Sillybean

Doctor Who flyers

As you know, Bob, I work at Texas A&M University. Also, I spent a good chunk of February watching Doctor Who while battling the flu, and am newly caught up on all the inside jokes I’ve been missing for years.

Imagine my amusement, then, to see that someone’s posting Doctor-themed flyers around campus — specifically, on the windows of a building I pass several times a day.

Fezzes ARE cool.

Blackwashing

Sometimes I forget to discuss things here after I’ve mentioned them on Twitter. Sorry about that. Here’s a good one: you might want to check out Ben Aaronovitch’s books, Midnight Riot (or Rivers of London if you’re in the UK) and Moon Over Soho. They’re excellent. The premise is kind of a Dresden Files / Harry Potter mashup, but the books have their own funky vibe. They’re set in London, and the mixed-race protagonist doesn’t know yet when Midnight Riot opens that magic exists. He’s a police officer angling for a promotion, but when he gets an eyewitness account of a crime from a ghost, he gets shuffled into the magical division of the Metropolitan Police… which consists of one guy, Thomas Nightingale. And he needs an apprentice.

Here’s an interview with the author:

Whereas Harry Dresden was a lone hero in the noir mould Peter Grant was going to be a policeman, part of a wider system, with rules and bureaucracies and procedures. This was going to be a Police procedural in the British mode.

That was going to be the other big difference – this was London, not Chicago, fewer guns more sarcasm and the stories were going to be spun out of the city’s long history.

The US editions, for a wonder, make no attempt to water down the London slang. I really appreciate that! Thanks, Del Rey.

However.

I mentioned Peter’s race above for a reason. When I picked up the first book at the store, I looked at the cover and thought, “Huh. They went with a silhouette to skirt the race issue. Cowardly, but okay….”

But I hadn’t seen the original covers until yesterday, when someone sent me to this SF Review forum thread. They weren’t just cowards; they actually changed the artwork. Take a look:

As one person on LiveJournal said, “Blackwashing! That’s new.”

Dear publishers of the world: would you STOP PULLING THIS SHIT? kthxbye.

Dear readers of the world: go check out the books. They’re lots of fun. And then tell Del Rey how much you do not appreciate their assumption that you’re a racist prick who wouldn’t have picked up the books if they’d kept the original covers!

(Sorry that’s a Twitter link. The website doesn’t provide any other way to contact the publisher, which is a whole ‘nother level of fail.)

Going digital

Since I bought my iPad a year ago, I’ve been steadily filling it with ebooks, especially when I find $0-5 sales. (Thank you, Webscriptions and Weightless Books.) For a while, I still preferred paper copies, especially for single-use books, because I could then swap them on BookMooch or PaperBackSwap, where I trade for out-of-print goodies, or at the local paperback exchange.

However, I’ve finally hit the point where I’d rather have everything digital. I was cleaning out the bookshelves for the umpteenth time, making room for all the random piles that had taken over my study, and I said, “Fuck it.” I’m tired of shelving these things, carrying them around, having to stop reading in the car when it gets dark, making room for more shelves in my house. I’m ready to switch my entire library. Hell, if I didn’t have to deal with all these dead trees, I could almost live in one of these. When the new iPad came out, I thought about upgrading — smaller! faster! with a nifty cover! — but decided to put the money toward replacing my books with ebooks instead.

I started calculating what it would cost to buy my in-print stuff over again as ebooks. The total is pretty appalling, even more so when I noticed how many series books were only partially available in e formats. I can see exactly when ebook rights got added to contracts! (Between The Young Widow and Village Affairs, for example.) It’s frustrating to see that I’ll be stuck with half-paper, half-ebook even within a single series. On the other hand, if I sold some of my more valuable first editions, I could probably come out even.

And then there are all the OOP books, and the in-print books from authors who are never going to sign ebook contracts (like Patrick O’Brian, who isn’t around to do so, and J.K. Rowling, who just won’t). In some of these cases, there are illicit ways of getting around the problem. (Ahem.) For the rest, I’m sorely tempted to spend a weekend putting together a book scanner.

