Book or PDF?

[HermanHiddema]

Flash? Something like brightest white or like switching on an old TV for a fraction of a second? Then I would agree; it is not what one wants when reading ebooks.

Not like that. E-ink has no backlight, its pixels basically consists of microscopic little balls with one dark and one light side, which it can turn one way or the other to make text/images. You need an external light source to read, just like with a normal book, which is why it reads so pleasantly. To keep the little balls aligned, on every page switch, it turns them all dark, then all light, then turns the text dark again. This is what kirk is referring to as "flash". Personally, I find it no more annoying than the necessary page flip on a traditional book. It doesn't bother me at all.

It's not a problem when you read normally, but if you leaf through a book, or want to skip ahead a lot, it's annoying.

Yes, but not so much because of the visual effect, but because of the delay it introduces.

[jdl]

I've been on the fence about the two existing Joseki volumes. Although I prefer paper books, I also purchase digital books. In this case, I'd be very likely to buy them as a PDF and they'd be an insta-buy on SmartGo Books.

[RobertJasiek]

The two joseki books will not be available in electronic form soon because, when I let print them, I ordered relatively high numbers suitable for a pure printed book distribution. Before possibly also offering electronic versions, first a greater number of printed books need to be sold.

My considerations are different for new book titles though because I can still make a decision to order an initially smaller print run.

[oren]

The two joseki books will not be available in electronic form soon because, when I let print them, I ordered relatively high numbers suitable for a pure printed book distribution. Before possibly also offering electronic versions, first a greater number of printed books need to be sold.

Hmm, I've been holding off buying your books because of the price. If you did offer a cheaper pdf I'd consider the two Joseki books. Just a piece of information for you.

[kirkmc]

It's worth noting that Amazon just announced a new Kindle format:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?i ... 1000729511

It will offer a number of graphical features that are not currently in their .mobi format. I don't know how this stacks up against epub, which is quite sophisticated (even though most books don't take advantage of the advanced features it offers).

Unfortunately, rather than adopt epub, Amazon has chosen to go it alone, further ensuring that there will not be compatibility between their books and other devices/programs. I had been hoping that everyone would turn to epub, as it's an industry-supported standard, so there could eventually be interoperability. Alas, it looks like this won't happen until a few European governments sue (as they did to prod record labels to stop imposing DRM on music sales).

[RobertJasiek]

I've been holding off buying your books because of the price.

The price of my printed books can't be any lower or I would have to stop publishing any. It is clear that some would buy a PDF because of a lower price but that is not a sufficient criterion for creating a commercial possibility of publishing a PDF. The sufficient criterion is whether it makes commercial sense at a given time. Currently it does not make sense for my previously printed books for in particular the reason stated earlier.

The price of a book depends on several factors. Printing cost is not the major factor. For my books, the major factors are a) time needed for actual writing and b) time needed to educate myself to write the very high quality contents at all. (a) is ca. 3 to 4 months per book. (b) is measured in many years. Given that, my printed books are unreasonably cheap. Not in comparison to other publishers' books but in comparison to what their price should be in view of appreciating the quality of contents and the potential for making readers stronger and broadening the scope of their knowledge.

If you do not want to invest ca. EUR 30 for a book incl. postage for improving at least half a rank (if I had gotten such books as a 10 kyu to 1 dan, I would have improved more than one rank per book), then ask yourself whether you want to improve at all! (If you have read, understood and applied the books but not improved, then your major weakness is not missing knowledge or strategy but probably tactics and reading ability or psychology.)

Don't judge books by their price but by the quotient of price and quality (amount and accuracy of conveyed knowledge and improvement potential)! (Other authors can emphasise other aspects of quality such as didactically motivated repetition of little contents or entertainment.)

[oren]

If you do not want to invest ca. EUR 30 for a book incl. postage for improving at least half a rank (if I had gotten such books as a 10 kyu to 1 dan, I would have improved more than one rank per book), then ask yourself whether you want to improve at all! (If you have read, understood and applied the books but not improved, then your major weakness is not missing knowledge or strategy but probably tactics and reading ability or psychology.)

