Books

Books
Books written by Ray Sullivan

Tuesday 29 July 2014

Geneology - 21st Century Style

Up until the Cambrian period the fossil record is quite scant, but then suddenly life took hold and there was a huge expansion in the numbers and diversity of species of flora and fauna across the planet. Scientists studying the period had to create a richly described taxonomy to help them compile what could be described as the family tree of all life.

Creating the family tree isn't something that I've ever aspired to, not for flora and fauna or for, well, family.  One of my sisters has and I guess if I want to know something about my forebears then I've saved myself a whole load of research.  Or she has, bless her. While searching about who married who hasn't struck me as being something I'd like to spend my time on, clearly this family tree thing is a popular pastime.

It's also a big business, and not just for working out where the lump on your nose came from (mine incidentally came from cycling while drunk in Cyprus in 1980 - tarmac does that to a face).  Historians as well as amateur family tree sleuths spend a lot of money as well as time researching timelines.  The internet has made the process both easier and harder - you have less travelling to find stuff out but my word, there does seem to be a lot of it, and not all accurate I'll bet.  Actually, quite a lot is inaccurate, I'd guess.

Whether you are building a family tree or not, one thing that may not have occurred to you is that you will probably feature in someone else's tree in a couple of hundred years time.  Will they have it easier or will the process be more difficult? Well there will certainly be more data about you than there is about your forebears, so that should be helpful. Right now we can say that Fred Married Flossie in 1905, Fred was a labourer, accountant or policeman and Flossie, well Flossie was a mother, probably. Emancipation was still a way off back then. Also we can find out, thanks to the census, where they were living at ten year intervals. Anything more is down to any recollections of aging relatives and scant documentation.

Our history is more complete.  We have databases brimming with information about ourselves.  So much data exists on me that I'd hesitate to contradict some of it even if I believed it was wrong.  If future genealogists are given access to our credit card statements then what we overspent, and when, will tell a fair bit about us all.  Then there's all those tedious blogs and tweets some insist on posting - they must crack a window to shed some light on what we were.  Facebook, of course, lets whole swathes of people wear their hearts and prejudices on their online sleeves.

But the real goldmine for future family tree researchers could be our Google search history.  Recent research has shown that we now ask Google the questions we previously only reserved for very close friends. The answers are irrelevant from a historical perspective, the questions are everything.  If I've asked about specific political parties that could indicate I have a tendency to the right or left, possibly both at the same time. If I search for places, tools or hobby equipment then that may reveal aspects about my interests that might otherwise be hidden from view. Of course we all search for lots of things that are unrelated to the kind of people we are - we hear a word on the TV or are asked by our partner about something when we have the tablet in our hands. But if we start to trend on certain topics, that really does suggest an interest.

Put all this data - Google search, Facebook, Twitter feeds and so on, throw in the terabytes of photos we'll end up storing in the cloud and genealogists are going to have a field day. The data will look like the Cambrian Explosion, with small discrete amounts of information on ordinary people right up until the turn of the century before ballooning out of control. We've even got the basis of a taxonomy to help us classify these various data streams - today we call it metadata, but it isn't as structured as the lineal system used in natural history. Perhaps we should push for it to be standardised and quickly, because in two hundred years some poor sod is going to have to try and make sense of it all.

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Thursday 24 July 2014

Should Amazon Drop Exclusivity Clause?

There are a lot of people in the US trying out Amazon Kindle Unlimited (KU) right now.  So they should, it's free for the first month.  Not sure what the get-out clauses say, mind.  I often politely decline 'free trials' because I'm always a little suspect that it may be problematic to back out.  As I'm based in the UK this doesn't apply to me, the service is US only at the moment.

But assuming the option to stop isn't too onerous, it may be worth US book readers taking a look.  It isn't the only ebook subscription service going, mind, there's Oyster and Scribd that have been going for a while.  It may be the future of eBooks from a consumer perspective, but it's not gold all the way.

