TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Steve Jordan’ Category

By Steve Jordan

A recent law journal essay referenced on this site examined Digital Rights Management and its impact on the e-book industry.

DRM, the essay said, is counter to the precepts of open-source development in computer hardware and software, thereby hindering innovation and slowing technological progress in the e-book industry.

The implicit assumption is that open-source is good for innovation in the computer industry in general, and especially in the e-book industry. But is it? Has open source been a positive influence on e-book development? Or has open source itself hindered the progress of e-books, DRM notwithstanding?

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By Paul Biba

Our regular contributor, Steve Jordan, usually known for his science fiction books, has taken a leap into a new area and has just published a drm-free ebook about the history of ebooks. Here’s the blurb from his site, where it is available for $4.00:

This book sheds light on a perfect storm of publishers, corporations, professionals, amateurs, dogmas, movements and beliefs, all of which worked either unintentionally or deliberately to forestall the coming of the e-book for over two decades. And it details which of these elements is still going strong and continuing to hold back e-books. At last, you’ll learn how badly e-books have had the cards stacked against them, and why.

This is a book on interpretations and personal observations of the e-book industry, from years of walking parallel with the industry before actually becoming a part of it.

By Paul Biba

It’s nice to see our regular contributors getting some notice. Steve was interviewed recently by The New York Times and nowThe Tainted Archive has just published an interview. It’s quite a comprehensive job. Here’s how they describe Steve:

Steve Jordan is a pioneer, he is blazing a trail across the digital landscape with his successful E-publishing venture, Steve Jordan books. So well known is he becoming that the New York Times recently interviewed him for a feature looking at the biggest revolution in books since the invention of the printing press. His web-site not only features his own work but offers a detailed look into the entire digital publishing industry. Find Steve’s website HERE and sit back and enjoy our chat with this 21st century man.

By Paul Biba

Yes, that’s right and congratulations to Steve!! Let’s hope it creates a huge run on his website. Here’s a short excerpt from the article, Before Choosing an E-Book, Pondering the Format by Peter Wayner.

Steve Jordan, a self-published science fiction novelist, has to make lots of decisions. Although most of them involve plot points, narrative arcs and character development, Mr. Jordan has the added burden of deciding how to deliver the stories he creates to his online audience. …

“I’m already selling six different formats on my Web site,” Mr. Jordan said. “If they have a particular format they prefer, they can usually get it from me.”

By Steve Jordan

OEB (epub) logo created by Steve Jordan

For quite some time now, fans of the Open E-book format, OEB, or ePub, have been begging to see some serious branding and marketing of the OEB format in public and commercial circles. It is the feeling of many that pushing the brand out there will get more people in-line with ePub, which is already on the way to becoming an international e-book format standard.

However, no branding, promotion or logos have been forthcoming from the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), creators of ePub. This has left many of us OEB fans seeking ways of contributing to the effort of branding ePub, and being the design-minded person that I am, I have been toying with a brand logo for the OEB format for a while now. My work has finally resulted in a logo which I will start using on SteveJordanBooks.com, wherever the ePub format is offered.

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By Steve Jordan

The author at rest.

The e-book market of 2009 has had one overriding concern throughout the industry: Can customers read this book? The issue isn’t one of literacy, availability or accessibility… it is one of format. Specifically, a question of the many, many e-book formats competing for dominance in the industry.

When e-books first appeared, it seemed there was almost a format for every e-book. Individuals created their own idea of the ideal e-book format, and custom-crafted readers to translate those formats. New devices, capable of reading e-books, soon had new e-book reading applications designed for them, and new formats optimized for those new devices. After about twenty years, many formats have fallen by the wayside, while certain formats have become overridingly popular in particular regions, or with particular subjects and genres. But the present result is almost a dozen commonly-used e-book formats, none of which can claim real dominance over the others.

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By David Rothman

The Solomon Scandals, my Washington novel published by Twilight Times Books as a paperback and e-book, will be discussed 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, July 28, a week later than scheduled earlier.

