The MS Word game: what font will I end up with next?

If you do a lot of writing or editing I’m sure you also know about the entertaining world of Microsoft’s unusual Software design choices. The one that never ceases to amaze me is MS Word’s handling of fonts, styles and paragraphs. As soon as you start copying text from a number of sources into your Word document there is no telling what will happen next when you hit the ENTER key to end a paragraph. You could end up with a completely different font, indentation or style. It’s just fascinating.

Whoever designed the copy / paste feature and decided to include foreign text formatting styles as a default deserves a “thank you for making my office days so interesting” medal. Brilliant! Thanks to this feature you will now end up with font and style names you can’t even pronounce (because you just copied text from a really stylish website).

It gets even better when you start deleting paragraphs because that could throw the formatting of your whole document. Fun! This is better than Xbox … and can occupy you for hours as you are trying to get back to what you had before you made a very simple change to your text.

So thanks again Microsoft for the great entertainment value of Word!

 - The BookIdol

Save the planet – publish online

Does anybody know how many books are being published in a year? And how many trees we need to kill to print them on paper? And most importantly how many are pulped, binned or are sitting in some attic never to be seen again? I bet the answer to every question is tens of millions. This is insane … there has got to be a better way. It’s called ePublishing and eReading.

A while ago Amazon launched their first big push into e-Reading by selling not only ebooks but also the worlds first (?) eReader called Kindle. Apparently they have now run out of stock … so it goes to show that the time is right. There are plenty of sites selling mainstream books available as ebooks and now there is bookhabit.com for the long tail of books from unpublished authors. Audio books on iTunes are also gaining a lot of momentum and what a great idea to listen to a book on your iPod while commuting or visiting relatives you don’t like.

It’s all good and it all helps the planet. So save the tress and buy ebooks (or if you are a writer – publish online).

-The Book Idol

Wake up call for writers and authors

I thought it was about time that someone started a blog that aims to awaken authors and writers from their 100-year slumber and takes them into the 21st century of publishing. There are thousands of writers support websites and blogs out there … somehow though I feel that most of them are stuck in the pre-Internet era. Although most of them make use of the Internet for communication (and very few of them for marketing their work) but when it comes to publishing all they talk about is getting that deal with a big publisher. And of course only hardcopies count – electronic publishing is hardly ever mentioned (apart from ebooks which in most cases are electronic copies of books that are in print).

All of this in a day and age when there are plenty of reasons to let go of the old paradigm of print publishing and look forward to the era of true end-to-end electronic publishing. For starters there’s global warming and water resource shortage. Surely we should start looking into making that shift from paper-based reading to e-reading for the benefit of the planet alone.  The technology to make this possible has been around for decades. Secondly the paper-based format is getting less and less appealing for certain target markets. More importantly if the Internet is about anything it is about disintermediation – in this case direct interaction between writers and readers.  Finally it’s a volume problem – there are simply too many people who love writing and want to get their book out and not enough people who are prepared to buy these books for the typical RRPs.

The solution is simple – don’t print and publish directly. What’s preventing the industry to do this? FEAR. Just like with the music industry it’s all about the middle man lobby and the scare tactics around IP protection. Fortunately the music industry has learned quickly that everyone will be better off with sites like iTunes. So they abandoned the whole Digital Rights Management issue (thank god). Most people want to do the right thing and buy their music – and it’s easy to do when a song is $1 and 3 mouse clicks away.

There is a fantastic opportunity now for the publishing industry to go through the same process (but faster). It will happen anyway – so embrace it rather than fight it.

Bookhabit.com is making a start – it’s a great service for unpublished authors. It’s a win-win, everyone on the planet gets access to fresh material and writers get 40% (!) of the earnings. Authors literally end up with about the same $ value in their pocked as with traditional publishing since the retail and publisher margins are huge (driven by unnecessary printing and distribution cost). Even the publishers win since the site works as a test platform for new authors. They can still decide to print a book that has sold 1000s of copies online for all those people out there who just prefer to hold that book in their hands.

Great!

-The Bookidol