Laughing Meme

Rabble is one of the hardest core Perl fans I know. Even when we were working together for Palm as Java programmers he was still writing Perl (which is something of a feat). So I’ve watched his enthusiastic uptakes of Ruby (and in particular Rails) with a mixture of curiosity and alarm . In fact it seems like a huge percentage of the really smart people I know are all learning or using Ruby. Now I’m on a bit of a self imposed “travel ban” when it comes to working on non-PHP projects, but with 4 hours to kill in the airport (Jasmine’s flight is delayed) I figured now was the time. But this blog post isn’t about Ruby (yet), its about eBooks.

First thing I did was I bought the Programming Ruby ebook. Pragmatic Programmers have gone a very nice route with their copy protection. They don’t lock, or encrypt, or in some other way hobble the PDF. I can copy it, and print it, and general own it. I can even “loan” it. But my name is on the bottom of every page so I have an incentive to tightly control access to it. This is good, and smart and embracing the possibilities of a new medium. eBooks aren’t ever going to take off as long as their publishers cripple them.

PDFs

I’m less enthused about the choice of PDF as the distribution medium. I’d be curious as to why this choice was made?

I spend a huge amount of my day reading online in Firefox, I’m comfortable with it, the quality of the display is excellent (at least on OS X), and I don’t have to launch a special application. I know I like reading books as HTML because I have experience doing this both with Baen, and with the O’Reilly bookshelves. (does anyone know a good script to produce properly formatted and linked HTML from a PDF?)

Bookmarks Please

If I was on Linux or Windows a PDF would be useless to me. Thankfully I’ve got a Mac, and as I spend more time with Preview.app I am more and more impressed with it. Its fast, its light on memory usage, its responsive, the text rendering is gorgeous. Odd how Apple can produce a better PDF reader then Adobe. The one thing I’m really missing is bookmarks. Apple, can we get some bookmarks in Preview? I’ve got a back button, and a previous and next commands, but I’m reading through an 800 page PDF and I need bookmarks.

A Bit More on Ruby

Okay I’ve spent 20 minutes playing with Ruby, and 20 minutes grinding my axe about ebooks, but I have to say what I’m most impressed by is Ruby’s ability to learn from others. Just one example, I learned Python sitting in idle playing iteratively. I’m very happy to find irb, and am having a similar experience.

The Baen Free Library is one of the coolest ideas around. It’s an expirement in disapproving the “fact” that the internet is damaging artists, and that the solution is to clamp tighter and tighter regulations on all content. And that is exactly what it’s proved, writers who include their work in the library seem increased sales, particular of their older works which had by and large stopped selling. (see Janis Ian’s famous article on the subject) And they are so classy about it! Rather then the usual bondage and discipline one has come to expect they bend over backwards to make their books accessible; you want it with frames? without? download and read it later? Sure here is a zip file. In fact they bring that same approach to their for pay service Webscription as well. Lets see Oreilly provide zip files on Safari, hmmm?

The Catch

One small problem. Baen publishes pulp! More then any other SciFi publisher I can think of Baen is famous for garish covers, and formulaic genre writing. Still in the late hours of the night, when you can’t sleep, you can read On Basilisk Station to see if the Honor Harrington books are as bad as you always thought. (not quite) Or can discover, Louis McMaster Bujold, Baen’s rare exception who gets mixed up by seeming to be genre writing, while actually dicing and chopping the tropes of military scifi into a feminist inspection of the future, and multi-genre romp, as her wonderful short novella, Mountains of Mourning available. (doesn’t do me much good, I just recite it from memory, but you could read it.) I think if insomnia persists I might have to finally read Lackey’s The Lark and the Wren.

Honor Harrington

The real problem with the Honor books (besides all the other problems) is I just can’t get past Weber’s politics which are as shallow as they are blatant. He does however think Earth First! will be around for another 1000 years or so, admittedly as misguided fools, but the vote of confidence is nice none the less.

More on Harrington

So I blew through Queen’s Honor last night, and now having read 2 Honor books I can say I think Weber is not someone whom I would like to meet. His idea of a happy ending is gross. Both books end with thousands of people dead, and very little subsantially changed with the universe. However we know they are happy endings because our main characters is heavily rewarded with money, land, and titles. The sort of ending that makes you pine for “and they lived happily ever after.” (and I’ll confess, while I read fast, I was partially able to read these books so fast, by kicking over to autopilot on the indepth descriptions of space combats, which, while by all signs are insightful and well thought out do not, in my book, constitute story telling, to paraphrase Olivier, “Try writing, dear boy.”)