Life In 19x19

“The Life, Games and Commentaries of Honinbo Shuei” is now available in SmartGo Books. Please see http://www.smartgo.com/booklist.htm for details.

Thanks to John Fairbairn for writing this important book, and to John Mifsud for converting it to SmartGo Books format. I really enjoyed reading it; you're in for a treat.

smartgo wrote:“The Life, Games and Commentaries of Honinbo Shuei” is now available in SmartGo Books.

Android, please?

Nothing is stopping someone from making an android book reader. Anders has said he has no exclusivity agreement.

hyperpape wrote:Nothing is stopping someone from making an android book reader. Anders has said he has no exclusivity agreement.

I'm not sure what that means. The books are in Smartgo format, which is a branded concept, with licensing arrangements. I very much doubt he will allow some 3rd party to create an Android Smartgo Books reader, and even if he would, I fail to see how the licensing of the books would work.

Furthermore, he has said that he won't consider this port until there is a successful Android tablet. I wonder what he would consider successful. The Nexus 7 has done very well, from what I can tell, although Google are cagey on sales figures. The Amazon Android devices have also done pretty well.

hyperpape wrote:Nothing is stopping someone from making an android book reader. Anders has said he has no exclusivity agreement.

It's already been answered below, but I'll join in too. Many people would jump at the chance to quickly make the reader if the books were available for purchase in some format.

Please see http://www.usgo.org/news/2013/01/your-m ... r-smartgo/ for my current stance on Android. Add to that e.g. the 80/20 revenue split mentioned here: http://allthingsd.com/20130416/mlb-com- ... s-on-deck/ I'll evaluate Android again once I ship the Mac version.

As for non-exclusive: publishers and authors are free to sell their books through any other means. But you need somebody willing to make a significant investment in app development and book conversion.

Some publishers and authors may go for selling the Go book file directly (which would enable anybody to build readers for other platforms), others may not. Something to consider, but again: Mac first.

Mac first? Good news for Mac users (I’m one).

A question that may be premature: Would it be so that i could use the books purchased with my IOS SmartGo Books on my OS X SmartGo Books?

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LinhNgo/ ... Mortem.php

Another interesting story about it Android and iOS development.

I was glad the previous books were at least Kindle so I could read them everywhere. I'm not likely to buy an iOS device anytime soon.

Bonobo wrote:A question that may be premature: Would it be so that i could use the books purchased with my IOS SmartGo Books on my OS X SmartGo Books?

Can't promise that at this point.

quantumf wrote:Furthermore, he has said that he won't consider this port until there is a successful Android tablet. I wonder what he would consider successful. The Nexus 7 has done very well, from what I can tell, although Google are cagey on sales figures. The Amazon Android devices have also done pretty well.

Another point of reference, Nexus tablet sales: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013 ... s-not-many

Of course other Android tablet manufacturers probably sell more units, but the tablet market is currently dominated by iOS devices.

For the record I own a Nexus 7, and consider it a pretty good device. After the first month of ownership it has mainly been sitting on my desk "dreaming".

So, do the comments in this thread indicate that the format is proprietary and/or that the authors do not have rights to the books in SG format? I had the opposite impression, but I'm not sure if it was well founded.

hyperpape wrote:So, do the comments in this thread indicate that the format is proprietary and/or that the authors do not have rights to the books in SG format? I had the opposite impression, but I'm not sure if it was well founded.

The only information I've seen was http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic. ... =20#p59279 , which looking at it is a couple of years old now...I'd be very interested in any updates, at the very least it would be good to have at least a vague standard that other parties can follow rather than reinventing all the wheels.

amnal wrote:The only information I've seen was http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic. ... =20#p59279 , which looking at it is a couple of years old now...I'd be very interested in any updates, at the very least it would be good to have at least a vague standard that other parties can follow rather than reinventing all the wheels.

That information is out of date. After creating twenty Go books using extensions of SGF, it became apparent that there was a mismatch between the tree structure of SGF and the more linear structure of a book. I'm now using a completely different format geared towards Go books. I plan to release a draft spec for that once I get the next version of SmartGo Kifu out the door.

That will be really awesome, thank you very much

smartgo wrote:After creating twenty Go books using extensions of SGF, it became apparent that there was a mismatch between the tree structure of SGF and the more linear structure of a book. I'm now using a completely different format geared towards Go books.

I think that hypertext (not a tree, but a DAG) can be a very good format for some books, some instructional go books in particular. (Some paper books have used it; Tutor Texts, IIRC. )