Archives for posts with tag: Stanza

Kindle for iPhone vs Stanza. Notes from a Stanza-whore

December 22, 2009 //
8

Okay, regular readers of this blog (hello, all three of you, and Merry Christmas) will know that I am a great big Stanza-whore for my ebook reading. This has been because, simply put, Stanza is easy, convenient, and flexible…and available to Australians.

When Kindle showed up in Australia, the very first thing I did was look for the Kindle for iPhone app on iTunes, yet another little nifty ebook reader not then available in my geographic region; I assumed that if the Kindle was available to Australia, so would the app be. It wasn’t. Perhaps that was because of software fixes that needed to be ironed out, or perhaps it was because Amazon wanted a few Kindle sales first before making the app freely available…either way, it wasn’t available then but it is available now.

So how does Kindle app compare to Stanza app?
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Categories Reading fiction

Happy links for readers and writers

December 20, 2009 //
7

Shortcovers changed their name to Kobo. It’s usually a bad move to completely change names, but this might help them compete with Stanza (I admit to having both apps on my Touch but very rarely accessing Shortcovers; I always go to my Stanza reads first) and widen their appeal across other mobile app groups.

Except they don’t seem to have changed overly much and the first time I tried to read a book preview-and-purchase, I got the dreaded geographical-restriction message. Sorry, author of Inside a Dog, I would have bought your book for $9.99 off Kobo just to try them out, but I wasn’t allowed and that’s irritated me so much I’m not going to go find you at the print bookstore (I’ll read you at the library instead). Is this a publisher-failed-to-secure-worldwide-digital-rights issue or an Australian-restrictions-on-parallel-imports issue? It certainly seems to affect Australians an awful lot.

Semi-related, Borders gets its act together to offer ebooks, partnered in some fashion with Kobo. Let’s all hope they won’t come up with yet another format.

The Independent lists its heroes and villains of the literary world. They mean actual people/entities, not fictional characters…as you would expect, Google and Amazon make both lists.

The Australian Publishers Association are calling for submission for their 2010 Book Design Awards – for Australian books published this year. What are your favourite cover designs from this year’s reading?

I notice on the APA website that they are advertising a symposium called “The Digital Revolution: Publishing in the 21st Century”. In 2010. About 10 years into the 21st Century. And definitely a little slow on the old digital revolution. That question I just asked, about why Australians keep getting thwarted in their ebook access? I’m now guessing it’s because Australian publishers often hold the Australian digital rights (why, why, why sell digital rights regionally, especially to a country like Australia which has no dedicated ebook store? What possible justification is there for making an electronic downloadable product available (or not) by region?*) and they’re still holding symposiums to work out what to do with them.

NSW State Library have released a report about scenarios for their public libraries in 20 years [pdf]. This is actually a really well laid-out and interesting report.

Arstechnica Weird Science says:

Give some physicists a collection of classical literature, and what do you get? If the New Journal of Physics is to be believed, a discussion of Zipf’s law, Heap’s law, and phrases like “The estimated γ values are consistent with a monotonic decrease from 2 to 1 with increasing text length.” The gist of the matter seems to be that authors introduce new words into their works with a frequency that remains stable across all of their output, regardless of how their subject matter or styles change over the course of their literary development.

*Yes, I know it protects local publishers in the same way the parallel import restrictions are meant to. For those who aren’t aware: the right to publish printed book is leased off the author on a region-by-region basis, which gives the publishers in each region the ability to cash in on the big sellers, as opposed to one publisher in one region getting all the dough. This in turn lets them support the vast majority of authors who do not make the bestseller list. The same logic applies to electronic books: if the first publisher of a book is able to snatch up worldwide digital rights, they get all the profit from the ebook sales – not a huge problem now, but will become a problem as the ebook market grows. However, this traditional approach is not useful for readers in countries like Australia who are being shut out of the ebook market because the local publishers are apparently failing to act on electronic rights, nor does it help the authors who are losing out on international ebook sales.

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Categories Reading fiction, Writing news

Best way to read using Stanza

September 10, 2009 //
6

I’m a great fan of Stanza, as regular readers may have gathered. Stanza, for those who don’t know (so, how is life under that rock, anyway?), is an application which lets you read books on your iPod Touch or iPhone. It, and applications like it, is at least partly responsible for the surge in ebook reading being reported by industry lately: it has two million users (well, downloaders, anyway) and more trying it out all the time.