Tom Peters, a trained academic librarian, will interview me for  Online Programming for All Libraries and also accept questions from others. Anyone can participate. See a quick description of the book (obsolete date listed) and how-to details for the chat.

The latest Scandals review is from Brad’s Reader.

If you’d like to mention your own book in the comments section of this post, be my guest. Links welcome, including purchasing info. All I ask is that the book be suitable for public libraries here in the States. Meanwhile, I’ll remind people of SF writings by Steve Jordan, a regular TeleRead contributor. His latest book is The Lens, shown here.

And speaking of Solomons: You can download PDF freebies of Japan in a Nutshell, Coney Island, How to Make the Most of a Flying Saucer Experience and The Book of King Solomon and How to Find Lost Objects, by a Harvard grad who uses Prof. Solomon as a pen name.

By Paul Biba

David and I had a great time at the MobileRead meet up. Here are a couple of shots of various readers in Nate the Great’s impressive collection.

MobileRead’s policy is not to publish pictures of its members—to ensure their privacy—so I haven’t included any other pictures here. Kaz won an autographed copy of David’s book The Solomon Scandals and Nate won a CD from Steve Jordan with his latest SF book.

It was great fun to put some faces to the names I’ve been reading all these years.

By Paul Biba

That’s the title of a new philosophical essay that contributor Steve Jordan published on his site today. You might like to take a look. Here’s an excerpt:

E-books are in a unique position of being able to stand at the forefront of the Digital Revolution, alongside digital music and other media. All digital media, in fact, share similar issues that must overcome the painful transition from scarce commodity to abundant commodity. But if those issues are overcome, they will be applicable to most other products of the Digital Revolution, smoothing the transition to other products, and aiding the development of whole new concepts of what a digital-era commodity is.

The state of our world, after the full adoption of the Digital Revolution, will likely be as unrecognizable to those of us alive today as the Industrial Revolution would have been to the farmers of the fifteenth century. The commerce of literature could also evolve into something we can barely understand today. But considering the value the world can derive, from a Digital Revolution poised to spread knowledge, entertainment and enlightenment around the world, who would we be to stand in its way?

By Steve Jordan

Yes, the seeming flood of articles, comments, complaints, perspectives and rants about the Amazon Kindle has me feeling like Jan Brady listening to everyone gush about her big sister Marsha! The Kindle has become the e-book device everyone wants to talk about—well, everyone who just recently discovered e-books, anyway. Like the iPod is to mp3 music, and now the iPhone is to cellphones, the Kindle is rapidly becoming synonymous with e-books to a major segment of the public, and publishers and manufacturers are beginning to center their attention on it as well. (In fact, substitute “iPod” or “iPhone” for “Kindle” in the title, and the same premise applies.) Anything being done with e-books must now work on the Kindle. It must be in the Kindle store, or it is nowhere. The Kindle is the device to compete against, to emulate, to beat, or just to look like, because, well, it IS e-books.

But therein lies the rub: It ISN’T e-books. Not by a long shot. I am not saying the Kindle is a bad device, but that it’s only a single dedicated-use device, sold by a single company, designed to read a single format of e-books. Other dedicated devices abound (many more than there are Brady siblings), available in many outlets online and on the street, and many of which can read multiple popular formats of e-books (including the format the Kindle reads). Many e-book formats are also capable of being read on non-dedicated devices, like computers, laptops, UMPCs, cellphones, PDAs, blackberries, iPods, Playstations… the list of devices capable of reading e-books is huge.

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By a TeleBlog Contributor

Editor’s note:  I received an essay by e-mail from Steve Jordan, author and TeleRead contributor, who, by the way, will be posting it eventually in a different form on his Web site. Thanks, Steve! – Paul Biba.

I’ve just released my latest novel, The Lens, into the wild as an e-book, making my count of self-published novels an even dozen.

And as I have on previous occasions, I find myself asking, “Do I feel that all the work I put in—all the trouble of creating a story, preparing it for availability, putting it online, monitoring and crossing my fingers—was worth it?