Like the other subscription services Amazon is charging a set monthly fee, in their case nearly $10 a month, to let you loan a set number of books - you can only have so many live at any time.  Probably what the more voracious readers have been waiting for.  However it's only a good deal if it holds the books you want to read.  Both Oyster and Scribd have done deals with the big publishers, so there's a good chance you can get to read many of the bigger sellers.  There's been some moaning on the Amazon boards that many of the big sellers aren't on there yet - that'll be down to Amazon's negotiating/bullying techniques.  I expect they are well developed right now.

What Amazon have got that the other two subscription serves don't have is all the KDP Select titles, the books the self published authors agreed to sell exclusively through Amazon.  Regular readers will know I'm not a fan of KDP Select, new readers only have to wander a little through my postings to see exactly where I stand.  Before I continue, I guess I should ask the question - do self published books make a difference? Well according to one report, self published books now account for one third of Amazon's total sales - these are conscious purchasing decisions made in the millions by ordinary people.  Considering self publishing doesn't have the marketing back up of the big league, that's impressive.  By the way, some of my books were in that third of all sales, so obviously there's an element of class in the buying public too.

So let's reverse the above question.  What do the other subscription services have that KU doesn't? Well, pretty much the remainder of the self published works world-wide, including many of the books that formed part of Amazon's third of self-published sales.  Mine are in there, somewhere. Hundreds of thousands of books - some good, some not so good, many sourced via Smashwords.  With exactly the same checks and balances in quality that the KU list have, which unfortunately is mainly formatting orientated. But self publishers know they won't sell many books if their stories aren't up to snuff, and I reckon there's a load of great self published books out there right now. There are probably a fair few dogs, too, which is where a subscription service comes in.  The reason these books aren't in the KU list is because the authors haven't agreed to exclusivity, so although most are for sale on Amazon, none are in KU.  Coupled with the wait for the big publishers to allow their books in that must make KU looking a bit patchy in some genres.

There's another big question to be asked about the subscription services in general.  Are they the future?  Possibly, maybe only if Amazon gets its way and somehow forces everybody who has a book worth a damn to sign up.  Probably not, though, because the way the royalties are calculated at present across all subscription models is unsustainable for the long term.  Of course Amazon and the others are relying on inertia to kick in - once signed up, subscribers will often find they go whole months without downloading a single book.  However the subscription service will not forget to draw down the monthly sub, because that's their business.  But if only the above mentioned voracious readers sign up long term, then I don't see the models working.  The only way that could work is for authors to practically give their work away for ever, regardless of how popular they are.  Most of us are giving our books away pretty much now to gain traction.  All those $0.99 books you bought recently will have reaped the authors, at most, $0.60.  If you bought them from Amazon, the author will have earned $0.35 (all before paying income tax, of course).  It takes a lot of sales to make a significant difference in an author's life and I suspect subscription will make that difference all the more elusive medium to long term.

And the authors are getting edgy, too. When KU was launched, despite it being relatively late to the ebook subscription market, there was a lot of debate on the various kindle and ebook related boards. Initially it looked like Amazon were in line to persuade a lot of authors to sign up for three months' exclusivity with them. But then there was a backlash, mainly from authors who had participated in KDP Select and had felt the service left them feeling underwhelmed. Following on, many would be KU authors have publicly decided against it. Sure there is going to be a number who will try it out, and the first month is likely to see raised transactions as subscribers try to milk the service before becoming liable for a month's fee. Certainly some Kindle authors who clearly have regular sales have noticed a dip.

For the avoidance of doubt I will not be allowing my books to appear on KU while it insists on exclusivity. As before I don't believe Amazon needs this business model - if they drop the anti-competitive approach they'll fill KU with books currently absent and will probably kill Oyster and Scribd in the process, which would be a shame. There may, however, be space for one or the other - every Coca Cola needs a Pepsi, that's capitalist 101. Maybe Scribd and Oyster will merge to create a larger opponent to Amazon, however the real challenge is likely to be Apple. Apple have stepped up in the last year, championing self publishers and maintaining competitive processes. Sure, they manage a virtual monopoly with their devices and eco-system, but it's a monopoly consumers enter out of choice. And Apple have the clout to face Amazon down. On the side-lines also sits Google, quietly trying to build its ebook service. Google don't appear to have tapped into self published books to any great degree yet, but my guess is that they will soon.

