A Proposal For Improving eBooks

Every book can have typos. Sadly, the rate at which typos occur--especially in ebooks--has increased at just the time when it might be easiest to report them. Books today are written on word processors with spell checking, but even the best spell checker won't catch a substitution of one valid word for another valid word--like there and their, or where and wear. And repairs

There are systemic reasons why ebooks often have a higher rate of typos than conventional books. This can be traced to the workflow of typesetting and printing that catches typos without propagating fixes back to the writer's original manuscript. This file is in turn converted to ebook formats.

I think we should turn the workflow inside out. Let's produce ebooks first, put them in front of a lot of alpha-readers' eyeballs to find typos, then propagate bug reports back to the writer to fix before typesetting and printing.

The trouble with the last paragraph is that it can be tedious to mark a typo in an ebook and report it back. I think technology can make this a lot easier and it can streamline reporting. Amazon could tweak their Kindle software to do this fairly easily, and if they get the @author thing working, it might be turned to this purpose. However, since Jeff Bezos doesn't take orders from me, I think we should modify an open source reader program--since we have the source. Pick one that runs on any Android device--cell phone, rooted Nook Color, or tablet. Maybe a Kindle Fire if Amazon doesn't get in the way.

To this application a programmer could add code to mark a word or words, where it appears in the text, what the problem is, and who the reporter is, pack it up in a well-formatted message, then transmit the message via the web to the writer. Bonus points for macro commands for the writer's word-processing program that will position the text at the location of the error as indicated by the report. And the reviewer's notes inserted as a comment.


The publisher could circulate advanced review copies to alpha/beta readers who'd use this system as indicated to improve the work's accuracy.

Since I'm a programmer all this seems very feasible to me. But I've learned that if I'm the only one interested in making something happen, progress goes very slowly. Does anybody else think this could be useful?

Leave a comment if you think so. If enough votes are in favor, I'll see about next steps.

Can Sherlock Holmes be an Action Hero?

If you read many mystery stories, you'll note a couple sub-genres: Cozy and Hard-boiled. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple is a little old lady who collects clues in her knitting bag and solves the mystery with her razor-trap mind. Conversely, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe sticks his nose where it isn't wanted and gets out of trouble with hard fists and a hot gat. Now that we've got that out of the way, I have a rhetorical question:

Is Sherlock Holmes a cozy detective or a hard-boiled detective?

The answer is not as obvious as you might think. In 2009 friends complained about all the fisticuffs of Robert Downey, Jr. in the Sherlock Holmes movie, because they thought it improper for a cozy detective to be busting heads. At first, I was inclined to agree. But that my agreement was predicated upon impressions created by Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone and a parade of similar screen depictions.

When I reflected upon the Arthur Conan Doyle stories I'd read the impression became less clear. Yes, he fills his pipe, catalogs cigar ashes, and plays the violin--cozy behaviors. But he also goes haring off with revolver in hand. When Sherlock Holmes springs the trap on his quarry, he is likely to subdue him physically.

Sherlock Holmes is both a cozy detective and a hard-boiled detective. And he is neither.

It is useful to reflect upon the reason for this. Arthur Conan Doyle published the first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887. Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler were not yet born. The cozy and hard-boiled categories did not exist until well after Sherlock Holmes was established in the public mind.

This is not true of the film treatments with with we are familiar. The screen adaptations are written and the performances are interpreted much later with well defined cozy/hard-boiled categories in mind. We've seen cozy elements imposed upon the film treatments that are only latent in the canon.

By way of analogy, before the boffins distinguished between six-legged insect and eight-legged arachnids, people could use the word "bug" in a way that perfectly equivocated the two categories. The Sherlock Holmes of the canon similarly equivocates the categories of cozy and hard-boiled detectives.

Public Service Announcement

I apologize for writing something only tangentially related to writing, but it has to do with eBooks,  Kindles, and stuff.

Ebooks will change the way books are read and published. This threatens some of the not-poor who will have to change the way they do business. Just ask Borders books. It also will disrupt patterns of power distribution between writers, agents, and publishers. None of this should be news.
Do-gooders often like to write hand-wringing essays about The Poor. I recently read here and here that the widespread adoption of ebooks will freeze out poor children from reading. And you probably know that Amazon as dropped its prices to $79 for the normal Kindle, and $199 for the Fire. Now add one more component to this equation: public schools.

