Have I got books? Sure. Shedloads. Downloaded in various formats over the years and converted by myself to a readable format.

Once in a while though I like to buy new books. Pay my way as it were.

So I go to online retailers thinking “hmmm, for sure this ought to be cheaper as an e-book than a hard copy?”

Why? because

1. only one copy is ever produced – ever ever
2. no paper
3. no binding
4. no printing costs
5. no storage costs (more than a few Kb on a server)
6. no postage
7. I use my own bandwidth to download
8. no handling by any people once the book is done
9. not ever out of order

Appearantly, to publishers, these factors have no impact on the price of books.

The books cost the same as physical copies, if not more expensive, and they are also constructed so that no one but ME can read them.

All of you in the publishing industry, let me let you in on a dirty little secret:

It won’t work.

Seriously, trying to make me reading this on my ebook reader more unattractive than actually buying the physical book is silly.

Reminds me of the early MP3 services which over charged (here is looking at you iTunes) their users. If people feel ripped off, they will not buy things.

I know how much it costs to make a copy of something digital. If I drag a file to an email message and send that to a friend I have made a copy. Cost to me: absolutely none. Let me up this stake, I send the same file to 100 of my closest friends. Cost is still the same.

Considering the state of the forests around the world, you should really encouraging new ways to enjoy your products. Branch out so to speak (pun intended).

Of course I understand that you want a return on your investment in some authors.

You won’t get that by ripping off customers who want to be legal. You know why? We do not think that it is priced right. I want to support my authors. I really do. I also know that you publishers constantly rip them off, and they don’t generally see any of the profits you make from the books.

OK, so selling a book online at a cheaper price  means that you will not make as big a profit as producing one book and then selling it at full price to thousands of people.

Considering your massive save mentioned above, I think a price cut in electronic books should be in order.

So far I have only found one fairly decently priced online shop at Mobipocket.com.  Still they are expensive, and they have some books only available in certain countries, but at least they have bargains too.

So tell you what – lower the price, or I will continue visiting the library – OK?

Update! Appearantly I am not the only one aware of this stupidity

Some marketing genius have started selling in the concept of publishing printed documents straight on the web.

This is a bad idea.

Why? To put it as simply as possible: your screen is not made of paper.

To quote IQ Pager, who seem to be a major player in this:

“1. Readability.
The user feels more at home in a traditionally printed format.

First off – that is a lie! A printed A4 does not equal the height of most monitors. As the matter of fact, with the increasing use of widescreen monitors this becomes even more appearant.

2. Faster and easier with no download
You must always download a PDF and open it in Acrobat. It takes time and you save the file on your machine whether you want to or not

Once again – lies. PDF files can open inside the browser, and does not need to be downloaded as a whole for that to happen. But PDF besides the point: A good web based version using the  screen medium, whether it be through Flash, HTML, etc will always be way more user friendly – and no downloads. For printing a good CSS file can format the printed document no matter if the user has A4, A3 or letter format paper.

3. Weighs nothing
If you send out a newsletter, a PDF is very heavy…

Wait a minute Shirley! Are you fucking nuts, dude? If you send out a PDF as your newsletter then you are doing it completely wrong. People want to read their emails, then discard them. Getting people to click a link in an email is HARD. They must really want to read the content. Emails are not supposed to be printed in the first place. E-L-E-C-T-R-O-N-I-C communication, people! IQ Pager uses a flash solution to read PDFs, nothing more. It is overkill.

The sales pitch continues, and it is clear that besides outright lying, they really have no business selling a shitty solution in the first place.

I have worked in the web business for over 11 years, and I come from a background in print design before then. You cannot mix your mediums like this. It is the equivalent of broadcasting an image on the radio – cumbersome and stupid.

For good marketing to work, you need to work with the medium you have chosen. You can not have a film playing in a newspaper (yet), and people accept this. You can not change the size of the paper once printed, nor can you change the size of peoples screens to fit a portrait A4,A3 or billboard in readable size.

Is this point clear? Jeesus F. Christ in a tutu on a pogostick! I can’t believe I have to get pissed off at this crap.

Here is my open letter to all web companies with similar solutions to this:

“Dear flash based PDF reading companies.

Stop. Just please stop. Do not encourage our clients to embrace stupidity. If you have a crappy product, then do not sell it. Just because you could sell the idea it doesn’t mean that you should. Sure, you sell the point of that they don’t have to put the extra effort of making a good presentation on the web of their printed information. That only cheapens what they are trying to communicate. Learn the basics: Print and Web are two different mediums. They should be separate. The key value is always communication. One way, two way, three way communication, it doesn’t matter. Ask yourself: If this solution is so fantastic, then why isn’t it used all over the web instead of HTML? It would save time! “

Yes, I am a big child. I love theme parks. I went on the Rocking Roller-coaster at MGM 5 times in a row. I have never backed down from downright scary rides, neither have I backed out from downright silly or childish antics either.

Clearly I have more in common with my nephews than my peers, but I would love to go to this themepark.

What also interests me is how they are going to bring a magical world to life technologically without breaking the fourth wall.  Moving portraits can be done using LED screens for sure, moving stair cases for sure, the candy (which I have tried) is a done deal. What about wands and magic duels – it could be a very very cool computer game that is live action.

Yes, I am looking forward to this.

One thing that really bugged me about my previous install was that I did not have a seperate partition for my /home folder (where all the user related content and application data is stored in Linux), so I adressed this issue during install instead of trying to do it after the installation. I set aside 50GB for the root partition and 350GB for my /home. That should be just about enough, considering that Linux is not as bloated as Windows, I probably have too much space for the applications, but who cares. Better be safe than sorry.

