Where to get eBooks

Well, first of all, Merry Christmas.  If you've stumbled across this post on Christmas Day then it's probable that you've been given an eReader or maybe a tablet computer as a present and want to get into the eBook world.

For those of you not convinced that eBooks are a substitute for the printed variety then, for what it's worth, here is my view as a person who has been reading eBooks on a variety of devices for the last couple of years.  So, OK I'm a little bit biased as I sell my own novels as eBooks, but I'm also a consumer of the genre.  You'll have to persevere and try the eBooks out for yourself before you're fully convinced, but in my experience every person who has insisted that they didn't rate reading eBooks over print books had, with one exception, never tried reading eBooks.  Of those who have subsequently tried the eBook thing, they love it.  Sure, there's a tactile element to print books, as well as allergy inducing paper particles, but you try lugging a couple of dozen of books around with you all day long and you'll soon realise there are disadvantages to the paper versions.

But you're reading this because you've opened a package and found a Kindle or a Kobo, maybe a Nook, possibly a Google Nexus 7 or even an Apple iPad in one of the two variant sizes.  Where do you go next?

Well, if the device you have unwrapped is a dedicated eReading device then you are largely limited to the bookstore supporting it for your books - that is, for Amazon Kindle devices look at your local Amazon eStore for books, for Barnes & Noble Nook devices, the B & N store that serves your region and so on.  There is one other legitimate route for you (and the implication that there are illegitimate routes is intended - books can be obtained over the internet through eBay and other sales channels that imply they are free but many of them are illegal copies).  The legitimate alternative is  Smashwords - a US company that lets authors self publish through them non-exclusively and acts as an aggregator, a company that distributes those books to B&N, Kobo, Apple etc.  Not every book on Smashwords is distributed to the other bookstores - that's down to the author choosing whether or not to and then jumping though some technical hoops if they do choose to.  Anyway, Smashwords provides dedicated eReader owners with an alternative source of eBooks.  Downsides are that you'll have to download the correct format (Smashwords makes that very easy for you) onto your computer.  From there you'll have to drag the file onto your eReader by connecting it via a USB cable.  It may sound techno, but it isn't that hard to do.  The other downside to Smashwords  is that it does seem to attract a significant number of 'adult' books, some only a few thousand words long which technically makes them an essay.  You should be able to filter these books out if they're not your bag and by default Smashwords signs you up with a 'prude filter' engaged.

If you have just unwrapped a tablet computer and want to use it for reading eBooks, then your options are better than ever.  Sure, you can use the product store associated with the tablet, if it has one, such as the Apple iBookstore or Amazon store for the Kindle Fire family, as well as the Smashwords option - by the way, if you buy books for an iPad through them then the book pops into the iBookshelf as if it came from Apple.

But the better news is that pretty much all the major eBook sellers have their own eReading apps that you can download for free onto your tablet.  So, if you have just opened a Google Nexus you can download the Amazon Kindle app or the B&N app for it. Same goes for your Apple iPad and any other tablet computer. The one bookstore that doesn't seem to  let you do this is the Apple bookstore - if you don't have an Apple device you don't get access to their bookstore.So the world really is your oyster as this allows you to shop around a little and perhaps find books not listed on your device's bookstore but on someone else's.

Enjoy your new eReading device.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Apple case weakens

The rumbling court battle between Apple and, well anyone prepared to make a mobile phone or a tablet computer but mainly Samsung right now has hit a new stumbling block.

It's not the first stumbling block since Apple were awarded a paltry $1 billion in damages for alleged patent infringements  but it is a significant one.  You see, the basis of the argument is that Samsung infringed six specific patents.  Many hours of legal argument have been spent on this topic in three different countries with three different results, but the US result that awarded the eye watering fine is the most spectacular.

That result is being challenged at the moment because the Jury foreman at the trial is alleged to have failed to declare an incident that may have prejudiced his opinion about Samsung.  Apparently Seagate, a company Samsung bought into a year or so ago, dismissed the man about ten years earlier resulting in his bankruptcy.  From what I have read, the man wasn't asked a direct question that would have revealed the link, but that's one for the lawyers to work out for certain.

Then there are the two non-US court cases over the patents; the South Korean courts found that both Apple and Samsung had stolen ideas from each other and awarded each fairly trivial damages.  The UK high court, in a ruling that is applicable across the whole European Union, found no case to answer.  In fact, they forced Apple to make a statement on its UK website and in selected UK newspapers stating that no infringement had taken place, a statement Apple made eventually after some prodding from the court.

And now the US Patent Office have decided that at least one of the six patents Apple claim were infringed was not a unique patent, that is, there were earlier patents that covered the same ground.  Probably not identical, but close enough to demonstrate that it wasn't a unique idea.  The patent was for the  'pinch to zoom' feature that is popular in many smartphones and tablets, and increasingly used in crime dramas on oversized capacitance screens - like public law enforcement agencies can afford that level of technology in this current economy!

And the other patents?  Well, one appears to be around the concept of a rectangular shaped device with rounded corners.  I think Hershey or Cadbury could challenge that idea quite easily.  OK, they never used the shape on a mobile phone but they did make objects that shape that people wanted to put near their mouths and loved.  Certainly the UK courts weren't too supportive to Apple on this matter, stating that Apple's products were cooler than Samsung's, but not infringed.

And there was the App bounce-back that Apple use to show you've reached the last page of Apps.  Somewhere between Newton's Laws of Motion and Einstein's Theory of Relativity sits the model for a dimensionless, massless image travelling towards an implied theoretical wall.  Another failure to impress the UK courts, it seems.

