Comments on this weblog

Showing messages 1 through 12 of 12.

• request
  2007-02-15 09:26:56  aaaazzzz [View]
  
  
  Hi,
  Dear Oreilly! how can you publish some free ebooks for your customers that are located in other countried like Australia, France, Pakistan and...?
  and can you give me any address to download them free?

• request
  2007-02-15 09:25:35  aaaazzzz [View]
  
  
  Hi,
  Dear Oreilly! how can you publish some free ebooks for your customers that are located in other countried like Australia, France, Pakistan and...?

• request
  2007-02-15 09:25:17  aaaazzzz [View]
  
  
  Hi,
  Dear Oreilly! how can you publish some free ebooks for your customers that are located in other countried like Australia, France, Pakistan and...?

• request
  2007-02-15 09:25:01  aaaazzzz [View]
  
  
  Hi,
  Dear Oreilly! how can you publish some free ebooks for your customers that are located in other countried like Australia, France, Pakistan and...?

• Paying for a peek
  2002-08-29 17:06:32  seanjones1 [View]
  
  
  I love books. That is common enough. Oddly, I once loved publishers too. When I was six I joined the "Puffin Club" - a book club run by Penguin for children. The publisher was my friend. I felt loyal to him. He sent me newsletters and invited me to "meet the author days". He liked having me around and was thrilled I wanted to read his books.
  
  At Secondary School stayed faithful, working my way erratically through the Penguin Classics. I felt I could trust particular publishers. They were at the creative end of a community to which I belonged.
  
  Now, when I want a book on a programming language or an internet technology, I turn to O'Reilly. Now you send me newsletters. Now I trust you.
  
  Except ... now the publishers do not trust me. I'm an author myself. I like receiving my royalty cheques. I understand that intellectual property is important. But buying ebooks makes me feel like a suspected felon.
  
  Before I could download my first ebook my reader had to go through an "authorisation process". No bookshop owner had ever required me to prove I had anyone's authority to buy a book before. The book I was sold cannot be printed out to read in the bath, or lent to a friend or even downloaded onto a portable device now it has been written onto my desktop's hard-drive. It is like an medieval chained library. I do not own anything, I simply have a licence to read the material provided I sit still in front of one screen.
  
  I feel stupid. Of course publishers were not my friends. That Puffin Club badge was a martketing ploy. My sense of community was in fact brand loyalty. I had thought the chubby cartoon Puffin was delighted when I lent my friend a C S Lewis. There I was; evangelising, whilst he was secretly gnawing at his webbed feet wondering how he could put an end to my dilution of his copyright.
  
  In the new world children get letters before action for having build Harry Potter fan sites and Russian programmers are kept from their children.
  
  If the publishers had not stopped trusting me, I would still have trust in them. Its like finding out that your lover is scheming and jealous. Its better to know - but weren't you happier when you didn't?

• A product designed to fail
  2002-07-09 15:20:07  paulmartin3 [View]
  
  
  The traditional ebook will probably make it into all the business school texts as an example of a product designed to fail. I am supposed to spend $150-$300 on a reader, then pay a handsome sum for each book on top of that? The price structure is such that you don't even come out ahead in the long run, and there are no advantages to justify the price of the reader. What's in it for me? Sorry, I just don't have that kind of disposable cash.
  
  New technologies generally produce new companies. The old companies are too busy protecting their existing products to see the potential. That's why they call it a disruptive technology. I don't know what the future holds, but I don't expect to find out from the current leaders in the publishing industry. I am happy to see that O'Reilly Press seems to be one of the exceptions.

• Free e-books?
  2002-07-08 18:23:36  jlb [View]
  
  
  Baen Books sells e-books in txt formats, and even offers quite a number of books free of charge on their website.
  
  The free library section contains a number of article by author/free library editor Eric Flint stating his position on the subject (and his disagreement with almost every other e-book publishers)
  
  He actually encourages readers to copy and distribute e-books as widely as possible, with eerily Stallman-sounding arguments.
  
  One of the articles even demonstrates how giving books away actually INCREASES their (paper) sales.
  
  here's the link:
  http://www.baen.com/library/
  
  (articles are under the Prime Palaver link)
• Free e-books?
  2002-07-08 22:43:23  Tim O'Reilly | [View]
  
  
  Yes, I've heard very good things about the Baen online publishing program. I agree that giving away free electronic copies of a work can be a good way to get attention.
  
