I have always loved public libraries. 

The library was always a little like church, wasn't it?  You had to be quiet and you had to respect the fellow patrons.  But you could stroll through the library on any weekend day and find tables of people with books spread out around them.  They were clearly working on some research paper or project.  You could walk the aisles and find a couple of friends chuckling quietly over the pages of some slightly scandalous book they were checking out on the sly.  Or you could have real fun and take a tour through the kid's section.  There you'll see the little boy tearing down the aisle back to Mom, excited to share his newly discovered book.

The public library has always been everyman's temple of knowledge.  And I was always every(wo)man.  Oh, I know that out there somewhere are folks who grew up rich or at least well off.  They rarely visited a library.  If they wanted to read a new book, they'd go to a bookstore and buy it.  Why borrow when you could buy? 

Well, I borrowed because I couldn't buy.  I grew up POOR - very, very poor.  Can't buy groceries, holes in the floor kind of poor.  Bill collectors calling kind of poor. There were many things that got sacrificed out of necessity - but books were never amongst those things.  Thanks to the public library, the wonderful world of books was always something I didn't have to sacrifice. 

Then life moved on and despite our poverty, my Mama (God Bless Her Soul) worked very hard to be sure I got an education.  I did college and law school.  If I ended up as a writing kind of "scholarly" lawyer instead of a rich ole' trial lawyer, well that surely wasn't my Mama's fault.  She gave me the world and even though driving terrified her, at least once a week she'd load me in the car and drive me to the library.  She never checked out a book that I recall, likely because her life was too full of taking care of 2 houses and her sick parents.  But she made sure I worked at my schoolwork and she made those weekly trips to the library for me to make sure that the world of books would be my world.

Things went pretty well after law school.  I was never rich but for many years I met one of my most important goals - I was never poor either.  That was true for most folks for a lot of years, I think.  We became a country of folks who could afford to go to the bookstore and buy.  During all those years the library was still there and I'd pass one and remember when.  But you know, it really is true - everything old becomes new again.

...continue reading "HOLLA At Chapin Library – A New Future For An Old Friend"

Angry Old Fat Dude here, and I've been especially steamed recently. Why? Because computers suck and everybody knows it, that's why.

How strange this is coming from a computer guy, right? 24 years in the industry. I was there at the birth of both the home computer and the publicly accessible Internet. You know what I never witnessed? The promise of a truly easy-to-use computer interface being fulfilled. If you've ever had to read instructions on how to simply make the computer do what it was designed for, then the computer isn't really easy to use.

You don't need to read a set of different instructions every year to operate a car. Even different makes and models of cars. They all work pretty much the same. They have practically the same interface.

How about other electronics? CD and DVD players work the same way, with the same sort of buttons coded in a universal fashion to tell the user how to operate the machine.

Before the smartphone, plain old phones all worked the same way. You input the unique number of the person you want to talk to, their phone makes a noise indicating that someone wants to talk to them, they pick up the phone and put it to their ears and mouths and you talk to them. This didn't change for over 100 years.

Now, hold on, you're probably saying "But AOFM, computers are open-ended devices! They're not designed with just one thing in mind! They can do ANYTHING!"

Well that's the problem in a nutshell. It's a machine that emulates other machines. To do this, a programmer must either utilize the most commonly attached devices - the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and printer - or propose an entirely new device - another machine to be bought, attached, and configured.

...continue reading "AOFM-MWU – It Should Just Work, Dammit"

There's no doubt about who's winning the  American Indie Revolution.  The castle walls of the old publishing royals stand in ruins.  Even former staunch allies like Barnes & Noble have defected to the insurgent writers.   

“Digital publishing and digital book selling will soon become the most explosive development in the history of our industry and will sweep aside those who aren’t participating,” Leonard Riggio, B&N's founder and chairman, said during a recent presentation highlighting the company's expanding forray into the digital market. 

The e-reader market is in the midst of a price war that is putting more and more of the devices into the hands of the book-buying American public.  Fewer readers visit the brick and mortar bookstores as more readers demand that the bookstores come to them, via their PCs, Macs, e-readers, iPods and cell phones.  Via America's strong and ever expanding wireless networks ebooks get delivered to readers instantly. 

When American publishers lost control of the distribution system, they lost control of the readers and the writers.  Today authors like Joe Konrath have chosen to forego offered publishing contracts for some books, electing to get them out in print and ebook format on their own, thank you very much.  Books of writers doing it their way are, more and more,  transitioning readers to expect stories undiluted by editorial changes demanded by publishers.  An American indie book or ebook is becoming an intimate experience shared only by the writer and the reader.    

But even in the present economic downturn, America's companies invested the time and resources to build the pipelines that allowed the Indie Revolt to succeed.   Those pipelines are being strengthened as demand encourages more investment.  Our writers can now write their books, publish them, sell them to readers and get paid via those same magic pipelines that funnel money directly into their bank accounts. 

In the heady atmosphere of power and possibility now held by the creators themselves, it becomes rather easy to forget that America's Indie Revolt is not yet the world's.  Imagine an American publisher today saying the following:  “Everyone knows that almost all publishers cheat their authors on their royalty payments, and there’s ­nothing the authors can do about it.”

...continue reading "America’s Indie Revolt: Why It Matters & Will It Spread"

AOFM here, not feeling too well. Bad lifestyle choices + piles of stress = world of hurt. We're going to have to make this one short.

As you know, Mary Anne wrote on June 6th about serialized books and how they could open up new (but actually very old) ways of making electronic distribution a little more interesting for the reader and more educational and fun for the writer.

Well, the very same day a bigwig in the e-publishing industry wrote about the very same thing, listing a subset of the same authors my wife listed in her blog post.

Same-said bigwig posted on the same topic on the bigwig's site the next day. That same day, the bigwig wrote about it on a bigwig political & news site.

Wow, that's an unbelievable coincidence, isn' t it?  Predicting on the very day the very topic and even the very list of authors that the bigwig was going to write about, before he did so!

It's like my wife is psycho psychic or something!