This is probably a hiccup in this long running saga that doesn't give many clues to the ultimate outcome.  I suspect that by the time a final binding decision is made the technology being argued about will be as relevant as a Betamax recorder is today and $1 billion won't be enough to buy a round of coffees at Starbucks.  In fact, I suspect we're almost at that threshold right now.

At least, as far as the round at Starbucks is concerned.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

How To Judge An Industry By Its Cover

I caught a segment on the BBC programme 'The One Show' on Tuesday about book covers - you may be able to watch the segment on the BBC iPlayer if you are interested.  Like most of the segments on this programme the subject matter was presented well but was ultimately shallow, such is the nature of a magazine style TV programme.

Inevitably the focus was on the conventional book industry and discussed how publishers make us choose their books over others - of course I'm interested as I realise the well entrenched belief that we tend to judge books initially by their covers is essentially true.  And it also reflects how people browse eBooks, I would suggest.  So that made the segment worth the time investment even if ultimately I don't think they actually said anything earth shattering or revealing.

Just as the segment was grinding to a halt the interviewer slipped in a sneaky question to an unsuspecting representative of, I seem to recall, Bloomsbury. The question was about whether all the skill needed to produce a good book cover is going to die off with the advent of eBooks.  Or something like that, it slipped in without any warning and I think it caught the publisher's rep off guard because there wasn't any natural reason for the question to slip in other than curiosity.

Anyway, said representative was duly defensive about the industry that feeds and clothes his family, for some unexplained reason.  After nearly choking on a creme de menthe he spluttered that there will always be books and, after recovering he added that 'they said TV would spell the end of Cinema'.  At that point the interview moved into wrap up and the programme moved on.

I thought he'd made a valid point for a while - to be fair there was some validity in what he'd said - but then I rationalised a bit more.  TV was touted to destroy cinema and in fact it very nearly did - there are whole swathes of the cinema industry that no longer exist.  After a period of decline cinema did reinvent itself - it produced fewer, bigger productions, the like that TV couldn't afford to produce.  So it survived, but it had to change to do so.

So it will be with books.  If we take the unreasonable view that eBook reading technology, effectively tablet computing, stands still then on current trends there will be a few books that will never work well electronically.  But most books are as good in electronic format as in print.  I know there is a sentimentality about books that transcends all the logic about cutting down perfectly healthy trees, logging, pulping, bleaching, printing, binding, shipping and finally remaindering and repulping them, a sentimentality helped by the eBook industry trying to price eBooks as if all the costs associated with real books needed to be applied to eBooks.  Some books, though, benefit from the print format - generally the large format coffee table books that actually few people own many of and even fewer read. However, the technology won't stand still, so even those books will, in time, be good candidates for converting to eBooks.

The other issue with the industry rep's comparison is that TV is arguably a poorer medium compared to film - or at least it was until high definition large screen TVs became affordable.  There still does appear to be an immersive quality to cinema that TV doesn't cut yet, but that differential is being eroded all the time.  There isn't really a comparable differential between print and eBooks - many eReaders and tablets have similar tactile qualities to books and generally those who complain that eReaders and tablets are inferior reading media are not generally found to have tried eReaders.  Once they do, the conversion rate is staggering.

So, do try to catch the segment using iPlayer but don't expect to learn a great deal about book cover design. But if you catch the programme you may learn quite a bit about the print industry fears.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Living in the post intuitive world

In the beginning there was the instruction manual.  Initially we would buy an operating system such as Windows and would get a paperback bound book full of information telling us how to set it up, tweek it and of course it would have the Frequently Asked Questions.  I never have understood how anyone could second guess what the FAQs for a new product could be until they have launched it and people have actually asked some questions, but there you go.  And I certainly have never understood why the FAQ that runs something like 'how do I buy more of your fabulously crafted programs?' should make the list when the more obvious 'your software keeps crashing - what should I do?' rarely does.

After the bound paperback came the CD-ROM instruction manual.  Often way inferior to the documents they replaced, apparently because of the ease of hyperlinking and indexing which was supposed to make finding what you wanted quicker or easier, although of course you probably didn't know what you wanted or what it was called at that stage.  I think Apple were watching very closely at this point and decided there were two ways they could go if they weren't going to follow the herd.  They could revert to manuals, very un-techy and decidedly retrograde.  Or they could dispense with manuals altogether.

So Apple invested in developing products that didn't need a manual.  That takes a lot of work unless you're designing a very simple device.  Screwdrivers, for example, tend not to have instructions supplied, because they are familiar and quite intuitive to use.  Apple ushered in the intuitive world!

But an MP3 player, a mobile phone and eventually a new genre of equipment, a tablet computer, had to be developed, designed and manufactured in such a way that Apple didn't need to explain how they worked.  In the main it seems to have been a success.  I'm sure ours isn't the only household to open an Apple box or two, take out the techy gizmo inside, remove the USB cable provided and then systematically dismantle the box and packaging in an attempt to find the instructions, without success.

But eventually there is the experimental push of a button, a loading screen, perhaps a message that points you in the general direction.  Within half an hour music is being downloaded, Apps are being installed, photos transferred, emails sent.  All without a manual.

However it has seemed increasingly necessary to resort to the internet to get the unofficial description of what to do with these Apple devices.. Nuggets of good and indifferent gen litter Google and You Tube, advice pours out of Yahoo and even Apple now sees fit to post guidance on its website.

