Author: Michael Lucas

Occasionally someone will ask me to read their work and either comment or tell them where they should submit it. Some of these folks I know, some I don’t. It’s flattering to be asked, but my answer is: no.  I could describe my reasoning in great detail, but the inimitable John Scalzi has a far better article than I do.

On rare occasion, I make the mistake of saying “yes, I’ll look at your work.”  One of the following will result.

1. I will give you my honest opinion of your first page.  You will respond by dedicating the rest of your life to making me miserable.
2. I will give you the metaphorical equivalent of a pat on the head.
3. I will say you lack the fire.
4. I will tell you that publishers require sentence to have both a noun and a verb, and that you cannot use emoticons in published work.
5. I will “accidentally” erase your manuscript, your email, and my hard drive, so that I can honestly claim that losing your work was part of a much larger accident.
6. I will put off looking at your work in favor of paying work or spending time with my family.  I will feel increasingly guilty about this.  I will begin avoiding you.  The importance and difficulty of evaluating your work will grow in my mind until it assumes unbearable proportions.  I will take a week out of my life to evaluate your work thoroughly.  By this time you will have married your third spouse, adopted four feral children and a platypus, and moved to Aruba to fulfill your lifelong dream of being a beachcomber.

Note that none of these result in you getting anything you want.

If you really want to get my opinion, I suggest you either pick a response you like, or roll a die.

(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.