The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jim Henry:

David Dyer-Bennet @338:

I think you have the durability comparison reversed.

It's true that etexts in thoroughly standard, widely supported formats like ASCII and HTML will remain readable indefinitely if they're routinely copied from one storage medium to another. But there are few electronic storage media, and none as far as I know in routine everyday use, which will last as long as an acid-free hardback or trade paperback. Many of them won't last as long as a mass-market paperback printed on acidic paper, even. And even if the storage medium remains readable for a long time, you may have a hard time finding a computer that can read it. But I can stick a book that I won't re-read very often on the shelf and ignore it for ten or fifteen years and still find it as readable as ever when I pick it up again; I find books in my grandparents' house that are still readable though in poor condition (due to varying extremes of temperature and humidity) after being neglected on a shelf or in a box for a lot longer than that. I've got multiple books, both hardback and paperback, which have suffered major water damage but are still readable years later (though the damage will probably cause them to decay or wear out faster than other books of the same format and type of paper) -- one I dropped on the ground while getting out of the car, and didn't notice it was missing until the next day, when it had rained overnight. Are there any electronic storage media that last like that? (Well, DVDs and I suppose CDs have a good record of surviving water damage. My friend's house was flooded, the two lower stories and a foot of the third storey under water; most of his books were destroyed, but nearly all of his DVDs were still playable though their cases and liner notes etc. were destroyed.)

The problem is a lot worse with DRM ebooks in proprietary formats, which is probably what Matt Austern @305 was thinking of. If the book was in the public domain or a Creative Commons release, you can probably find another copy online somewhere if the copy you had is no longer readable because of obsolete storage media or catastrophic failure of your computer and your backup media at once; but not necessarily otherwise.

Paula Lieberman @322:

You're missing the infrastructure/overhead at print publishers for dealing with the printing pipeline activities, the physical book handling and distribution and unsold stock operations, and the span of control layer and latency in conglomerates. Each additional layer of management adds more expenses, and makes the response time and decision time longer and more expensive, and less "responsive" as regards reacting to market changes.

Okay, so some of the things you mention are differences in overhead between a publisher that does ebooks exclusively and one that does paper books only or paper books plus ebooks. But as long as the ebook market remains a tiny fraction of the paper book market, which is liable to still be the case for some years yet, I don't think many publishers will switch exclusively to ebooks and get rid of the staff who deal with distribution and returns of paper books, and I don't think many publishers will start up that do exclusively ebooks. Some will, but they'll be small presses, not a major factor in the publishing industry as a whole in the short to medium term. Those publishers, large or small, that do both paper and ebooks will still have those overhead costs. Theoretically they should, in their accounting, note which overhead costs belong only to the paper edition of a book, which belong only to the ebook, and which are common to both; but I suppose it's a lot easier to do that precise accounting for only the marginal costs.

The other thing you mention -- "the span of control layer and latency in conglomerates" -- has nothing to do with paper vs. electronic formats; it's a difference between large publishers and small publishers.

John Chu @44:

Whether the $10 cap is an expectation that Amazon has established or it's a ramification of us not placing much value on a bunch of bits on a hard drive, the expectation is still there.

Indeed; the value of something is what people are willing to pay, and has little or no relation to what it costs to producer to provide it. Since pubishers' fixed costs are about the same for ebooks as for printed books, while most people's valuation of ebooks is much lower, that's probably going to continue preventing the general adoption of ebooks in preference to paper books until and unless publishers' fixed costs get a lot lower (not sure how that could plausibly happen) or people's valuation of ebooks gets higher -- which could happen because DRM goes away, or because new generations grow up who are used to reading ebooks from a young age, or for other reasons.

TrishB @154:

The only badly formatted book I've come across is the free version of Pride and Prejudice that I downloaded, and even that wasn't horrible.

If I recall correctly, www.pemberley.com has good etexts of Jane Austen's books that were better proofed and formatted than the Project Gutenberg editions (as of the last time I read any of her books as etexts).

Ben Trafford @2 & @30

whether that be speech-enabled (goodbye, separate audio book industry),

I've heard a book read aloud automatically by my cousin's Kindle, and it doesn't compare to an audibook read aloud by a skilled reader. (The importance of skilled readers-aloud has become clearer to me recently -- for some years I borrowed a fair number of professionally published audiobooks from the library, and occasionally would comment on a particular reader being better or worse than average; but I've recently started downloading and reading public domain audiobooks from LibriVox, the audibook offshoot of Project Gutenberg, and the variation in skill and talent on the part of the readers is much higher.)

I expect the quality of speech synthesis will improve over time, but for it to equal professional-quality audiobooks, either we'll need strong AI so the speech synthesizer understands what it's reading, or we'll need highly detailed semantic markup of the text -- far more labor-intensive and skilled than the stuff we do in the formatting rounds at Distributed Proofreaders, which in turn is far more than the ebook producers at major publishers can apparently be arsed to do, based on recent comments here about the poor quality of "pro" ebooks relative to recent Project Gutenberg etexts.

Publishers who play in the print world have a massive amount of overhead that purely electronic publishers would not.