You see, the iPad of today is infinitely more complex than the iPod of five years ago.  And of course Apple are not an island, they allow other products onto their platforms which increases the complexity further.  And finally they have iOS 6, which is threatening the need for a formal instruction manual.

We have spent more time in the last month scouring the bulletin boards and websites for information just to make iOS6 work.  Simple tasks such as modifying the iTunes list, updating Apps, making space by removing  items have become hard work.  In fact, it's becoming increasingly hard to work out what to do just to keep the darned devices running smoothly.

So, perhaps it's time for Apple to rethink their stance on manuals.  Take us into the post intuitive world.  Or maybe rethink iOS again and get back to basics.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Facebook Vote For the Apathy Party

I'm not an overly political person.  By that I mean I don't slavishly follow one political party or another.  I do have one golden rule when politics rears its invariably ugly head, though.  I don't debate politics with those who could vote but don't.  I also try to avoid debating with those who do vote, but will at least allow myself to be dragged into the debate, if a little reluctantly.

Over here in the UK voting appears to be a dying past-time, with many elections being poorly supported.  This can lead to extremists managing to vote their crazy candidates in. We recently held elections for the new Regional Police Commissioner posts over here in the UK - a role that I understand has been in place for some time in the US but is brand new to us.  To be fair, most of don't fully understand what the role requires and, listening to some of the candidates on TV, that included them.  The turn out was poor, even by jaded British standards at about 15% of the electorate.  I voted - for a guy I don't know who seemed the best bet from a mediocre list.  And he won.  See what I mean about extremists and their crazy candidates?

Now it seems we are going to be asked to vote for Facebook, or their policies at least.  Nobody told me that Facebook was a democracy!

Well, maybe it isn't.  For starters, it's a bit of an experiment.  If less than 30% of Facebook users respond then Facebook will do whatever it pleases - it will take the results under advisement.  But hang on - 30% of Facebook users equals about 300,000,000 people, I hope they're not relying on the Brits to vote, given our track record.

And the subject matter is a bit technical:  Amongst the small print the vote will be to allow FB to share data about you between its affiliates - most of us assumed they did anyway.  Also they are proposing that they can change who contacts you - I'm not fully read in on this one, but it sounds like a marketing ploy to me.  Perhaps most controversially FB wants to change who can view your timeline data after you've hidden it.  The clue should be in the phrase - 'after you've hidden it'.  It's your data, you should be allowed to change your mind.  You surely have the right to decide who cannot see it.

But the biggest vote is about voting - FB want to stop it and start using feedback to determine governance. So we didn't know we had a vote and as soon as we do it is to vote to lose the vote.  Is it just my head that's spinning?

Of course, unlike real votes, this is open to FB users which does appear to include rather a lot of younger persons who may not have ever voted on anything except reality TV before.  Unlike reality TV, the words used may be a bit more technical, so younger FB users might be a little challenged if they are to help keep the participation numbers up.

And what about the FB pages for cats, inanimate objects and pretend people?  If the cats, objects and make believe people don't vote then the 30% threshold gets harder to reach.  If they do vote, then the results could be distorted by users who just aren't real.  Even people like me will distort the stats - I have a personal FB page that I rarely use, an FB page linked to my writing and my evil alter ego, B L O'Feld has a Facebook page where he posts suitably evil messages for his 'Friends'.  All are welcome, by the way - it's Barry Liam O'Feld if you're searching in FB.

Anyway, we've all got until December 10th to vote, email should be dropping into your inbox any day now.  If you don't vote, don't pick a debate with me over Facebook policies next time we meet in the pub.  And if you do vote, well, you know what I drink, don't you?

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

December Sale Now On

I've spent much of this year experimenting with the price of my eBooks. I've set them relatively high, I've set them incredibly low.  In fact, at one point, I gave them away.

Most of this was curiosity as to the best price to pitch at.  I've made no bones in the past that eBook prices should be way lower than print book prices.  My personal view is that books from authors like myself who are pretty much unknown to the majority of readers should be set very low, however research by Smashwords contradicts this approach.  They find that the most popular price point is above $2.99, which I think is very high for an eBook.

I've tried at that price point to see if the theory worked, and I've been sat at a price point below that for some time, however I'm aware that we're approaching the holiday season and some of you are probably looking for books to load on your eReaders to tide yourself over the few days you'll have curled up in front a a fire waiting for your employer to re-open.  I'm also aware that many of you will be hoping Santa will remember to slip an eReader or tablet computer into your stocking this Christmas.

So I've set my eBook prices to a uniform $0.99 each. I say uniform, there are vagaries involved. For example, Apple will convert the $0.99 and convert it to £0.49 or £0.99 in the UK, as they see fit.  Amazon will list the books at 0.99 in dollars, pounds sterling or Euros plus will pluck a random number for India and Japan.  Other variations may occur with your preferred bookseller, feel free to shop around.

I'm aiming at running this promotion for December, then I'll re-evaluate.  I think $0.99 is a fair and reasonable price to pay for an eBook.  The part I don't think is reasonable is that Amazon, at that price point, keep 65% of the purchase price whereas the other eBooksellers tend to keep 40% - a reflection of Amazon's strength in the industry.

