Ebook toolsets for mac

Spent a lot of time today tweaking my ebook tools.

First, there's a new version of epubcheck here. It caught some minor errors in my most recent epub books - Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences, which appear to make some small difference rendering my HTML/CSS in epubs.

Second, also for the epub world, Adobe Digital Editions seems to have a less flakey version out for mac, although their flash installer fails, as one might expect. You can download the standalone installer here.

Second-and-a-Half, in a nice also-ran, is the Barnes and Noble eReader. It does a tolerable job of rendering ePubs, though it still ignores more of my CSS than Adobe's offering. The user interface is /much/ nicer, though a bit idiosyncratic, than Digital Editions. The thing does crash fairly reliably if you feed it two different versions of the same book, so it's problematic for ebook testing in my case. It's available here.

Third, and long, long overdue, Amazon has released a version of the product formerly known as mobigen now known as Kindlegen that is native for mac. If you didn't know, I've been running mobigen for PC in Wine's occasionally flakey emulation since I got my kindle. Now I have a native executable that runs in MacOS X. Much faster, much less flakey, and I don't have to wait for x-windows to start up. Otherwise it appears more or less the same. You can get Kindlegen here.

Fourth, also courtesy of Amazon, OS X finally has a decent mobipocket reader that runs natively in the form of Kindle for Mac. Another tool I've had to use in Emulation, and the only reason I have been maintaining a Windows 7 beta installation in Parallells, so I could verify that my mobipocket files actually worked on anything besides an actual Kindle, which also have. You can get Kindle for Mac here.

I'm not sure what to make of the spate of new tools for Mac. It's easy to say B&N and Amazon are afraid their book readers will be swept away by iPad, so rather than continue to disenfranchise Mac users (in Amazon's case) they finally decided to support Mac. I don't actually know, and I don't care that much. I have a Kindle and I use it when I travel. I have an iPod touch that I use constantly. Both can read my kindle library, as can my desktop. Theoretically (though I haven't tried it on Kindle) both can read free epub books as well. From the standpoint of /making/ ebooks on my desktop, having these new tools is a godsend. Oh, and one other thing. They're all free (as in beer).

-JRS

Apple, iPad, and the education market

One thing I think all the pundits miss when they either praise or condemn the forthcoming iPad is who its primary market is.

Consider. Apple has sold and continues to sell a huge number of laptops to the education market. I would not be surprised to discover that, in fact, this market is the one that continues to demand the white plastic shelled MacBook, which Apple has reduced to a single model at the low end of its laptop products.

Consider that one of the biggest costs of these programs is supporting the laptops. Laptops are fragile. Hinges break. Hard drives don't like large jolts. Power supplies get lost. Software gets deleted. The list goes on and on.

Now imagine you're an educator and Apple comes to you with a machine that is more robust, has fewer moving parts, lives in a walled garden of software that can be restricted further by the teachers.

IPad would be ideally suited as a textbook replacement. Unlike other ebook readers (cough kindle) it can display in color, and it can display fixed pages in PDF. Textbooks are a media consumption system, and that is what the iPad is designed for.

I suspect you will see Apple pushing them out to schools, and I would not be surprised if the white macbook, last scion of the old ibook that the schools loved so much, shuffles off in the next major product update.

Speculating wildly here. :)
-JRS

Technorati Tags: technology

Ebook Rebuilds again

The rebuilt version of Irreconcilable Differences in Mobipocket is up.

JRS

Ebook Rebuilds

Just a quick note. I've rebuilt both ebook versions of /Looking Glass/ and the epub version of /Irreconcilable Differences/ so that ebook software with limited memory won't gag on them anymore. I'll get the new version of /Irreconcilable Differences/ in mobipocket out probably on Monday.

-JRS

Wind Farming for Farmers is Profitable

Turns out I was right about farmers and wind farming. But good grief, if my calculations at the time showed how little a farmer makes per acre growing food and grain, I missed it.

-JRS

A Little Music Theory, Maestro...

There comes a time, when you're writing about a professional musician and how she thinks about music, that you'd better have some music theory under your belt. This has proven to be a problem. I play guitar (occasionally), but everything I know on it I learned by rote, with none of the underlying theory. I don't read music, either. It's all strictly by ear.

This makes for a frustrating day, when you're trying to put words in the mind of someone with advanced degrees in music.

So in desperation, I was combing the web for some theory, and decided to start with pentatonic scales, since they seem to come up a lot, and are said to be the foundation of blues and rock music. A little digging turned up videos from justinguitar.com, and damned if he doesn't walk you through your minor pentatonic scales, slowly and carefully, in each of five positions, in one video. Free (donations requested). You'd better believe I'm donating. His site is a wealth of guitar lessons, all the stuff I never learned because I learned guitar by ear (my ear is pretty good) and by rote, the same way my father played.

Having learned some pentatonics, it dawned on me that I've been /playing/ those in one lick I picked up a long time ago described at the time as "stolen from the fingers of Elvis." Elvis undoubtedly knew his pentatonics, either by rote or as a theory, and now I understand them as well. Twenty years I've been playing that lick and I never understood what it /was/.

Writing novels is like that. You use little tidbits of knowledge you gathered up over the years, and then wind up learning entirely new subjects just to apply them in the story. Writing Irreconcilable Differences, I learned more than I ever wanted to about tactical nuclear weapons, windmills, babbitt bearings, and how the auto industry was evolving at that point. Einstein's Blues is proving no different. These searches seem less likely to bring me to the attention of the FBI, though. :)

-JRS

Technorati Tags: Einstein's Blues

Induction Rigs, Kind of.

Well, here it is 2010, and if you crunched the math while reading /Looking Glass/, you'll realize that while there's all kinds of promising technology towards direct neural interfaces, unlike my predictions in /Looking Glass/, the first practical ones aren't out yet, and things aren't looking too promising for them by the end of the year. Oh well, the risks of writing near term science fiction, I suppose. :)

Exceptthis, which I stumbled across on Make: Online. The EPOC Headset claims to be able to translate thought patterns (and presumably surface muscle activity) from the head into keystrokes for your computer. It also has a gyroscope to monitor head position and whatnot. I suspect it's doing a lot with physical cues as well as neurological interfacing, and certainly it's not writing back to the wearer's brain. Yet. But. It's a step.

Just what I need. More expensive toy lust. :) At least the CupCake CNC machine is mac compatible.

-JRS