I sent it to them nearly three and half months ago, so I’m fairly certain they’re not going to respond at this point. To me, it’s a perfect example of how a local bookstore can fail at building a relationship with local customers who want to shop locally but prefer ebooks over print.

Here’s what I wrote:

I briefly stepped into McNally Jackson this past Saturday, and although it was too crowded for my tastes, before I left I glanced over a couple of tables at the front of the store. I found a trade paperback of science essays titled Future Science that I wanted.

But here’s where the problem comes in, and why I’m writing to you: I wanted it in ebook format, because if I bought books in print these days I’d essentially turn into a third Collier brother. But I couldn’t figure out a way to buy it in ebook format while in your store.

I looked up at the register to see if I could ask about this option there, but there was a line of about five customers waiting to buy printed books. That’s great news for you, but not so much for me since I already wanted badly to get out of there.

I thought about asking the woman at the Espresso Book Machine, but she seemed busy, and not at a register.

I looked around for some sort of signage or instruction about how to buy a Google Books digital edition from within the store, and I couldn’t find it (maybe I overlooked it?)

So here’s what I did. I left the store, and literally before I crossed Mulberry Street I’d used my phone to buy the Kindle edition from Amazon.

Now to be clear, I didn’t buy the Kindle version because of price, or because I hate bookstores, or because I’m naive about the financially precarious state of indie booksellers. I’m pro-McNally Jackson, just not to the point where I’d buy a format I don’t actually want or need just to help a business I don’t own.

I wanted to share some thoughts about this with you:

• I wanted to buy the book right then, while it was fresh on my mind, not later (for instance not from your website when I finally got home hours later).
• I’m not a Kindle fanatic. I know how to strip DRM and I can easily adapt most of my ebook purchases to suit my needs.
• I’m price conscious but, unless there was a price difference of 50% or more on the Google Books edition over the Kindle edition, I would have bought the Google Books edition as a show of support for your store. (It turns out, the price for both digital editions was the same.)
• It was the physical, face-to-face encounter with the trade paperback that prompted me to make the purchase, so I feel that you should have received that sale.

So I’m at a loss as to how I can help support you. I’m a frequent book buyer, and I want to support McNally Jackson, but there’s no real place for me as a customer in your store right now so far as I can tell.

I realize I’m probably still in the tiny minority of your current customers, and this isn’t meant to be a rant. But if you can figure out a way to let people like me browser [sic] the merchandise and then leave your physical store with a digital edition instead of print, you’d be my first and pretty much only bookstore in Manhattan from now on.

Here’s what I got in response:

And that’s why I don’t feel bad for buying my ebooks from online retailers that aren’t connected to this bookstore.

I clicked through to the settings screen and was presented with this new (well, new to me) set of options.

I think it’s terrific. I’ve been a big proponent of eReaderIQ for a while now, because it’s an effortless way for the average consumer to find Kindle deals. (For a similar service for iOS, try AppShopper.) Unfortunately, eReaderIQ’s daily email has been losing its utility lately as more and more ebooks flood the Amazon store—the amount of chaff makes it harder than ever to find the occasional grain of wheat.

This morning, I opened my eReaderIQ email and smiled. It’s a lot cleaner and better organized, and a lot easier to see whether there’s anything worth grabbing.

(Photo: peterjroberts)

Whether such cases are due to idiocy or deliberate copyfraud, they hurt the consumer. It’s prohibitively expensive for the average private citizen to have to engage the Library of Congress as well as hire a copyright attorney (which, no kidding, is what the Copyright Office recommends) just to confirm that he has the right to do what he wants with something published in 1925. Even then, if the work was first published outside the U.S. then it may be nearly impossible to determine its true copyright status.

Which leads me to the problem of locked PDF versions of century-old works. I’m now in the possession of half a dozen PDFs of old short stories that various websites offer for free, and yet those files have been password protected to prevent me from printing, copying, or otherwise gaining direct access to the text. In the most extreme cases, the person who created the PDF file has, for reasons known only to him and the functionally retarded demon who guides him, added his own copyright claim to it. Seriously, people should just be hit with sticks sometimes.

Remove that PDF’s sham DRM with MuPDF!

(That may be the worst subheading ever written.)

Fortunately, Robert Brewer at Excited Curiosity explains that you can use a free open source PDF toolkit called MuPDF to unlock password protected PDF files. There are MuPDF viewers for Windows and Linux at MuPDF.com, but For OS X you have to use the command line (i.e., the Terminal app found under Applications>Utilities). Everything that follows is for OS X users.

