Ana's Note: This piece was composed in February 2012 and is an unintentional two-parter piece about ableism, with the first piece set to run 3/8/2012. The first piece was the Kindness & Cookies piece; this second part is the Firebrand piece.It's getting harder and harder to avoid conversations about J.K. Rowling these days.
Last year in 2011, an announcement went out that the Harry Potter books would be available in eBook form in October 2011. And there was much rejoicing, because these books are probably the most sought after not-currently-sold-in-eBook-form books on the planet. There was rejoicing among eReading people in general, but there was rejoicing among People With Disabilities even more.
See, a lot of PWD can't read Harry Potter books. Many of them -- including yours truly, if we want to get personal -- have never been able to finish the series. And a big reason for that is that the Harry Potter books weigh, and this is a scientific fact, one megaton each. So if you have the kind of disability that prevents you from picking up and wrestling open one megaton worth of book, then you haven't read the most popular kids' book series on the planet. And if you happen to be a kid with this disability, this is really freaking sad. So the announcement that soon there would be Harry Potter eBooks to load onto eReading devices that do not weigh one megaton was extremely exciting for PWDs.
And now it's the first quarter of 2012. And there are no Harry Potter eBooks. There may never be any Harry Potter eBooks -- there was a survey back in, oh, December 2011 that I participated in that was basically all, "Do you guys even really want these because it's kind of a pain for us to have to, like, make them and stuff." And so I've been trying -- really really really hard -- to stay out of conversations about these books and their uncertain future as eBooks and the many speculations as to why J.K. Rowling isn't releasing them as eBooks despite being perfectly capable of hiring a very nice eBook formatting person to take care of the HTML coding.
Now, I tend to assume that Rowling is a perfectly lovely person whose company I would enjoy. And I also firmly believe that her intellectual property is her property to do with as she pleases. This is not a post about omg Rowling Is Awful because I do not believe that. So let's just hang a nice disclaimer over this whole post: I think Rowling is a Nice Person who can and should do whatever the heck she pleases with whatever books she writes and publishes. Yay for a Free Society and Copyright and Choices and all that.
But. I do feel, and I do not think it's wrong for me to feel, that the decision to indefinitely delay a handicap-accessible version of an incredibly popular kids' book series is a symptom of ableism in our society. It's one more indication of the fact that disabled people are routinely treated as invisible non-existent entities when the discussion of eBooks is treated as entirely a matter of pure, privileged preference.
And the reason why I've been trying to stay out of these discussions is that apparently when I say stuff like well, it's my personal feeling that all these endless delays is a big fuck you to people with disabilities, apparently I sound hostile. And when someone helpfully* points out that there are Harry Potter movies and audio books ($30 per book! listen to the whole series for $200!) that people with disabilities can sample and I say my god! audio books? this is a thing? why did no one ever tell me? THANK YOU, KIND SIR, oh-wait-I'm-hard-of-hearing, apparently that's just beyond the pale of appropriate internet etiquette. And here I thought I was being polite by saying thanks. *sad trombone*
* Haha, this is not helpful at all. Dear Internet People, please stop acting like five whole minutes of thinking about a disability gives you the same insight as living an entire life with a disability.
And you know what? I am hostile about having a disability sometimes. I freely admit that. But then when I say, yeah, you know what? I'm hostile about this because I live in a world that is hostile to me, some Very Nice Internet Person will always jump in to explain very kindly that what I am doing and the tone of voice I am using is Not Helpful and that if I really want to educate people about disabilities then I need to be a little nicer, a little sweeter, and a lot quieter. Because when I'm Being Hostile, it's just not helpful at all for helping people to learn to not be ableist.
Now, I'm all about the Tone Arguments. The bulk of my Feminism 101 posts are written with sweetness and light, reassuring the reader that oh, you're such a Nice Person, I know, here's a cookie and a glass of milk while you read my gentle words on feminism and why maybe you should totally not joke about raping people, yeah? And I even think there's a place for that in this world. Allies are allies, and some of them are won over by kindness and cookies and some of them need the occasional firebrand to get in their metaphorical internet head-space and break through the Privilege Shell. And to be freely honest, anger isn't something I'm usually very comfortable with, so I'm pretty happy to do the Kindness & Cookies thing and let the other feminists do the Firebrand thing. Yay for variety!
So it's interesting to me that I come off as so hostile in discussions about accessibility and books, and I guess it's because it's such a personal issue to me. Reading is knowledge, and knowledge really is power and privilege. Being able to discuss popular culture is a huge part of my daily interaction with people. My co-workers and I may not have much in common together, but by gum we can bond over The Hunger Games, and once that bond is established maybe they will prioritize my information requests such that I can accomplish my tasking. My relatives and I may not always be able to see eye to eye on politics and religion, but we can power through the family reunions with discussions of Twilight, and as long as those relationships are nourished, I can be reasonably confident that they will pick up their keys and come help me the next time I've literally fallen and can't get up.
This isn't unimportant fluff to me. The establishment of relationships through conversation is essential to my life. My ability to bond and network with people affects my career, my relationships, my access to basic services and needs. In the Maslow hierarchy, even if the act of reading is a Self-Actualization need, the information gained through reading still directly affects my Safety and Physiological needs. Being effectively walled off from a massive cultural phenomena against my will is not only upsetting and distressing, it reduces my ability to blend into able society and it draws unwelcome attention to me as different and Other. It's an act that has meaning to me, and to every person who shares my disability.
But able society doesn't acknowledge that. I can't count how many times I've been told online that People With Disabilities are not "entitled" to electronic copies of books we can't otherwise read, that we're not "entitled" to video copies of live musicals we can't otherwise attend, that we're not "entitled" to subtitled editions of movies we can't otherwise make sense of, that we're not "entitled" to see or experience the pieces of shared information that make our culture an actual culture and not just a random selection of individuals. We're being uppity to ask, we're being hostile to demand, we're being entitled to expect any kind of accommodation. Disabled people should all rot in a darkened room somewhere and be grateful for the scraps of culture thrown our way. And if we point out that this attitude that we don't even exist and aren't worth catering to is a "big fuck you" in our direction, we're labeled as Hostile. Aggressive. Uppity. Entitled. And above all, Not Helpful.
I exist. I deserve the same place in public as anyone else, despite being female, despite being fat, despite being disabled. I'm not going to go hide in a dark room or keep my opinions to myself simply because someone isn't comfortable with my existence.
I might be helpful. I might offer someone cookies or milk while I gently explain Sexism 101 or Ableism 101 or Racism 101 to them. I might work all day long, to the detriment of my health, my projects, my lifestyle, and my needs to help someone learn a little bit more about the people they'd prefer would Fuck Off And Die in order to make their world a simpler place. I might.
Or I might not be. I might be hostile. I'm not going to bully, I'm not going to harangue, I'm not going to cause harm. But I absolutely reserve the right to point out asshattery when I see it. I reserve the right to take a "helpful" suggestion and point out the underlying assumption that disabled people are too stupid to think of alternatives. I reserve the right to take an accusation of "entitlement" and point out the foundational belief that disabled people don't deserve basic human rights. I reserve the right to swear like a sailor while doing these things.
And I absolutely reserve the right to respond to an accusation of "Not Helpful" by saying that I've got all of ten spoons today and I'm not going to spend a single fucking one coddling someone who doesn't believe I deserve to exist in public discourse simply because I committed the crime of being born with a random genetic disability. If someone has a problem with that, by all means THEY can go coddle that person and teach them Ableism 101. Go with god, and my hat off to them. The world needs Kindness & Cookies, so if they've got the spoons to tackle That Guy, please go for it. But I'm not going to sit down and shut up just because they think I'm so very much Not Helpful. And if they've got the time and the energy to try to shut me down, but they've got nothing to say to That Guy, then please excuse me while I question their priorities.
Is that hostile? Yeah, it's probably pretty fucking hostile. But you know, it's funny how a lifetime of being called "entitled" for trying to survive and thrive will do that to a person.
And you know what else? I'm writing this post in February. By the time this post goes up, I may well be confined to a hospital bed, recovering from the same surgery I had a lifetime ago in a childrens' charity hospital not too far down the road. I'll have an eReader in my hospital bag in the hopes that a little reading will be able to keep my mind off the excruciating pain that inevitably follows being sliced wide open so that a doctor can reach in an fiddle with my spine. I'm guessing now, in advance, that eReader won't be containing Harry Potter books on it. If anyone thinks it's entitled and hostile for me to be peevish about that, well, I'd like to suggest they hold on to that opinion until they've walked a mile in my hospital footies.
And here's hoping that Rowling -- who is, I'm sure, a very nice person -- will prove my guess wrong.
UPDATE: The Harry Potter books went live five days after this post. Link here; rejoicing here.
103 comments:
And a big reason for that is that the Harry Potter books weigh, and this is a scientific fact, one megaton each. So if you have the kind of disability that prevents you from picking up and wrestling open one megaton worth of book, then you haven't read the most popular kids' book series on the planet.
This is something of an eye-opener for me. Thank you.
I'm kind of sad to say it's a eye-opener for me, too. I started reading the piece and started wracking my brain, trying to come up with anything in the books that could be an abelist portrayal, any characters using words that might be slang I didn't know - it was so plain, simple, unambiguously obvious that the books just weigh too much for some people.