So subscription is likely to be a buoyant market for the next one to two years, but my guess is that it could be heading for some turbulent water soon. If you're an author, hold tight.


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Tuesday 22 July 2014

The internet of thingumybobs

Like many of you I've been hearing bits and pieces about IoT in recent months.  The acronym takes me back to my airforce days, when it stood for Initial Officer Training, where newby RAF officers were given their first leadership training and taught which order to use their knives and forks in.  It appears there are different types of cutlery for different types of food and there is definitely a right and wrong way to select your eating irons.  As an other rank I never had that problem - I generally only needed the one knife, fork and spoon for any given sitting. I probably got them wrong on some occasions, to be fair.

But now it stands for the Internet of Things. This isn't a new concept, but perhaps it is one that is coming of age.  I can recall reading in the early 'nineties an interview with Bill Gates where he enthused about washing machines and dishwashers being hooked up to the fledgling internet, receiving updates and diagnostics as needed.  I recall wondering about the logistics of creating network points throughout the average British house, given than most I've ever lived in never had enough power points, let alone LAN sockets.  I have a rule of thumb about electrical outlets when upgrading part of a circuit - work out how many sockets are likely to be needed in the worst case scenario, then double it.  By all accounts, RAF Officers have the same approach with cutlery at mealtimes. I don't remodel often enough to ensure that I've always got enough sockets, so like most other people I have a surplus of extension cables dotted around the house waiting for the next partial rewire.

Obviously I hadn't considered the wireless environment we now live in, although I would still expect my WiFi to struggle if all my domestic appliances plus regular computing devices were to connect simultaneously.  But that's a fixable engineering problem, I guess.

So are we going to see Bill Gates' vision realised?  I think so, but expect there will be a mix of standards surfacing in an attempt to make one OS more predominant than the others.  Personally I favour a Microsoft solution; like many folk who use opposing OS such as Android for recreational purposes, I revert to Windows when I want to write or do anything productive.  I know Google wants to break this this up, but having been exposed to Chromebooks recently, I think I'll pass for the time being. Windows might be constantly hacked, bloated and prone to needing updates every time I look up, but they do have a track record in both consumer and business computing. Not a great record, maybe...

Of course it may be someone like Cisco who will hold the high ground - this IoT is all about devices talking to each other over the internet, allowing us to remove as much human interaction as required. You may not notice it happening - the process is very subtle and happening now. If you think about how you used the internet ten years ago it was probably just you and a computer. Now we routinely interact with computers via an intermediary device, setting our Sky boxes from our smart phone, for example. Google building self drive cars that will understand our travelling preferences is a heartbeat away.

The IoT is going to become very much in our faces and our lives very soon. But we may not even realise it while it unfolds. With luck it will develop into self selecting cutlery in case I find myself eating a meal in a posh hotel, because I never was sent on that course.

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Sunday 20 July 2014

Searching for truth

Many of you will be aware of the decision recently by the European Courts to force Google to carry out some quite specific actions in pursuance of individuals' rights to privacy.  Those of you from across the pond have probably felt that the ruling is a strange one, given the US Constitution and its position on free speech.  While I like my privacy and guard my rights to it assiduously, I'm also a great proponent of free speech too, so I'm pretty much with you on this one.

In a nutshell, as far as I can tell - and I'm no lawyer, I'm an engineer who writes Sci-Fi thrillers and comedic novels, for goodness sake - the ruling states that Google has to remove links to web pages that intrude on individual persons' that are no longer adequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.  Individual's have to apply to Google to have the links they don't like taken down and if Google thinks they have a good case then they will do so.  Apparently Google are wading through about one thousand applications a day to achieve this and have to date been asked to remove more than a quarter of a million links in 70,000 applications made so far.  Allegedly some of the applications upheld have included a convicted sex offender, apparently offended by links that tells the world what he's been convicted of, and an article about the brother of a high profile British politician converting to Islam. While anyone's religious convictions are truly personal, if their brother is one of the most influential politicians in the country then they lose some of their rights to be anonymous, in many eyes. Anyone convicted of sex crimes should expect that information to stay in the public domain forever, unless they can prove that the conviction was false. That's a decision for the courts though, not Google.

