[Theepistle] Kindling interest

Mon Jan 18 15:49:07 GMT 2010

I bought possibly 50 hardback books last year, many of them Saint books from ABE. After many years of buying books that I don't want to turn loose, I find that space is at a premium in a small house with two storeage buildings outside; full.
My job requires me to travel for extended stays and to sometimes, fairly remote areas. Then with a vacation every year in Guatemala, I am limited to what I can pack and carry to the job or out of the country.
The Kindle DX is more convenient to read on than a Laptop, easier to hold and claims to hold up to 3500 books. I have the leather case for it, so its not too much different than reading a heavier, leather bound book for me. Now, if only Amazon would come up with a better way to organize the books on the Kindle!   Waymon

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Robinson <michaelr14153 at hotmail.com>
To: theepistle at fascicle.org
Sent: Mon, Jan 18, 2010 8:37 am
Subject: Re: [Theepistle] Kindling interest

I agree with Delmo, they will pry the printed page out of my cold, dead hands.

Here's another thing about Kindles and the like. I have Saint books printed as far back as the 1940s. I have other books dating back to the mid-seventeenth century. I can take any book down from the shelf and read it whenever I feel like it. But a computer file on, say, a five inch floppy disc from around 1990 would be useless. 

If you spend money on ebooks in whatever format, chances are they'll be selling you the same stuff again, and again, and again into the future as technologies change. Maybe that's not a problem with airport novels that you only read once, if you read airport novels. But it doesn't seem a good bet for the Immortal Works.

Just a thought...

Michael

> Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:39:57 +0000
> To: theepistle at fascicle.org
> From: tmf at ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: [Theepistle] Kindling interest
> 
> 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 
> 
> 
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