When I was a kid the nicest and most expensive books I ever saw were my textbooks. They were glossy, and colorful. Now, I just read here that public school systems are poised to save a lot of money in storage space and shipping costs by switching their texts to ebooks.

Can these savings subsize Kindles for public school children? One of Newt Gingrich's more outrageous ideas was to give laptops to homeless people. I still think it's ridiculous. But it makes sense to give Kindles to disadvantaged school children with their ebook texts.

I can see some very well-heeled corporations spending millions demonizing this idea. But there are even more millions to be made by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and/or Apple switching public school children from dead-tree texts to ebooks.

Update: I hear that the Indian government is moving forward on something along these lines.

A Taxonomy of ArtPrize Entries

I've devised a crude taxonomy of #ArtPrize entries.

(If you don't know what ArtPrize is, come to Grand Rapids, MI and find out!)

1) The unkind title of the first category is Refrigerator Art. Some people took Garrison Keillor seriously when he said all the children are above average. And the unhappy truth is that some people have no business entering their work in ArtPrize. Though everyone is God's special unique snowflake, not everyone is able to produce something worthy of display. I'm not saying anybody should be excluded, but maybe loved ones could stage an intervention.

2) The second category is the Monumental. Some artists have genuine talent and they deploy this talent in the service of The Cause. In Soviet Russia, these would be larger than life depictions of the New Soviet Man, working in a factory or driving a tractor. In China, you'd see a five-story Mao leading the Long March. But in Grand Rapids, MI we've got a number of competing religions, like Sorting Recyclables, Empowering Disadvantaged Youths, and Restoring The Ten Commandments. Each of these partisan interests inspire larger-than-life submissions.

3) The Propaganda category combines the worse elements of the first two. It beats the Propaganda drum so furiously that it never gets around to executing any good-looking art. It's just there, declaring some message in the most heavy-handed way imaginable without the slightest breath of humanity or humor. It can be produced by a crowd of 6-year-old draftees or by some too-earnest "artist" toiling away in his garret. Is it Art? I dare not deny that, but you can't deny it's propaganda.

4) My favorite category is the Science Demonstration entry. The Good Lord put some really beautiful phenomena in the laws of Mathematics and Physics, and some boffin will find a way to render that tangibly in an ArtPrize entry. Bravo to you. You've got my vote, because I'm a boffin wannabe myself. Same goes for the engineer who lashes together software and hardware to make some pleasant interactive blinking lights and sound effects. These guys are like the Wizard of Oz, tweaking their balky devices to make them work while saying, "Pay not attention to the man behind the curtain." I salute the man behind the curtain.

5) Then there's the Crafty Art category. What can you make with an unlimited number of toothpicks, ten-penny nails, coins, legos, cigarette butts, win corks or push-pins? Anything! And they usually look wonderful. They're a gimmick and I love gimmicks.

So far, I've described categories of ArtPrize entries that have varying chances of winning. Now I'll describe the one category that is a Sure Fire Loser

6) The Sure Fire Loser category is different from all the other categories. Entries in this category reflect something appealing in nature or humanity. And they do so beautifully. But what makes them a Sure Fire Loser is that they could easily fit on a wall of my house. Nobody is going to vote for this over a 10-ton flying pig, or a 50-foot woman. I could never put a Public Service Announcement over my couch and entries in this category won't attract the partisans' votes. I don't want to dust a million toothpicks formed into the shape of Sonic the Hedgehog no matter how cool that would be. But that painting of a bucolic pasture or that stained glass rendering of dogs playing poker would be welcome additions to my home.

That's where I think #ArtPrize is the best. It takes guys like me who would never consider buying anything from an artist, and it puts the notion of Buying Art into the realm of the possible. The artist who executes a Sure Fire Loser will give his or her card to someone like me. I'll never be able to buy a Rembrandt, but Rembrandt is dead and there are starving artists who'll benefit if their universe of customers expands to include fellows of questionable artistic pedigree such as myself. These artists should be numbered among the winners of ArtPrize.