One American citizen has shown his irritation at the European ruling by setting up a website - Hidden from Google - which promptly aims to provide links back to the sites that Google is now suppressing.  Because the order from the court was simply to remove the Google search links, not to remove the sites, so he's simply reposted them. And because it is a new link, it will now reappear in Google listings until Google are requested to remove the link again. There's sufficient defamatory laws that cater for sites that tell lies about individuals, but apparently lies aren't the issue here, it's people hiding from the truth - maybe.  Challenging lies online can be a costly business and unless we have sufficient resources behind us most of us can only hope that appealing to the owner of the website or the host will work.  Running through the courts isn't an option for most of us, no matter how right we are. Incidentally Google removes links to websites every day without court rulings - sites that try to trick consumers, sites with embedded malware, sites that promote illegal activities. They do so of their own volition.

So despite Google's attempt at complying with the European courts, their attempts are being quite legally thwarted.  Probably just as well, as the ruling doesn't quite make sense.  And it does seem a little one-sided, Google may be the biggest, best known search engine in the world, its name now a noun, verb and adjective, but it isn't the only one.  I'm not aware that Yahoo or Bing have been ordered to edit their listings, so even if Hidden from Google didn't exist, individual's with a nose for a story could simply search one of the other engines. Interestingly, I'm not aware that either Yahoo or Microsoft have complained of the oversight regarding their search engines by the European courts. Of course many people don't rate these other engines, based on the size of Google.  That may or may not be a valid point and one that's difficult to test, but fear not, help is at hand.

Microsoft are clearly pushing to get their search engine, Bing, to be the engine of choice for more people.  Apple are using it on their products, probably because they dislike Google at least as much as they rate Bing, and of course any Windows machine has Bing as the default search engine anyway.  Is it as good as Google?  Microsoft seem to think so and for the second year running they've run a completion to see if users can tell which search engine is best for them.  If you mosey onto Bing It On you'll find you can carry out five consecutive searches for anything you want - no holds barred.  After inputting each search term the software runs off and applies it to both Google and Bing, giving you both results side by side.  You are then asked to vote on which set of results gives, in your opinion, the better set of links.  You don't find out until after the fifth search which engine you have been voting for.  I ran the test and found that I couldn't prefer one result over the other on one search, I favoured Google in two and Bing in the other two.  So I was a draw.  My wife had one result she couldn't choose between, one favouring Google and the remaining three favouring Bing.  So Bing won her round.  According to the website, Bing is consistently voted the better results.  Why not try the challenge while its still running, and if you find you prefer Bing, why not give it a go more often.  At least it isn't artificially suppressing links, but to be fair, it hasn't been compelled to by the European courts.

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Thursday 17 July 2014

Amazon to launch 'Netflix' for eBooks - second update

* See below for update on this story*

** See below for link to Mark Coker's Smashwords' blog entry on this subject - interesting reading **

In a flurry of activity over the last few days it appears that Amazon has been trialling a new format that will support eBooks in the way that Netflix does for TV shows. The idea is that the consumer pays a monthly fee and has unlimited access to the Amazon library - well, maybe, more of which later.

It's interesting that commentators are using the phrase 'Netflix for books', because Amazon already owns a major competitor to Netflix, LoveFilm.  They've also spent a certain amount of effort in separating up the services from  LoveFilm, which is now indelibly marked with Amazon Prime in some form or another, with subscribers now being billed twice each month, once for Prime, and again for LoveFilm, but the total cost is the same as it always used to be.
 
For fully fledged Prime subscribers the benefits include free next day delivery (not actually free, it's what the monthly fee is for) and access to the Amazon library where you can download an ebook a month for free (not really free either, it's also in your  monthly subscription).  Regular readers will know that although I like the idea of Amazon providing its subscribers enhanced benefits such as the free ebook library, they'll know I'm not a big fan of how it's populated. 