In fact, Amazon are trying to be the only eBookseller in the industry.  If you've read my earlier blog about KDP Select you'll know that they run a scheme that puts members' books in a virtual library that can be accessed for free by Amazon Prime customers.  If an author has a book in this library and has given Amazon exclusive rights to his/her book then Amazon will pay them a royalty based on the amount of times their book is 'borrowed'.  They've just pumped another $1.5 million into the fund on top of the multi millions already committed, just to try and take authors away from Apple, Kobo, B&N etc.  I may be cutting my throat here, but I'm not biting.  I like competition and hate monopolies.  This is attempting to create a monopoly.

Anyway, having taken my personal stance for democracy, should you wish to take advantage of my book offer and prefer the larger part of your payment to reach the author then buy the book from anyone other than Amazon.  Smashwords can provide my books, and books by 50,000 other authors, in a Kindle friendly format and the author gets the majority of the proceeds.  The price you pay is the same, but the author's cut is better.  I may be a tad biased, but I'm struggling to remember when Amazon was credited with helping someone write a book.

Anyway, if you have been looking at my eBooks and felt them to be too expensive, now is a good time to download them for next to nothing.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Watch Your Online Spelling

Many years ago I was the technical specialist on an engineering project for the Royal Air Force.  Not only did I monitor the technical specification, the design development, the manufacture and the testing programme but I had to review the deliverable technical documents.   Imagine the smile on my face when I read the formal proposal included the memorable line 'and we will ensure the documents will be checked for correct spelling and grammer [sic]'.  I can't say my response to that specification ensured that I didn't have to return too many submissions for spelling and grammatical errors, but I'm sure that the supplier at least tried to trap the more obvious ones.

I probably took more pleasure out of that typo than I should have.  I guess it was the irony.  It seems I'm not the only spelling monitor on the block, though.  A Twitter account, @yourinamerica, has sprung up and is dedicated to literally one spelling error that turns up often enough in Social Media, the use of 'your' instead of 'you're'.  Now it doesn't take a lot of trawling through Twitter to find a whole lot of similar spelling issues and don't get me started on Facebook...

But the interesting thing about this is not that someone felt incensed enough to spend their evenings spanking Twitter users for one specific typo - let's not forget that many Tweets are made on mobile phones so some slack could be let out to the offenders - however after three days and sixty remonstrating Tweets the account had attracted 8000 followers.  Eight thousand people felt sufficiently moved to search out and push the Follow button.  Of all the millions of Twitter subscribers out there, with the exception of the celebrity accounts it is almost unheard of that degree of success in attracting Followers.  That's a lot of  Schadenfreunde.

When Mashable reported the story it opened a floodgate of comments and probably swelled the Follow list of @yourinamerica even more - I didn't follow as I'm in the UK and anyway the subject matter is too narrow for me.  Not that Twitter users aren't strangers to narrow subject matters!  However the comments indicated that there's scope for dozens of similar Twitter accounts.  I'm not sure we need one for every misspelling trend, but seeing as 'your versus you're' is already trending, why not?

If you want a one-stop nuclear option to spelling gaffes, though, then why not add a link to Lynne Truss' 'Eat Shoots and Leaves' book?  You could Tweet the link if you're feeling brave!

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Black Friday Sees Tablets Take the Lead

According to some analysts, the Black Friday sales saw tablets overtake laptop sales for the first time in the US.  Of course, we'll have to wait for the sales figures to be returned and ratified but the projections are indicating a 3:2 ratio.

I can't say I'm surprised and if you've been reading my blog for the last year you would know why - I've been saying that this is going to be the year of the tablet, forecasting a surge before the holidays since last January.

And of course, it's not only the Apple iPad that is pushing the concept forward now - over 100 million units strong - but also the iPad mini, the Amazon Fire and the Google Nexus.  The consumer is spoilt for choice across all price points as we lunge towards the Christmas period.

But it's not just the sexy attractiveness of the tablets that has pushed them ahead of the laptops, nor the convenience of using a hand-held device anywhere to do, well, pretty much anything apart from word processing, crunching numbers in a spreadsheet and printing off the results.  So, OK, tablets still have a few challenges to overcome but they're pretty cool and great fun to use.  They're also great for reading books and magazines as well as watching movies so their utility is pretty much unbeatable.

The real kicker in the laptop/tablet race that I hadn't realised was taking place is that we all pretty much have laptops, netbooks and even some dust gathering desktops at home already.  Outside of the serious gamer applications, the laptops are now keeping pace with technology better than ever.  Sure, Microsoft are still trying to develop operating systems that suck every last megabyte of RAM, ROM and hard drive capacity but most of us are finding that whatever legacy version we are using is adequate, or have moved over to Linux.  Even the old chestnut of needing to upgrade on a regular basis because of hard drive capacity being overtaken by software and file storage is becoming a thing of the past as the low cost flash drives and cloud based storage becomes mainstream.

So the real reason that tablets overtook laptops is that everyone has a laptop or two - some new, many getting on a bit (maybe two years' old?), grandparents have them, for goodness sake and even their grandchildren have their cast-offs (grief).  But not everyone has a tablet, not yet. OK, some folks will be on their second iPad - some will be on their fourth, for no other reason that there have been four iterations, but despite Apple's best endeavours there are plenty of people who don't have a tablet yet.

I knew that tablets would take off, the Kindle Fire last year sounded the challenge loud and clear.  I've been quite upfront with my contention that this will be both the best year for dedicated eReaders and their peak as well, but I didn't guess that laptop sales would be a casualty.  But I guess when we look back, it was inevitable.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Save the Date, Get an Apple

Apple products are expensive.  There I've said it and will probably find myself thrown in the dock for mentioning it.  But it's true.  Unfortunately they are in a fantastic bargaining position that their competitors can only dream of.