Publishing, Ebooks, and Saving Money

The world is changing. Used to be that a few large corporations held unassailable monopolies on what you could read. They decided what got published, and what didn't. Since they were in the business of making money, they reasonably made decisions to maximize profits. Thus some amazing prose from some obscure genius would get tossed out of the slush pile while some porn star's ghost-written memoir would be fast-tracked. I'm not ragging on porn stars, just pointing out that in the traditional model, the corporation had a limited number of opportunities and it chose what maximized profits.

Is this what you want?

If you don't yet own a Kindle or a Nook get one. If you've already got a tablet computer or smartphone it'll cost you nothing to download the Kindle application.

No, go do it now. I'll wait.

OK, now that you've got a Kindle you're going to want to put something on it. And if you don't have a bunch of free ebooks from Project Gutenberg, you're missing out on a huge value.

When you go out looking for free ebooks from Project Gutenberg, you may notice some other ebooks are for sale. Amazon sells lots of them and most of them are about $9.99 (or they were until Apple won the right of traditional publishers to charge more). If you keep looking, you'll see there are tons of books that are free. And others like my story, The Aristotelian, that are $0.99.

There are a LOT of ebooks for $2.99 and under. A whole lot of them. It boggles the mind how many. How come? Because of Kindle Direct Publishing a lot of writers are bypassing traditional publishers and selling directly through Amazon. All the jobs that traditional publishers did are being done by the authors themselves. Or not being done.

Traditional publishers have a name for this kind of thing, vanity press. And since it undermines their profits they've done their best to discourage it. Oh, Mr. Bookseller, you don't want to carry that title, it's self-published. Same for newspaper reviews. Like it has cooties.

And there's a grain of truth in that narrative. A traditional publisher pays for editing, an editor is supposed to go through the text and do proof-reading to flush out any typos. Self-published work can sometimes skip this step, and statistically, you're more likely to find typos. Moreover, an aspiring writer may be so in love with his story, s/he'll disbelieve any report that it's not wonderful. Writers are dreamers who tell lies for a living and before they'll tell you any lies, they tell themselves lies about themselves and the quality of their work. If any writer says otherwise, reread the last sentence. Hence, some self-published works are unworthy.

You can find lots of cheap ebooks, but you won't necessarily want to read all of them. Whereas $0.99 much money, there's time. An ebook must be worth the time it takes to read it. Plus the time it takes to decide to buy it, plus the time it takes to find it.

What to do? The Traditional Publishers have a solution they'd like to push on you. Simply pay them $9.99+ and they'll decide which titles are worthy and which are unworthy, and they'll decide what you will like, too. And they'll tell you to do things their way or you'll drown in an ocean of self-published dreck.

There is another way. I go to flea markets, yard sales, and thrift stores to save money. I also sort through bins of CDs at Dollar Stores. Looking for bargains is like hunting. You take what you find with no guarantee up front what you'll find. You have to enjoy the hunt to sort through nicknacks at an Estate Sale. If you watch American Pickers, Cash & Cari, or Antiques Roadshow on television, you'll understand. I realized just recently that schlepping through a long list of cheap ebooks is just like this.

But there's a difference. When you're at an Estate Sale, and your search turns up some unrecognized treasure, you snap it up for yourself. If there's two, you grab it, too. And you brag to your friends at what a great find you acquired. All they can do is envy you. Conversely, with ebooks there's no limit per customer. You can download it, and your friends can, too. Or your friends can report to you what treasures they've uncovered!

Everybody wins, except traditional publishers who'd rather charge you $9.99+ and tell you what to think.

Monster Hunter Alpha

I’m a troll, but not in the sense you’re thinking. I live under the bridge—the Mackinac Bridge. This is what Yoopers call denizens of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. Yoopers? That’s what we call denizens of the Upper Peninsula. Michigan is schizo that way.

But us trolls often find an excuse to go “Up North," because the U.P. is just cool. Yeah, it’s cold, too. I’ve been to the U.P. a few times, but I generally try to include a literary pilgrimage of it. For instance, after I read Steve Hamilton’s “A Cold Day in Paradise (Alex McKnight Mysteries),” I made my way up to Paradise to get a look at the lay of the land.
And this summer, I went out of my way to visit Big Bay, MI where the events of John D. Volker’s “Anatomy of a Murder” took place.