Hi privilege. Nice to see you again.
Hear, Hear!
I agree completely. Human rights are not up for negotiation on the basis of convenience and smegheads are not entitled to the time, patience, and forbearance of every unsuspecting passerby they manage to steamroll with their ignorance.
Beyond that even is how frustrating it is to hear the *exact same arguments* with only the specific marginalized group swapped out. "It's too expensive to make our product more friendly toward women/gays/blacks/disabled persons/etc... because they don't make up a large enough section of the market." They don't make up a large market share because you are actively hostile to them. If you are more friendly, they will be more interested. If you are getting enough questions/complaints about this issue that you feel compelled to comment, there is *already* a sizable market that actively wants to be catered to and is just waiting for a product to buy.
You can probably come up several dozen others just off the top your head which act like a Mad-Lib Bigotry Justifier.
Has anyone come up with a form that contained matching counter-arguments, where you'd just have to select the group under assault with the autofill option to have an instant rebuttal of equal intellectual fortitude? I'd volunteer but my programming skills are weak in the Force.
Trigger Warning: violence,
(One final note, though. Ana, you mentioned you were never able to finish Harry Potter? From everything I've seen on your blog, you probably haven't missed out on much you'd really enjoy- in the later books the main 'heroes' become almost, if not as despicable as Edward. We have presented as 'good' by the narrative people who permanently scar a young girl's face for reporting truthfully on their illegal activities. People who withhold potentially vital information from the authorities to protect some of their friends from punishment, even though the boy they injured showed signs of serious brain damage, possibly permanent, and the medical staff had no idea how to fix it since they had no idea what happened. People who see nothing wrong with mauling someone with summoned canaries so badly they're hospitalized, just because they were jealous the mauled party dared to date someone else.
This isn't to say the earlier books weren't fun - they were. But I've seen enough people throw apoplectic fits over how disappointed they were in those later books and how disgusted they were with the supposed the 'heroes' that I thought you deserved a heads up, at least.
On the other hand, if you don't read them you won't witnesses the AWESOMENESS of Neville Longbottom or Luna Lovegood. But they're almost entirely out of focus. Which is probably why they turned out so well, rather like Meyers and Jacob.)
Thank you, all.
I should clarify that all this came from a conversation on an unrelated site -- MobileRead.com, if anyone is curious -- and is not directed at anyone here. And the tone is meant as earnest and pleading, not screaming at the top of my lungs. (I should record myself reading these things out loud! :))
On actual Harry Potter news and actual surgery news, it looks like my surgery will be this September, and the ebooks just might be out then. *crosses fingers*
Until then I will continue to claim in public that I liked the movies but that the books "are just too long" to read because it's frustrating to have to continually advertise your limitations to the world. It's a question of privacy, but also a question of protection -- I can pass as more able than I actually am and I don't like having to admit that I'm not, which puts me in a very vulnerable position in work and social situations.
I would also like to buy the eBooks for a close younger friend whose physical disability is much more severe than mine.
*rereads comment* Oh God I should not try and write before I've had my morning caffeine, I always forget the things that are actually *important*...
I hope everything goes well for you, Ana, and that you're having as painless a recovery as humanly possible.
No, no, my guess in February was that I'd be surgerying in March; that's been moved to September. So you can save the recovery wishes until then. ;)
Yeah, I admit it's the same for me. I think it's because when I think of a "book", I think of the series of words, sentences, and chapters which form a story. So I didn't even think that, yeah, books are also traditionally physical objects too, printed on something I've heard is called "paper". I blame living in the information age. (Speaking of the Harry Potter books in particular, they don't even offer them in paperback, do they? It's doorstopping hardcover or bust right now, isn't it?)
Also I think it's probably a good idea to give Rowling some benefit of the doubt here (which I think you are, not trying to attack you or anything), since even though I don't work for Amazon or anything, I suspect there's a lot more going on here than what she wants. I can't help but think about how long it took for the Beatles to get on iTunes...
** Also, as a scientific experiment, I decided to weigh my copy of Order of the Pheonix, which I *think* is the largest book in the series. It weighs in at 2 pounds, 11 ounces. For comparison, my boxed set of all seven Narnia books clocks in at just under 2 pounds, including the case. That's... kind of funny actually.
Actually they do have the Harry Potter books in paperback, I own all of them in paperback except book 7 and that's cuz I wanted to buy it right away, not wait for paperback. They still weigh a megaton each though.
Given what J. K. Rowling is like as a person, if she has any influence with her publishers at all, if she was convinced by e-petition to support Harry Portter e-books so that people who couldn't lift the tomes could read them, maybe she could tell them she wants Kindle editions?
I say "if" because, while J. K. Rowling is the big exception to all rules, most writers have close to zero influence at their publishing house on how their books are published. And I'm not sure if Rowling's really any different now she's actually finished the HP series.
If an e-petition already exists, link me to it so I can sign it and promote it: if it doesn't exist yet, well, I'm happy to write a draft and run it by you, Ana.
I’ve been studying France’s political system in one of my classes. It’s supposed to be one of the most welfare-intensive states: nation of 35-hour work weeks, long vacations, and huge unemployment benefits – some companies are required to compensate former employees with years of pay. So it took me by surprise to read an article that talked about just how little the welfare state takes care of disabled workers.
In France, they are extremely underrepresented in the workforce, since the government requires companies to make a quota of 6% of large companies, and most pay fines rather than hire handicapped workers. Likewise, it’s difficult for them to get around. Part of that is due to urban architecture: only half of France’s public buildings are accessible to wheelchairs. In 2001, a survey showed that in twenty-two major French cities, 3% of bus lines, 34% of cinemas, 30% of museums, and 42% of post offices were accessible to wheelchairs. Practically all hotels are also inaccessible, with even those with elevators unable to accommodate wheelchairs, limiting vacation opportunities.
But the thing is, the article compares it to the United States. France has about 6.5% of the disabled population in the workforce, and America has roughly 30%! And this, I think foreign readers are supposed to feel, is a positive thing to say about America. Except that means about 70% are not in the workforce. And look, about 12.4% of French elderly couldn't even leave their homes in the 1980s; compare that to Sweden (Denmark?) where only 2% were unable to leave their own homes. It's something I've never thought about, I'm ashamed to say.
Thank you for the post. I don't think you were hostile at all.
Why any modern book isn't available as an eBook as soon as it's out in hardback these days is beyond me. It's not like the Harry Potter series was typeset by hand on a Gutenberg press in a one-man print shop. It was done with modern typesetting, which means entirely digital after a certain point in the process, and by a big enough publisher to actually have staff who can format stuff for e-publication. All they do by delaying issue of the ebook edition is encourage piracy.
I have read for several years now that one of the really nice advantages of ebooks is that readers who can't manage today's door-stopper books can handle them on e-readers. It usually comes up in the context of "my arthritis doesn't let me hold heavy books for long any more", but I can see where it would apply to other disabilities. I certainly appreciate the ability to instantly turn any e-book into a large print edition, some days.
BTW, if you're a scifi fan, Baen Books not only issues all their published titles in NON DRM-encumbered ebook formats at a reasonable price, they have been acquiring the rights to quite a few classic scifi works and publishing them as ebooks. My spouse noted that Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry stories will be coming out this year, and I have been the happy owner of pretty much every story Leigh Brackett ever wrote, as ebooks, for several years now, thanks to Baen. However, if you want to get your Edgar Rice Burroughs fix, you'll have to go to Project Gutenberg.
Speaking of which, I can't recommend them enough as a source for classic literature (that other thing besides pop culture that is our common cultural heritage--aka, "last century's pop culture"). PG has its books available in all the major ebook formats, and these days, the text is usually pretty well formatted. (Much better than I remember it from 10-15 years ago). There are also several sites that "pretty up" the PG texts and make them available, such as FeedBooks.
As for Harry Potter, if it were old/unavailable movies, unavailable TV shows, video games you paid for but can't play due to broken DRM, out-of-print tabletop RPG texts or comic scans, I'd say hoist the Jolly Roger and go a-pirating, but pirate ebooks tend to be PDFs of scans, which IMHO suck for reading. Can't be reflowed and all that. Also pirating books hurts individual authors, which I am against. Pirating stuff that should have been out of copyright if our copyright laws hadn't been corrupted by massive corporate lobbying makes my crocodile cry, if you know what I mean.
JK Rowling didn't sell ebook rights to her publisher; if she had, they would have been available as ebooks since 10 minutes after Amazon announced their shiny new Kindles. The lack of an ebook edition actually is JK's fault, since she could do any of the following: 1. Sell ebook rights to any publisher on the planet for a gazillion dollars; 2. Hire someone to make beautiful HTML editions of her books and release them on Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, etc., which could be done in a month, seriously. In a WEEK if she hired someone with a team of people working for them. 3. Especially since they could start by re-pirating the pirated e-editions that are all over the Internet (I know several authors who've done this, when they decided to self-publish their backlist.)
I just want to swoop in and say 'Baen, frak yeah~'
For the longest time I couldn't name a single 'favorite author'. Then David Weber's Honor Harrington series happened.