First download the OS X binary from mupdf.com, unarchive it, and put the resulting folder wherever you like. Then in Terminal, use the “cd” command to navigate to that folder, and then run the “pdfclean” command on a locked file and in seconds, you’ll have a new unlocked version. Here’s an example of how to run the command if you have the MuPDF folder in your home directory and the locked PDF file on your Desktop:

./pdfclean ../Desktop/lockedfile.pdf ../Desktop/newnameforfile.pdf

If you’re not used to Terminal, here’s a quick introduction that will teach you the basics. Pretty much all you need to know to use MuPDF is how to type the full paths of the MuPDF folder and of the locked PDF file, and the command “cd” to change directories. (The command “ls” to list the contents of your current directory is also helpful.) You can also check out this comment on Brewer’s blog for more help.

Using OS X? Here’s a contextual menu shortcut for MuPDF

I was excited about finding this free solution to the bogus DRM problem, but I wanted an easier way to use it in the future without having to launch Terminal each time. I created a simple workflow service in Automator that I can access via the contextual menu when I click on a file. Now when I download a PDF and find that it’s locked, I simply right-click the document and select “UnlockPDF” from my Services menu, and a clean version appears next to the original.

Here’s the code I used to create the service. Note that I wrote this using Automator 2.2.1; when I shared a similar tip last year for KindleGen, I discovered that some readers couldn’t replicate my instructions because they were using older versions.

on basename(thePath)
	if thePath ends with "/" then
		set nameIndex to -2
	else
		set nameIndex to -1
	end if
	set ASTID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
	set thePath to text item nameIndex of thePath
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ASTID
	return thePath
end basename

on getdir(theFileName)
	set theReversedFileName to (reverse of (characters of theFileName)) as string
	set theOffset to offset of "/" in theReversedFileName
	set thePrefix to (reverse of (characters (theOffset + 1) thru -1 of theReversedFileName)) as string
	set theSuffix to (reverse of (characters 1 thru (theOffset - 1) of theReversedFileName)) as string
	return thePrefix
end getdir

on run {input, parameters}
	set myFile to quoted form of POSIX path of input
	set newFile to basename(POSIX path of input)
	set newPath to getdir(POSIX path of input)
	set finalPath to (newPath & "/u-" & newFile)
	try
		do shell script "../../Applications/mupdf-0.7-darwin-i386/pdfclean" & " " & myFile & " " & finalPath
	end try
	return input
end run

Quick instructions:

1. Launch Automator and create a new Service workflow.
2. At the top of the composition area, change “Service receives selected [dropdown]” to either “files or folders”, “folders”, or “PDF files”. Change the other dropdown to “Finder”.
3. In the Library pane on the left, click the Utilities directory, then find the “Run Applescript” action and drag it into the composition area.
4. Select all the default code in the “Run Applescript” box and delete it.
5. Paste the above code in. Be sure to edit the path to the MuPDF folder so that it’s correct for your situation.
6. Click the hammer icon to compile the code.
7. Save the service under whatever name you like. I chose “UnlockPDF” to make it easy to find months from now when I’ve forgotten all about how I did this.

Because I’m a pretty bad scripter, I’m sure this isn’t the most elegant way to do this. If you can improve on it—particularly if you can fix it so that it can batch process an entire folder of PDF files—please let me know and I’ll update the script.

(Frozen book illustration credits: Ice Block, Risager; Old Book, HoskingIndustries)

Capaneus at Capane.us figured out where to find the text files for Skyrim’s books from his own copy of the game, and then he formatted them into a single ebook file for reading on the go.

So, I took a look at how Skyrim actually stores these nuggets of incidental storytelling. By the 9, it was in plain text! I pasted the book text into separate docs, slapped on headings, created a table of contents and a cover, and just like that, I can read my copy of The Lusty Argonian Maid on-the-go!

According to his later comments, “Just like that” actually means about eight hours of work:

All the books are in plain text in a monolithic string file under //apps/skyrim/Data/Strings…in the DL string file. [Use an app like Notepad++ to open the file.] Start by copying and pasting the text of each book into a seperate .html file. Keep the filenames consistent with the title of the book, and add a number at the end of each book in a series. This will make table of contents building way easier.

I think this ebook approach is a cool way to repurpose some of the game’s content for personal use, but if you don’t want your own ebook version, you can read these books online in the Lore section of The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.

Capane.us [Via Sidequesting] ]]> http://booksprung.com/how-to-convert-the-entire-skyrim-canon-into-a-single-ebook/feed 0 http://booksprung.com/new-kindle-weather-website-launches-competes-with-other-browser-utilities http://booksprung.com/new-kindle-weather-website-launches-competes-with-other-browser-utilities#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:03:48 +0000 Chris Walters http://booksprung.com/?p=7179 I got an email from Kindle Weather Station this morning, a new service in beta that offers a full screen weather report (via the experimental browser) for your neighborhood. The good news is the weather is presented in a huge, easy-to-read layout that I find quite useful. The other news—maybe not “bad” but not necessarily helpeful to end users—is that the service is only free during the beta phase. After the company has tested it out and/or acquired a large enough base of users, it will either start charging money or showing ads.

