TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Richard Herley’ Category

By David Rothman

Who doesn’t like the idea of shareware books? Download ‘em for free. Pay up only if a writer gives you a good read.

A gifted U.K. novelist named Richard Herley—and, yes I’ve read The Penal Colony and can vouch for his talent—bravely tried such an experiment. You bet I cheered him on. I wanted my skepticism toward shareware books to be wrong, and I gave Richard ample exposure. Manybooks.net and Feedbooks did the same.

11K downloads but just 25 payers

So what are the results of the experiment after three months? Despite 11,000 downloads of The Penal Colony and other titles, Richard got paid by a mere 25 people for 89 books. I’m sure that some writers may thrive with shareware, but I wonder how many. Yes, as I keep noting, there often can be a relationship between the quality of literature and whether and how much people get paid. Rob Preece, by the way, the owner of BooksForABuck.com, also found that shareware just didn’t pay off.

Now pondering “the logic of writing fiction”

As for Richard, he tells me the sorry results have “made me ponder the logic of writing fiction at all. Writing is hard and lonely work, and is, by and large, poorly remunerated.”

Perhaps an author will write the first novel in a burst of inspiration, but sooner or later, as has been pointed out on the eBook Community list, the, er, content provider’s family will demand an accounting of his or her time. Furthermore, as I see it, shareware programs can be more easily converted into commercial products than can novels.

No shareware/POD nirvana

Also, let me note that print-on-demand novels are the longest of shots, and I just don’t see a shareware/POD mix as a viable business model in most cases for fiction. Marion Gropen, an expert on the business side of publishing, would almost surely agree. So do self-publish POD fiction for satisfaction, but not for money. Richard’s novels were not available POD, as far as I know, but I wonder if it really would have been worth the trouble, financially. Feel free to speak up to the contrary!

In Richard’s own words

Verbatim, here’s what Richard wrote me: “I’m sorry not to have been in touch for so long, but I have lost my enthusiasm for e-publishing and indeed publishing in general. You may be interested to hear the results of my experiment. My site opened in mid February, and since then, in conjunction with Feedbooks and Manybooks, at least 11,000 ebooks have been downloaded. An unknown quantity has also been distributed via newsgroups and bit torrents.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

By David Rothman

Windows Live Writer is a great way to create and edit blog entries, but at least for WordPress, authors’ bylines don’t show up except in a menu item you need to look for. The default byline is mine.

Just now, alas, to my horror, I noticed that my byline rather than Richard Herley’s was on the stellar Q&A with Matt McClintock of Manybooks.net. Was mine there from the start, or did the software burp later on?

At any rate, without any prompting from Richard, whom I mentioned in the tags, I’ve fixed the glitch, and I’m posting this notice here to make sure that everyone knows who did such a good job. Sorry, Richard!

Just for that, you get a special plug for your prize-winning Stone Arrow and the rest of your site, including your downloads page (shareware model in use). When people write for the TeleBlog, it’s imperative they enjoy proper credit!

Note: The Stone Arrow is also downloadable from Feedbooks and, yes, Manybooks.net. Ahead I’ll repro the blurb from the first edition:

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Popularity: 3% [?]

By Richard Herley

Today TeleRead talks to Matthew McClintock, the spirit behind manybooks.net. Matt is the Director of Web Services for Columbia College, Chicago, the largest arts and media college in the U.S.; manybooks is one of his private interests.

Q. Can you please tell us about the genesis of manybooks.net? Does it have anything to do with “satisfying both my nostalgia and my burning desire to become a total geek,” to cut ‘n’ paste a line from your personal Web site?

Loves gizmos, e-reading—and well-organized collections

A. My reasons for starting may be different from the various reasons I have for continuing, but the short answer is that I love reading; I like gadgets; and it’s hard to browse collections of etexts in the way you browse a library or bookstore, if you’re surrounded by unfamiliar authors and titles.