The Apple belief is that a computer needs to be more than the sum of its parts - which is why they control the hardware design and the software production - sure, they let outsiders produce Apps for the tablet devices but they vet the products and charge to let them on their network.  There's no renegade programming going on that they don't sanction.

What you get with Apple is a whole environment - starting with a device, be it a Macbook Air, an iPad, iPad mini, iPod and, when they start digitising desserts, the iPud probably.  Then they add the software which is generally considered a good thing, but we'll gloss over iOS 6 for now as it will probably be superseded before I push the 'Publish' button on this blog entry anyway.

On top of the hardware and software there is an overlayer of support in the iCloud.  Up there, wherever that is, you store your iTunes, naturally, plus your iBooks, your personal photos, your calendar entries and anything else they can suck up out of your iDevices.  I'm not being negative, it's amazing how they do this because they then allow all of your data to be shared by all of your Apple devices.  Hence the bigger than the sum of its parts claim above.

But, despite all of these things, they are bloody expensive.

Well, if you are harbouring a desire to own an Apple-like device, perhaps to use for yourself or to share with a loved one as a present then Friday 23rd November 2011 could be a date to circle on your calendar.  I know it's short notice, but I'm a Brit and still trying to get my head around the Black Friday thing.  Because Apple don't limit the traditional post Thanksgiving shopping spree to just the US, they extend it even to the far flung shores we call the UK.

At the time of writing there isn't any specific details about the discounts being offered for one day from this notoriously expensive company with virtually no track record of  offering bargains, but traditionally they offer between 10% and 15%, which is £40 - £50 on better spec iPads.

Save the date and, if you are in the market for an Apple product right now, save yourself some cash.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

When Not to Share

In the UK over the last week there has been a lot of controversy that has rocked an already unsteady BBC. In the wake of the allegations against former BBC presenter Jimmy Savile of sexual abuse of minors, plus other very serious allegations, there was a BBC programme that allrged that a Nineteen Eighties politician engaged in child abuse at a north Wales children's home.

The programme didn't name names, so the specific allegation hasn't been made publicly by the BBC, but the rumours started flying around the social media sites about a specific person who has since been paid a substantial sum from the BBC in compensation for the harm his reputation has suffered.  I'm not mentioning his name - there's been enough attention on the claims which the BBC has clearly acknowledged to be untrue - and it has caused the Director General to resign in the midst of all of this.

As far as I can tell, the speculation about the name of the person appears to have been fought outside the BBC, particularly on Twitter, with a specific name ending up trending as a result.  Hence the unwarranted reputational harm that the BBC has felt the need to compensate for and allow its titular head to resign over.

Now it seems that the lawyers who are acting for the person wronged by the allegations have settled out of court with the Corporation, and the person they represent has settled for a sum that probably doesn't even start to reflect the harm such allegations can do but has been tempered by the fact that it is public money that forms the compensation.  That is very noble.

However the lawyers haven't finished, not by a long chalk.  It appears they are trawling through the many Tweets that named their client, in order to determine who did what harm to him.

You see, when dealing with defamation you have two forms.  The first is slander, where a person says something about another that is untrue and tarnishes their reputation. The second is libel, where someone or some body - such as a newspaper or a corporation such as the BBC - publishes something that is untrue and tarnishes someone's reputation. Libel is generally seen as the more serious offence as slander tends to affect a localised group and the harm can be limited.  OK, sure enough if someone bad mouths a colleague in front of their boss and the statements are untrue then that can have serious consequences for them, so any subsequent slander case could result in major damages.

But libel tends to allow an untruth to permeate further, to reach deeper and cause more harm that is longer lasting.  So the interest in the Tweets should be making a few people a little nervous.  In fact, more than a few as to get a person's name to trend it takes an awfully large amount of Tweets and Retweets.  Which means that while only a few people may have made an incorrect link to the upcoming BBC documentary, or perhaps may have been leaked information that has not subsequently been substantiated - after all, the BBC clearly agrees it has done something wrong here, and as they didn't screen the documentary it must have been something that they allowed off air - they did so  to sufficient numbers who probably retweeted glibly to their own list of followers.

There could be some serious ramifications of this analysis by the lawyers, because I'm certain they're not doing this as a technical exercise.  If this ends up with people in court defending their Tweets and Retweets we could see a sea change in the usage of social media - don't forget that Facebook has just launched the Share function which allows FB users to redistribute posts to all of their Friends.  As a minimum, users of Twitter and Facebook should think carefully before posting or reposting allegations about a person - most of us are not going to be in receipt of the facts of these cases and it is all too easy to get carried away with the call for blood that we're witnessing over in the UK right now, and it could cost individuals a lot of money if they contribute to defaming a person's reputation by the simple act of pushing a virtual button.

Long term this could be seen as the point that social media grew up and started to understand its social responsibilities.  Take care when Tweeting, Retweeting or Sharing.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Share This On Facebook

Despite every tech company suing the backside off every other tech company, there doesn't appear to be any slowing down of me-too approaches.    We shouldn't be too surprised by this - the leading geneticist and  generally controversial guy Richard Dawkins postulated quite a long time ago that ideas reproduce like genetic material.  He suggests that they are analogous to Genes and calls them 'Memes'.  So when one tech company finds that rectangular shaped, rounded corner devices are popular, other companies pick up on the idea too.