As for Harry Potter, if it were old/unavailable movies, unavailable TV shows, video games you paid for but can't play due to broken DRM, out-of-print tabletop RPG texts or comic scans, I'd say hoist the Jolly Roger and go a-pirating, but pirate ebooks tend to be PDFs of scans, which IMHO suck for reading. Can't be reflowed and all that.
That's not really true anymore. It's certainly not true of the pirate copy of Harry Potter I have, which I have because I can't buy it as ebooks, and yet I often find myself searching it. (I should point out that I own the entire series in print, before people start accusing me of ripping Rowling off.)
I'm of the firm opinion that authors should be compensated for their work, and if people want to own a copy of something, they should buy it.
And if the company doesn't sell it the way you want, or, in this case, need, buy a different format, and convert it. Legally, it's probably good, morally, it's fine. The Supreme Courts have always upheld format shifting when it's a necessity, which would apply here. So it would be perfectly legal to buy and scan the books.
And if, instead of you doing the conversion, someone else does for free and you just grab the conversion they made, I really don't see a moral distinction there, as long as you own whatever they made their version from. And, strangely, this appears to be completely legal in the US. (It's the act of making and providing copies that is illegal, not receiving them. People are sued for file sharing, not file receiving.)
Of course, Ana in no way needs to justify why she doesn't pirate the book. If's she's decided that purchasing the physical book and downloading pirate ebooks would be immoral, I'm not here to argue that, and that is actually a fairly absurd societal solution to the problem.(1) I'm fairly certain we solved this problem with braille already, in that publishers are required to 'license' their books to braille printers at a reasonable cost. Someone who knows how that works needs to post that.
I'm just pointing out pirate ebooks are not as bad quality as people assume, and there's a moral argument that buying the books entitles the purchaser to an actual readable form of them. (And, if you're still on the edge, you could always destroy the physical books afterwards, so you still only have 'one copy'. Or just remove the front cover so you can't accidentally resell it.) So while that's not really a good solution in general, it might be okay here.
And I'm very hesitant to post this, as apparently talking about copyright law and how it actually works, and how specific things are legal under it, and it's not as absolutist as people seem to think, turns otherwise reasonable people into strangely antagonist people. So I'm rather of the option that the trigger warnings here should probably include 'Copyright Law'. Not because it bothers me, but simple because some people cannot engage in reasonable discussions about copyright law, and I'm sure I'm about to get yelled for this suggestion.
Because I, who have paid Rowling whatever fraction of my ~$60 I gave the store, then pirated the ebooks so I don't have carry them around, am a worse person than someone who borrowed the books from the library, read them, and gave Rowling nothing. And I'm also a worse person than someone who bought the books, scanned them, OCR'd them, proofread them, and reads the results on their ereader, despite the fact our current situations would be literally indistinguishable.
1) This is really a problem that is much bigger than it appears. Why are some books out of print? Why are there movies rotting in studio vaults? Why is copyright able to make things inaccessible from sheer neglect? That is not what copyright is for.
/helpful privilege /sarcasm
But Ana, have you tried using a book stand? Levinger has a really nice one for only $350 that comes in either natural or dark cherry.
You're welcome!
/sarcasm /helpful privilege
I'm actually sort of taken aback by the fact that HP isn't available as an e-book. I understand that conversion isn't always totally straightforward, but we are talking about a best-selling series aimed at a group that's probably tech-savvier than average. Plenty of people would re-buy, just to have the books on their preferred device.
I was just contemplating today that I am seriously fucking *done* with the absolute saturation of privilege of garden blogs/books and how little it's addressed. If I read one more site that says "Short on space? Consider taking out part of your lawn!" I am going to fucking lose it. So solidarity!
Wow. You just prompted this shameless lurker to make her first comment. HP is my favorite book, and I was sort of annoyed about the lack of ebook, but I never thought about how privileged that thought is. You are so right. Thank you for showing me this.
Oh, and by the way, you're awesome. I never posted to mention that before.
But Ana, have you tried using a book stand? Levinger has a really nice one for only $350 that comes in either natural or dark cherry.
LOL! Dav, I love you.
Randomness:
@DavidCheatham, it is a fraught subject, and especially once disabilities get involved. The example I always bring up is with live musicals like Wicked. Now, I've been blessed to see Wicked in person, and it was one of the most tremendous artistic moments of my life, but a LOT of stars had to align for that to happen and most people with disabilities just can't go to see live musicals.
And the current musical paradigm is to ABSOLUTELY NOT release a DVD edition, even though I guarantee they'd make so much more money doing so. I mean, they could release it for the price of a ticket, and I'd pay it. The price of two tickets! Or three!
I assume that they refuse to release an edition because they believe that one person will buy and pirate it and everyone else on earth will stop paying them money. Which of course ignores the fact that there ARE pirated versions already out there: they're called video cameras, and you can hide them pretty easily now days.
So a PWD is left with the choice to either break the law or (again) be walled off from a major cultural and artistic phenomena.
And (again) if you complain about this, you're a big entitled baby who thinks the world should be handed to you on a silver platter! Which, beyond anything else, ignores the fact that this "walled off from culture" phenomena is going on all the time. This isn't about ONE movie or ONE musical or ONE book -- it's a flood of them, a whole river of culture that says You Must Be This 'Able' To Participate.
And -- copyright issues aside, which yes are complicated -- it sometimes pisses me a little off.
And I don't really know how to solve it, because I *do* feel strongly about creator rights. But it's just frustrating that some creators have a lot of able-privilege. So I guess I'm most angry at society in general for not educating people about these things a little more. In school, or something. :(
Back at Dav, that really did crack me up. And I didn't know that about garden blogs, but I *do* get tired of some urban-greenie sites acting like having your own chickens PRACTICALLY PAYS FOR ITSELF. Pretty sure, no. O.o (That was an exaggeration, but still.)
@Jeldaly, aw, thank you. ;D
(And I certainly don't think it's bad to be annoyed about the lack-of-eBook-version for non-disability reasons! Keep on being annoyed with your awesome self.)
@Sol, that made me really sad. I thought France was a mecca for PWDs, what with all the nationalized health care awesomeness. :(
Ana: And I didn't know that about garden blogs, but I *do* get tired of some urban-greenie sites acting like having your own chickens PRACTICALLY PAYS FOR ITSELF. Pretty sure, no. O.o
Ah, chickens. I can almost hear Mom complaining now. Something along the lines of "Why the hell are people in the middle of fucking Waterloo legally allowed to have chickens, but outside the city they don't allow for non-commercial farming and the law goes '<3 acres: 0 chickens, 3 - whatever acres, 1 - 5000'?!"
Now whenever people talk about hobby chicken farming, that's all I can think of.
(I don't think she'd actually say "fuck" out loud in this context, but that's the gist of it.)
Rowling -- who is, I'm sure, a very nice person
Rowling recently lost her billionaire status due, in part, to her donations to charities.
This was a post of beauty and I feel as though it should be mandatory reading in all high schools so idiot young adults learn early to find some respect for people who are different. Even though I don't share your disability I know what its like to be invisible - I spent my twenties struggling terribly with a phobia that wouldn't allow me to work, date or leave the house very often. When family called to catch up I was invisible, I didn't exist. When family friends visited as soon as they learned I wasn't dating, wasn't married, wasn't in school I got passed over as worthless.
So your amazing post on being the bottom invisible rung in society strikes a powerful cord for someone like me who has stuggled mightily to regain the ability to enter society (six years of behavior therapy). Still single but now dating AND I graduated college.
Still plenty of rage though and plenty of exasperation of trying to explain (in small words) what it's like to have an uncontrollable condition that directly impacts my quality of life. Mostly it's a waste of time.
Let's face it: the Metropolitan Opera House has figured this part out, Broadway's just being silly not catching up.
(The Met has long been happy to broadcast some of their productions over the radio -- it's part of building their audience. Nowadays they've partnered with certain movie theatre chains to do simulcasts of big operas. It's not exactly like being at the actual show, but you see what's going on, you hear the music on reasonably good speakers, and you're with a crowd. There are usually subtitles too, and interviews during intermission. Result? People who are willing to pay $20-30 for a ticket try it out and start to like it. Whereas even the cheap seats at a live production are usually more than four times that price. Then they release them on DVD, costing around $40 each, so opera fans can watch Natalie Dessay iron a regiment's worth of shirts while singing an intricate solo.
Maybe it helps that opera fans are weird.)
Though I have seen a number of West End productions. So the London stage is catching on, too. Hope! There is hope! And with enough pressure on the producers, we may yet get half-decent videos of more and more musicals.