You see, to get in the library you have to commit fully to Amazon.  If your books are listed in Apple or B&N, for example, then any you want included in the library have to be delisted from these other locations, with a minimum commitment of three months.  Personally I'm a bit of a free markets, market forces kind of guy who doesn't like monopolies.  If Amazon offered better royalties for my books I might be a little more interested, but apart from a slush fund used to bribe authors to engage with KDP Select, the process by which authors succumb to Amazon only, they are actually quite poor payers to authors like myself who chooses to price books nice and competitively.  Plus I don't like to feel I'm being told what to do, so I choose to stay listed in all bookstores.

Now it seems that Amazon took their experimental website down pretty soon after it was spotted and talk started across the net, so we don't have all the details, but the main rumour is that it will cost about $9.99 per month to subscribe, which will allow unlimited access to a vast library, so if you routinely spend more than this amount a month on eBooks it may look attractive.  What isn't clear is whether all the books available on Amazon are going to be available and if so, how are royalties going to be paid.  If it is just an extension of the KDP Select process than my books, for eight, won't be up there, although you can own, not borrow, all eight for less than one month's mooted subscription and have enough change to buy yourself a coffee (from a real coffee shop, not one of the overpriced, tax-dodging varieties selling milky froth for an exorbitant amount) to drink while you work your way through the first couple of chapters.

Whatever Amazon decides, I guess we'll know soon enough, because when they commit, they do it big time and they don't hang around. I'll keep you posted.

*18 July 2014 - Amazon have emailed all Amazon registered authors about the new service titled 'Kindle Unlimited'.  Their email confirmed that the books that subscribers (this is limited to the US at the moment) will be limited to those forming part of the KDP Select group - that is, those books that the authors have given Amazon exclusive rights to.  Any such book accessed through the kindle Unlimited service and read 10% or more through will qualify for a payment to the author.  As discussed above and in earlier posts I won't be participating in KDP Select while it insists on exclusivity, but good luck to those who elect to do so.

** http://blog.smashwords.com/2014/07/is-kindle-unlimited-bad-for-authors.html **
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Apple out of touch

Like many households we've become locked into the Apple ecosystem.  Not me personally, I'm a bit of a rogue running an Android phone, an Android 7" tablet and a Windows 8 Surface RT tablet, so I'm spreading the love across two operating systems myself.  My wife is the Apple user, with both the iPad and the iPhone.

It was the iPad first, if my memory serves me correctly, followed by the iPhone.  Earlier adopters will have bought the iPad second, but it's all the same as far as locking-in is concerned. Part of me struggles with the locking in part - I'm toying with the idea of moving over to a Windows 8 phone when my contract comes up for renewal later this year. Because I'm not tied completely to either Android or Microsoft I can swap around as much as my contract allows me.

Apple users, though, struggle with this lack of loyalty, and with good reason. Apple were first to the post with a joined up ecosystem, linking devices together so that photos taken on the iPad appeared almost instantly on the iPhone and vice versa. Same with their calendar, music and, of course, apps. Now I've blogged about this a few times previously, but the ecosystem appears to be more dysfunctional than ever. Photos are very sticky, once in almost impossible to remove, so the photo library grows and grows, to the point that my wife has deleted virtually all her musice from her iPhone to accommodate the photos. Moving music seems harder than we remember it, too. Initially my wife used to use her iPhone like a juke box, changing songs to suit her mood and season. As her phone is only 16gb versus the iPad 32gb she always had to take care not to bust her storage, but in the last year or so that has become almost impossible. As her phone contract is up later this year she has mooted changing to a non-Apple product, but then the crisis regarding the ecosystem always crops up.

But now it seems that Apple have come up with a potential solution, albeit unintentionally. They've just revamped their iPod Touch MP3 players, dropping the price a tad while upping the spec. They've also added some colour to the devices, so that may please some potential buyers. The biggest improvement, apart from price, is the inclusion of a 5mb camera. So users could pick up a larger capacity iPod - they go up to 64gb - so all of your photos, music and diary events could be stored on the one device, it could become the go-to camera to carry around, it can share with the iPad and the iCloud.

And users would be free to go with whatever phone, based on whatever OS they wanted. Which is good news for Android and Windows 8 phones, because that is probably where Apple customers will go as soon as their phone contract is up.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                         
Visit my Book Website here


 
    
    Visit Project: Evil Website here                                        Visit DLF Website here

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        Join me on Facebook -  use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me