkering involved to set the new machine up with all their accounts and all that. For my mother, buying the computer took longer than getting it up and running with all her data and applications. The longest part of that process was copying the data off of the time machine drive. It took maybe a dozen mouse clicks to make it all happen, and frankly if I'd been out of the house, she probably could have done it herself.

Thank you, Apple Computer, for putting the thought and the care into your hardware and software to make the recovery from such a catastrophic failure such a non-event, and for making her shopping experience at the Apple Store such a positive one.

There's only one thing missing. Someplace to email this to. So I'm posting this as an open letter to my blog.

-James R. Strickland

Google Ebooks Ripoff - Refunded

Two days after I made my post about what a ripoff Google Ebooks was, I was contacted by Anna, on the Google Books team, who apologized and offered me a refund, which I accepted.

While my complaints about the quality of the ebooks they're offering stand, I have to say it's almost unsettling how proactive their customer service is. Kudos to Anna and the team for settling the matter.

-JRS

Google Ebooks: A complete and utter rip-off

I've been following the ebook thing for a long time, but seldom have I seen such a disgusting rip-off as google e-books. Doing research for the novel I'm currently working on, it became necessary to have a copy of the Sears, Roebuck catalog from the late 1890s. Great, I figured. Here's a job for an ebook. I looked on Google's ebook site and they had one. I read through the information on it, and nowhere did it say the book was not available in PDF or epub format, so I purchased it.

First problem: the price. Google ebooks are either free or expensive, in this case I paid $9.95 (plus tax) for a book I could have bought on paper for $12 from Amazon.

Second, I'm stuck reading the book on the cloud. This sounds nicer than it is. It really means that on my desktop I'm limited to using their browser-reader, and on any other device it has to have an active, battery sucking internet connection. Oh, and by the way, there is no way at all to read it on Kindle. Let me repeat that, because it's one of the main reasons I'm calling this a rip-off: there is NO downloading this book. You read it from Google's servers or not at all. Basically, you're paying to access a web site.

Third, this book is a plain scan of the reproduction of the catalog. This is as primitive as ebooks get. It is in no way searchable. It has no internal organization other than was present when the catalog was published 114 years ago. While this simplicity (the only addition is a foreword from the republisher) would be charming in a paper edition, in an ebook edition it severely limits the book's usefulness.

Fourth, of course, is the web-page reader itself. Consisting of a web page listing the books you were fool enough to buy on this service, and a link that takes you to the ebook in question. Once there, you get a bar at the top of your browser to take you back to your "I wasted my money on THIS?" page, and a button at either edge of your browser to scroll, one page at a time, through the ebook, along with an uncalibrated slider at the bottom of the page so you can scroll to about the middle of the book, or somewhere near one end or the other. That's as accurate as it gets. Using the forward and back buttons is no special joy. Each time you hit one of the buttons, the web site has to send you another page (remembering this is a scan, so it's a big image file of some kind, so even on my 16mb/s link it takes a certain amount of time). If you hit it more than a couple times close together (I need to get to page 500) it will stop responding altogether. As if these defects weren't sufficient, there is one that is above all, unforgivable. If you shrink the window it buckles the text and hides the forward and back buttons altogether. Read that again. If you scale your browser window the PRINT BECOMES UNREADABLE and THE FORWARD AND BACK BUTTONS ARE HIDDEN. THE READER BECOMES UNUSABLE IF YOU TRY TO SCALE IT.

If you're entertaining the idea of buying a google book for any reason, I encourage you to think twice, maybe three times. Google has not done any work at all to make a quality product here.

-JRS