ipads and the writer

 

ipads and the Writer

Last week I saw a post for a free writing course called Creative Writing, Learning from the Masters. The six featured writers included Norman Mailer. I quickly went to have a look at it on Apple’s itunes U. I successfully download the ibook of the course onto my computer but could not open it as I did not have an iphone or ipad. Rotten Apple.

But then I thought, maybe I could buy an ipad. Apart from allowing me to get advice on how to write from Norman Mailer, buying an ipad would allow me to download from the ibookstore. And if I downloaded a wordprocessing app, I could use the ipad to write with when my laptop got sick.

I went online and found that ipads ranged in price from a mini-ipad at just under $400 to fourth-generation ipads at just under $800. My eyesight’s not too great, so I wanted the biggest screen possible, which cut out the mini version. The cheapest full sized fourth-generation version was $500. That version only had wi-fi, which is what I wanted as there was no way that I was going to shell out money for a 3G mobile type plan.

After I found my wallet, dusted it off and carefully pried its compartments open, I found I did have enough money to buy an ipad. So I dashed off down the street, excited at the prospect of getting a new tech toy. First stop Dicksmiths, but they didn’t sell them, that left Harvey Norman. They didn’t sell them either. Was this to be another case of Wangaratta retailers not having what I wanted?

I often joke that Wangaratta is a great place to save as its shops never have what I want. Recently I had to travel to Albury (an hour’s drive away) to get a pair of thongs that didn’t make me look like a complete bogan and a decent towel for the pool (hence the need to find and dust off my wallet).

But when asked, a salesperson in Harvey Norman told me that Big W might sell ipads. Big W??? But they just sell crap. They don’t even sell decent thongs or pool towels. But then again, how could they stuff up an ipad? They are all mass produced in Chinese sweat shops. So I walked around to Big W. They had four mini-ipads and one (just one) fourth generation wi-fi only ipad. I bought it.

I have spent the last few days fiddling with it. I have signed up and read the first bits of the Creative Writing, Learning from the Masters course. The ibook is full of videos of the authors talking. I will let you know what I think of the course when I am further into it.

I downloaded a free word-processing app, and learnt that I could send its documents through email to word on my laptop. I then purchased a Bluetooth keyboard that I can use to write those documents. The keyboard also acts as a stand for the ipad, so it is like having another laptop. So I have a back-up computer.    

Comparison of ipad to a Kindle.

·         I changed the ipad’s screen to sepia, but I still much prefer the sepia look of a Kindle screen.

·         I prefer the page number system for ibooks on an ipad to the percentage system used by the Kindle.

·         A Kindle is much lighter than an ipad.

·         It is much easier to return to the table of contents in an ibook than in the Kindle.

Overall, I prefer to read ebooks on a Kindle because of the look of the page and the ipad starts to cramp up my hands after holding it for extended periods.  

Price Comparision Between ibookstore and Amazon.

It has been a long time since I compared prices of Amazon’s ebooks with Apple’s ibooks. I had concluded that Amazon was much cheaper. This time I compared eight books that range from current bestsellers to the classics.

·         Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – ibook  $12.99, Amazon $13.75

·         The Twelve – Justin Cronin – ibook $19.99, Amazon $21.22

·         1984 – George Orwell – ibook 99c, Amazon 99c

·         Ark – Stephen Baxter – ibook $11.99, Amazon $12.69

·         A Wanted Man – Lee Child – ibook $9.99, Amazon $10.52

·         Fifty Shades of Grey – ibook $8.99, Amazon $8.33

·         War and Peace – ibook free, Amazon 99c

·         The Paradox Resolution – KA Bedford – ibook N/A, Amazon $9.99

So my quick survey shows ibooks are currently generally slightly cheaper than Amazon.

I also discovered a free space invaders game app for my ipad, and I can hear its thrum thrum thrumming. Now if only I could play it and drink coffee at the same time.

My Writing Week, Issue 24, Year 5

Price of Ebooks Going Up????

The last time I checked Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers list was in February. Unless the best seller list I looked at yesterday was an aberration, the prices of ebooks have both diversified and dramatically increased.

At the lower end of the price scale, I only counted three ebooks selling for 99c, compared with 34 at that price in February. Twenty-two were selling for the ebook guru nominated price of $2.99, compared with 32 in February.

Two free ebooks and one for 96c had somehow made it on the list. I was under the impression that free ebooks were kept on a separate list and that an ebook could not be sold for less than 99c on Amazon, so I assume their appearance was a technical glitch. But things might have changed.