The ebooks come with their own challenges. None of the readers have great methods of organizing them — who the hell wants to list a series alphabetically rather than reading order?! — but someone will figure that out sooner or later. Borrowing some features from Delicious Library would be a good start. Many of the books have minor formatting issues, some of which I can fix with Sigil once I get them converted to EPUB from whatever goofy format they come in. For conversion, Calibre is a lifesaver. There’s a suite of plugins for it that will remove DRM from almost any format, which is fabulous, because I was getting irritated at having to remember which app held the book I was looking for. DRM, stripped; book collection, consolidated. Ugly covers, removed or replaced.

Then there are the issues with the big ebook stores.

Amazon’s Kindle store has the widest selection, but I’m not as fond of the Kindle app as I am of iBooks, and it’s just a little more challenging to get Kindle books obtained from other sources (like the Shadow Unit bootleg) into the app.

With iBooks, it’s much easier to transfer any book into the app — you just drag it into iTunes — but the iBook store is terrible. It doesn’t have the selection Amazon does. It doesn’t list preorders very far in advance, which drives me insane — I’d much rather order something as soon as I find out about it, rather than having to remember to come back for it later. Worse, it doesn’t have a web interface! Again, this prevents me from buying the book as soon as I hear about it — usually online, at my desktop, not while I’m using the iPad.

But the biggest problem is that iBooks doesn’t have a mechanism for me to report problems with the books I’ve purchased. A couple of the samples I downloaded — Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me and Laura Bickle’s Embers — were absolutely riddled with typos and OCR errors, just in those 20-30 pages. There’s no way for me to tell Apple, “Hey, I’d buy this book if someone could please fix the errors,” or even to report problems after I’ve bought the thing. On Amazon’s Kindle pages, there’s a link to report problems, and when I reported Bet Me, I got a cleaned-up copy the next day.

And of course, books from both stores come DRMed to hell and back, but I can get around that.

Despite all the glitches, I’ve decided that digital is better. My iPad is tiny and can hold something like 32,000 ebooks; my house is… a lot bigger, and can hold nothing of the kind. I can’t imagine anything more delightful than traveling with my entire library in my bag.

(Expanded from a comment on Nicola Griffith’s ebook pricing post.)

Observations

I’ve spent part of my writing group meeting this morning reading my friends bits from this article in The Guardian, in which writers answer some basic questions about the writing life.

So why write?

Hilary Mantel: It’s always worried me, is writing a way of life or is it a way of not living, is it essentially a second-hand pursuit? I think it probably worries all writers, but then they say the onlooker sees most of the game, so that’s the virtue of it.

Via Joanna Bourne on Twitter. And now I really should write something. (But not before noting that newspaper comments in the UK are vastly better written and more amusing than our domestic ones.)

Plagiarism on WordPress Arena

I just discovered that WordPress Arena has plagiarized my article on the hidden feeds in WordPress. My table was published here in 2009, appeared in the Hidden Gems presentation I did for OpenCamp Dallas last summer, and was published in Chapter 4 of Beginning WordPress 3 last June. The WordPress Arena version was apparently copied from the book sample (which is online), where the search term example is “apress,” the name of my publisher. The Arena article doesn’t show a publication date, but judging by the comments and tweets, it’s been up for about three months.

Screenshot, archived for posterity.

Hey, Nur: you’ve really pissed me off. I haven’t gone through the rest of your archives yet, but I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one you’ve ripped off.

ETA: Yep, there’s more:

Chip Bennett found this article on creating a child theme, ripped off from April Hodge Silver’s WordPress 3 Complete. The article does end with “[Source: WordPress 3 Complete]” — but April’s name does not appear, all the examples use Nur’s name, and I’m betting neither April nor Packt gave anyone permission for this reprint.

This troubleshooting article, posted in January, is taken from page 271 of the 2006 edition of WordPress Complete, by Hasin Hayder. Come on, Nur, you could have at least used a more up to date edition!

There’s a Facebook/Wix article cribbed from Website Magazine, an article on landing pages taken from page 93 of The Ultimate Web Marketing Guide, and I could go on, but at this point I suspect there is not a single original article on all of WordPress Arena.

… OK, I couldn’t resist. More:

WPTouch article taken from WordPress Top Plugins

Video player article taken from WordPress for Dummies, page 187

Hosting article taken from Build a Website for Free, second edition, page 23 — this one’s not only copied, but has bad information! The book was not written for WordPress-specific hosting. This article talks about Google Sites, for crying out loud.

Intro to 26 great commercial themes taken from Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s intro to her chapter on free themes in WordPress for Dummies, second edition, page 357

… that’s every article from the January archives.