That irritates me too. But as pointed out I'm sure there are plenty of other things going on between getting the books from physical form to ebook form. I would think though that they would want to get those out with how many people are switching from physical books to e-readers and how popular that series is. I personally have read the entire series and saw the films. However, I also get really pissed at people without disabilities when they critique those with disabilities. I also get frustrated with our government and their willingness to cut funding for those who can't really fight back ie: the elderly, disabled, and school systems. But that may be a different rant that I plan on doing on my blog. I'm currently in process of writing one about "freaks vs. normal" people based off an image I saw and some comments regarding said image and another on the (very little) differences between me and a person of colour(but I'm going at it from a biological standpoint proving that society is stupid and minus how much melanin we have/lack at the core, we're all the same). I know what it is like having a very minor version of a disability(since I do have a very minor version of a disability) and I know what it is like living with someone who has a more severe disability(in my case, my little brother especially since I am the primary caregiver for him whilst my parents are at work). Society sometimes NEEDS people with disabilities to be "rude" sometimes. And honestly Ana, I don't see any of this as you being rude/hostile or anything. I see it more as venting your frustrations to those of us who are more privileged than you and can do things that you may have difficulties. Also, I really didn't know that the books weighed that much O_o. But I can understand the frustration that must accompany that. I hope your procedure goes well in September and hopefully the books will be in e-book format by then.
The lack of an ebook edition actually is JK's fault, since she could do any of the following: 1. Sell ebook rights to any publisher on the planet for a gazillion dollars; 2. Hire someone to make beautiful HTML editions of her books and release them on Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, etc., which could be done in a month, seriously. In a WEEK if she hired someone with a team of people working for them. 3. Especially since they could start by re-pirating the pirated e-editions that are all over the Internet (I know several authors who've done this, when they decided to self-publish their backlist.)
The nature of her contract almost certainly forbids that. Contracts as a matter of course include a clause stating that the publisher has electronic rights should they decide to employ them later; this has been the case for many years. Contracts that pre-date such agreements generally have amendments added; this also began many years ago. There's no way a publisher would forget to address this issue with such a profitable author.
So no, she couldn't. She'd get sued, and the e-book would get taken down.
Also, it's not a good idea to have a book edited by a team. Teams don't spot inconsistencies from section to section. Publishing books is not like turning out material by the yard. You're just making stuff up there.
If you're going to make generalisations about the business, you should try to understand how the business works before chucking blame around.
Also, what's with calling her 'JK'? That's not her name. People refer to writers by their surname; people who know Rowling, I believe, call her 'Jo'. It's just disrespectful.
I really wish people would try to know what they're talking about before blaming writers. Disabled rights aside, that is hostile.
It's certainly not true of the pirate copy of Harry Potter I have, which I have because I can't buy it as ebooks, and yet I often find myself searching it. (I should point out that I own the entire series in print, before people start accusing me of ripping Rowling off.)
I'm not going to accuse you of ripping Rowling off, but I am going to point something out: this is probably the reason they hesitate to release it as an e-book.
Publishers worry about e-books because they're so easy to pirate. It's a not unreasonable speculation that if there are some pirated versions online when there's just a print book, there will be more if you release an e-book - and once they're out there, it's a lot of expense to do anything about it. Therefore, anybody who releases or consumes a pirated version of a book is providing statistical evidence to a publisher, whose job it is to weigh the odds, that producing an e-book is against their economic interests. And since publishers have to earn their living like everybody else, making something against their economic interests is a reliable way to get them not to do something.
Forget the moral arguments. Forget whether you think publishers are correct in that estimate or not; you aren't their economic adviser and they're going to go on their own judgement. We're talking practical effects here, and releasing and consuming pirated copies is, if you want an e-book (or rather, if you want e-books to be legally available to everyone rather than just having your own personal copy willy-nilly), against your own interests.
Publishers don't withhold e-books because they feel like annoying people. They withhold them because they have to pay their bills and publishing runs on low profit margins as it is. In this instance, pirates and their consumers are the reason we can't have nice things.
Everything I have read on this subject - and it's something I've followed very closely - says that Rowling has retained her eBook rights.
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304569504576403291417417796.html
And while it is not a good idea to edit a book by team, eBook versions are frequently worked by teams because they are essentially a piece of software. One team handles the HTML, one the CSS, one beta tests across multiple devices (kindle, nook, sony, kobo). /software engineer with fanatical interest in eBook formatting
@Ana - that's interesting. And unusual; a less stellar author might not have that option. (I can see a publisher refusing to publish a newcomer who wouldn't contract for e-rights, for instance.)
I stand by the point that you shouldn't edit content in sections, though, which is what seemed to be suggested. (With rather a tone of snapping at a servant for not cleaning up quick enough, which I am very weary of seeing directed towards authors.) And the point that e-books would be a lot less of an issue if it weren't for the pirates.
It IS a very unusual situation, I agree.
Rowling has always stated a fear of piracy, with regards to eBook editions, and I understand that.
However, she has a long history of upsetting the PWD community by also justifying her choice with statements like 'I just prefer to read on paper' and 'children don't own eReaders'.
It took her actually owning her own Kindle to decide that maybe eReaders were nice, but several delays since then have been justified on the grounds that the fans have already read the series, so there's no rush.
(And of course I can't find quotes for any of this because googling Rowling + eBooks this early in the morning only nets me OMG EBOOKS IN OCTOBER news.)
All this is absolutely her right. (Though the poster above is correct that these could easily be done in a month. I know more than enough about the software involved to do the books in two months.) But, again, her right. Bury the eRights in a time capsule or blast them into space - that's her right.
What PWDs object to, though, is the constant invisibiling as though we don't exist. We don't "prefer" to read on paper because our preferences simply do not matter, as our disability overrides them. Our children (my step-daughter has severe cerebral palsy) absolutely do read on eReaders.
And, no, some of us haven't already read the books. So the "ha, ha, delayed again, aren't computers HARD" updates from Pottermore get.... old after awhile.
It's a unique situation.
And this has been all the more puzzling and perplexing because, as noted, she gives copiously to charities. So she must be at least aware that many children cannot hold or turn traditional books.
And there was a time when all the eBook sales were rumored to go straight to charity. I think that was just a rumor, but it certainly would have made piracy and sales-cannibalism moot.
The whole thing is very strange.
Forgot to add: Fear of piracy may be why there were no Harry Potter books prior to 2010, but piracy is no longer an issue now.
The eBooks were announced to be out in October 2010. According to the latest news I could find today, the books have been pushed back to "late 2012", which gives me a sinking feeling that we won't hear anything again until 2013.
So if there is an attitude here of authors not being "quick enough", it is almost certainly because People With Disabilities - who keep up on technological development - know how long it takes to do X and understandably ask why X is taking four times longer than it should when a promised deadline has come and gone.
And I wasn't kidding when I said that the announcements and surveys coming out of Pottermore have basically been that computers are hard. Which, yes, they are, but many disabled people get hostile when absolutely no mention is made that "we know there are people who can only read the books in electronic form and we are doing our best to get copies out in a timely manner". Instead of essentially blaming the beta users for visiting Pottermore too much and keeping this teasing tinge throughout about how there's no rush, before going back to posting fan art on Pottermore. Which is what they've actually been doing - I've been following this for months.
Which is why I said in post that this whole thing feels like a big Fuck You to people with disabilities. I don't think that's hostile to authors, but if it is - well... I guess I'm hostile. :(
Put it this way: it's hard to square your objection to tone arguments in the article with your complaint being so much about the tone of announcements.
As to the teasing tone ... they wouldn't be the first people to adopt one as a way of addressing issues that need to be addressed while keeping some distance between themselves and the most aggressive fans. If you're trying to get something done people are giving you a hard time about it, you'll piss them off if you ignore them, and you'll piss them off if you defend or explain yourself, and you'll piss them off if you tell them that they're right that you should deliver by a certain time but then don't manage to. There's really no way not to piss people off except to give them what they want - and with that attitude, I don't blame authors for feeling a little ironic about the whole business.
There's no way to please everyone, especially if, for whatever reason, you aren't in a position to give people what they want right away. But if you're going to defend your right to take a hostile tone, then it's only fair to allow them the right to whatever tone they see fit. Either tone is a valid issue or it isn't.
Have I said anywhere that Rowling and her team can't or shouldn't take whatever tone they please? I'm genuinely curious where and how I've given that impression.
I am trying to explain how their words, tones, and actions make me feel. And I am attempting to assert my right to feel that way.
And I am also trying to convey that people who spend more time arguing with me about my attitude (or about 'the facts' or 'the alternatives' as though I'm not acutely aware of the hurdles that prevent me from participating in social culture) and less time listening to the hurdles that disabled people face are not my allies.
As I have been apparently not clear, I absolutely believe that Rowling and her team can continue to publically pretend that people with disabilities don't exist. And I believe I have the right to be annoyed by their willingness to do so.
I haven't been following this as closely as you have, Ana, but what *I* have read is that the fans feel they were "promised" / have demanded (I've read both) that the e-book versions come with considerable enhancements, and that's where the delay lies.
As to why they don't just release plain vanilla ebooks until the enhancements are finished, probably because they don't want the hear the howling about "you suckered us into buying the same thing twice" that accompanied the release of the LOTR films.
To radically change the subject, I've praised Kristen Cashore's books to the skies here and elsewhere She has the latest in her trilogy, BITTERBLUE, due out May 1. (And they are all available as ebooks).
Do you know what I honestly liked best about BITTERBLUE? It wasn't anything in the book itself. It was a comment in the Afterword. She discussed how a reader had politely criticized her portrayal of a disabled character in the first book for using the trope of "magical compensation for disabiity", and her response was:
1. Good gracious, is that a Thing?
2. Huh, that really wasn't what I was going for.
3. Nonetheless, I can see how that was hurtful!
4. How can I fix this and remain true to my characters and story?
(Needless to say, it was 3 & 4 that I loved.)