The little screen may seem off-putting to some of those new users, so here is my best tip for getting the most out of reading on the iPhone/iPod Touch.

One, turn off your wireless access. This seems to make the battery last longer.

Two, open Stanza, load the book you want to read, and adjust the font a couple of notches up (or down). You can also optionally fiddle with other settings.

Three, turn the Touch on its side so that the screen rotates. This best replicates the page-line length of a printed book and eases the eyes.

Keep reading this entry for more detailed instructions. If you want to know more about ebooks in general, check out this page. If you’re all over ebooks and have a tip for me on reading on Stanza, let me know in the comments.
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Categories Writing tips and techniques

Writing round

July 6, 2009 //
0

*** Blog on hiatus – two weeks ***

The Chronicle Review features an article on reading a book in four different ways (hard copy, audiobook, dedicated ebook reader [Kindle], and iPhone reader [eReader]). You can also hear the writer discuss her experiment at ABC’s Book Show. Big call: she says iPhone is the Kindle-killer. I concur. There’s a reason Amazon bought Stanza and has made Kindle-purchased books available on the iPhone…

I really liked this: “Tomorrow’s readers will immerse themselves in their favorite books…based on deeper needs. It will be just the sort of seamless decision we make every day when we decide whether we will place a phone call, send an e-mail message or text message or photo or video, handwrite a note, or make a personal visit.” Nice.

Um, David Eddings died. A month ago. That bit of news just whipped right past me.

The biweekly Writing World newsletter features a good article about midlisting in its first July newsletter. It kind of matches what I’ve been saying about writing and commercial success lately, except the professional writers interviewed here are do move with market trends – but they have the contacts that let them know what those market trends are in advance. New writers without contacts are going to struggle to do that, but the rest of it – be prolific and flexible, have a very thick skin, and understand that most writers won’t be massive bestsellers but can still make a living – is all good advice. Read it in the archives.

So, who DOESN’T look at a screwdriver and thinks ooh, this could be little more sonic? Captain Jack Harkness, that’s who. Torchwood’s back on tonight in the UK.

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Categories Writing news

Writing round

January 11, 2009 //
0

Well, I said ebooks need to be cheaper to get the new format(s) to take off, and lo! Orbit Publishing is now offering a $1 ebook per month, available from an impressive array of ebook providers, ie all of the big ones including Amazon, Fictionwise and Stanza (which is powered by Fictionwise anyway).

Also in that post, I said copyright protection hurts more than it helps and should be dropped, because it is complicated and intimidating to normal users, and that pirates were never going to pay for the product in the first place – they want it free or not at all (I can see this with the google searches for ‘[book title] free pdf’ that sometimes hit on my site; it’s not like they were searching for the legit version and accidentally found a pirated version, they were never going to pay).

And lo!, right again – bow before the power of my prescience! – in a way…Apple is dropping copyright protection on the songs sold through iTunes. Hopefully this trend will spread to other digital entertainment media.

Hopefully also, Apple won’t continue to charge to upgrade their purchased music: they charge 50c per song to upgrade previously-bought protected songs to iTunes Plus (DRM-free). But if I had just waited until Plus became available before buying, I would have only paid between 0c to 30c – that’s right, they charge more if you bought early. If they do this now with every song I’ve bought, the cost will be onerous (and very annoying, since barely two weeks ago I bought myself three albums – if only I had held off a little longer instead of giving myself a Christmas treat…). Perhaps in my recent post on how to choose your hourly rate, I should have pointed out the need to not punish your regular clients/early adopters with random pricing bands.

Digression over. Electronic books have actually been big in Asia for some time: one explanation I read is that the trains are just so crowded you can’t even open a paperback (let alone a newspaper), so being able to read ebooks on a screen was adopted quick-smart. I read this in an airline magazine, where I also read that Barbara Bush was paid a stupid amount of money to not divorce George W until after the elections, so take it with a grain of salt. But you can see evidence of the early adoption on iTunes, where very many of the ereader/book apps for iPhone/Touch are Asia-orginated or focused.

