TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Robert Nagle’ Category

By Robert Nagle

I have one question for Netflix. I need an answer. If you click on the movie metadata, you can see other films by the same director or cast member. Why on earth would Netflix not also let you browse by the name of the script writer? They don’t even list it in the metadata.

I remember reading somewhere that in Shakespeare’s time his plays were very famous, and people associated them mainly with the   actors who played the leads – but nobody had  never heard of Shakespeare’s name. Shakespeare wasn’t exactly hiding his identity; in fact he published poetry widely under his name.  Looking back, it seems unbelievable that fans didn’t see what Shakespeare had accomplished in the theatre.  

Maybe someday in the not-too-distant future nobody will know who Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise is, but will fondly remember Glen & Les Charles, Bryan Fuller,  Grant Naylor and Steven Mofatt. Those names don’t sound familiar? How typical. They’re some of the best script writers in the business – but none of them are listed on Netflix. (Thankfully, IMDB does list all of these people… as does Wikipedia).

By Robert Nagle

Some brief links I stumbled upon that grabbed me. Semi-related to publishing.

• 2 good articles about Web typography from Smashing Magazine: Best Practices and some usability tips. See also Richard Rudder’s elements of typographical style applied to the web.  Here’s also an article about font-stacks and embedded fonts.
• Joanna MacNeil on why teenagers read better than you and the new self-publishing: If I could enter Max Frisch’s “I’m Not Stiller” in a search engine and receive several recommendations of similar books, you bet I wouldn’t care if they’re self-published or not.
• Virginia Woolf: “Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.” (more…)

By Robert Nagle

I realize this is off-topic, but I have been working on a series of articles about Jamendo, a free and legal French music site that distributes over 29,000 creative commons albums. Over the last 3 years I have listened to 2200+ of the Jamendo’s 29,000 free music albums and chosen the best of the best for my article 11 Incredible Music Albums you can download for free.

The Jamendo concept is very interesting (I wrote about it for Teleread a few years ago). In many ways Jamendo has been doing a lot of things right from an audience point of view and from the standpoint of promoting individual artists; they just haven’t had as much success finding a sustainable business model for themselves,   Below are some insights gained by watching a musical community grow and asking about lessons learned which apply to literary communities. .

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By Robert Nagle

I’m busy figuring out cool things to get children for Christmas. (Alas, David, I should have written this post two weeks ago!) Feel free to share  your own ideas and recommendations.

• Book of Totally Irresponsible Science: 64 Daring Experiments for Young Scientists : fun book with lots of attitude. Burning ice! How to make a backyard volcano! I’ve thumbed through the book. It looks great!
• Phantom Tollbooth, a childhood favorite of mine, with nutty illustrations.
• Sita Sings the Blues, feature-length creative commons cartoon based on Hindi mythology. Free download.  It wouldn’t hurt to toss in some Charlie Chaplin, Popeye and Gulliver’s Travels.
• Cheapass Games. Lots of unusual and original board games with minimal packaging.
• DVD of  Gods Must be Crazy & Gods Must be Crazy 2.  Kids love DVDs, and parents are always buying them the usual Disney/Baby Einstein crap. Gods is not only screamingly funny, but good clean fun and tangentially educational.
  By the way, this edition includes a poignant documentary about the Bushman actor who appeared in the original film. They visit his village and try to portray village life of the Bush people as realistically as possible. The highlight came when the film crew donated laptops to the village school, and the kids watched the original movie on the laptop. They loved it! 

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By Robert Nagle

Here’s an amazing TV commercial for Levi’s Jeans starring…. Walt Whitman! Click on image for larger view.

Yes, that’s his actual voice reading the 1888 poem America in this video poem/commercial.  Here’s another video poem for Whitman’s Pioneers from Leaves of Grass..this time read by actor Will Greer. (These pieces are directed by M. Blash of the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy).

Aja Gabel comments:

When I watch the commercials, I am convinced that I am the mistress of my own fate. I’m just not sure if I’m okay with that fate being sold to me for $40 a pair by a man who worked nearly his entire life to eschew the mainstream. If Whitman wore jeans, he wore them because they were the clothes of the rebellious, not because they were the affordable uniform of the pretty.