So it shouldn't be too surprising that there is cross pollination in the Social Networks.  Actually, what is surprising is that in general the networks are quite distinct.  I know there are technically loads of these networks out there, most specialising in sharing knowledge in vertical markets, but there's two big ones (Facebook and Twitter, for those who haven't noticed) and one pretender (Google+ which may or may not usurp one or both).

It's clear what Facebook's purpose is - it harvests data about individuals and pushes advertisements at the users while they sit there providing the data for resale.  As a way of thanking them, it gives a lot of people an opportunity to share thoughts, links, photos and meaningless facts with each other.

Twitter's purpose is not as clear - sure it also allows people to share thoughts, links, photos and meaningless facts with each other - as long as you keep the message ridiculously short (given today's technical economy).  It doesn't cost to get on it, to use it and hard as I stare at it, I can't see any obvious advertisements.  OK, in my ever expanding list of tweets I notice a small number of sponsored links that don't seem to make a huge amount of sense to me - clearly not too tightly targeted I would suggest, although as I tend to read tweets from a small number of the many I receive perhaps I'm just missing the point.

But one aspect of Twitter that has been very useful is the retweet - the button that let's you share a tweet that has made you laugh, cry or drop your mobile phone in shock.  In fact, for those of us using Twitter to promote our books, music or whatever business we're in, the retweet is like music to our ears.  To get your link retweeted by just one person automatically puts your pitch in front of a new set of potential customers. When a Tweet is retweeted again and again - goes viral - then that is the Holy Grail of Social Networking.

Well, you may or may not have noticed it, but you can do much the same thing on Facebook now.  They've slipped it in quietly, so you may have over-looked it, but there's an option to Share a posting.  This could be very powerful, given the more graphic nature of Facebook compared to Twitter.  Tweets are, essentially, a few words and maybe a link and you have to decide from your evaluation of those few words if you want to risk wasting your time opening the link, which is almost invariably compressed so you can't fathom a clue about it's content.  With FB you can see what the posting is about and when you share it, so can the guys and gals on your network.

And this is the power of the share.  Because even those of us who don't spend out lives sharing every last detail about what we've seen or done with the world have quite unique FB contact lists.  I have a lot of the same names on my FB account as my wife has, but she has many more that I don't and as I use my FB account as a drop in for strangers curious about my writing and blogging, I have a lot of different names as well.

This isn't as tightly targeted as the Google+ circles I mentioned in my last blog posting - that seems to be the absolutely right idea however it doesn't have the penetration that Facebook has, at least, not yet.  So the downside is that we may find FB postings about people we don't know, would never know, don't want to know, creeping in our FB feeds.  But let's face it, there's a lot of clutter there already and if you don't want to look at the stranger's posting, why not look at the adverts instead?

However, Facebook already allows users to compartment their contacts into lists - I'm not sure how many people use them as I haven't seen an advantage to using them apart from perhaps providing FB with  more usable data to sell up until now, but now with the Share button it  does appear to allow us to choose who we inflict the item on.

So, why not give the Facebook Share button a try out?  Go on, share this on Facebook.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Return of the Review

I've posted a few reviews in my time, more as a social gesture than anything else.  I'll be honest, if I read a dog of a book I probably won't mention it anywhere public.  It may be a touch weak, I may be a tad paranoid.  I'm not keen on being sued and anyway, having reviewable books on Amazon, Apple, B&N etc means I'm an easy target for retaliation.

Plus I'm a little wary of reviews.  I suspect that when peer reviews first popped up on the likes of Amazon they were really useful.  I have a perception that everyone was nice and honest and really trying to present a truthful but upbeat review back in the beginning.  But there's money involved in sales, and it seems that reviews can affect sales, so there is an incentive to massage the reviews to make a product more attractive.  There's also a darker side, too.  Got a grudge against a manufacturer, hacked off because someone's book is selling better than yours, having a bad day?  Write a negative review, why don't you?

And then there's the anonymous nature of reviewing.  Some use their own name - I do, by the way - but many hide behind handles.  Perhaps I'm not the only one a tad paranoid about being sued, but maybe some people deal with it in different ways.

But let's be honest, sometimes a review is the only clue to a product we have outside of the otherwise deliberately biased sales blurb, whether that be the product description or the three hundred words that tries to make you want to read a book.  If only we could trust the reviews.  Well Google thinks it has the answer.

You may have noticed Google pushing something it calls Google+ lately.  Well, part of Google+ is a Social Network, just like Facebook, only smaller, less popular and up to now, for me, a bit opaque.  It tries to sit somewhere between Facebook and Twitter, in fact it tries to be both and neither.  You share your views and news, your posts, your photos with people you know and supposedly care about, or perhaps with like-minded people, or persons who share an attribute such as a common school or workplace.

So far, so FB or Twitter, but Google+ is different because it lets you build 'circles' and you do your sharing with whichever circles you feel appropriate.  Got an in-joke about someone in the office? - use the office circle (carefully).  Want to show your child's latest school photo? Use your family circle.  And perhaps your friend circle.  Want to share a blog entry you've just found or written? Use your everything circle.

I've looked at the Google+ network a few times and just hold off pushing the join button.  But I guess I'll take the plunge one day soon if only because it's a sales channel that looks likely to grow as it becomes clearer as to its purpose.  And one purpose might be around the thorny review problem.

Because although you may not trust a review from some anonymous reviewer with a phoney handle and you may not even trust a review from little old me in plain speak because I'm actually just a name on a blog, you would trust a review from someone you know, or at least you would if you personally trust that person.  And that is where Google+ is aiming to help, because if someone you know - and by know I mean is a Google+ user AND is inside one of your circles AND if that person has reviewed a product or book or CD or whatever that you are  interested in then their review will sit at the top of the user reviews list.

