Category: Nonfiction Books

(Disclosure:  I have a Kindle, and I think it’s fabulous.  My newer books are available on Kindle. I expect that everything I write from now on will also be on Kindle.)

As an author, I think ebooks should be cheaper than paper books.  Ebooks are an inferior product.  Yes, you can get them more quickly, but you don’t actually get a book: you get a license to have a copy of a book attached to your account.  You can’t resell ebooks.  You can’t loan them out. You can’t express your disgust by using them as toilet paper.   Anyone in the IT industry knows the difference between owning a piece of software and licensing it.

When ebooks are more expensive than a hardback, people who have “invested” in an ebook reader become angry.  Amazon has many 1-star reviews of ebooks because the price is above that of a hardcover.  This leads to angry emotional arguments from both sides.  You can see lots of reader arguments on Amazon, and then there’s publishers’ arguments like this one from the SFWA.  But buried in the recent SFWA post are a couple of interesting facts that aren’t getting enough attention:

• ebook prices are set by the publisher
• physical book prices are set by Amazon

Amazon specifically dislikes the agency model under which books are sold.  They tried to use a more traditional model, but were forced out of that.  All indications are that Amazon is very unhappy about the agency model.

Amazon discounts their books under a formula known only to Amazon.  One side effect of this is that ebook devotees are angered by the price differences — and they’re getting angry at the publisher, not at Amazon.  And Amazon has previously used paper books as loss leaders.

I cannot say that Amazon is deliberately feeding this anger by choosing to price hardbacks slightly below the publisher’s ebook price.  But they make a point of labeling ebook prices as “set by the publisher,” where they don’t say that hardback prices are “set by Amazon.”  I think it’s fair to say that Amazon is aiming the anger.

And for those folks who say that publishers need to die, preferably soon:  I wholeheartedly disagree.  My books would not be nearly so good without my publisher.

Finally, on a completely different topic, but still about writing:  There’s a popular article kicking around now about reasons to date a writer.  I wanted to do a corrected, realistic version, but thankfully it’s already been done.

I don’t want to do a separate blog post for every review of Network Flow Analysis that comes out.  But it seems that I haven’t posted any for two months now.  If I’m going to batch these, I need to figure out a happy medium, say, every month or so.  Of course, now that the book has been out for a few months, the number of reviews is going to decline rapidly.

But to catch up: there’s been reviews at javaranch, from Henrik Kramshøj, from the Linux Users of Australia,  a few comments in Japanese, from Utah, and the Security and Risk blog.  There’s also a review in the illustrious Dr. Dobbs.  Back in the day, Dr. Dobbs’ was The Source for geek stuff.  A positive review there makes me feel like I have Arrived, that I am Someone of Substance.  Woo for me!

I’d like to thank all the folks who took the time to review NFA.

I started writing books on computer in the 1980s.  I used a Commodore plus/4, a Macintosh Classic, a mid-90s Mac laptop, and assorted UNIX boxes.  This assortment of platforms has taught me something important:  as an author, I don’t want my writing tied to any single software vendor.  My documents should be in a format that I can easily access on any operating system or platform.  This excludes proprietary solutions, such as the Commodore plus/4’s text editor, MacWrite, or Microsoft Word.

OpenOffice interested me right away.  I could write and mark up documents, and they would be stored in XML.  Even if OOo died tomorrow, I could find a Perl script to extract my text.  Oracle buying Sun, and getting OOo with it, is enough to make the paranoid angels who live in the back of my head start their chorus.  Oracle cannot take away the software that’s freely available today, but Oracle has absolutely mastered the proprietary software business model.  Oracle is excellent at extracting every possible dollar from every available asset.  And Oracle is smarter than I am.

That’s why the new Document Foundation LibreOffice interests me.  It’s a proactive move to block Oracle from dominating the free office suite space.  (I’d like to commend the Document Foundation on not waiting for Oracle to toss them overboard.)  And the Document Foundation is sponsored by several companies who have publicly committed to, and are even built upon, an open-source ecosystem.  I downloaded and installed LibreOffice on my laptop.