Thirteen ebooks were $3.99, compared to four in February. Twenty-five ebooks were priced from $3.87 to $6.96. So 47 of the ebooks in Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers list were priced over $7, including three at $9.09, seven at $9.99, four at $11.93, three at $12.99 and three at $17.05. Compare this with only six ebooks being priced over $8 in February, but there were 22 over $8 in August the previous year.

Maybe in February everyone had overspent at Christmas and could not afford dearer ebooks, or perhaps a lot of people who received a Kindle for Christmas were busy filling them up with cheap ebooks in February.  

However, just for a moment, I could suppose that many Kindle users have discovered that cheap does not necessarily mean good. But, having said that, I have found price not much of an indicator of the quality of an ebook, as the one of the best ebooks I have read, Turing Evolved, by David Kitson, was free – I sent him an $8 donation for it. And I bought the signed paperback version of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother before reading it as a free ebook.

I will have to check the best-selling listings more frequently to see if what was a definite downward trend in prices has now changed.

Chook Lit.

According to an article in a not so recent Age, Random House in Australia say Chook Lit is the only genre of fiction that is increasing in sales. WTF! I hear you exclaim. Chook Lit is a variant of Chick Lit, but set in rural Australia. Most of the books are romances. But before every writer rushes to their computer to write such a book, they better be female and live on a farm, like all the big sellers of this new genre do. 

Rachael Treasure (great name for an author) is a sheep and cattle farmer who has sold 289,000 novels so far. Fleur McDonald lives on a 3000 hectare station and her three novels have sold 56,600 copies. And so on. It appears the author’s authenticity matters with readers, or at least publishers.

My Website.

I am currently re-building my website after a number of false starts. I had a great page constructed using Bravesites, but unfortunately it did not allow me to transfer my large interactive story onto it. If I had linked the Bravesites site to the interactive story it would have meant paying for two website hostings (one for the site and one for the story). So I quit Bravesites.

I have looked, and will continue to look, at a number of other web hosting services. Most seem to be big on templates, which would leave the same problem of not allowing me to transfer the large interactive story onto the site. I also failed to find any hosting services that convinced me of their ability to display my blogger blog on the website.

So I have been using Frontpage, which came with the Office XP I bought a while back, to construct a webpage. Frontpage is compatible with Bravehost, which my interactive story currently sits on. Now if only I could find a way to get my blogger blog running on Bravehost.

My writing week: Issue 20, Year 5.

Another Reason Amazon is Cheap.

A while back one of my posts mentioned a reason why Amazon books are cheap. According to an article in The Age, Amazon did not pay sales tax in the US, which many states were trying to do something about. Just today I read another reason they are cheap in another article in The AGE: The dark face of a cheap and easy online shopping habit. 

The article mentions the lousy wages and conditions some of Amazon’s warehouse employees have to put up with because hey, it’s a recession, so put up with it or fuck off, there are plenty more unemployed around.  

I wonder if wages and conditions are similar in the Book Depository (recently merged with Amazon) warehouses in the UK, with workers freezing rather than collapsing in the heat?

This has got me thinking I will not purchase print books from Amazon again. Ebooks maybe, but not print books.

More on Bryce Courtenay’s Embellished Life.

It seems more and more people want Bryce Courtenay to pay penance for his embellished life. I recently posted about an article I had read detailing a lot of things Courtenay seems to have made up about his life in South Africa and then Australia. And now ABC television has an extended interview with him, called Bryce Courtenay, Fact or Fiction.

As I said in my previous post, I thought many of the events in The Power of One were based on his life, which gave the book more emotional impact. But after reading of Bryce’s embellishments about his life in South Africa, some of the power has drained from that novel.

I also wonder what impact his embellished life had on selling The Power of One to publishers, and then selling it to the media. By media I don’t mean the book critics who evidently savaged it in Australia – at least that is what Bryce says they did in the television interview - I mean media interviewers, columnists, and talk show hosts. And then, what impact did his life story have on selling it to Hollywood?

Would the publishers, media and film producers had treated a book written by a seemingly privileged white man from South Africa differently from a book written by an orphan who had fought against apartheid by teaching servants to read?

My Writing Week: Issue 7, Year 5

Hi all,

I am only two days late with my weekly post this week. Could my near punctuality be a sign that I am getting my writing under control and my computer isn’t acting up? Or I am just ignoring some writing activities? It’s a bit of all three.

Amazon’s KDP Select.

In a post a couple of weeks ago I mentioned Amazon’s KDP Select program in relation to its Lending Library. Members of Amazon Prime can download a free ebook a month from Amazon’s library. For an author to place an ebook in the library, they must offer Amazon exclusivity to that ebook for 90 days.

In December authors were paid $1.70 each time one of their books was lent. I reckon that payment will decrease over time. But there are other potential benefits in being part of KDP Select for an author.