There are two impediments to this approach, three if you agree that there are enough social networks on the planet already without Google+ complicating the situation.  The first is there needs to be an awfully large amount of people on Google+ reviewing stuff for this to work and secondly, you need to have a meaningful amount of them in your Google+ circle(s).

Now I don't know if Google+ will take off in the same way that Facebook appears to have done, judging by the rumours, but I can see some of the attractions such as segmenting who you tell and what you tell them.  Building a trusted review network would seem to be a really good idea too.  The hard way is for all of us to embrace Google+, the easy way is for FB to adapt the ideas and introduce them into their network.  Shouldn't be too hard or, while the Google lawyers are busy fighting off Apple, too risky either.

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

How Many Lawyers Does It Take to Design A Mobile Phone?

Plenty, if your company name is Apple. Or Samsung.  Probably also Google, judging by the current wind direction.  The list used to include HTC too, but that looks like water under the bridge for now.

There's been a lot of suing and counter-suing going on lately.  Most of it appears to be around who thought of flat, rectangular mobile phones with rounded corners first.  Gene Roddenberry, probably, but like Steve Jobs he's not with us any more so isn't in a position to counter-sue.  Steve left a legacy for that eventuality. In case you missed it, here's a potted round up.

Apple and HTC have been popping in and out of court for years, keeping the lawyers gainfully engaged in the process.  Apparently they have come to an agreement recently, although the suspicion on the street is that HTC have seen the eye watering judgement against Samsung earlier this year and decided to cooperate with Apple rather than face them down.  Apple have entered into the spirit of things and shelved their litigation for now.

Of course that Samsung case is still rolling.  A US court awarded over $1billion against Samsung for infringement of its designs.  A UK court didn't come to the same decision, but then again they didn't have a jury foreman who might have had a grudge against Samsung.  You see, the foreman in the US case had been sued by his former employer, Seagate, a company that Samsung now are a major shareholder in.  He ended up a bankrupt as a result of the litigation and Samsung are now suggesting that he may not have been unbiased in the Apple case.  Add that to the fact that Apple have chosen, under a certain amount of judicial duress, to state publicly that the Samsung design did not infringe its designs and you've got a case that will roll on for years - literally as the appeal isn't due to be heard until 2014.

But Google could be the big target of Apple's wrath.  Apple have already had a pot shot at the Android operating system, claiming that it stole a chunk of ideas from them.  Now Google own the Android system, have done for years - from before either they or Apple had launched a mobile phone operating system.  Now, of course, Google are venturing into the mobile phone market directly with the Nexus 4, the iPad mini market with the Nexus 7 and the iPad grown up market with the Nexus 10, so the dynamic is changing.

Apple have several beefs with Google, one being that for now they need the company.  Virtually every search on the web today starts with Google.  Sure there's Bing and a few others, but Google is the search engine of choice for most of the planet, which means Apple have to include it on their devices.  Which means they have to pay Google for that right.  Google maps is another predominant mapping technology and up to now Apple have had to pay Google a pretty penny for the privilege.   Apple have consequently invested vast sums of money in developing their own version, but screwed up big time by rushing it out - that's the reason for the recent iOS6 upgrade.  Unfortunately the mapping  didn't work and in fact, for the few who actually saw them in action, behaved terribly.  That's why they rushed out iOS6.01 which reverted to Google maps - most of us hadn't got around to upgrading the OS  by then hence we never saw the maps in action.  However people keep on mentioning them in their blogs, so it isn't going away.

If only those pesky bloggers would let it go.

My guess is that Apple will have fixed the problems by now, but they will have to be really certain before they re-release the mapping routine.  You can only make a first impression once and they squandered that with iOS6.  The re-launch needs to be perfect and probably will need to be wrapped around something really tasty to take everyone's eyes off the past.

All of this legal activity could have been better directed.  We all know about how Apple missed a vital detail when buying the iPad name from a failing Chinese company, not noticing that China wasn't included in the deal.  That cost them about $60M for the oversight.  Now they've paid a Swiss clock firm $21M for using their clockface in iOS 6 without permission - that could have been a lot cheaper, given a little foresight and some decent legal eye for detail.

But perhaps if they sat down with all the tech companies they are suing, with the lawyers out of the room, perhaps they could hammer out a deal that didn't involve suing everyone else stupid.  Then the lawyers could get back to what they do best - oh, I don't know.  Changing lightbulbs?

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Since Gutenberg had his big idea, books have changed lives.  They've imparted wisdom, humour, excitement and pleasure.  There have been a few dogs along the way, but that's art for you.  With the exception of a few notable examples, most of the books printed between the invention of the press and a few years ago have quietly found their way to landfill, recycling or have been used as kindling in long dark winters.

Because once we've read a book, with few exceptions, we don't revisit it.  Historically a printed copy has been passed around the family and friends before being thrown away; some copies have been read and re-read due to being stored in a library, but ultimately most of the books ever printed don't exist anymore.  And those that do are probably sat on bookshelves unread for decades and will remain there until the ultimate ignominy - the house clearance that marks the final act in our lives.

While I'm sure someone from the British Library can hazard a guess at the total number of unique books published ever and can probably point you towards actual copies of many of them, in reality the majority of books from the distant through to recent past don't exist at all any more.  One of the main reasons for this is because printing books was an expensive process, actually still is, and consequently once a book fell below a  predetermined level of sales it wasn't printed any more.