And she managed (imo) to pull it off with compassion, integrity, and artistry!
Publishers worry about e-books because they're so easy to pirate. It's a not unreasonable speculation that if there are some pirated versions online when there's just a print book, there will be more if you release an e-book - and once they're out there, it's a lot of expense to do anything about it. Therefore, anybody who releases or consumes a pirated version of a book is providing statistical evidence to a publisher, whose job it is to weigh the odds, that producing an e-book is against their economic interests. And since publishers have to earn their living like everybody else, making something against their economic interests is a reliable way to get them not to do something.
Except this makes no sense. There already _are_ pirate ebooks of Harry Potter out there. Failure to release an ebook will not make them disappear. Producing an ebook will not make _more_ pirate ebooks.
In theory, it might make the pirate ebooks better, except at this point, ebooks really don't have any issues. In fact, the copy I have is so well done that, until reading about it here, I was under the impression that I had a DRM-stripped copy of the British ebook and it just hadn't come out in America yet, and I had to go and check that before posting here.
So the idea that producing an ebook would cause it to somehow be _more_ pirated, and thus cause _more_ lost sells doesn't stand up to ten seconds thought. I once had the same discussion about why I can't download full episodes of TV shows with commercials, instead of having to stream them, which doesn't work well for my connection. Someone responded to that with the claim that pirates would 'strip out the commercials and DRM and distribute them', which caused me about ten minutes of laughter before I could suggest that, um, it would probably be easier for pirates to continue using their system for pulling them straight off their digital cable feeds than to screw around in a DRM-cracking battle. (But TV networks have a more reasonable excuse, in that they are contractually restricted from doing certain things, and it's possible they can legally stream but can't legally provide a download. Whereas Rowling doesn't have that excuse.)
In other words, I can't take any reasoning seriously that claims 'We can't release as format X because people will pirate it', when the slightest look at the current state of the world demonstrates that pirates already have a perfectly functional system of pirating that content and putting it in format X, and hence failure to release in format X cannot possible hinder pirating. All it does is _assure_ that if people want it in format X, they will pirate it.
Now, presumable publishers are not always rational, and it is possible they do think what you said. But it's objectively wrong and nonsensical.
Of course, a somewhat different reasonable conclusion could be that the ebook market is already _full_, and releasing the book would mean they'd have to compete with existing pirate copies, so it's not worth the effort...but as has been pointed out, the effort to turn a current book into an ebook is microscopic, so that doesn't make sense either. We're talking about work that probably could be covered by selling 100 copies. (Or, to clarify, we're talking about work that _random pirates did for free_, in the most complicated way possible of scanning and OCRing the book.)
I don't know what every single HP fan has done, of course, but everything I've seen has been the opposite case.
Most fans just want a regular ePUB/mobi version. The Rowling team utterly horrified the eReading world when they originally announced that they were going to release editions that gave everyone "the same, identical reading experience" because from a technical standpoint the closest format that can give you that is PDF and no one wants that.
Similarly, the decision to create their own social DRM was very badly handled.
But all of this to say:
1. When an author sets a release date and doesn't meet that date,
2. and continually frames the issue of eReading as personal preference,
3. they are perpetuating a social attitude that PWDs do not even EXIST,
4. and as a PWD, I find that an aggressive position and I react with hostility.
That is really all I was trying to say. Everything else about piracy and copyright and DRM is so much smoke and noise.
I don't feel entitled to a free, signed copy of Harry Potter; I feel like I'm entitled to not continue to be invisibled over and over and over and over and over until it's not one author (Harry Potter) or one musical (Wicked) or one show (The Tudors), it's a death of a thousand cultural cuts.
DavidCheatham, it doesn't have to make sense TO YOU.
It has to make sense to the people who actually own the rights. Y'know, the ones who have a real live economic stake in this.
So unless you are an author or a publisher, discussing what reasoning YOU PERSONALLY will "take seriously" is relevant only on September 19, which is six months away.
.but as has been pointed out, the effort to turn a current book into an ebook is microscopic, so that doesn't make sense either. We're talking about work that probably could be covered by selling 100 copies.
Considering the crappy quality of most of the self-published e-books (and some professionally converted ones, NOT just OCR scans), this is objectively not true.
Unless you don't actually care about the formatting and editing of your ebooks. Surprisingly few people don't. Then again, surprisingly few people care about grammar, pleasing prose, plot continuity, characterization that makes sense, etc., to judge by many bestselling books.
(And your claim that people are "willing to do it for free" has zero to do with how hard it is, or how good the quality is. After all, people are willing to build scale models of Gondor out of toothpicks for free as well.)
I am not particularly inclined to applaud the decline of editing standards.
Have I said anywhere that Rowling and her team can't or shouldn't take whatever tone they please? I'm genuinely curious where and how I've given that impression.
You said this:
And I wasn't kidding when I said that the announcements and surveys coming out of Pottermore have basically been that computers are hard. ... Instead of essentially blaming the beta users for visiting Pottermore too much and keeping this teasing tone throughout about how there's no rush to do the thing they actually promised to do, before going back to posting fan art on Pottermore. Which is what they've actually been doing - I've been following this for months.
You specifically used the word 'tone'.
--
Except this makes no sense. There already _are_ pirate ebooks of Harry Potter out there. Failure to release an ebook will not make them disappear. Producing an ebook will not make _more_ pirate ebooks.
See, when I said, "Forget whether you think publishers are correct in that estimate or not; you aren't their economic adviser and they're going to go on their own judgement," I was anticipating this response. Sadly, you didn't pick up on it.
You can't make a sweeping generalisation that more e-books won't definitely produce more pirated copies. Publishers tend to think it's a risk worth considering. So as long as you are consuming pirate stuff, you are contributing to the culture of piracy that discourages publishers from producing e-books. Whether you can 'take that reasoning seriously', that is the consequence what you are doing. What you take seriously is not their concern; what people rip off and consume is. They don't care whether you think you're acting rationally or not; they care that people are pirating work and consuming it. How you see that action while you're doing it is not their concern.
Now, presumable publishers are not always rational, and it is possible they do think what you said. But it's objectively wrong and nonsensical.
I have no problem with tone arguments: your tone here is arrogant, pompous and disrespectful to professionals who know a lot more about their business than you do. There is a difference between 'rational' and 'doing exactly what I think people should do/want them to do' all the time, and I suggest you observe it.
So if there is an attitude here of authors not being "quick enough", it is almost certainly because People With Disabilities - who keep up on technological development - know how long it takes to do X and understandably ask why X is taking four times longer than it should when a promised deadline has come and gone.
Four times? It's way more than that.
Once you have the text of the book correct (Which is a big part of publishing, e- and otherwise.), the actual 'turning into an ebook' is not a particularly complicated process at all, and it's one that should be 99% automated by now.
In early days with ebooks, there were all sorts of tiny bugs and glitches to iron out. But this is software, and software only needs to be written once, and I'm sure book publishers now have their epublishing software working at this point. No one's writing new software for each book. It's essentially 'insert book text, compile ebook'. It's nowhere near as time consuming as laying out print books.
Yes, it then needs reading on different readers, making sure the pictures and whatnot lined up right or whatever, but we're talking about a process that should be ten minutes of work to come up with beta copies, a week of beta reading with some trivial tweaks, a week or so of getting it into each e-store, and then release.
Whenever anyone asserts year-long delays in a fortnight-long process...something else is going on.
Can I please reiterate that this Harry Potter subject has nothing to do with piracy?
Rowling has decided to release the eBooks with social DRM. Piracy is not preventing the release of the books. Don't believe me, believe the official statements from Pottermore.
Pottermore is saying that the books have been delayed because the technology involved in maintaining and creating their site is hard. That is all; this is not an issue of piracy fear.
For the record, it is absolutely possible to create a beautiful and clean ePUB in days, not months. The delay right now is because they want to sell the books through the Pottermore website, which is significantly more complicated.
Hopefully that will clear things up a little on the subject.
Ana, not trying to pick a fight here, but trying to understand your viewpoint:
If Rowling and her publishers had chosen not to authorize translation of the HP books into, say, Chinese, would your default assumption be that this was an aggressive act of cultural imperialism?
Rowling has decided to release the eBooks with social DRM. Piracy is not preventing the release of the books. Don't believe me, believe the official statements from Pottermore.
You don't think it might have been a factor in delaying the decision so long? (Since this is a text conversation, please imagine me saying this in a friendly, enquiring tone rather than an aggressively hostile one, if that's doable!)
I find this question so perplexing that I do not know how to respond.
First of all, since we are talking about a specific example here, there are actually multiple translations of Harry Potter in Chinese. Harry Potter has been officially translated into 68 languages, with some languages having multiple translations depending on dialect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation#List_of_translations_by_language
(Does anyone here speak Urdu? How do you pronounce that?)
