The Parasite on Kindle

Right, that was quick. The Parasite, one of the first ‘books’ I published – it is in fact a 40,000 word novella – is now available on Amazon Kindle. I’ve worked through it, but not a huge amount since I didn’t want to change it into something that had ceased to be that original The Parasite. That, I can tell you, was a temptation difficult to resist. I also haven’t got a cover picture or ISBN number up. If I’d used the original cover picture then I would have had to bugger about with copyright issues and I didn’t get an ISBN because I don’t yet know whether it would be worth the money (10 ISBNs for a £100 I’m told)

I hope you all enjoy it.

Calling Kindle Owners

Okay guys, I’m getting near to publishing The Parasite on Amazon Kindle. Now, in an attempt not to fuck this up too badly, I have a questions:

Presumably, once you’ve bought a book from Amazon for your Kindle you can download it as many times as you like? I’m asking this because I’ve loaded a Word version for Kindle convert and I’m not entirely happy with the formatting. It looks like it might appear without the small margins I’ve seen on pictures of other works on Kindle. If it turns out that it looks crap I need to be sure that I can update it and that you can download it again.

Can you put in margins on your ebook?

Come to think of it … once something is actually published on Kindle can it be edited later?

I am presuming you can change the size of the text on Kindle, can you also change the font?

More questions as they occur to me in the comments…

Publishing a Kindle Book

Well, I’ve taken a little look at it all. Initially it seemed that the 70% rate was a load of bollocks because when searching you mostly come up with 35%. However, further searches (thanks Geoff Lynas) reveal that there is a 70% rate for certain regions, and most importantly for me they are UK, USA and Canada. It’s also the case that there is a ‘shipping charge’ of $0.15 X number of megabytes and a 15% VAT rate (though when and where that’s applied I’m not sure).

Another thing putting me off was finding pages with all sorts of instructions about loading the books in HTML or plain text but, on checking, I found that the Word ‘doc’ format is supported. Just to check all this out I signed up (here) with my Amazon ID and finding that there’s a ‘draft’ setting I loaded up my novella The Parasite and, sure enough, I can take a look at how it will look on a Kindle and it’s fine.

The only drawback here for me is that this is all (please correct me if I’m wrong) on Amazon.com and, because its US, any payments I get will have to be by cheque rather than direct to my bank account. Then again, if the cheques turn up promptly I’ve no problem. I do wonder what the minimum amount is before a cheque can be sent.

Okay, I am now going to rework The Parasite and give it a go. When it’s up for sale I’ll let you know how it all goes.

To Kindle or not to Kindle

I just received this email from ‘Xanares’, which is interesting and certainly food for a lot of thought:

Hey there Neal,

Thought you might be interested in this one. It’s about (an) independent writer’s success publishing novels on Amazon Kindle. It’s of course Vampire fiction (I know I know sigh), but it goes to tell that at least some parts of the writing industry are on their way towards the same business-idea that parts of the gaming industry have been playing with for a while now:

“Welcome to disruption. 26-year old Amanda Hocking is the best-selling “indie” writer on the Kindle store, meaning she doesn’t have a publishing deal, Novelr says.

And she shouldn’t. She gets to keep 70% of her book sales — and she sells around 100,000 copies per month. By comparison, it’s usually thought that it takes a few tens of thousands of copies sold in the first week to be a New York Times bestselling writer.”

Admittedly she’s selling some of her books for just $1 to $3 each but, if you average that then consider that percentage above, she gets more than I get on a damned paperback or even hardback. I will have to carefully consider any future contracts I sign, I think.

Xanares concludes his email with: For us old romantic book-sniffers it’s odd, but hey… science fiction is here.

New Virgin Galactic CEO

It’s always worth keeping and eye on what’s going on here:

George Whitesides has recently replaced Will Whitehorn as the CEO/President of Virgin Galactic. In an interview with Sander Olson, George Whitesides discusses suborbital spaceflight, orbital hotels, and the Government’s role in cultivating commercial spaceflight.

From the last answer George Whiteside believes we could see daily suborbital flights by 2020 and thousands of people will have flow to suborbit.

Guns, Germs and Steel.

Having heard about the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (I think it was Richard Morgan who recommended it) I managed to pick up a copy from a local charity shop. However, when I tried to read it my eyes started glazing over and I ended up sticking it to one side. It then ended up in that pile of books destined to be sent to a charity shop under the label ‘Life’s too Short’.

A number of weeks ago I then noticed a Channel 4 documentary with the same title and recorded it. Just yesterday, feeling knackered after having to get up at 4.15AM to drive my mother to Gatwick, I decided to do something less mentally taxing so sat down to watch it.

The essential question posed was, ‘Why have the Europeans always been the winners?’ Why have they generally been ahead of the rest of the world? Jared Diamond’s reasoning is essentially this: most of the animals that can be domesticated are only found in Eurasia, which took farming in this region beyond the subsistence level thus freeing up human resources for technical and social development e.g. the smelting of metals like steel and really, the building of civilization. This domestication of animals also led to an increase in the diseases the Eurasians suffered and subsequently gained some immunity to. So, armed with steel, rapidly developing technology and a shitload of diseases they went off and conquered the world.