David Kazzie, in a blog post titled How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved My Book, writes that his ebook sales skyrocketed after joining KDP Select. He says Amazon allowing him to give the ebook away for free for five of the ninety days was the catalyst for much higher paid sales. Huge free downloads lead to his ebook being placed on recommended to buy lists, which then propelled his paid sales. 

Social Networking Failed to Sell ebooks.     

The second part of David Kazzie’s post is equally interesting. He thought his blogging, social networking, and viral animated videos lead to few sales. If you are a writer you have probably watched some of his shorts on youtube. I had.  

He has 158 blog followers, 563 Twitter followers and 276 people like his author’s Facebook page. The animated video linked to above has been viewed 270,000 times. But before he signed up to the KDP Select program he had only sold a few hundred copies of his book.

If makes you think: Is all the time spent by many writers twittering, facebooking and blogging worth it?

I enjoy blogging, it’s my shout to the world: I’m a writer who has something to say. I’m not a great blog reader though. I imagine there are many writers who diligently go through a list of hundreds of blogs each week and write a pithy comment on every post they read. I only read a few other blogs and I try to say something intelligent when I comment.

I rarely visit Twitter, only posting about once a week. I spend much more time on Facebook and post more frequently. Even if I don’t sell any books to Facebook friends, I very much enjoy being part of the Facebook writing community, especially since I am stuck out in the bush.     

David Kazzie’s post also got me thinking about how many books I have bought as a result of reading blogs and social networking. I reckon about ten. But only one of those would have been from an author who befriended me for the specific purpose of selling me their book. It was a very good book too.  

My Writing Week: Issue 5, Year 5.

Hi all,

I thought it was about time that I checked what was happening with the price of ebooks on Amazon. While there, I discovered the Kindle Lending Library which could be a total game changer in the publishing industry. Earlier in the week I read a blog post by an anonymous traditional publisher that said most of his colleagues are in denial about the effect Amazon with have on their businesses

Ebooks Getting Cheaper.

I just checked the top 100 bestselling ebooks on Amazon. 34 were 99c, seven were $1.99, 32 were $2.99, four were $3.99, 5 were $4.99 and four were $8.99. No other price had more than two ebooks. There were only six priced above $8.

In August, the last time I checked, 41 of the top selling ebooks were 99c and only four were $2.99. Four were also $1.99, and 22 were more than $8. So the overall downward trend in prices continues.

The increase in the number of bestsellers at $2.99 from four to 32 is interesting. Amazon, the last I heard, only gives authors 35% of the list price when the price is less than $2.99. If it is $2.99 or more the author gets 70%.

I assume many authors who independently publish would have come across Joe Konrath, perhaps after discovering links to him on mega-selling Amanda Hocking’s blog. He is adamant that $2.99 is the best price for an ebook.  

Amazon’s Lending Library.

For US citizens, Amazon has created the Kindle Lending Library. The library allows a reader to borrow one ebook a month and return it whenever. The book needs to be returned before they can borrow another.

To get access to the library a customer must first join Kindle Prime for a cost of $79 a year. Besides the lending library, Prime gives you cheaper deals on books and free streamed movies. Members borrowed 295,000 books in December. Membership is free for the first month. How many pay the $79 after that? Perhaps many let their membership lapse. It does see a bit costly considering what you get.

So what’s in it for the author? The author or publisher must make their books exclusive to the Kindle store for at least 90 days. They are then paid out of a monthly “fund” which seems to be arbitrarily set by Amazon. For December it was $500,000. This fund is then divided by the number of books borrowed, so for December each author received $1.70 per borrow of their books.

The top ten library authors earned over $70,000 in December. But as more authors sign up the amount in the fund will need to be spread among more borrowed books from more authors. So will participating authors continue to get $1.70? I don’t think so.

Amazon Set to Kill off Traditional Publishers.

A publisher in a blog post on Pandodaily thinks Amazon is well on the way to killing off traditional publishers.  He says his colleagues are in denial as they don’t want to have to get rid of 40% of their print book staff to try to compete with Amazon.

According to the anonymous publisher, 95% of readers will soon read digitally. Amazon has been paying huge amounts to buy up the rights to books they think will sell to these readers. The traditional publishers just can’t compete.

So there you have it. Not only will Amazon totally dominate ebook selling, but is seems it will soon dominate publishing while perhaps changing the whole industry into one were books are lent and not bought.

My Writing Week: Issue 43, Year 4.

Hi all,

Amazon’s Latest Publishing Exploits.

In the past couple of weeks two articles about Amazon’s publishing ambitions have backed up my thoughts that they will soon dominate the publishing industry. The first article in Publisher’s Weekly was about the launch of Amazon’s new publishing imprint called 47North. This imprint will publish Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.