LibreOffice is supposedly the latest OpenOffice, plus fixes for many long-standing bugs that outside developers couldn’t get into the main OpenOffice code.  They’ve replaced the Oracle logos in the latest OOo update, and the window decorations are slightly different.  The LibreOffice beta looks and feels just like OOo.  OOo crashed on me every few weeks, and I haven’t run LibreOffice long enough to reproduce such a crash, but on the whole it seems perfectly fine.

My one complaint is that LibreOffice didn’t import my OOo dictionary.  I write many documents with specialized vocabulary, and I spent a great deal of time getting everything into my OOo spellcheck dictionary.  LibreOffice means that I have to start over.  In the grand scheme, however, this is a minor annoyance compared to the threat that Oracle poses to my writing.

The Document Foundation has stressed that they are not offering an OOo fork.  Oracle is welcome to join with them, or otherwise demonstrate their good intentions.  I feel confident in predicting that in 2012, however, LibreOffice will be a better choice than OOo.

I’ve been asked to do an interview on AT&T’s Tech Channel.  I’m no Steven Bellovin, but what the heck.  It’ll be recorded in NYC on 11 November 2010, the day before NYCBSDCon starts.  No idea when it’ll actually be available.

The TechChannel shows are available online.  It seems that they’re also used as content snippets in real TV shows.  One day, if I’m lucky, my head will appear on a TV near you, with a text label beneath it and my words taken completely out of context.  Probably in a faux-reality TV show about ghost hunting or something.  Ah, fame at last…

My short story Wednesday’s Seagulls was just posted on short-story.me.

For those who wonder why I don’t publish more fiction:  I have this weird idea that I should get paid for my work.  The amount doesn’t matter a great deal — this story made enough for a couple of hot fudge sundaes.  The Internet has made “getting published” almost meaningless, but:  if a piece of writing isn’t good enough that someone will buy it, I don’t want it out there with my name on it.

I’d much rather have less work available of higher quality than publish reams of sewage.

Yesterday’s biannual royalty statement contained an unexpected surprise:  it included ebook royalties for Absolute BSD (published in 2002) and the first edition of Cisco Routers for the Desperate (published in 2004).  Both are out of print, and have newer editions.  While the royalties for these books played out over several years, I certainly never expected to see any new sales of either of these books.

It turns out that both of these are available through ebook licensing services, such as ebooks.com.

This leaves me with mixed feelings.  There’s no real cost to having ebooks available.  For all I know, someone has a serious, legitimate need for high-quality documentation on FreeBSD 4.  Reliable documentation from that era is hard to find, and you have dig to find answers.  I don’t want to forbid people from buying it.

But I suspect that most people who buy these older ebooks made a mistake.  They really wanted the newer editions.

In my mind, the obvious thing to do is to have the licensing service put up a warning along the lines of “This ebook is obsolete.  You probably want this other book.”  That’s what my publisher’s online bookstore does.  But licensing services are independent companies.  I can’t dictate to them.

I could tell my publisher to rescind all rights to sell these older books, and force ebooks.com to remove them from their catalog, and to heck with people who need documentation for older kit.

What do you think?

Mr. Beijtlich is bad for my humility.  Apparently I have to stop asking him to tech review books, so that he can write actual reviews rather than just announce to all his readers that I’m utterly awesome.

This is the sort of commentary that I keep on hand for when my morale is low.

NYCBSDCon accepted my talk proposal:

BSD Needs Books

If you wander into any bookstore, brick or virtual, you’ll see books on Linux, Solaris, Macintosh, and even non-Unix-like operating systems.  The BSD books are far between.  We as a community need to address this if we’re to expand our reach.

This talk covers designing, selling, writing, and promoting your own technical book, with a special emphasis on BSD books.  I’ll cover everything that I wished I’d known before I started, common errors, where the “generally accepted wisdom” is wrong, how to actually complete the book, how you can use your publisher to your advantage, post-publication work, and — most important — how to enjoy the process.

I’ve attended NYCBSDCon repeatedly, and have never been disappointed.  They always have interesting content and the after-hours events are fabulous.  (Yes, I like BSDCan as well, but there is no place in the world like New York City.)

Now to figure out how I do what I do…

…available here.

Interview 1 of 2 on Network Flow Analysis for Ron Nutter’s TechBytes.

Ron interviewed me for Network World, and that (longer) interview will also be up before long.  We recorded these afterwards for his personal tech news site.