The Dismal State of e-Book Editing – Case: Terry Pratchett’s “Snuff”
Ever since I bought the Kindle a year ago, I’ve been a big fan of e-books and this autumn I’ve spent quite some time learning to make them. One thing has started to annoy me about many commercial ebooks: far too many of them are littered with all kinds of encoding errors: extra line breaks, missing spaces between words, indents turning into empty lines, etc. It seems like this problem has been getting worse, not better, during this last year, and now I ran into the total nadir of this: the Kindle-edition of “Snuff” by Terry Pratchett.
Digital Comics & eBooks – Gone Digital, May Be Out For a While
I’m a big fan of digital distribution of entertainment and I’ve switched to using it as much as possible, except for two frontiers: comics and especially books, about which I’ve been a traditionalist. This October I finally took the big leap from books and comics printed on dead trees to stuff made of bits – and it turned out to be a really excellent choice.
Online Music – Just the Way I Like It pt 2: Fat Fucking Chance
Sigh. Yep, it was too good to be true. In the end of last year I wrote this entry about how I’ve finally found an on-line music service that works like I want to called Spotify. Streaming music, a huge catalogue, a simple interface and a way to pay for the music.
I started paying attention that I couldn’t find some bands that really should be in the service anymore and what do you know. They are implementing region restrictions, because they don’t have rights to deliver all the songs and bands to every country.
Region-fucking-restrictions in a service that works globally, because the fucking labels can’t get their arse off the 1960’s. Fuck this shit.
Well, it remains to be seen how long will I continue paying the subscription fee. It really depends on how many times I run into a situation where I don’t find the music I’d like to listen to. This idiocy gets me livid, though. If the industry model seems to actively drive people to downloading stuff illegally, they are not allowed to say word one to complain about it.
I hope Spotify won’t die before it gets properly born, because damn – for the time I’ve used it, it’s been a really fucking excellent service. I won’t be abandoning it yet, though – because now more than ever services like this need support from the users.