So, at any given point in time there were only so many titles in print and for a long time there have been more titles out of print than in.  But now we're in the eBook era and any books published electronically will, technically, live forever.  Is that a good thing?  Is it even desirable?

Sure, many books will date.  Some will date within days of publication, others will last a few years.  Some, very few I suspect, will become classics like the works of Austin and Dickens.  But all will be available forever.  Many will appear timeless because they are deliberately locked in a specified period in time, such as Nineteen Fifties Americana gumshoe novels, others will be placed in an undefined 'near future' that is never reached.  Detective stories, high adventures, pure romance, we'll always want them.  Language will evolve to make the older works sound strange, archaic - and of course those books that try to predict the future will always be hopelessly way off beam when compared to the true passage of technology development - but a yarn is a yarn, right?

So some books, more than traditionally considered normal, will still be available many years after the author has shrugged his or her mortal coil and may, possibly, satisfy a whole new generation of readers.  But we're witnessing an interesting phenomenon right now that I believe is only going to increase - not only has every person got a book inside of them, as the adage goes, they all seem to be publishing the bloody things .  So there's a lot of new books hitting the eBookstalls every day.  Some are poor, some are OK, many are damned fine reads and a very small number, in strict proportion to how it has always been, are exceptional.

So this is good, yes?  Well, maybe.  I don't know about you, but I find looking for books to read to be a bit of a chore, trawling through lists of books on Amazon or Smashwords or whichever eBookseller you prefer. Sure, we're given tools to help us choose.  Amazon have a daily deal which increasingly seems to be pushing books I wouldn't impose on my worst enemy's Kindle.  I have a theory that right now they are pushing KDP Select titles, but can't prove that at the moment.

All the eBook sellers provide tools to filter down, but these are pretty blunt tools.  Even if I knew what my favourite sub-genre was, I'd probably name it something different to whatever Amazon and co decide to call it.  I'm not even sure what sub-genre my own books should belong in, and I know them as well as anyone could, so I have difficulty in deciding on what the correct sub-genre I want to read from is called.  For the record, I think my non comedic novels are science based thriller or adventure stories, but that usually translates as Sci-Fi.  Sure, some of the science I use is theoretical in nature, but it really does occupy and feed real clever people around the planet, other speculative science I use is practical and being developed as we speak.  But the science is only part of the vehicle for the stories, so perhaps the science bit is a red herring.  Perhaps I ought to classify my books by what they're not - they're not vampire teenage romance fantasy porn, for example.

But I digress.  The point is, finding a good book is difficult and with the immortality we're facing for books, is going to get a whole lot harder.  I think we can discount best seller lists if we want to find something that is good and new, even if we can trust them.  Let's face it, the likes of Apple and Amazon are hardly falling over themselves to qualify how books get on the lists.  Then there's user reviews.  Some are really helpful, some are highly questionable.  Most probably don't accurately reflect the general opinion, certainly I've found many reviews to be more generous about a book than I would be, while others are unnecessarily harsh.

Trawling through the lists of books is pointless; a great title and superb cover may draw you to read the blurb, but that is still a terrible way to choose a book, let alone judge it.  Titles and covers are art forms in their own right and the skills to write a really good blurb are way different to the skills needed to write a killer novel - many authors will readily agree that the three hundred word blurb took proportionately longer to write than the three hundred thousand word opus it describes.  But a good title, great cover and superlative blurb do not guarantee a half decent book and I suspect I've breezed past many a great book in a dismissive manner because I've made a shallow negative judgement about the title or cover.

Personal recommendation from someone you know and trust has got to be a powerful and accurate way of finding books, but finding that person is always going to be a challenge.  Finding that a person you know and trust also likes the same kind of book as yourself is a coincidence worthy of an eBook plotline, in fact.

So, how do we find the books we want to read?  I think that there needs to be a tool that provides a better way of drilling down, something that pulls the essence of a book out in a way that helps us to decide whether it is for us or not.  I don't know the answer but I think I stumbled across a possible way forward the other day.  I noticed a Tweet from a fellow author who asked whether his writing style was more like John Le Carre or Graham Greene.  I nearly replied with 'I don't know, which was the most arrogant?' but I resisted.  However there is mileage in this approach.  All books have something in common with other, previous books.  Think of any really successful and popular book and it is likely that you can relate it to another book, often by an earlier author.  It's all about standing on the shoulders of giants, if we're sensible and read widely enough.

My idea is that we start a database that readers use to map books together by - not just the best and most successful but any that they've read that they think have a positive link to other books they've read.  Not copies but in style, genre, pace, detail.  Initially the list will be worthless, but over time, with enough help from the many good readers on this planet a web will form and once you've read a book and enjoyed it you could follow the book's web and find out what other books are considered to be related in a positive way.

By doing this we can build a map of the world of books that may make their immortality worthwhile.  I won't be constructing this database, by the way, because I'm too busy right now writing my latest book about a seventeen year old blood sucking nymphomaniac with a penchant for humping the occupants of middle for diddle earth.  And I've no idea if it will be linked to any other books that have passed before it, but it's possible!

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I can be followed on Twitter too - @RayASullivan
or on Facebook - use raysullivan.novels@yahoo.com to find me

Why not take a look at my books and read up on my Biog here

Want to see what B L O'Feld is up to?  Take a look at his website here

Worried/Interested in the secretive world of DLFs?  Take a look at this website dedicated to DLFs here, if you dare!