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Categories Writing news

Writing round

December 7, 2008 //
0

Malcolm Gladwell, of The Tipping Point and Blink fame, has released a new book, Outliers: The Story of Success which discusses the (obvious) idea of genius as a mix of an initial attraction plus a hell of a lot of hard work. The excerpts I have read raise the idea of the ’10,000 hours’ of practice that are required to truly excel at something (anything), using the examples of musicians and computer programmers. What’s interesting is the intermingling of having an aptitude or passion for something, working at it obsessively – but who could commit themselves to 10,000 hours of effort (10 years at three hours a day) without some level of aptitude or passion in the first place? – plus a dose of luck, which together translate into what we call talent or success – including in fiction writing. Read more about it here and here.

I think all writers can use a reminder now and again that no one gets a free ride with the talent – everyone has to work hard. Of course, then there’s Stephen King’s opinion, from On Writing:

…while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

…which I suppose saves all the trouble of those 10,000 hours, if you were aiming for great…

More news on everybody’s favourite ebook reader, Stanza: the Little iPhone/Touch App That Could has now done a deal with Fictionwise to overcome format/DRM issues. I think you’ll still need wi-fi for file transfer though.

Speaking of ereaders for the iPhone/iPod Touch, last week I mentioned BeamItDown; this week, it’s Bookshelf. Unlike Stanza, it costs to get this ereader application. I’m not sure what advantage it has over the free Stanza app; it may read more formats. Meanwhile, these guys are publishing comic books – search for Uclick in the iTunes store, or browse App Store – Books.

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Categories Writing news

Writing round

November 30, 2008 //
2

The dates for next year’s Perth Writing Festival have been released: Fri 27 Feb – Mon 2 March 2009. Full program will be out in late January but I’m very excited to see Sebastian Barry is coming. Not that I’ll be in Perth then. But still. I adored his touching and beautifully-told novel A Long Long Way, an Irish perspective of World War I in the context of Home Rule (Irish soldiers treated as traitors by their own people for fighting an ‘English’ war, and by the English because of the politics going on back home).

Regular readers will know of my love for Stanza, an ebook reader for iPhone and iPod Touch. Now there’s another one: BeamItDown. The name (not especially intuitive to trying to remember it, I have to say) refers to its delivery system: instead of statically delivering the text and having you click to ‘turn’ the page, it scrolls the text down the page like a teleprompter, or indeed, like a scroll.

Currently, you can buy public domain book collections very cheaply (eg the Jane Austen collection for $2.49), or try the software free on The Christmas Carol or T’was the Night Before Christmas. I don’t know if they intend to roll it out for mainstream/modern ebooks (it may perhaps require yet another format), but certainly they are frequently adding more and more classics. Even if the ‘unique selling point’ of the scrolling doesn’t grab you, it’s a useful way to experiment with reading on your iPod/Touch if you don’t have the WiFi transfer capability that Stanza requires.

While I’m talking about book-related things for the iPod/Touch, LibriVox are doing wonderful things in turning public domain books into chapter-by-chapter Audiobook Podcasts in iTunes. Listen to the classics, or volunteer your time to record chapters.

NaNoWriMo finishes today. This collective keyboard-bashing effort has been going for ten years. Professional writers tend to look down their nose at it, with some justification, since it does minimise the skill and craft of writing in favour of the word count (quantity over quality) and I can see how some professionals would be offended by that. There’s also the risk that the high pressure of it could persuade some potential writers that it’s all too hard and cut them down before they ever get started.

On the other hand, writing is one of those professions that both fascinates people and that plenty of people think they can do, so why not encourage a try at it in a supportive environment (if nothing else, maybe they’ll be a bit more respectful afterwards). I did it in 2003 and found it useful for teaching me that I can write to a word count even when dropdead exhausted from a long day at work, so I would never completely discount its value. What makes me shudder is when successful finishers casually say they plan to give it a last quick proofread and send it off to a publisher tomorrow. Poor, poor slushpile.

The Bad Sex in Fiction Award winner was announced during the week. Excerpts from the shortlist can be read here. Let that be a lesson to you, writers: “weeping orifice” is not necessarily all that attractive in a sex scene, and perhaps avoid the “like devoted siblings” metaphors.

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Categories Writing news

Stanza for the iPhone or iPod Touch: affordable ebook reader

October 30, 2008 //
8

I’m a big supporter of the somewhat shaky ebook revolution (as you might expect, given my books are primarily electronic, with the printed version available as an afterthought). However, up until now I did not own any ebook reader device.