It would be interesting to run a poll and discover what visitors to manybooks.net find most useful, but I can tell you what I’ve tried to add to the texts made available by Project Gutenberg and others: categorization, special formats, and some links between books of a series. I’ve also tried to make the individual files seem more like books, with cover art and publication dates.

How Matt started

So, how did I get started? I read P.G.’s Mirroring How-To then downloaded the DVD, eventually figured out rsync, and … well, it’s an ongoing process. Suffice it to say I became enmeshed in figuring out how to convert text files into a variety of different formats for different devices, so that folks who weren’t inclined (or who couldn’t figure it out) could read a book or two.

The first thing I did was set up a few Palm PDA formats, since that was what I used at the time. Doc, iSilo, Plucker, each with their own requirements and display capabilities. I’ve added new formats over time, most of which I’ve used myself, at least for a little while. I like having a variety of things to read with me at all times. That’s a big motivator – the huge selection of different kinds of fiction that I can carry with me; I’ll never be bored again (if the battery holds out!).

PHPH, MySQL among other draws

This feels like we’re getting further and further away from an answer to your question – I keep finding myself back at “I like to read” and “Gutenberg was hard to browse”, but that seems unnecessarily critical of the wonderful PG, and it doesn’t touch on what really got manybooks rolling. I liked the challenge, it was easy to mess about with PHP, and MySQL, and rsync, it didn’t cost anything, and I could learn a little. All good stuff. Plus I might help folks out a bit – both readers and authors, once I learned about Creative Commons.

Insurance against censorship

Q. It’s intriguing that information technology has reached the point where a single Mac Mini in a private house can deliver thousands upon thousands of books to readers all over the world. The Web has blown all our notions about conventional publishing, and the dissemination of knowledge, to smithereens. Once someone has downloaded a file from Project Gutenberg, or indeed from manybooks, there is no knowing how many further copies are made and read. That’s got to be a good thing for everybody. The more informed and educated the populace, the less chance there is of it being tyrannized. Do you have any ideological motives for manybooks, or does it just appeal to your sympathies for the Open Source movement?

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Popularity: 4% [?]

By David Rothman

  Will Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” strategy work for writers and others? I’m skeptical, and so is John Scalzi (photo).

Condensed and in Scalzi’s words, the counter-arguments are:

1. “Gathering a thousand true fans is harder than it looks.

2. “The available universe of ‘true fans’ is not the entire US (or the entire Internet), but the subset of those who are willing/able to spend a significant sum of money on a single creative person.

3. “Artists are likely competing for ‘true fans.’

4 . “‘True Fans’ may not stay true fans.

5. “Just because a ‘true fan’ spends $100 on you doesn’t mean you get $100. Remember those really excellent folks who spent $250 to buy a lettered limited edition of one of my books? Well, most of that money goes somewhere else other than my pocket—mostly to the publisher, who, to be fair, did have to pay to produce the book (I’m okay with this, incidentally).”

Moderator’s note: In the near future, Richard Herley will reveal how he’s doing with the literary equivalent of shareware. Are the donations pouring in? It should be an interesting test of one fan-oriented business model. Remember, Richard is a prize-winning novelist of SF, fantasy and other genres—who, as I can attest after reading The Penal Colony, writes first-rate, compelling prose. Furthermore, he has enjoyed good play on public domain sites such as Manybooks.net and Feedbooks.

Popularity: 5% [?]

By Richard Herley

David has invited me to highlight some of the freely available files at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere. May I kick off with a work I have contributed myself, under my given rather than my fiction-writing name?

It is an electronic edition of the first three books of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, an epic poem first published in 1590-6 and one of the chief glories of the English language. The painting shown here is “Una and the Lion” by Briton Rivière; Lady Una, representing Truth, is among Spenser’s main characters in this allegory, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth 1. You can download the Faerie Queen text itself from Project Gutenberg (here) or Manybooks.net (here), or read Mary Macleod’s 1916 prose version.