Actually, from what I've seen recently of publishing professionals offering breakdowns of the costs of publishing books, the difference between paper books and ebooks is almost all in the marginal costs (printing, distribution, and returns, vs. server maintenance and bandwidth). The fixed costs, including the overhead, are essentially the same; markup and conversion to various ebook formats may cost less than design and typesetting of a printed book, but not hugely less. We can quibble about cover art -- arguably you can get away with lower-quality art if it's going to be displayed only as a smallish JPG than if it's going to be reproduced in print on a dust jacket, and pay the artist less for a colored line drawing that takes a few hours than for a painting that takes a few days. But otherwise the fixed costs, especially the largest components like the payment to authors, editors, copy-editors and editorial support staff, are going to be about the same.

David Dyer-Bennet @88:

I timed myself while proofing several pages at Distributed Proofreaders, getting an average of 4 minutes 12 seconds per page. For high quality you'd want at least two people proofing each page; so, for SF paperbacks of the 1960s, around 200 pages * 252 seconds * 2 people = 28 man-hours, or 3.5 man-days assuming eight-hour workdays, just for proofing (not counting scanning, or adding formatting mark-up, or re-proofing after the mark-up is added to make sure it displays correctly on various ebook platforms). There are probably people who proofread faster than me with similar error rates; but on the other hand, I was working in the second (of three) proofreading rounds. When one does first-round proofing, it takes longer because you're fixing more OCR errors, so those factors probably roughly cancel out.

(This is for reprinting an out-of-print book; someone earlier in the thread was talking, I think, as though effort and time for publishing a raw manuscript was similar, which is silly. I'm sure editing and copy-editing a raw manuscript takes a lot more time than proofreading the scans of an already published book -- how much more, Teresa or Patrick might can say -- and that's not counting the overhead time of reading slush to figure out which raw manuscripts can be made publishable with a reasonable amount of effort on the editor's part.)

Re: serials, I'm not sure if they're perfectly comparable to the kind of ebooks the current discussion is focusing on, but Lawrence Watt-Evans has had some mixed success with serializing three novels that Tor wasn't interested in. The first two were Ethshar novels -- that series had a strong fan base, but not quite large enough I suppose to sell as many copies as his other fantasy novels; the serials brought in enough contributions to roughly equal the advance he would have gotten from a publisher, IIRC. The third serial was a sequel to Nightside City (IMO his best science fiction novel, and better than many of his fantasies), which had fewer fans than the Ethshar series; contributions stopped coming in after a few chapters. He finished the book and sent it privately to those of us who'd contributed already, but stopped posting new chapters on the serials website. I think he's said that hasn't discouraged him from doing more serials, and that there will probably be more Ethshar serials sometime when he's not busy with higher-paying work.

Dave Kuzminski @235:

In general, the differing prices of things in different areas of the country are probably due to two things -- transportation costs from the place the things come from, and overhead costs (esp. lease/rental of store space) for the retailer. I suspect the latter is the largest component in the differing costs of e.g. groceries and gasoline between cities, suburbs and rural areas. Why doesn't that make books as well as groceries cheaper in rural areas than in suburbs and small towns? Actually, I think it does, but not in the expected way: rural areas and small towns generally can't support new bookstores at all, and may only have used bookstores and thrift stores, but the book prices in said used bookstores are generally lower than in the used bookstores found in cities and suburbs. The differences in real estate costs between different cities across the country probably isn't big enough, relative to all the other costs in the book supply chain, to make a noticable difference in retail prices in the new bookstores.

A few years ago I loaned my copy of Mastering Regular Expressions to a friend at work. Many months later, she apologized for losing it, and bought me another copy. Some years later, after she'd left the company, someone else returned the borrowed copy (which had my name in it). I tried to get in touch with the friend who'd borrowed it, lost it, and bought the extra copy, to give her back the extra, but without success.

Greg Egan has recently posted an article about his trip to Iran last year to his website.

Paul A. @81:

(Strictly speaking that isn't based on an anime either, since Avatar: The Last Airbender is an American series, but you wouldn't be the first person to be misled by the art style.)

So does "anime" necessarily refer to national orgin as well as style? "Magic realism" (or "magical realism") used to refer to a certain subgenre of fantasy of South American origin by definition, but I've heard it used (and by fairly respectable literary critics) to refer to fantasy in the same or a similar style by American, British, and Eastern European authors as well. I'm not sure how I feel about genre or style categories that aren't orthogonal to nationality, race, language and so forth. I suppose it relates to the competing ideas of defining genres by their style and content, vs. defining them by the communities of authors and readers involved; both approaches are valid as long as you don't confuse them.

Re: Avatar: The Last Airbender, I enjoyed the few episodes of it that I watched with some friends, and I'm fairly annoyed with what I've heard so far about the film adaptation.

Wesley Osam @87, quoting Paul Cornell:

The natives of Avatar needed, more than their western hero finding his place in nature, a good team of civil rights lawyers and a PR firm.

