Here is a thing about eBooks

I want to read Let the Right One In, preferably on my iPhone.  Mandy and I watched and enjoyed the film together, then she checked the book out of the library, read it & loved it.  I didn’t get around to reading it when she had it out, so I re-requested it (it’s a very popular book & there are only two copies in circulation in the Phoenix library system, so it took a while) and it came in a couple weeks ago and … I still didn’t get around to it.  I’d like to try reading eBooks (I basically never have), on my iPhone, and I’d like to see if having the book always available, in my pocket, makes me any more likely to actually get through it than merely having the huge block of paper lurking around the house, taunting me about not reading it.

Also, Mandy loved it so much that she has stated that she would like to read it again.  So:

1) I could go to a book store and buy the book (the paperback is broadly available, on account of the movie), or just order the paperback from Amazon for … looks like $8.88 used or $10.85 new (or the hardback for $9.90 used / $14.69 new) … then we’d own it & I’d be able to read it and Mandy would be able to read it over and over, and we could even lend it out if we wanted to.

2) I could buy the kindle version from Amazon for $9.99 and read it on my iPhone.  And only my iPhone.  And Mandy can’t read it again without us buying or borrowing it again.

I can’t find the book as an eBook anywhere else (though admittedly I’m not experienced at trying – where do YOU look for eBooks?), so this may be the only e-option for this title.  Amazon’s DRM means that I can either pay twice for the two people in my household to be able to read the one book, or buy the paper book and then a totally unrestricted number of people can read it.  Let me rephrase: I can buy the electronic version for $9.99 and I’ll be the first and only person ever allowed to read that copy OR I can buy a paper copy for $8.88 that’s already been read by an unknown number of people and I can be one of many people who are allowed to read that copy in the future.

There is a reason publishers like DRM and dislike used books, and it has nowt to do with readers.

I believe that publishers should do everything they can to encourage reading as much as they can in every possible way that they can.  I believe that anything publishers do that discourages reading, or that fails to encourage reading, is working against their own best interests.  I believe that the amount of money society spends on reading material relates directly to how much people are reading – so that the best way to increase spending on books is to increase reading. Duh! Please, Macmillan, encourage me.

video: Publishing Revolutions

I’ve just finished a new video, on some of the exciting changes taking place in the publishing world (I recommend you watch it in High Quality & full screen, if possible):

If you watch it a couple of times (once to absorb everything I’m saying, then again to absorb the production techniques) you’ll see that … at the beginning of working on this video, last Monday, I had never done any 3D animation and only a modicum of modeling (mostly in SL), and had never used Kinemac before.  (I bought the Macheist 3 bundle earlier this year, for access to that and BoinxTV, mostly.)  As I worked for about a week and a half on this video, I became more and more experienced with the software, more aware of what it was capable of, and more comfortable doing more advanced things with it.  So at the beginning, the big 3D text is pretty neat, but by the end I have an entire bookcase of individually hand-animated books leaping in and out of a box.

There’s things I’d like to change about it.  Not just improving the animation in the first half, either.

On Demand Books is now saying they’ll have two million titles available by years’ end, rather than one, for example.  Plus, I feel like I may have represented the kindle more strongly than the iPhone – while I believe the 41million iPhones/iPod Touches in circulation worldwide, each with hundreds of individual book apps and at least 4 different major eReader apps, each with robust eBook catalogs and (coming soon) in-app purchasing will do significantly better and reach wider and have more of an impact than the roughly half-million, all-US-based kindles.

I’m already working on the script for the next couple of videos.  More thoughts on what it means to have over 1400 new titles published every day.  More thoughts on print on demand.  Something about eBook pricing.