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Webitz - January 2012

Wings not quite clipped

January 27th 2012 23:21

When it comes to service we tend to remember the times we've had cause to complain about something far more than the times we've been well-treated. So by way of amending that approach, I want to tell you about ClippingsConverter.com and Jim, who's the man behind it (he's a Brit working in the US). I'm not entirely sure of Jim's role, but I suspect he may be Clippings Converter.

Anyway, those of you who use Amazon Kindles will know that you can make notes as you're reading, or highlight passages, or do various other things. The 'My Clippings' file includes some other things which I don't use much, so I can't remember what they are offhand. I don't tend to use the features when I'm reading a novel, although occasionally a phrase or word will catch my eye, but when I'm reading non-fiction, I use the clippings feature a lot. It's the equivalent of scribbling in the margins or underlining in a 'real' book.

I came across ClippingsConverter.com because I'd been trying to sync the clippings for a particular book (Hannah's Child

Birds with clipped wings by iglazer on flickr.com

, by Stanley Hauerwas) and for some reason - and this is the only time it's happened - the notes wouldn't sync to my computer, however much I tried. You can read the notes and highlights online at Amazon's Kindle pages, but normally I would read them in relation to my 'copy' of the book on my computer.

ClippingsConverter.com offers to upload your My Clippings file (once you've transferred it to your computer (in the My Kindle Content folder, a folder that arises automatically once you've got Kindle on your computer) and turn it into an Excel file or a Word file or even to send it to Evernote. (Since, for the first time ever, I've used up vast quantities of my monthly allowance on Evernote, I thought I'd forgo that option this time round.)

I went to ClippingsConverter, got the file, uploaded, and then found I had to register. No problem, except that from then on I couldn't get back into the system with my username and password. I asked for a resetting of the password and got the most horrendous and unmemorable password you've ever seen (certainly one that's hacker-fullproof, I'd think) but this wouldn't let me log in either.

I emailed the feedback section and Jim emailed me back, saying he was puzzled about why the password wouldn't work, as it worked at his end. Finally he offered to check out remotely what was happening on my computer when I tried to log on. Which meant he had to set up a 'meeting' online and ring me on my ordinary phone. At his expense.

The problem was very quickly solved: somewhere between my original registering and my subsequent attempts to log on, the username had been changed from what I'd put in to my email address - the username is similar. I don't think the system did it; I suspect in the confusion of going back and forth I may have gone for the email address instead of the username proper. And according to Jim, that should be acceptable. The system should take both.

He was grateful that working through my problem meant he'd found something that wasn't quite working according to Hoyle. So that was pleasing all round, as I guess he may have had other people with the same issue who've given up on the site. But what was most pleasing was that someone would take their time to deal personally with a problem. even if it meant a call from New York to Dunedin, New Zealand.

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Posted By: Mike Crowl - Category: No Category

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Apple, Publishing &Textbooks

January 20th 2012 22:37

Apple has plans to change the way textbooks are sold - forever. Like everything else Apple has done, however, it's all going to be done Apple's way, and stuff everyone else. And of course, you'll only be able to use Apple products to access these textbooks....didn't that kind of monopoly annoy everyone in the past in relation to Microsoft? How come it's taken this long for people to start complaining about Apple's monopolistic approach to everything digital?

There have been a lot of comments about the textbook issue - for example, from Audrey Watters
See, you can’t really say that you’re going to “change everything” when it comes to textbooks and announce that your partners are the 3 companies who already control 90% of the textbook market. You can’t say that you’re going to disrupt the textbook industry by going digital when Pearson – one of those big 3 and, indeed, the largest educational company in the world — made over $3 billion from digital content last year alone.

Or you can see a different overview at the Wall Street Jounral

The Vook people take a different approach to publishing, one that in my opinion is the way to go. It doesn't tie people frustratingly to one device or one system all with its own in-built 'widgets'. In an age of choice, Apple's approach seems odd, to say the least.

When people write a book, they want that book to be available everywhere. Not just on one platform or device. They want as many people to be able to read their book as possible. Which is why this is announcement has us so happy at Vook. Our platform allows you to build and create files in ePub and Mobi, for Amazon, BN, iBooks, Kobo and others. Vook is not a proprietary format, though we can produce those files. We serve as many of the distributors as possible, bringing your content—and making sure it looks great—to the vast diversity of existing devices and platforms.

And The Australian points out that Amazon already has far more textbook content available than Apple's 'handful' -

T]he real winner may be Amazon, whose Kindle Fire tablet costs 60 per cent less than an iPad 2. There are already far more textbook titles available for the Fire, direct from Amazon or through publisher-supported start-up CourseSmart.

Finally, Ed Bott at ZDNet comes out with some strong words:

Over the years, I have read hundreds of license agreements, looking for little gotchas and clear descriptions of rights. But I have never, ever seen a legal document like the one Apple has attached to its new iBooks Author program... He goes on....I have never seen a EULA as mind-bogglingly greedy and evil as Apple’s EULA for its new ebook authoring program. [EULA means End-User License Agreement.]

Thanks to The Passive Voice for bringing together these various articles - it's a site I've only just discovered, and sends out an email update every day (which is, every day, full of several summaries of articles...so don't take it on unless you've got time!

Incidentally, for a final word, one that didn't come from The Passive Voice, there's Seth Godin saying Apple didn't make publishing easier He differentiates between printing a book (which is what many people can now do digitally) and 'curating' a book, which is what publishing really means. While he appears to approve of Apple's new plans, he rather undercuts what they're doing, I think, in his comments about curation.

PS I've just come across this quote from The Scholarly Kitchen:

The publishers’ dream of creating content once and having it run everywhere is just that, a dream. We will all be nostalgic for Microsoft soon, which for about a decade or two essentially developed and controlled a standard for all computing. Those days are gone. There will be some publishers who will develop products for all available platforms (at great expense) and others who will focus on one platform alone (giving up a big piece of the market). But these are difficult days for publishers because platform wars have come to the book business.

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Posted By: Mike Crowl - Category: No Category

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Kindle improvement

January 13th 2012 00:30

We've just been overseas for the first time in some years. We wanted to put a couple of documents on our Kindle, so that we had a backup of these while we were away.

This wasn't too difficult, though we had to remember what our specific Kindle email address was in order to do it; once we'd attached the document to the email, Amazon sorted its format out and sent it back to our Kindle.

Now they've improved the method and instead of going through email you can add an application to your computer called Send to Kindle (which is self-explanatory, at least, unlike some application names). When you want to send a document you have two choices: if you're already in the document, just 'print' it. When your print options come up, just choose 'Send to Kindle' and Amazon will do the rest.

It will check if you want to send it to your own Kindle and/or to any others on your account (at present both my wife and I have Kindles). You then click on Send, and there's a little announcement telling you it'll take a moment or two while Amazon sorts the format out, and voila! the job is done.

If you're not in the document, you can just go to Internet Explorer (or its equivalent) and right click on the document from there. I've tried both methods, and the first seems to work best. At the moment, I'm struggling to find the 'Send to Kindle' option when I right click on a document. I'll persevere; I'm sure it's there somewhere. And curiously, the docs I've sent to Kindle haven't yet appeared on my Kindle machine. I wonder if they're suffering from overload?

I'll keep you posted.

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Posted By: Mike Crowl - Category: No Category

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