Origin of the edition

In 1989, together with an ex-university friend, I formed a company to prepare CD-ROMs for tertiary teaching of English. Using hypertext and similar newfangled gizmos, these were to make studying English literature a breeze. But the price of CD-ROMs collapsed and so did our business.

Our first venture was The Faerie Queene. This was in the age before reliable OCR, so I typed out the text, proofing it against a facsimile edition. Then I “translated” Edmund Spenser’s original into a modern English parallel or “shadow text,” supplying context-sensitive notes and definitions of difficult words. EMACS automated much of this work.

Electronic publication permits the sprawling size of a text like this: it is too big to be printed.

User interface

As programmed in 1990 by my colleague, the beta was a delight. The reader could adopt the font used in the 1596 quarto edition, even switching on or off the old-style “long s.”

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Popularity: 5% [?]

By David Rothman

Oh how I’d hate it if TeleRead weren’t a global e-book blog. Where would we be without posts from Branko Collin in Amsterdam or others such as Carol Jurd in Adelaide or Ficbot in Toronto—or, now, Richard Herley, the prize-winning novelist whose essays reach us from a village in the Hampshire Downs in the U.K., an area shown in the photo?

But no course requirements, no academic details, bedevil us. What about institutions? How can degrees be more similar in a number of places—not just Europe or the United States but also cash-strapped developing countries? And can open source software and the right library resources, including, yes, well-stocked national digital library systems, help? Not to mention OLPC-style computers and variants that can display e-books well.

The World in Your Library conference

Such topics will come up Friday at an all-day conference called The World in Your Library: International Users and International Librarians: Enriching the Academic Experience, and I’ll be among the speakers along with another name familiar to TeleBlog regulars, Wayan Vota of OLPC News. If you’ll be attending and want to say hello, just shoot me an e-mail. Wayan and I will be part of a 3-4:30 p.m. program and demo XOs afterwards, although we’ll be there all day. Beyond the librarians, I’m also looking forward to meeting Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation. The event is part of the LACUNY Institute series from the Library Association of the City University of New York.

Where the TeleBlog is weak: We need more contributors from developing countries, such as David Ajao, who wrote about e-books on mobile phones in Africa. E-mail me if you’re working to popularize e-books there and want to write about successes—or challenges.

Popularity: 7% [?]

By David Rothman

“Recently, I learned about a new e-book program dedicated to kids called kidthing.com. Kidthing is a digital media platform that is designed to bring interactive books, movies, and games to children. Kidthing, in conjunction with Dr. Seuss Enterprises and NEA’s Read Across America, is giving away an animated version of Horton Hears a Who, one of my daughter’s favorite stories. I downloaded the program and the free ebook. It was a great experience.” - Jane, at DearAuthor,  writing on the glories of freebies and suggesting that romance publishers experiment with them.

The TeleRead take: Speaking of trying and buying, later this today we’ll be publishing an essay by U.K. novelist Richard Herley—on the Net’s effect on author-agent-publisher roles. Richard recently posted his books online as shareware.

Popularity: 9% [?]

By David Rothman

Richard Herley, the author of The Penal Colony and other novels, including The Stone Arrow, which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, will contribute to the TeleBlog from time to time. Welcome, Richard!

For the benefit of latecomers, let it be known Richard is generously making his books available as shareware under a Creative Commons license. Pay him if you enjoy the reads!

Sony Reader owner

Meanwhile Sony Reader owners will be pleased to learn that Richard is among them–he reads off a PRS-500 that a friend got him in the States.

Richard’s bio follows: "I am English, born in 1950, educated at the local grammar school and Sussex University, where I trained as a scientist but realized I wanted to be a professional writer. My first published novel appeared in 1978; the film rights to my fourth, a thriller released in 1987, sold to Gale Anne Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens) and the movie actually got made (No Escape, 1994). I lost heart from the late eighties and had no further will to expose myself to the industry. However, in 2000 I completed another thriller, which I am now revising for publication online. To her puzzlement my agent was unable to place it, but publishing was changing, the caravan had moved on, and I was left behind.

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