Second of all, the persistent marginalization of disabled people is in no way comparable to a theoretical marginalization of people who speak Chinese. This strikes me as akin to the "well, what if there was a business that didn't serve white people?" Answer: Then it would have completely different context because marginalization does not occur in a vacuum.
Third, I feel like this question means that you essentially did not read my OP. I specifically said:
I think Rowling is a Nice Person who can and should do whatever the heck she pleases with whatever books she writes and publishes. Yay for a Free Society and Copyright and Choices and all that.
But. I do feel, and I do not think it's wrong for me to feel, that the decision to indefinitely delay a handicap-accessible version of an incredibly popular kids' book series is a symptom of ableism in our society. It's one more indication of the fact that disabled people are routinely treated as invisible non-existent entities when the discussion of eBooks is treated as entirely a matter of pure, privileged preference.
So to address the content of my post; if Rowling said "I don't want to release a Chinese edition because it's too expensive or too legally complex or too difficult or because Chinese food gives me a tummy ache," that would not be aggressive. But if Rowling says "I don't want to release a Chinese edition because everyone has the ability to read the English version," then that would be a public statement that people who can only read in Chinese DO NOT EXIST. And it would be a public statement by someone with millions of followers, and charity connections, and the sort of position where the speaker must know that they are wrong and yet... they say it anyway.
And if that sort of thing happened over and over and over and over again, it would be a symptom of... something. English-ableism? I don't think there's a word for this.
So your analogy baffles me on many levels, I'm afraid. :/
(I'm beginning to feel like I have to do some kind of Harry Potter eBook 101 timeline just to bring everyone up to speed on this issue and I'm afraid I don't have the time at the moment. So apparently that was my fault, I apologize.)
You don't think it might have been a factor in delaying the decision so long?
Oh, good gracious, no. She's been very upfront about the initial delay being over piracy and has only recently publicly reversed her decision. Piracy was certainly a factor in her initial delay. It's just not *now*, since we've got people coming up to speed on the issue. Either way, this post is not and never has been about chastising her for not releasing. (It's not been about chastising her at all!)
This post is about:
It's one more indication of the fact that disabled people are routinely treated as invisible non-existent entities when the discussion of eBooks is treated as entirely a matter of pure, privileged preference.
All the delays surrounding the eBooks since the October 2011 release date have insisted that the most important thing right now is the website Dueling Wizards game and Potion Mixing page with the implication being that the fans have all already read the books so the most important thing is naturally the *new* online content.
Delaying the ebooks and digital audiobooks launch will, said Pottermore, "allow us to focus on our first priority: opening Pottermore to as many people as possible and making the experience as good as it can be".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/03/harry-potter-ebooks-launch-delayed
That's fine. In very big letters. F-I-N-E. If Rowling's life-long dream is to have an operational Dueling Wizards web game before children with severe cerebral palsy can read her book that is and should be her right.
But it is -- and I want to be very clear that this is just my personal opinion -- a big "fuck you" to people with disabilities who are being asked to wait even longer before we can read these damn books. She may not mean it that way, she may not have any idea that she's even doing it, but that is what it effectively comes down to: a free web game for flinging LEMGUARDIA LEVIOSA (which I can't spell because -- hey, guess who hasn't read the books!) is a higher priority than creating a quick side-page to Pottermore for selling the eBooks that I can pretty much guarantee already exist. (Since Overdrive accidentally "pre-released" the book displays for pre-order to libraries this month before puling them back down. Whoops.)
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/51161-overdrive-postpones-pottermore-e-books-for-libraries.html
And when that decision is delivered with a side-order of "ya'll have already read the books anyway, so what's the big deal," it is *invisibling* to people like me. And I get increasingly tired of being invisibled every single day, multiple times. Or of having to justify why I don't partake in mainstream culture -- which means I either have to lie and say I don't want to read Harry Potter or I have to volunteer to people that I am Too Disabled To Participate. That's not Rowling's fault -- and I never said it is. It's just something that I, personally, am tired of.
I am not now and never have argued that Rowling shouldn't be able to do whatever she wants with her books. I'm just saying that whenever someone like me says "she doesn't seem to give a shit about people with disabilities", the best answer isn't "no, she totally does, she just X!". (Where X is piracy, DRM, charities, alien overlords, whatever.)
Because when you're being told that your passport to culture is being delayed until a person with millions of dollars can hire a team to put together a decent Facebook-style flash game -- NO MATTER HOW NICE THAT PERSON IS -- it feels like "fuck you" and I'm not sure that's something that a lot of able people can immediately understand.
But. I do feel, and I do not think it's wrong for me to feel, that the decision to indefinitely delay a handicap-accessible version of an incredibly popular kids' book series is a symptom of ableism in our society.
I am not quarrelling with your right to feel angry, Ana. If I were in your situation*, I would also feel invisibled. (Is that a verb?)
Except... dare I say it -- it's more complicated than that?
Because HP, is, in fact, released in many handicap-accessible versions. It's available in Braille, it's available in audio, it's available in Large Print.
What is not is available in one specific format of accessibility. One which, I must also point out, relies on a significant degree of wealth and technological privilege. (Not to mention a certain degree of physical ability; I find e-readers much harder on both my hands and my eyes than print books, to be honest.)
It may very well be that Rowling and her publishers are exhibiting a form of ableism in not understanding that it is not a matter of preference for certain disabled people as to whether they wish materials available in e-form. I do not know; I cannot read their minds.
It may also very well be that there are complications in translating the materials to that format which are entirely divorced from concerns of accessibility. I chose the example of "Chinese" for a reason -- the fact that translating many of Rowling's artistic choices to a non-Western language presents many, not immediately obvious, technical difficulties; the rampant piracy of Western entertainment materials, which is evident of both high demand and serious concerns for the rights owners; the fact that the Chinese population is, in fact, one that is seriously discriminated against in their information access, with the full collusion of Western corporations and governments; and the simple truth that, even with fully authorized and technically competent translations available, hundreds of millions of Chinese persons who might wish to read the HP books cannot afford to.
I don't know how much of this is attributable to systematic discrimination against Asian peoples in our global society. I do believe that some of it is (the Yellow Peril canard is alive and well). I also know for a fact that the marketing departments of publishers (and other companies) frequently issue statements framing marketing decisions that reflect things that they think their markets want to hear, rather than the actual factors considered.
----------
(*well, in fact, I *am* in your situation, to a much lesser degree. There are increasing numbers of texts that are only available in e-version. Thank God I can both afford and have the technical abilities to access them. But yes, e-readers are physically painful for me to use. And no, POD isn't always an option.)
It has to make sense to the people who actually own the rights. Y'know, the ones who have a real live economic stake in this.
People here give rationals for other people doing things, I point out that the rationals for that behavior appears to fall short of the standard of 'making objective sense', and somehow this turns into some sort of metaphysical discussion about the rights of man or something.
When someone says 'I don't like that' or 'I don't feel like it' and someone else tries to tell them how to think, yes, go ahead object to that. We do not get to tell people how they think or feel or what they 'really' believe.
But, uh, that doesn't apply with reasons that are external to people, even if hypothetical future ones. Whether or not it would cost sales is an actual, real fact. This isn't something inside someone's head. _Someone_ is wrong here, either me or a hypothetical Rowling using that as an reason. (I'm not sure Rowling actually is using that reason, though.)
Now, because this is a _hypothetical_ and we do not have a control universe without pirate Harry Potter, it's possible we can't decide who is wrong, and it's reasonable to disagree with me on that basis. But to say 'Justifications never have to be based in fact' is not a reasonable position to take.
If I owned a building, and people complained that the current handicapped ramp was too far away, and I claimed that 'I'm not going to put an extra handicap ramp on a building I own because one of those would cost 2.3 billion dollars', would you really just let that rational stand, despite clearly being bogus?
Considering the crappy quality of most of the self-published e-books (and some professionally converted ones, NOT just OCR scans), this is objectively not true.
As I pointed out, this is software. It gets written once. Publishers already have it.
Self-published stuff is crap because they are using the wrong software, usually trying to turn a Word document into the crappy HTML that Word produces, and then they stick that HTML into an epub (Which is just a renamed zip), which works correctly on exactly 0 ereaders.
The badly converted professional stuff was because publishers were trying to do low-level page formatting for specific devices instead of just giving them the text and letting them do it. Normal ebooks you shouldn't even _have_ to test on multiple devices. They do not have page breaks, they do not have fonts, they do not have margins. They are files with marked headlines and paragraphs, with an embedded image or two, and they let the damn ereader format the layout.
All the bad ebooks out there were produced by people who did not know what they were doing at all. Both amateurs and professionals. Luckily, the professionals appear to have learned at this point.
I've actually converted documents to ebooks before. It is not a complicated process at all.
Just saw your reply to Kit which was posted while I was typing this one, Ana, which did address many of the points I raised here.
All the bad ebooks out there were produced by people who did not know what they were doing at all. Both amateurs and professionals. Luckily, the professionals appear to have learned at this point.
I've actually converted documents to ebooks before. It is not a complicated process at all.
So the badly formatted e-books I have purchased THIS YEAR from publishers which are E-ONLY and are MARKET LEADERS in this field -- are solely due to the fact that they are too stupid to have hired you to produce their books?
That may very well be true. I bow to your superior knowledge of your capabilities.