  But like everything else, it isn't a panacea. Remember how in the early days of the web, everyone said, "see how having a web site makes us all equal." But that was only so long as there were only a few web sites. Now, it's no easier to get a web site noticed than it is to get a book noticed.
  
  Signal to noise ratio still means something. And more signal than the receiver can handle becomes noise to the recipient.

• e-book advantage
  2002-07-07 18:21:09  farre [View]
  
  
  I must say, as an author, an often overlooked aspect of e-books is their convenience to the author looking to build interest in his or h er work. I don't mind saying it's helped me a lot to serialize my first novel and send that to revieweres and readers for feedback and word-of-mouth marketing.
  
  Best,
  
  John Farrell
  www.farrellmedia.com/books.html

• Repeated Misconceptions About Storytelling
  2002-07-07 07:49:31  pnh [View]
  
  
  I couldn't agree more with this column, save for one sentence which I think is disastrously wrong:
  
  "...computer games, like the novel, are a delivery vehicle for certain types of storytelling."
  
  This is true in about one and a half ways, and wrong in about a hundred. Like the statement that "modern dance, like bicycling, is a delivery vehicle for certain kinds of exercise," it gets at a trivial truth by ignoring everything important about computer games and novels, or ballet and bicycles. It's a reductionist view in which a commodity called "storytelling" is more or less the same whatever its "delivery vehicle."
  
  This is the way the worst kind of Hollywood executives talk about stories and storytelling, and it's startling to hear someone as levelheaded as Tim O'Reilly lapse (albeit briefly) into it. Certainly, there are resemblances between computer games and novels, and it's interesting to discuss the ways they sometimes meet some of the same human desires and needs. But, Hollywood to the contrary, "storytelling" isn't some kind of unprocessed ore that can be strip-mined from one medium and poured intact into another. Novels and computer games are more than shells for "storytelling," and we can't talk about them and make sense if we adopt the commodifiers' reductionist and inaccurate model of what's going on.
• Repeated Misconceptions About Storytelling
  2002-07-08 22:38:38  Tim O'Reilly | [View]
  
  
  Whoa! You're reading a lot into that one line that I didn't put there. I certainly agree that a stroy can't be "strip mined from one medium and poured intact into another." And in fact, you'll note that at the end of the piece I explicitly make the point that the form of the eBook will evolve, just as movies evolved from simple transfers of stage plays to film.
  
  My argument was rather that in an economic sense, you have to look at goods that are substituted for each other by consumers. And when you look in this market-driven sense (which of course was the context of the original article), you have to look at what is actually being replaced by an "eBook" -- is it the physical book, or the function of the book? And if the function of the book is the focus, then defining an "eBook" as something that closely resembles the physical book may lead you to miss the larger market that is developing.
  
  I maintain that books are not being replaced by eBooks, per se, but by online information delivered in other forms. For example, MapQuest is now likely the most widely used road atlas in America, and Google the most widely used encyclopedia. And of course, technical publishers know that we compete not just with each other but with online sites. The biggest competition for Java in a Nutshell is java.sun.com, not a book from another publisher; the biggest competitor for any publisher of books on Windows programming is MSDN, the Microsoft Developer Network. (And of course, that's why we're building Safari as an online service rather than an "eBook" per se. We're modeling ourselves on services that have already proven successful in the new medium. For all its flaws, MSDN generates more revenue than all the highly touted eBook initiatives put together.)
  
  While I will agree that the differences between a work of imaginative fiction and a computer game are probably greater than the differences between a computer book and a technical information web site, the parallels are instructive. It's no accident that people like Tom Clancy and George Lucas, each coming from a different storytelling medium, now simultaneously realize their stories in print, in film, and in computer games.
  
  Ultimately, I think we're in violent agreement. My complaint about the original article is that it assumes that the goal of eBooks is simply to reproduce in electronic form the features of the book, when in fact, it should be to discover the features that can better be delivered online, and thus lead us to new ways of communicating our knowledge and ideas.
  
  

• I agree
  2002-07-06 14:14:55  ftobin1 [View]
  
  
  While never having really used an e-book, but having tried to linearly read long sections of text without interruption, the current screen media tends to be poor. I am certain this will change in the future, though, as our screen media technology advances.
  
  Currently, text is optimal in electronic form if it can take advantage of the media. This advantage shows up most clearly for reference texts, which in print form are poorly linked (bibilographies, etc), and are poorly searchable (indexes).