This is probably a good time to remind you of a competitor, Kinstant, that offers a similar service. Kinstant’s page—also displayed via the browser—offers links as well as weather. The weather portion is nowhere near as fancy as what Kindle Weather Station offers, but on the other hand you can add your own custom links and access dozens of commonly used websites. Based simply on sheer value offered, I’d currently recommend Kinstant over Kindle Weather Station.

And finally, Kindle Weather Station also offers a free way to access the service from your Kindle’s home screen. Instead of opening up the browser and selecting a bookmark, you can download the sample of a special ebook from Amazon that will let you jump straight over to the Kindle Weather Station service in the browser. While this counts as a solution, you should know that it’s ridiculously easy to create a “Quick Links” document that you can customize as much as you want, and that can include as many bookmarks as you like instead of just one.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that those old print-biased territorial restrictions have made the site somewhat useless for anyone in the U.S. or Canada. Gollancz, the publisher behind SF Gateway, notes that only about one third of their titles will be available for customers in those two countries. Yes, once again publishers, agents and authors have managed to prevent sales of books to customers and simultaneously encourage piracy; it is truly a remarkable industry.

However, I noticed a weird thing this morning on a title I randomly selected. Here are the SF Gateway and Amazon pages for “The Swords of Zinjaban” from L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Cook de Camp:

• SF Gateway
• Amazon

I’m in the U.S., and SF Gateway tells me it can’t sell me this ebook, but what appears to be the same edition is available to me on Amazon. In other words, if you find something on SF Gateway you want and it’s not listed as available where you live, try the standard online retailers just in case. This could just be a temporary error with Amazon’s listing, but it’s worth a shot before you hit up the file sharing websites.

Phased access starting in late October

In a blog post on Pottermore Insider, they refined their original “opening in October” announcement as follows:

Since the launch of the Beta, we’ve seen really high levels of activity, and interaction with the site has been phenomenal. This affects how quickly we can give everyone access. As a result, we’ve decided to extend the Beta period beyond September and take a different approach to the way new users are brought onto the site.

From the end of October, registration will be opened to everyone and we’ll be giving access to registered users in phases. Access may be granted quickly, but please note it could also take some weeks or months, depending on demand.

I believe their claim about high levels of activity. I scored one of the early accounts back in the first week of August, but didn’t get access until just a few weeks ago. The first time I tried to log on, I was rejected due to server traffic. The second time I tried a day later, I got on but the site took forever to load screens. As noted in today’s status update, at least one highly popular part of the site—the Wizard’s Duel—has been disabled because it’s too popular and/or buggy.

No ebooks until 2012

The other big delay is in the ebook and audiobook store that’s supposed to accompany the site. Now instead of opening in October with the site, the online store won’t open until sometime in the first half of 2012—which means it could be as late as next summer before you can buy Harry Potter in ebook format.

What you’re missing

I recorded my first few moments on the site to share with everyone, so here’s a video and some screen captures. There are more detailed previews and tours all over YouTube now, but I attempted to highlight some of the ways the original new writing is being integrated into the site. (The swoosh-zoom effects are mine, in order to show you close-up details.)

In general, although I thought the design was great, I was left underwhelmed by the overall experience. But I’m probably not the ideal target audience by either age or enthusiasm, and the site was running a little slow the day I poked around.

Maybe this new phased launch strategy will give Sony time to make the experience faster and smoother for true HP fans. Unfortunately, some of those fans now may have to wait until 2012 to get a first-hand glimpse of Pottermore.

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I’m sure it’s more complicated than I understand, but right now it sounds a lot like the type of page and asset caching that Opera uses (used?) for its mobile browser, or that some cable companies use to reduce download times for customers.

Since Amazon Silk essentially routes all of your web browsing on the Fire through Amazon’s servers, it also raises a significant privacy question, but so far today I haven’t seen many mainstream media types address that. After all the dorky excitement over consumer technology dies down, I imagine we’ll start seeing headlines like “Do you trust Amazon with your web browsing?” and “Amazon Silk lets Bezos watch your every move”.

Update: The Amazon Silk Terms and Conditions agreement mentions that you might have the option to turn off the Amazon server caching and browse the web as you normally would, but since the word “generally” pops up several times in that section, I don’t think Amazon is making any legally enforceable guarantee to absolute privacy. (And that’s if you can turn off the Silk functionality on the Kindle Fire at all—there’s some confusing wording in the Terms that suggests the Silk browser may be on a “computer” instead of the Fire tablet when this feature is offered.)