One, they’re not widely available in Australia (we’re not getting the Kindle any time soon, that’s for sure; neither is Libya, where I currently live), and two, they’re phenomenally expensive for something that does just the one thing. I know this is something that has put off many people (the other major factor being the entirely understandable attachment to tactile books).

Apple to the rescue! Or more accurately, Lexcycle to the rescue, with their wonderful Stanza application for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. One free download from the iTunes store to my partner’s ever-versatile Touch, and all of a sudden, we have an ebook reader that can handle pdfs and all the ebook ‘standards’ (when there’s five or six formats, you can’t really claim a standard).

Two caveats: one, you need wi-fi internet to transfer books over to the iPhone/Touch, and two, if you buy a lot of books through major ebook vendor Fictionwise, you may find you have protection issues – DRM problems – and will have to use their own ebook reader for iPhone or iPod Touch (find it in the iTunes store).

(Self-plug alert! My own book, After the Dragon is available in multi-format from Fictionwise and its associated sites (like ebookwise) and you won’t have any DRM issues.)

The other major factor slowing uptake of ebooks (aside from the love of the print version, expense of the reader, and the hassles with formats and DRM – I speak as an author here when I say, for the love of god, drop the protection, it just interferes with honest folks’ ease of use; pirates were never going to pay for the product in the first place)…where was I (damn these long-winded bracketed asides)? Oh yes, the other major barrier is the cost of ebooks themselves, which is usually the same or or not much less than the cost of the printed book.

The biggest cost of producing a book is in printing, distribution and delivery (you’d think paying the writer would be a major cost but no). For the price of a paperback book, at least half of that goes to the bookstore (real-life or online store); of the rest, a fair proportion is the cost of printing the book and storing it or getting it to the store’s warehouse so they can sell it to you. Ebooks take those costs away (‘distributing’ it – hosting it on a online bookstore’s website – still costs significantly).

Now, publishers point out the labour costs associated with producing an ebook in up to eight (eight! Tell me again there’s a ‘standard’) different formats. To which I say: that’s an upfront one-off cost for the title, same as preparing the print file (also, if your labour costs are that high when producing different versions of an electronic file, you need to look into automation procedures, my friend), whereas printing and distribution costs are per copy of a printed book, not per title.

Yes, ebooks aren’t free to produce, but once produced, they have minimal additional cost – except for the advertising and distribution, and maybe publishers need to be honest and admit that instead of crying pity on labour costs (after all, the most labour comes from the author, and yet they’re not seeing any additional royalties from ebooks; I’m talking about major publishers, I have a fair deal with my own small publisher).

And let’s not leave the distributors out of my sweeping condemnation: since online bookstores have reduced physical warehousing, leasing and stocking costs, they could probably re-think their pricing structure to give ebooks a fair chance.

It’s time ebook prices started reflecting the savings, especially if the fledgling industry is to follow the music industry into the bright shiny age of bits.

(Self-plug alert! After the Dragon is available for $4 or less from Fictionwise, Books for a Buck or Amazon Kindle – my money’s where my mouth is on this issue: ebooks should be substantially cheaper than printed books).

I don’t think ebooks are going to beat out print books: I think they should be an easy way of reading a book and then deciding if it’s worth getting the print version (there’s plenty of books I’ve read for free out of the library and then bought my own copy; the same process works with ebooks). They’re convenient, especially for travellers and holiday-makers; they’re good for the environment (iffy argument; the ereader is pretty damaging to produce in the first place – but then that’s why a multi-function device like the iPhone is great); they don’t take up physical space; they’re economical (or should be); they can be borrowed from public libraries (maybe not yet in Australia) or paid online libraries…

…and they can be read on your iPhone or iPod Touch with Stanza.

Added Nov 23 2008: Books on Board have now added instructions for buying their Stanza-compatible books directly in the iPhone or iPod Touch (but you’ll still need a wi-fi connection to be able to get to the website).

Added Sep 16 2009. This is a very popular entry. If you want to know the best way to read a book on Stanza, click here.

***shameless self-promotion***

My books are cheap, DRM-free, and not limited to any region. Check them out if you like character-driven fantasy fiction, or if you’re moving overseas and want some organisational help, or if you just want a cheap and easy way to try out Stanza or another ebook reader.


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Categories Authors, Book reviews, The philosophy of writing
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