But since there is only one of you, and you do not (I assume) work for Rowling's publishers, the point is irrelevant.
I am not quarrelling with your right to feel angry, Ana. If I were in your situation*, I would also feel invisibled. (Is that a verb?)
Sadly, it's not. It should be. :)
Because HP, is, in fact, released in many handicap-accessible versions. It's available in Braille, it's available in audio, it's available in Large Print.
(Technically, it's available in audio CD and not mp3/audible/electronic format, which still makes it inaccessible to people who have hand/motor disabilities and of course the large print versions are even HEAVIER, but this is all true.)
It may very well be that Rowling and her publishers are exhibiting a form of ableism in not understanding that it is not a matter of preference for certain disabled people as to whether they wish materials available in e-form.
It's very possible. That's why I tried to frame it as a "symptom" of society-based ableism.
But we say "intent is not magic" because we mean that the person who is hurt feels the hurt regardless of the intent. Whether Rowling is neglecting the handicapped market because of hatred or neglect matters (I do think intent matters), but it doesn't magically protect me from feeling like I'm being given the middle finger. (In America. Possible the middle finger means something else in the UK.)
But yes, e-readers are physically painful for me to use.
That's awful. :( *hugs* I'm in the process of formatting Pulchritude for POD because I know someone else who can't use eReaders and she would like a copy, but you're right that covering all options is difficult sometimes. (My book, for example, in not in Chinese!)
Ana, I hate to sound picky but my first response to a totalizing statement such as:
Most fans just want a regular ePUB/mobi version. The Rowling team utterly horrified the eReading world when they originally announced that they were going to release editions that gave everyone "the same, identical reading experience" because from a technical standpoint the closest format that can give you that is PDF and no one wants that. (emphasis added)
is to say "since when was I no one?"
I actually have a large number of books in pdf form. Many of them academic, many of them from earlier printing eras and many of them work far, far better in pdf form than in any other form. In fact when I first began to use an ereader (and I was an earlier acquirer) almost everything I wanted to acquire I also wanted into pdf form.
Academic papers, academic monographs and many other things either render dreadfully in alternative forms or would take lots and lots of work to be workable in other forms.
And I am not the only person I know who finds reading things in pdf form to be pleasant and sometimes preferable to alternatives.
Firstly, 'pompous' is not a tone. Pompous is a style of speech, like 'terse' or 'meandering', it is not in the least bit disrespectful, and I am unsure of who elected you style police. I will continue, as always, to phrase sentences in whatever pompous manner I wish or desire, without fail.
Secondly, 'disrespectful' appear to mean, to you, 'disagreeing'. At no point did I disrespect anyone. I called something (you hypothesized) they believed was wrong and nonsensical. I didn't say _they_ were, I said a specific thing they believed was.
I can't even imagine how 'arrogant' plays into this. In every discussion where one side thinks the other side is wrong, they can be called 'arrogant'. Your reply was fairly arrogant.
You can't make a sweeping generalisation that more e-books won't definitely produce more pirated copies.
I'm fairly certain that not only can I do that, but I _did_ do exactly that. And then I pointing out such a mechanism does not exist.
Saying 'You cannot make the argument that you have made' is not really a fruitful way to have a discussion.
Nor is 'I will come up with hypothetical justifications for other people behavior and then assert that those justifications do not need to be grounded in anything other than those other people's hypothetical beliefs, and how dare you question any of this?'.
And, while we're talking about _tone_, it is, uh, a little disrespectful to completely ignore the fact that I _gave_ a reason why such logic was wrong. Calling it a 'sweeping generalization' is a little disrespectful.
Sorry, I meant "no one with an eReader". PDFs have set page sizes, and eReaders vary from 5" screens to 10".
Going from traditional PDF to reflowable text is lossy; going from ePUB to PDF is not. So PDF as the SOLE format is generally a pretty painful choice, whereas once you have an ePUB for sale it's very easy to create a PDF from that ePUB with zero loss.
Also, for the record, David is right about the software side. I buy all my books in eBook format now, and I do have to make edits from publisher mistakes in the code, but this is not hard stuff IF you have a software programmer on staff.
Unfortunately, many publishers apparently do not, and are relying on PDF conversions and Word conversions which are inherently lossy, and then not realizing they have to fix the HTML.
I've sent corrections to several major publishers in the last year, and they've usually updated their books in response to my emails.
/ramblings of an HTML coder
Grr. "No one with an eReader of non-standard screen size". Or, I suppose "most people with..."
My favorite eReaders are a 5" and a 7" and PDFs rendered for 6" readers don't render well on those.
Must proofread.
Ana
Still willing to argue about pdf. I am not arguing about what enjoy but what I have used for years. I read pdfs on an ereader. An earlier generation edreader with a 7" screen.
And there are really things that are dreadful in any form by pdf. You cannot make a good ePub of many of the things I read -- they are no longer the book they were before the translation to ePub form. Really. Believe me.
And am comfortable with mobi, epub, lit, pdf and html outputs. All have strengths and weaknesses. And there are most definitely things that don't work well in anything but pdf form -- because the overall layout of the page and the juxtaposition of different elements on the page is key to the appreciation of the text/content.
In other words, there are things that simply don't work well with a 7" ereader.
If you have a lot of money you might by a DX -- or you can read them on a large screen computer (much of the software for reading them on computers is free.
Firstly, 'pompous' is not a tone. Pompous is a style of speech, like 'terse' or 'meandering'
Wow. Are you sending yourself up?
And, while we're talking about _tone_, it is, uh, a little disrespectful to completely ignore the fact that I _gave_ a reason why such logic was wrong.
You said 'Producing an ebook will not make _more_ pirate ebooks.', which is not a reason but an unsubstantiated assertion. If that's your idea of giving a reason, congratulations, but I don't see why I should have to give it the respect due to a proven fact.
--
If Rowling's life-long dream is to have an operational Dueling Wizards web game before children with severe cerebral palsy can read her book that is and should be her right.
I absolutely agree with you that it's a good thing to have a book like this accessible to children with disability. Want to say that first, emphatically.
But when you say things like that, it does make me think, 'Come on, be fair.' It's not her lifelong dream, and nobody said it was.
Can you explain what Pottermore is supposed to be? All I can find is an under-construction site.
Beyond that ... well, I think hapax makes a fair point when she says that e-readers are easier for some people with disabilities and harder for others, and they certainly exclude people who can't afford to buy them and don't have Internet access, so, in the nicest possible way, do you think you may be overstating a bit when you talk about 'the handicapped market'?
To clarify, I was trying to say that "no one" (poor choice) wants a SOLE release of only PDFs with no other ePUB/mobi options (if only because some eReaders do not support PDFs fully). I fully recognize that given a choice of multiple formats, some people will happily choose PDFs. But that was a poorly worded off-the-cuff statement, and I apologize for making you feel marginalized.
But when you say things like that, it does make me think, 'Come on, be fair.' It's not her lifelong dream, and nobody said it was.
It's just the way I talk. *shrug*
Can you explain what Pottermore is supposed to be? All I can find is an under-construction site.
Users are able to participate in interactive reading experiences or "moments" beginning with the first book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Users can move through the chapters and "follow" Harry as well as collect items such as potion ingredients, books and galleons (a wizard coin), many of which earn them house points once they are sorted. Among other things, users are able to visit Diagon Alley, learn spells, duel other users and create potions. Students from different houses compete with each other for the House Cup by gaining house points mainly through dueling and potion-making.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottermore
I have a few friends who are in the beta, thus I know about the fan art, site delays, dueling games, etc.
Beyond that ... well, I think hapax makes a fair point when she says that e-readers are easier for some people with disabilities and harder for others, and they certainly exclude people who can't afford to buy them and don't have Internet access, so, in the nicest possible way, do you think you may be overstating a bit when you talk about 'the handicapped market'?
No.
Disabled access items are always more expensive. That does mean that it's more expensive to be disabled in this country; it doesn't mean that we don't exist. The specialized mouse that my step-daughter uses is expensive; it doesn't mean she's not a market for that mouse. The specialized eReaders that we use are expensive; it doesn't mean we aren't a market for reading. "Handicapped people are too small a market!" is *always* the first excuse for why we can't have subtitles, DVDs of musicals, electronic texts, and the like.
I live my life as a disabled person. I have disabled members in my family. I participate in disabled groups. Please do not ask me if I'm "overstating" things when I talk about myself and others I know as a market. We exist, and we're tired of being treated like we're just too few and too specialized to have to be considerate to our needs.
Ok, seriously, Ana, I think you misread me there. I said nothing about the size of the market; the reason I suggested you were overstating, wealth issues aside (and I take your point there) is that others on this thread have stated that e-readers are more hostile to their disabilities, not less. Aren't they in the handicapped market too?
Aren't they in the handicapped market too?
I have never said they were not. I specifically said:
Whether Rowling is neglecting the handicapped market because of hatred or neglect matters (I do think intent matters), but it doesn't magically protect me from feeling like I'm being given the middle finger.
That Rowling is neglecting a portion of the handicapped market and not the entirety of the handicapped market has never been in dispute. Unless I've somehow given the impression that I don't think blind people exist (who most certainly cannot read eBooks, and text-to-speech is generally less preferable to the audio books that I already mentioned existing in the OP).