To create the /home partition it was as simple as choosing to set up the partitions manually during install, first creating the smaller OS-related partition, then creating a larger partition (set up as primary) and then choose it to mount under /home. There. Done. there are more in depth descriptions of this process online, so google it if you are interested.

Am I happy now then? Yes. Now I can reinstall Ubuntu without loosing any of the settings and files related to my user. That feels a lot safer, because I do experiment with new software once in a while.

So anyway, this is not the most interesting bit about Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). More cool stuff are

Ext 4

Faster boot times – even though I hardly ever need to reboot. Under XP at work it takes around 2-4 minutes before I am ready to start working. With Vista, yeah that is a coffee break right there clocking in at 15 minutes. Ubuntu reboots and is logged in around 1 minute. Brilliant

Encryption of /home

These days when privacy is such an issue I like the fact that my /home folder is encrypted by default (if you choose to). Good. So even if someone would steal my computer and log in as an admin then they cannot get to my files without the proper passphrase.

New look

Finally, something that isn’t so effing brown! OK, it is a different brown but over-all the new standard theme is a lot less shitty than previous incarnation. Switched my theme to a cool black one first thing I did, but even the logon screen looks cool and slick. Very well done.

It works!

OK, one thing many people complain about is that you have to do a lot of set up with Ubuntu. Not true this time. Everything worked out of the box, including my obscure Wireless card, my web cam and the sound card too. All of these are notoriously buggy under Linux. Well, even after I applied the propriety driver for the graphics card I got all of the Compiz goodness that makes the linux experience so much more enjoyable.

Downsides

OK, so it is not perfect, but on the other hand I still have some issues to deal with.

1. Internet banking – under 9.04 it worked really well, and I followed the same instructions this time. Nexus Personal just wouldn’t do it this time. I managed to install it allright, but it won’t show in the menu, and there are issues when needing to confirm actions in the internet bank.  I can still log on and view my details, but I cannot pay anyone. That sucks. I think this is more due to the user being dim, than software, so I will continue working on it. After all, I do have a virtual Windows lying around for these kind of emergencies. Hopefully they will do some proper testing for the next release of the certificate software.
2. Xbox streaming. Not tried this yet, but waiting for the scene to mature a bit. At the moment I stick to using USB for both my xbox and my surround system.
3. VPN connection – got it running. I think. cannot really tell.

All in all I am quite happy so far… the experience is really smooth. Next upgrade is in April 2010… if they keep this up that will be the version that kicks Windows and MacOS ass.

I have decided to publish all that I receive here, because I find them amusing and would probably make a good book.

Here is my first entry in this category. I shall call this “The russian library doesn’t burn books”. I received it from two addresses, which in my book indicate that the spammer found my email address in two seperate address books.

elenaga@zymail.ru
elenaga@lapost.ru

”
Hi,

My name is Elena, I have 32 years and I write you from Russian province. I work in library and I can use computer after my work when possible. I finded your address in internet while visited some sites and decided to write you this desperate letter.

I have daughter Angelina, she is 8 years, her father abandoned us and we live with my mother.

Due to financial crisis my mother recently lost job and our situation became very difficult.

The prices for gas and electricity is very high in our region and we cannot use it to heating our home anymore.

The winter is coming and weather becoming colder each day. We very afraid and we don’t know what to do.

The only accessible way for us to heat our home is to use portable oven which work with burning wood. We have enough wood in our region and this oven will heat our home all winter for minimal charges.

Unfortunately, we cannot buy such oven in our city because it price equivalent of 191 Euro and very expensive for us.

If you have any old portable oven and in case you don’t use it anymore, we will be very grateful to you if you can donate it to us and organize transport of this oven to our address (200km from Moscow). This ovens are different, usually they made from cast iron.

I will be waiting your answer.

Elena and my family. ”
Russia.

Now doesn’t that bring a tear to your eyes? Don’t you want to immediately send this poor family a cast iron stove that is portable? Because clearly, the ground is too bloody good for these people to burn wood on. I think that we really should pinpoint where this email came from and then dive bomb the place with cast iron stoves.

What can I say, Nightmare on Elmstreet was one of my favourite movies growing up. We saw the first movie when I was 11, back in 87, while travelling on a bus. In the end 20+ kids toppled out of the bus puking… I was not one of them.Will this be another attempt of hollywood to rape my childhood or will this be something completely… new? A good remake?

1. From what I can see they flesh out the backstory – good.
2. I can see some remade iconic moments – bad.
3. They have taken elements from both the first and second films – good.

This means that if it would be a success then a sequel would not be a direct sequel of the second movie – even better.

A Nightmare on Elm Street in HD

Personally I am not a big fan of it… I have been engaged to be married twice. I believe that it should be seen as in this use of the word

engagement – a hostile meeting of opposing military forces in the course of a war; “Grant won a decisive victory in the battle of Chickamauga”; “he lost his romantic ideas about war when he got into a real engagement”

It can of course also be seen to mean

1. The act of engaging or the state of being engaged.

2. Betrothal.

3. Something that serves to engage; a pledge.

4. A promise or agreement to be at a particular place at a particular time.

5.

a. Employment, especially for a specified time.

b. A specific, often limited, period of employment.

6. A hostile encounter; a battle.

7. The condition of being in gear.

Synonyms: engagement, appointment, assignation, date¹, rendezvous, tryst

Anyway, I am very happy for the both of you! You deserve the happiness I see between you two.

It is in early alpha but can appearantly mimic the rendering of IE from 5.5 all the way through 8.

So far so good, we will see if this will grow to be a useful tool.

För att citera Jeff Goldblum i Jurassic Park: “Bara för att man kan göra något betyder inte att man bör göra det.”