This reminds me of Lloyd Biggle's Monument, a wonderful novel that's about the right length to make a good movie without the drastic cutting that most book-to-film adaptations suffer from; though there the natives were human, low-tech descendants of a long-lost colony who used the law to protect themselves from exploitation when they were rediscovered by Earth. Also of Uncharted Territory by Connie Willis, which is set in a similar situation, but later on, when the aliens have already learned how to game the Terran legal system for fun and profit.

mike shupp @56: It's been a while since I read Lest Darkness Fall but I think Procopius actually appears as a minor character.

John Chu @90:

Re: "make your own movie", it seems that with the costs of making and distributing movies and other media art forms going down, the assymetry in power of expression between rich and middle-class is decreasing. (Not between races per se, and not between rich and poor because strictly speaking poor people still can't afford to make movies or produce any media more expensive than text or perhaps comics, but that day is probably coming as well.) It's not likely to disappear, any time soon or ever, but I expect it to keep decreasing for a while.

Slightly off-topic, but: I started reading David Hines' LiveJournal last year when someone linked to the OH JOHN RINGO NO post, and have been reading it intermittently since; IMO that brilliant review is not his best work, only his most famous. For some time now he's been posting a poem every day, the majority of them pretty good and some of them wonderful. (Be warned that a few are bawdy.)

Debbie @150: Thanks for the link to Dr. M von Vogelhausen's sublime, insightful reviews. The review of the 12 Kelso Table Forks Cutlery Dining Set Canteen was full of eefoc.

Besides "Shooting an Elephant", there's also Orwell's novel Burmese Days; IMO a better novel than Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Around 4200 words since I last posted here on November 22; but that includes an alternate draft of one scene from a different character's POV; only one version of that scene (at most) will be in the final draft. Total word count ~79000 words.

A couple of days ago I got to what I thought was going to be the ending, but I realized it was too inconclusive and it wouldn't suit to just stop the story there. I could either restructure the latter part of the plot so more conclusive things happen in a shorter time, or just keep going; on first draft I'm opting for the latter, but will almost certainly do the former on the next draft.

I know there are several pro authors, maybe more than a few, who prefer using a text editor rather than a word processor. If there are any reading here, pro or novice or amateur, or if you know details about other authors' work processes, I'm curious about what markup language(s) or processes you use for turning a text file in a format that's easy to work with for writing, revising, etc. into a printed manuscript in standard format or a file in one of the standard formats that online zines accept submissions in. troff? LaTeX? Some form of SGML or XML? Something else?

I've been writing for about twenty years, but the last time I finished anything I thought good enough to submit to a magazine was before I switched from an ancient DOS-based word processor to editing plain text files in Emacs.

Around 7800 words since I posted to this thread on November 11. The novel as a whole is at around 73000 words; it was about 55000 words when I resumed work on it on November 2. I think I'm pretty near the ending, 3-5k words left perhaps, but there are scenes I skipped earlier that I need to go back and fill in, plus the aforementioned plot and worldbuilding inconsistencies that will necessitate major restructuring on second draft.

Around 2800 words today, and about 6000 words since I last posted in this thread on Sunday.

Nicole @98: Most of Molly Case's comments on NaNoWriMo are beside the point, but from what I've heard in various other places, I suspect that this:

There is no market for 50,000 word novels. No real publisher will look at a novel that short, but it is too long to be published as a novella. It is pretty much the most useless length of story someone could train themselves to tell.

may not be entirely wrong; at least I have the impression that the 30k to 60k word range is hard for a new writer with no track record to sell in, most first magazine fiction sales being short stories or occasionally novelettes, and most first novels being rather longer than the NaNoWriMo 50k. Nearly all the novellas I see in the digest magazines, and the novellas and short novels published in book form by small presses (more rarely by major publishers), seem to be by more experienced writers who've already built an audience with shorter or longer work. Would Teresa or Patrick or any of the other publishing professionals care to comment on this?

Michael Roberts @425: I don't think anyone has mentioned Charlotte Brontë yet. I'd strongly recommend Jane Eyre, and Villette a bit less strongly.

Michael Roberts @425: I don't think anyone has mentioned Charlotte Brontë yet. I'd strongly recommend Jane Eyre, and Villette a bit less strongly.

4200 words added in the last few days to a novel I started just over two years ago. It was 55500 words so far when I last worked on it a month ago. I'm reasonably sanguine about bringing it to a halfway decent ending by the end of the month, though it's going to require major restructuring in the second draft; I kept changing my mind about the villain's identity, motivations, and methods for the first few thousand words, and there are many inconsistencies to be fixed.

Joel Polowin @20: I haven't yet read Bone Dance, though I've heard it recommended.

B. Durbin @30: That sounds familiar. It's probably "Willie" by Madeleine E. Robins, F&SF December 1992. My copy is packed up somewhere so I can't confirm all the details you mentioned, though.

As soon as I posted that comment I thought of an example Patrick's post itself should have reminded me of: Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. It's the best of Cory's works I've read so far, and one of my favorite recent urban fantasies; it's set in a much nearer future than Halting State, probaby in our past by now, but it's got the mix of cutting-edge-present/near-future technology and characters from a magical background that I was thinking of.

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