47North had signed 15 titles when it launched and included a series by Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. All titles will be available in print, Kindle and audio formats.

The article also mentions an author who signed up to Amazon publishing because of their better ebook royalty rate. Traditional publishers, it would seem, are going to have to raise their 25% ebook royalty to compete with Amazon.

The second article appeared in the NY Times. It starts by announcing that “Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and ebook form.” “Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.”

Literary agent Richard Curtis is quoted as saying “everyone is afraid of Amazon”. Amazon is offering authors the opportunity to cut agents out. One of Amazon’s executives says “the only really necessary people in the publishing process are now the writer and the reader”.

I have been thinking that agents are probably going to have to reinvent themselves if they are going to survive into the future.

As for book reviewers (critics) there are thousands of them on the web, but will they disappear from the press? I know I have yet to buy a book based solely on its reviews on Amazon, but I do look at them. I am aware that the five star reviews for a book could be written by friends or aliases of the author. While the zero star review might be written by a disgruntled writer who is angry at the world. In last week’s blog post I listed books I want for Christmas. I read good reviews of all the books I wanted in The Age.

The article also said than an author’s contract with Amazon forbade her discussing its details. This is worrying.

Contagion

While watching Contagion I pondered what viruses the person who packed the lollies I was eating may have had. The film could make a person as paranoid about germs as Jaws made people scared of sharks. I found Contagion engrossing. Its one of those rare films, for me these days, where my attention only briefly wandered.

It’s a story about the outbreak a flu type virus that kills millions around the world. Stephen Soderbergh directed it and it is very like another movie of his Traffic. The story is told from multiple viewpoints in a rather unemotional style. But it is deceptively subtle. You need to watch and think.

I left the film wondering if I had just watched a science fiction film or just a medical thriller. For a story to be classified as science fiction, science has to be essential to the plot. In other words, if the science is taken out, there is no plot. If the science was taken out of Contagion, then a fair bit of the plot would have gone with it. There would have been no search for a vaccine. The film would have been mainly about the civil attempts to contain the virus, so about a quarter to a third of the film would have gone missing.

If the film had been science fiction, it could have gone the way of the Andromeda Strain and remained mainly in the research labs. I think such a film would not have been as good. I doubt whether Contagion will be judged as science fiction for the Hugos.

My Writing Efforts

After a lot more research, I have all but finished my article on weight loss for people with disabilities. The research has made me feel fat, but at least I now have a lot of information about losing that fat. I hope to submit the article to Divine by Wednesday. I only briefly worked on the short story I am writing.

My Writing Week: issue 36 of year 4

Hi all,

Last week I wrote every day for the second week in a row. But unlike the week before when it was all non-fiction, last week it was all fiction. I am still not spending anywhere near enough time writing, but some writing is better than none. Hopefully I can build on last week’s efforts this week. 

I spent a bit of time on other writing relating activities, like setting up a group’s page on Facebook for this blog.

New Article on Divine Magazine

I submitted a new article to Divine online magazine last Monday and, much to my surprise, it was up on the site by Wednesday. That’s two articles for August.

The new article is about why I love gardening. The article is an attempt at a more whimsical tone. Over the past year’s 13 articles for Divine, I have attempted different styles and tones, from serious informational, to personal accounts of tragedy, to uplifting interview based articles.

Book Sales Up in Australia

An article in the Age states that book sales rose 0.4 per cent by volume in 2010, with 66.2 million books sold. The bad news is that the value of those sold books dropped by 4.2 per cent. But with those sales not including purchases from Amazon and other overseas vendors like the Book Depository, the number of books purchased by Australians would be much higher.  

Book Depository Vs Amazon

As the two large online booksellers merged recently, the above heading could be considered inappropriate, but there are still differences in price, postage and delivery time. I recently used the Book Depository for the first time after deciding Amazon’s postage costs added too much to the cost of a purchasing a single book.

The book I wanted to buy cost $15.20 on Amazon, but postage pushed that up to $24.95. At the Book Depository, the book cost $20.19, with no charge for postage. The book also arrived in less than a week, much quicker than the three weeks or more I have waited for Amazon to deliver.

Review of Under the Dome by Stephen King

Warning, spoilers. I posted a review of Stephen King’s science fiction thriller Under the Dome last week. I did not want to have spoilers in the review so I did not say that I reckon King might have been having a go at his readers. In the book a dome was placed over the inhabitants of a small town by an alien race so they could be amused at the antics of those trapped inside. But King was inviting his readers to have similar voyeuristic intentions by enjoying the carnage wreaked on the inhabitants of the dome. I enjoyed the book, so does that mean I would make a good callous alien?