[Theepistle] Kindling interest

[Tim Forcer]

At 08:21 14/01/2010, Ian wrote:

>  Whilst I'm firmly with Delmo in favour of the printed page
>  nowadays I am a lot more accepting of Kindles if not other
>  forms of electronic literature.

So far, I've not even been tempted by an e-reader.  I like the 
concept, but feel it needs more development before it might suit 
me.  Things I'm not keen on are:

a) Display resolution - currently crude, so number of legible words 
per display is much smaller than per paperback page.  (And, for 
legibility, the typefaces have to be those optimised for pixel-based 
displays, rather than those used for printing - the latter are much 
easier on the eye, but don't render well on the screen unless the 
resolution is exceptionally high.)

b) File formats - there's no way I'm getting into proprietary 
formats, particularly if the platform won't handle general-purpose 
formats (eg pdf, txt, rtf).  (And I'm not sure how pdfs look - most 
pdfs are produced for A4 or similar page size, so would be illegible 
on a Kindle unless one zoomed and scrolled all the time, or unless 
the software was smart enough to be able to re-paginate on the fly, 
which makes pdf pointless.)

c) Rights - while I DO want the rights owner to get a fair return, I 
don't want to have to pay again every time I shift the file from 
drive to drive (and I'm certainly not interested in having the file 
reside on a server somewhere - a book should be usable anywhere, 
anytime, not simply where and when WiFi is available).

d) Second-hand - I own a huge number of second-hand books, but the 
resale market for files is fraught with rights issues.  With printed 
books, the publish-on-demand option has brought large numbers of 
out-of-print titles back into circulation, and I've been very happy 
to buy such volumes.  As yet, besides rights-free offerings through 
Gutenberg and others, there seems little opening up of 
back-catalogues.  Long live ABE!

>  The problem with offering the adventures of the Saint on
>  those platforms is simply one of effort versus return. I
>  think it would be far too much effort for very little
>  return.
>
>  Happy to be persuaded otherwise though!

OK, a challenge.

I cannot believe the recent _Best Of The Saint_ volumes were printed 
other than from electronic masters (the chances of the original 
plates being around is surely nil, and anyway the page layout would 
have been wrong for modern paper sizes).  Therefore, Hodder already 
have, in digital form, all or most of a quartet of Saint original 
volumes, or a couple of dozen original shortish stories.  Turn a 
handle or two and they become collections of rtf, pdf or whatever.

Use those to test the water, pricing by comparison with 
back-catalogue offerings rather than recent publications.  (OK, this 
will knock chances of further print-runs of the books, but by now I 
would expect any such to be unlikely?)

If this is a success, the income after preparation and admin costs, 
and the estate getting appropriate royalties, ought to be enough to 
begin a process of converting old masters (of whatever form) into new 
sets of files.

A commercial-grade book scanning / OCR operation is neither costly 
nor particularly time-consuming (going by personal experience with a 
consumer-grade OCR system and general-purpose scanner) - you don't 
have to be Google or the British Library to set up a viable system.

Obviously, the results need proper proofing, cleaning up, 
de-paginating and the rest, which isn't particularly cheap as 
peanut-paid monkeys deliver crushed nuts.  One needs people who are 
not just literate but literary and without the slightest tinge of 
dyslexia.  Probably not suitable for farming out to low-wage 
operations in developing countries.

To make the results _*really*_ appealing to fans, the virtual covers 
of the virtual books could cycle through a random selection of the 
actual covers used for print versions.  Which would be of very 
limited appeal with current equipment, since all have low resolution 
and limited (or very limited) greyscale displays, not the high-res 
colour needed to do justice to the wonderful artwork we all know and 
love.  (My personal favourite, partly because it's how I got to know 
The Saint, is the stick-figure Hodder paperbacks, but I'm sure the 
other styles have their champions too.)

Look, I can dream if I want to!

Sometimes, one has to accept that something is technically possible, 
but not currently achievable in commercial terms (a year ago I ran a 
student project which was about combining a collection of known 
technologies and applications to achieve a particular stand-alone 
system - the excellent team found that it wasn't _quite_ on at the 
moment, but give it a couple of years and it might well be).  If 
there are clear "wants" made known to publishers (etc, etc), then, if 
enough people "want" it, their marketing arms will push for it to happen.

Currently, Kindle and the like sell well, but not extravagantly 
so.  I doubt they make a huge amount, even where the hardware is a 
bit of a loss-leader and files are sold at quite a premium to the 
actual costs of production plus royalties.  Let the book world know 
WHY we aren't ALL buying Kindles, and we might start to get something 
a lot better?

Tim