The Mothership

I bought a scanner a while back to help with my mess of papers and documents, and then it collected dust in a corner for a while. One of the other reasons I got it though, was so that I could scan some of my comic collection, for convenience and long-term archival. Unfortunately it’s probably one of those ideas that was better in theory than in practice.

It takes about two or three minutes per page to do the basic scanning, after accounting for proper positioning attempts, previews, the full scan, the slowness of the software and disk processing, and trying to handle things carefully. That just gets me a bunch of extremely large raw images that still need to be postprocessed, though. Stuff like the colour curves and black level adjustment could be skipped if I’m not feeling too picky, but at the very least it has to be cropped, rescaled to a manageable size, compressed, and checked for gross errors or aliasing patterns.

For now I’ll probably only bother doing this on my very favourite and rarer, hard-to-replace issues. For others, I may as well let someone else do all the work and just find some pirate scans online… :-P

I’ve been saving up a list of books that have been recommended by people I know from various places on the net. So, tonight I went down to the fairly large Chapters store at Chinook to buy some of them, and I could not find a single one of the titles.

It’s not like they’re obscure, out-of-print books either; I jumped on amazon.ca and found every one of them available new, and that’s where I’ll be getting them from. No, in most cases their major fault was simply being more than five or ten years old, or being earlier in a series. That last one in particular baffles me; they’ll stock the latest and greatest book in a long-running series or world, but not the early ones that someone new to it might like to start off at?

I also took a look at the technical books, and although there were a couple interesting ones, the standard prices are still a lot higher than what I can get online.

Instead, I just picked up a few popular classics that I’d been meaning to get around to eventually, but still left without a single one of the books I’d intended to get there. Amazon, here I come (again).

“In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.”

An interesting interview with Neal Stephenson. I’m working my way through Cryptonomicon, and although it’s slow going, it’s still pretty interesting. It’s not really so much about cryptography itself (there are no silly “oh no, he’s only 13 bits away from breaking the asymmetric vault key on the RS/6000!” scenes) as it is about scenarios where it’s a subtle influencing factor, in wartime and business, and the kinds of people (proto-geeks, if you will) you might find involved.

Not only do I have a stack of games to work through, but I have a stack of books waiting, too.

Currently I’ve been trying to get through The Eye of the World, the first book of the Wheel Of Time series, and it’s been slow going. So far there’s been a lot of Vague Hinting, people constantly Running Away From Imminent Threats, and descriptions of the world and people as they travel, but it still doesn’t really feel like anything interesting is happening yet. There isn’t anything that really compels me to continue reading.

Admittedly though, I am only reading it in small bursts as time allows, which is potentially making a somewhat slow stretch seem even worse. It’s a beloved enough series (the first few books, anyway) that there has to be something more to it, so perhaps it just hasn’t reached the good parts yet (maybe things pick up once they actually reach Tar Valon), or has to be read at a faster pace.

It probably doesn’t help to be reading multiple books simultaneously, either. I’m also reading A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge, and it at least always has something new or interesting happening in order to retain your attention. Maybe I should finish it first and then go back to EotW…

I’ve begun reading more fiction again, after a long hiatus. I used to devour books like crazy as a teenager, but they gradually got replaced by textbooks and technical manuals and games and web surfing and so on, and I just didn’t have time for plain old written stories anymore.

Now that I’ve got my V37 though, it’s made it a lot more convenient to find books, tote them around, and read them in spare moments thanks to the wonders of the e-book formats.

There is the occasional problem though, and it’s best illustrated here.

Why in the world is the e-book version over 40% more expensive than if you were to buy it brand new in paperback??? The physical book’s price includes a lot of overhead costs like distribution, storage, printing, etc. that would be next to nothing for the e-book version, yet they want even more for it. The only reason I can think of is that demand for it is expected to be so low that the production cost of putting it in e-book format has to be a large chunk of each sale (i.e., if it cost $10,000 to convert and you only expect to sell 1000 copies, each copy becomes $10 more expensive), but then the high price deters people from the e-book version anyway.

Another questionable tactic is that of selling off individual short stories. Not that there’s anything theoretically wrong with it, but here it seems like an attempt to squeeze more money out of them. Traditionally you would get a bunch of short stories in a collection, but if you were to add up enough of the stories you’d expect to get in one, the total cost is a lot higher when you have to buy them separately. I don’t want to have to look through the whole list, story-by-story, trying to figure out if it’s worth the 87 cents or not.

Fortunately most e-books *are* cheaper than the paper versions by a buck or two. It’s debatable whether an e-book is really a good replacement for a ‘real’, printed book, but the cheaper they are, the more you can get. I’ll probably just get printed versions of my favourites, which I might still want to reread twenty years down the road, but I don’t need printed versions of *every* so-so story I run across.