I’m actually all for corporations co-opting public domain images and sounds and stories. It’s good to have a lifeline to previous eras, good to see a contemporary rendering of an early poem. Perhaps it would be better if videographers did these kinds of reworking outside of ads  (so we don’t have to spend so much time guessing at the video’s hidden agenda).  What next – Emily Dickinson being used to sell deodorant?

By Robert Nagle

I recently wrote a 2 part series about green hosting companies and the environmental impact of data centers. Part 1  examines the challenges of trying to estimate the carbon footprint of a webhosting service or a data center. (In addition to discussing some known green hosting companies, I also talk about my unsuccessful attempts to figure out the carbon footprint of TeleRead).  Part 2 takes a look at how various data centers are attempting to improve their data efficiency and how the EPA plans to release a new Energy Star rating system for data centers in April 2010. Near the end I include a question: which action has a  bigger carbon footprint: ordering a book from Amazon.com or driving to the nearest Barnes and Noble to buy it?

For the record, the piechart of Rocky Mountain Power shows the  energy mix of Bluehost (which currently hosts Teleread):

Factoid: An Amazon.com data center designer  estimates that a 15 megawatt data center can "use up to 360,000 gallons of water a day."

See also my July article on Teleread  about books, ebooks and climate change my recent post about a sustainability expert’s opinion about ebooks.

Related: Designer Sean McDougall wonders if the geek’s desire to have the latest gadget  is contributing to the problem.  See Annie Leonard’s 20 minute Story of Stuff video about product lifecycles.

By Robert Nagle

Sustainability expert Don Carli on ebooks:

When subjected to “cradle-to-cradle ” Lifecycle Analysis eReading is not nearly as green as many naively assume it is.

There is no question that print media could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders and cell phones don’t grow on trees and their spiraling requirement for energy is unsustainable.

Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently there was little if any voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle “backstory” of digital media.

Sadly, print has come to be seen as a wasteful, inefficient and environmentally destructive medium, despite the fact that much of print media is based on comparatively benign and renewable materials. In addition, print has incredible potential to be a far more sustainable medium than it is today… and a truly digital medium as well. Despite its importance to business, government and society, print has been cast in the role of a dark old devil in decline. Digital media has been cast as the bright young savior on the rise.

In other news, Al Gore’s new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (which I am enjoying btw) is not available as an ebook. (To be fair, it has a lot of cool color  graphics). See also my July article about climate change and ebooks.

By Robert Nagle

Last week TeleRead editor David Rothman and I were strolling together around Old Town of Alexandria. We spent most of the time shooting the literary breeze and suddenly found ourselves in front of a chain bookstore (where a giant display of  Glen Beck awaited us). We walked through the aisles (making the usual snide remarks) and I mentioned  Daniel Stolar’s hilarious article about his unsuccessful attempt to persuade his local bookstore to carry his book. I also regaled David with stories about working at a chain bookstore in summer of  1997.  I found that job after working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Albania and being evacuated as a result of civil unrest. What follows are generous excerpts from a 1997 essay I wrote about that summer of working at a bookstore chain. By the way, if you like reading “insider accounts” of working at bookstores, be sure to check out Rick Klaw’s great Geeks with Books columns at SFSite.com .

In this land of abundance, value is underappreciated, underreported, underrepresented and yes, even undermined. Abundance is ultimately overwhelmed by triviality. One of my unpleasant jobs at my summer bookstore job was scanning each and every new book on the shelf with a computerized inventory gun. If the gun made a chirping noise, I would need to remainder (i.e. destroy) the book because it didn’t sell fast enough or didn’t justify the shelf space needed to stock extra copies of “More Chicken Soup for Idiots” or autobiographies “written” by half-literate basketball players.

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By Robert Nagle

Literary blogger M.A. Orthofer successfully predicted this year’s Nobel prize winner after noticing the web domain mail.Svenskaakademien.se in his referrer logs.