I have no problem investing more money on books. I've done it plenty of times and my library is quite full (too full to even really go over all the books at this point). I'm just pointing out that I would pick up your book if it was a cheaper pdf.

[gogameguru]

It's worth noting that Amazon just announced a new Kindle format:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?i ... 1000729511

It will offer a number of graphical features that are not currently in their .mobi format. I don't know how this stacks up against epub, which is quite sophisticated (even though most books don't take advantage of the advanced features it offers).

Unfortunately, rather than adopt epub, Amazon has chosen to go it alone, further ensuring that there will not be compatibility between their books and other devices/programs. I had been hoping that everyone would turn to epub, as it's an industry-supported standard, so there could eventually be interoperability. Alas, it looks like this won't happen until a few European governments sue (as they did to prod record labels to stop imposing DRM on music sales).

Format wars again... awesome.

Publishing some books in electronic format(s) - as well as on paper - is something Younggil and I have been talking about for awhile too. Thanks for starting this thread Robert.

The biggest question we have is a practical one. Given the current formats, how do you go about writing a Go book so that you can publish it in several different formats with the minimum amount of rework? What do people think is the best software for doing that? SmartGo books, I imagine, will still require its own process. However, perhaps the SGF for SmartGo books could be done first and used to generate the diagrams with sufficient planning? Maybe I'll ask Anders about this too...

Kirk, I've noticed you sell a book about Scrivener 2 on your site, and it's available in ePub, mobi, PDF (etc). Did you write the one manuscript (in Scrivener?) and then output it in different formats? How much extra work (if any) is required for each one?

Robert, what software did you use for writing your book and creating the diagrams? I've experimented with (a slightly old version of) SmartGo (on Windows) and SGF2DG on Linux, both are good, but could be improved upon.

[RobertJasiek]

The software is

- OpenOffice,
- GoWrite,
- export ODG from GoWrite, open ODG in OpenOffice Draw, mark all, copy, paste special GDI meta file to OpenOffice Writer,
- OpenOffice export to PDF/A with all fonts embedded.

It is still not a perfect solution because of OpenOffce's software bugs related to layout, which cost me about 2 days per book of extra work. With other text editors, I had at least as many bugs though. Using an extra layout software was not worth the invested time. Circumventing the bugs is faster. For most purposes, GoWrite is very good.

Procedurally, I save all SGF and ODG files by numbers and enter the number in each OpenOffice picture context menu so that I can easily find and replace diagrams when necessary.

[kirkmc]

Kirk, I've noticed you sell a book about Scrivener 2 on your site, and it's available in ePub, mobi, PDF (etc). Did you write the one manuscript (in Scrivener?) and then output it in different formats? How much extra work (if any) is required for each one?

I wrote the book in Pages. The publisher, Take Control Books, then outputs it to PDF, ePub, mobi, etc. It also goes to O'Reilly, who puts it online on their site and some others. (We use Pages because the publisher has a template with pre-defined styles; we used to use Word, then switched recently.)

You could use Scrivener to create a book and then export it to any of those three formats. It has very good ePub possibilities - I've been working with a classical record label who is using it to create ePubs of their liner notes.

Exporting from Scrivener to those formats is pretty simple. You need to make some decisions up front - fonts, styles, etc., so they get carried over correctly. But the export process is just a few settings in a (somewhat comprehensive) dialog box, then clicking Export.

[jdl]

The software is

- OpenOffice,
- GoWrite,
- export ODG from GoWrite, open ODG in OpenOffice Draw, mark all, copy, paste special GDI meta file to OpenOffice Writer,
- OpenOffice export to PDF/A with all fonts embedded.

It is still not a perfect solution because of OpenOffce's software bugs related to layout, which cost me about 2 days per book of extra work. With other text editors, I had at least as many bugs though. Using an extra layout software was not worth the invested time. Circumventing the bugs is faster. For most purposes, GoWrite is very good.

Procedurally, I save all SGF and ODG files by numbers and enter the number in each OpenOffice picture context menu so that I can easily find and replace diagrams when necessary.

Interesting, thanks. Don't ask me why I thought this, but I would have assumed that you were a LaTeX guy.