Different authors have different answers to that question, because it depends on a lot of personal factors: How much of the work of e-book preparation do you have to do?  Do you have others employed (or contracted) to do that for you?  Do you have a publisher or contract to go through?  Do the positive aspects of e-books outweigh the negatives?  Are you skilled in the areas that require your extra input?  Or do you simply not want to bother?  And finally, do you get any satisfaction (emotional, financial, or otherwise) from the whole thing?

Many authors wouldn’t even consider the process I go through to produce a single novel… in fact, some may consider everything other than the actual writing as “beneath them.”  Others simply consider it to be unworthy of their time.  Maybe the difference comes in my point of view: I do not imagine myself as an artist who does one thing extraordinarily, and leaves others to fill in the gaps; rather, I consider myself a craftsman with a wide skill-set, and I apply all of my skills to the task of creating credible and professional material on my own.

In my case, that means that I am the sole producer of every aspect of my novels, from the text (obviously), to the cover, the marketing (the selling Web site, and entries in various Web sites and forums), copyright arrangements, the conversion process, decisions about product (pricing, formats and DRM), PayPal accounts, payment scripts, and the maintenance of the whole kit and caboodle.   As you can imagine, after I finish a novel, I still have a lot of work to do, every bit of which must be done by me, or the novel isn’t going out at all.

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By David Rothman

You already know the drill. The brother-in-law of a local newspaper reporter gets a Kindle or Sony Reader. Bingo! Ms. or Mr. Journalist has just discovered e-books. And from there, in most cases, it’s more or less a formula. Check in with the local librarians. Get a quote from a bookstore owner about how nothing will ever replace p-books. Drop the names of Stephen King or a few other best-selling writers who’ve tried E. Maybe write up the technical and business details of a local novelist’s adventures with e-books. Story done.

Over at the Washington City Paper, however, Ted Scheinman, an online producer, took another route and reviewed e-books as he would any other books—a task for which he’s eminently well credentialed as an English and classics graduate of Yale. Mike Riggs, another reviewer, joined in. Credit Read an E-Book Week (March 8-14) for the reviews and the accompanying intro to e-books, complete with the catchy image of the writer at work.

The result? Kindle in the Wind: Who needs agents and traditional publishing houses when there are e-books? Scheinman writes up The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel,as well as short stories by Quinton Peterson, both a D.C. cop and recognized writer. Riggs handles Psaurian: A Novel of Semi-Intelligent Design—written by Donald Carr and e-distributed by Smashwords, the topic of a recent Q & A by Kat Meyer. He also writes up As the Mirror Cracks, by Steve Jordan, a contributor to TeleRead and MobileRead as well as a talented Web designer. I’ll let other the writers review their reviews if they’re inclined. Here are a few snippets from the write-up on Scandals:

“…we get to relish his chatty first-person narrator spinning characterizations of D.C. with the same dark zeal Hammett held for Frisco or Chandler had for Los Angeles… It’s hard to call an e-book a page-turner—novels like The Solomon Scandals require a new word.”

Hey, I’ll go along with that. Please note that Scheinman objected to some “some of the hardboiled constructions” in Scandals and also said it could have gotten off to a faster start. But, hey, that’s life in Novel Land. Since when have writers and reviewers agreed on everything? All in all, a most thoughtful and astute review. I especially liked Scheinman’s reference to my “preoccupation with obsolescence.” Yes. That just might be the bridge between Scandals and my fight against DRM and for ePub.

A few more details: Scandals is isn’t just an e-book but also a trade paperback, from Twilight Times Books, which is a small press as opposed to a publishing service or vanity publisher.

And a Smashword update: As long as I’m mentioning our Q&A on the company. I’m pleased to report that Smashwords is now running images of book covers when they’re available, and I’m hoping that a whole bunch will soon be visible from the top of the home page.

And a suggestion for Read an E-Book Week: Next year, why not use the City Paper write-up as a template for other local newspapers? Most every large city has some e-book writers lurking around. Make life easier for the press and discover them ahead of time. Along the way, encourage the newspapers actually to run reviews. treating e-books seriously as the City Paper did.