Last time I went up to the Kewanaw peninsula I took a tour of the Quincy Mine in Hancock. I didn’t go underground, but I did see the building where they had the big steam hoist. I think this is where Larry Correia’s book “Monster Hunter Alpha” takes place. I’m not sure because Mr. Correia has set the story in Copper County, MI and the town of Copper Lake. Neither place exists. Too bad for the Hancock Chamber of Commerce.

The UP is different. It’s a little like Canada with guns, being quite far north and all. I’m told Finnish and Cornish miners settled the region. I was also told that the two major religions of the area are Lutheranism and Communism, but I don’t quite believe that. One aspect of the UP that stands out are yooper girls. You know how the Beach Boys sang about California girls? Something like that is going on. There’s a distinct, recognizable set of traits that are shared by many yooper girls I’ve met.

The best thing about Monster Hunter Alpha is the red-headed yooper girl, Detective Heather Kerkonen. Larry Correia has done a good job with this character. This is one of Mr. Correia’s strengths: limning distinctive, compelling characters. In this case, Heather is a cop who feels protective of her hometown.

The trouble in Copper County, Michigan is werewolves. Lots of werewolves. The town absolutely reeks of them. And that’s when Earl Harbinger, the red-neck who runs Monster Hunter International drives into town with a truck full of ordnance. Do you like guns? No? OK, you might want to read something with metrosexual sparkly vampires instead. But I like guns and I like stories with guns and gunplay. I liked this story.

I loved Louis L'Amour'swriting. He often followed a pattern: the gunfighter comes to town and he takes a shine to the girl. Similarly when Earl Harbinger meets Heather Kerkonen he asks her to dinner. His interest is not romantic, but she thinks so and turns him down. Earl Harbinger’s core competencies do not include seducing yooper girls. I suppose you could check out sparkly vampires for that. Earl does know how to punch out a monster, though.

Larry Correia does a nice job of capturing the character of the UP and the people who live there. I’m already sold on the Monster Hunter franchise, but putting the story in the UP was icing on the cake. Buy and read Monster Hunter Alpha so Mr. Correia can write more faster.

Monster Hunter Vendetta

If you have not read Monster Hunter International. Stop. Go read it. You can buy it here. MHI is an origins story and a lot of characters get introduced with a lot of mystery about their backstory. This is good.

One of the characters in that story is Agent Franks. One thing Larry Correia does well is maintain tension between different characters on the same side. And Agent Franks is someone everyone on the side of goodness loves to hate. It is easy because he represents the soulless, amoral US Federal Government agency the Monster Control Bureau. The avatar of this agency is Agent Franks.

Monster Hunter Vendetta is set up at the end of MHI when the Feds nuke one of the elder gods (you know those unpleasant beasties from H. P. Lovecraft). And that makes him mad. And he blames the protagonist of MHI, Owen Pitt, and he puts out a contract on him.


In the course of MHV we learn a lot of back story. Why Agent Myers hates the hero's boss. Why the hero's father-in-law unleashed hell. All this courtesy of "the shadow man," a necromancer who is the elder god's hitman. There's a lot of betrayal in MHV and manipulation.

But the thing I found most entertaining was learning about Agent Franks and HOW we learn about Agent Franks. Imagine an atom smasher. What's its purpose? To disclose the essential nature of atoms. How does it achieve this purpose? By throwing things at atoms with more and more energy. Then study what flies off the high-energy impacts. Such it is with Agent Franks.

After the Feds realize they've got a problem with a necromancer who's taken the contract on our hero, they assign the job of bodyguard to Agent Franks. Every time something really bad goes after the hero, Agent Franks steps up and gets trashed by it. Since we don't like Agent Franks, we don't mind much. Though, as we grow to understand him better and after he saves the hero's life a few times, we're willing to cut him some slack.

Betrayal is a big theme in this novel. Who's spying on whom? Some guys we hate come off more sympathetically. And some guys we sympathized with turn out to be less honorable than we'd wish. Sort of like life.

Larry Correia puts a lot of humor into his stories. I loved his one-liner about the Stig. If you liked the trailer-park trash in MHI, you'll love the ghetto bangers in MHV.

All in all I recommend this novel to everyone who loved MHI.