This is, of course, a simplification. The documentary itself was almost certainly a simplification of the book.

A particular case cited is that of the Conquistadors. Armed with steel, experience of warfare and mounted on horses, Francisco Pizarro and his men first defeated the Incas in battle (mainly because of the naïve stupidity of their emperor), then the small pox the Spanish carried finished off the job. Yes, historical fact, but was it necessary to imply in this documentary that the small pox was somehow deliberate?

The logical thread of this is very attractive and certainly has much truth. However, the continuous use of the liberal buzz-word ‘inequality’ throughout should have clued me in to how specious some of the reasoning was. The first hiccup was with that domestication of animals and non-subsistence farming. This happened in the Middle East and with a bit of hand-waving and talk about how it spreads latitudinally, it magically became the big advantage to the people of Europe. One then has to ask the question: why wasn’t it the middle easterners with their ‘guns, germs and steel’ conquering the rest of the world? I’ll take the forgiving view that this is all a bit more complicated than portrayed in the documentary, so perhaps I really should read the book.

Next we go to tropical South Africa which the Europeans struggled to conquer because their farming methods didn’t work and because the diseases were on the side of the Africans. However, the Europeans did win there because the steel was on their side – mainly the Maxim machine gun, then the train. Okay, I get that – more historical facts. But what got my back up here was the glorification of the native and the life style of the ‘noble savage’. And please stop it with the implication that the Europeans destroyed some wonderful agrarian idyll and that a return to that life style might be a good thing. Yes, the life-span in the place depicted is about 40 now, but did those ‘noble savages’ live any longer? Did the women enjoy popping out baby after baby until dying of it? Did they all enjoy labouring every day just to put food in their mouths?

Diamond then moved away from his central contention to claim that the similarities between tribal languages indicated a previous single underlying language and an African civilization, on the bones of which the Europeans built their African empire. I can see the point of the language thing when we look at the ‘romance languages’ and the like. If you want to you can contend that the Europe we know is ‘built on the bones’ of earlier civilizations (The Greeks and then the Romans). Thing is, we’re still digging up those bones. Nothing remains of this particular African civilization because they built nothing long-lasting and invented no more than had already been current in the Stone Age, which is a curious and highly convenient definition of civilization.

It would have been better if this had stuck to Diamond’s original contention about ‘guns, germs and steel’ rather than straying into the apologia and fatuous fact-twisting of political correctness.

In the end this documentary was another of those liberal self-flagellation fests; another deep revel in white guilt and the present practically Luddite attitude towards technology. It was highly selective of its ‘facts’, quite good at confusing correlation with causation (another common one nowadays). Yes, I perfectly understand the point that no single race possesses some underlying superiority, but I damned well disagree with the idea here that because luck and circumstance put the Europeans on top that they should feel guilty and be all apologetic. The reality of this documentary is that those who produced it don’t really understand their own proposition of underlying equality, which is that if the ‘guns, germs and steel’ had arisen elsewhere in the world, it would have been the Europeans who got the kicking.

Strange isn’t it, how the politically correct revel in a guilt that stems from their own assumed superiority.
Noblesse oblige.

Free-electron Laser.

Thanks Brent for directing me towards this article. Now, I’ve blogged about the US Navy’s Mach 8 railgun and that is inked to in this article. That would be this weapon:

 DAHLGREN, Virginia — There wasn’t much left of the 23-pound bullet, just a scalded piece of squat metal. That’s what happens when an enormous electromagnetic gun sends its ammo rocketing 5,500 feet in a single second.

The gun that fired the bullet is the Navy’s experimental railgun. The gun has no moving parts or propellants — just a king-sized burst of energy that sends a projectile flying. And today its parents at the Office of Naval Research sent 33 megajoules through it, setting a new world record and making it the most powerful railgun ever developed.

I’ve also blogged before about this free-electron laser, but there’s much more about it in this article. What I didn’t realize is that it can operate at multiple wavelengths (the white lasers in Line War anyone?).

And I also didn’t realize this, which almost reads like fantasy:

Currently, the free-electron laser project produces the most-powerful beam in the world, able to cut through 20 feet of steel per second. If it gets up to its ultimate goal, of generating a megawatt’s worth of laser power, it’ll be able to burn through 2,000 feet of steel per second. Just add electrons.

You have to wonder if, maybe in ten or so years time, naval power will rise to displace air power until such a time as such power and accuracy becomes  lighter. Beyond that there is only one suitable rational response to this. Fucking hell!

Anti-laser

And of course I’m thinking about Polity dreadnought defensive systems…

New Haven, Conn. — More than 50 years after the invention of the laser, scientists at Yale University have built the world’s first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out. The discovery could pave the way for a number of novel technologies with applications in everything from optical computing to radiology.

Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called “gain medium,” usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light-light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another.

Last summer, Yale physicist A. Douglas Stone and his team published a study explaining the theory behind an anti-laser, demonstrating that such a device could be built using silicon, the most common semiconductor material. But it wasn’t until now, after joining forces with the experimental group of his colleague Hui Cao, that the team actually built a functioning anti-laser, which they call a coherent perfect absorber (CPA).

Oops, get back to those copy-edits Neal!