M.A. Orthofer’s Literary Saloon/Complete Review publishes lots of reviews of novels in translation. Therefore, it is not surprising that even the Nobel committee would end up using Complete Reviews as a reference. 

Here is the Herta Müller page at the complete review.  He summarizes the Romanian’ author’s appeal:

Pros:

• Lyric/poetic sense of language, in both poety and prose
• Brutally honest look at life in communist Romania

     Cons:

• Stories often hard to follow
• Tries to convey more through language than action
• The honest depictions can be depressing in their relentlessness

I expect in the future the Swedish Nobel committee will be more careful about their web surfing habits. That said, it is a sign of the importance that literary bloggers play in calling reader’s attention to new and overlooked texts.

To see wikipedia work its magic, check Müller’s page before the Nobel announcement and after the announcement. For the record, I just bought 3 books by Müller for 75 cents from Better World Books.

By Robert Nagle

Several literary communities have started with varying results. Here’s another addition to the mix.

Fictionaut (according to the announcement on the blog) is a burgeoning hub for a growing number of diverse literary scenes. I was a member when it was in private beta and have watched the community from afar. It has attracted a variety of contributions from new and established writers. Key features:

• a Save as PDF feature
• social networking features (contacts, bookmark, groups)
• a way to browse through members/contributors plus author profile pages
• a rich text editor, tags, and the option to choose creative commons licenses
• to see what a sample story page looks like, go to my attempt at fiction. 
• opportunity to make comments
• the ability to make a story as private (for members of private groups only to see it)
• an active blog that links to notable stories (plus publications of Fictionaut authors elsewhere). (This blog is well-written and gives links both inside and outside the Fictionaut community).
• a DIGG-like point system for recommending stories

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By David Rothman

When the TeleBlog upgraded to the latest WordPress, most people barely noticed—despite an “excuse our mess” notice from Robert Nagle.

Behind the scenes, however, Robert devoted many hours to the task from his place in Houston. He’s here in Alexandria, Virginia (second photo), now, part of his D.C.-area visit with friends, and we plan to walk along the Potomac and exchange some book chat—he’s a gifted writer as well as a tech guy, with an MFA from the prestigious program at Johns Hopkins.

Along with another volunteer, Brett Fielo, who supplies hosting services, Robert is truly our hero on internal technical matters. You might think of him if you’re looking for an experienced tech writer, assuming he isn’t already booked up. I know about Robert firsthand. Hey, how many blog owners will be getting cPanel documentation from a Hopkins MFA? And of course, don’t forget Brett as a possibility for Web services.

Meanwhile you can check out some quick thought from Robert on ePub, PDF and related matters. Among his tips for writers and publishers: Find out about “eScape, an OpenOffice template you can use to make .epub files.” What’s more, Robert notes, “Aspose Word for MS Word lets you save MS Word files as .epub.” Also think about plug-ins for DITA and DocBook (experimental). Your thoughts on these possibilities?

By Robert Nagle

Amazon.com is requiring Librarything to remove links to other booksellers on its book page On the bright side, it looks like LibraryThing is upgrading its interface and offering more features.  As a practical matter, I almost never did book hunting via librarything’s book page, especially because it didn’t list books on half.com (which usually had the cheapest prices).

Mike Cane notices that Google search results is now opening up PDFs directly  in Google Docs.

Aspose Word for MS Word lets you save MS Word files as .epub.  It’s a free plugin, and a cursory test seems to work with images. However, you still need to format MS Word docs very carefully.

Speaking of word processor plugins, here’s eScape, an  OpenOffice template you can use to make .epub files. Basically, the OO template loads a batch of designated styles, and a free downloadable Windows utility for handling the conversions.  They have a nice tutorial and a Style Reference Sheet (PDF). Again, this doesn’t eliminate the complexity of the task; you just have to understand the styles on the OO template which they provide. By the way, I noticed that they have a special style for verse. Nice!  The eScape interface lets you manually specify a different CSS file, so that gives you some control over layout. (The Infogrid Pacific people include two css files specifically for ebooks). (more…)