Moderator Notice.
We are having technical difficulties, and the post referenced in my last post has disappeared. I apologize for the inconvenience.
PDFs are pretty much the only useful choice for textbooks and other books with a bunch of illustrations of and tables and footnotes and whatnot.
Technically, you could do such a thing as an epub, as epubs are just HTML+CSS in a ZIP and HTML can obviously do all that, but the problem is that no actual ereader application (Either the hardware ones or even software) would be able to handle that formatting. Ereaders are not web browsers, and there's a _very_ limited amount of HTML that's 'safe' to use in epubs. Making any sort of non-linear text, like picture headings and tables, is a tricky thing. (And getting it from the typesetting language to HTML in the first place is not trivial.)
So books like that should be 'printed' directly to PDF, page for page.
But for Harry Potter, which is just text with a few page-wide illustrations? You just pipe that in and get an epub out.
And reading PDFs on small devices does not work well, so things should only be provided in PDF if they don't work well otherwise. Otherwise, the option of something else is needed.
As for the other formats, I'm not aware of any functional differences between lit, mobi, and epub. I don't know of anything that one of them can do that the others can't, although I've admittedly never really looked into it. They're all basically the same concept of 'marked up text', vs PDFs, which are 'pretended to print this on individual pages'.
One issue I do know of is that epubs do not have any sort of standard annotations, and other formats do. (You can usually annote epubs, just don't expect the annotations to transfer to other ereaders.)
Oops, my technical fault. Sorry about that.
Given your forgiveness on that issue, I'm going to stop arguing with you and leave this discussion. :-)
As for the other formats, I'm not aware of any functional differences between lit, mobi, and epub. I don't know of anything that one of them can do that the others can't, although I've admittedly never really looked into it. They're all basically the same concept of 'marked up text', vs PDFs, which are 'pretended to print this on individual pages'.
Mobi is slightly more limited than ePUB; ePUB supports embedded fonts, drop caps, text reflow around images, and png files with interlaced transparency. I've seen someone mention that unique fonts matter with a Harry Potter book, but if they're chapter headers (or something similar) an image would do the trick.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=82220
LIT is supported by only a couple third-party readers but can be trivially converted to ePUB. (I think it's a lossless conversion, but the only lit files I've converted were bad to begin with and the results were not great.) I *think* it's officially a dead format, as I remember Microsoft announcing that their Reader software was going to be discontinued. But I may have dreamed that.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9772
/ geekery derail
Wow. Are you sending yourself up?
Yes, I was sending myself up. I was making a joke by making my speech even more pompous.
I am aware I talk in a pompous manner. I use too many commas, I explain things repeatedly, I use words like 'technically' and 'really' too much, I use three words when one word would do, I overemphasize things. I just don't understand how that's a concern of yours unless I'm so pompous you can't understand me. Speaking pompously is not any sort of insult to you, or to anyone at all, and you are not my speechwriter.
You said 'Producing an ebook will not make _more_ pirate ebooks.', which is not a reason but an unsubstantiated assertion. If that's your idea of giving a reason, congratulations, but I don't see why I should have to give it the respect due to a proven fact.
That paragraph was talking about Harry Potter specifically, so my actual claim was roughly: [the publisher] Producing an ebook [of Harry Potter] will not make _more_ pirate ebooks [of Harry Potter].
If that's the point of confusion, if you thought I meant that releasing an ebook of a random novel (Which might or might not have an existing pirate version) cannot possibly lead to pirated versions of that novel, that is not what I was saying. And I apologize for not using the word 'Harry Potter' in every single sentence of that paragraph. (I sometimes edit sentences down and remove redundant information, because I've been told I speak pompously and often repeat myself.)
Or, to put it better: There is no method by which pirated copies of Harry Potter would somehow become more available or numerous because there is now an ebook version.
If you disagree, please point to such a method by which such a thing might happen.
I have no way of iterating over all possible method and proving they do not exist. This is the sort of situations that 'cannot prove a negative' is designed for, despite people often misusing that phrase. I can no more disprove the existence of such a method than I can disprove the existence of unicorns.
I did address one hypothetical method such a thing might happen. Specifically, that they might be 'better' than the existing pirate copies, which I disagreed with, as the pirate version is pretty much perfect as far as I've noticed. Feel free to take issue with my address of that. Perhaps I am wrong there.
I apologize for making you feel marginalized.
Thank you Ana.
In response to a number of other people -- here is where I stand on the issue
a) there are many, many, many books that I think are far more important to worry about than the Harry Potter series. Among those I taught who had disabilities (including very limited vision, blindness and cerebral palsy among other things) not one every complained about not being able to get the latest Harry Potter but I often heard complaints, questions and queries about other books including (but not limited to) text and reference books. I was asked how to get a copy of Sartre's No Exit (not available on Kindle) and how to get copies of The Screwtape Letters (available on Kindle) and had questions about the vexing copyright question of using screen readers to "read outloud" downloaded ebooks but not a single student ever asked about Harry Potter even though many of them wore scarves to identify their Hogwarts House.
b) And...I think that J. K. Rowling not only has every right to make the decisions about how her books are (or are not) published I would even venture to assume that she is privy to far more data than are any of us when she is making her decision. Since she is notably involved in charity and known for her generousity and is clearly a very intelligent and capable person I hesitate to double-guess her decisions.
Since David addressed me directly:
I am aware I talk in a pompous manner. I use too many commas, I explain things repeatedly, I use words like 'technically' and 'really' too much, I use three words when one word would do, I overemphasize things. I just don't understand how that's a concern of yours unless I'm so pompous you can't understand me. Speaking pompously is not any sort of insult to you, or to anyone at all, and you are not my speechwriter.
No, I'm your interlocutor. And a pompous manner isn't a problem because its verbose; it's a problem because it's patronising. You come across as laying down the law to lesser intelligences, even when you don't have inside experience of the subject, to wit, the business of publishing. Speaking to me in a pompous and patronising manner is insulting; speaking of my colleagues - which is what publishers are - in a pompous and patronising manner is insulting to them and I don't like to see my colleagues insulted. And calling people irrational is a plain insult whether you're pompous or not.
Is this really so hard to understand?
I have no way of iterating over all possible method and proving they do not exist. This is the sort of situations that 'cannot prove a negative' is designed for, despite people often misusing that phrase. I can no more disprove the existence of such a method than I can disprove the existence of unicorns.
In which case, maybe you should acknowledge that you're talking of probabilities rather than certainties. Forget circumlocution: it sounds pompous to lay down the law and declare disagreement 'nonsensical' when you're only speculating about what you think is most likely.
The pomposity isn't in your verbosity, to assonate it. It's in your phrasing speculations as pronouncements, and in insulting people you disagree with.
Mobi is slightly more limited than ePUB; ePUB supports embedded fonts, drop caps, text reflow around images, and png files with interlaced transparency.
Ah, so just enough rope for publishers to hang themselves. ;)
And I think it's less what epub supports than what mobi doesn't....epub is essentially a HTML file (Well, a bunch of them, and the images and fonts, and metadata, and stuff), and looking at the standard, I see nothing about it only supporting a subset of it, which means it can, in theory, do anything HTML can do. In fact, as it's now HTML 5, you could even do things like embed video in it. (Crap, I should not have said that aloud.)
Of course, absolutely no reader will support half the HTML standard, which is where the whole 'We have to have a test on every device' nonsense comes from. 'Oh, this device understand tables, and this device we can use nested divs, and this device will let us position using absolute css left and right but not top and bottom, and this device...'
Or, instead of that, they could just have a plain html with just paragraphs and headers and images, and tada, the reader formats it and it works. Even can have embedded fonts, and they just default to normal fonts if not supported.
It's sorta like the web browser wars of the 00s, with incompatibilities between epub readers, except the ereader users don't really want the fancy stuff and the publishers are doing it for no reason at all except that they don't understand how this is supposed to work.
It's a _book_. We are trying to read the _text_. Please _present_ the text to us. k thx bye
I've seen someone mention that unique fonts matter with a Harry Potter book, but if they're chapter headers (or something similar) an image would do the trick.
Glancing at my print copy, the chapter headers are in some weird askew font. By askew, I mean things like the H does not have both sides be the same height. Of course, that's right below the chapter image anyway, so one image would work work. Also, there are some 'handwritten' parts in a different font, but there's not any real reason they need to be.
The joke of 'We want to make sure every reader gets the same experience' is that every reader _already_ doesn't for HP. I mean, there are British and American version, to start with. Entirely different page layouts and even words.
Us users of ereaders understand there will sometimes be slightly off formatting issues. That sometimes we will get a page that stops off halfway down because there's an image, but not enough room to show it yet so we have to go to the next page. Or whatever. We don't mind, we know publishers cannot magically predict what device we're reading it on and in what font.
And attempting to 'fix' stuff like that gets us PDFs that we have to scroll back and forth to read, and it gets us epubs with _line breaks_ in the middle of paragraphs to 'make sure none of the words wrapped' or whatever, so a slightly different font gives us new lines all over the place, which _does_ piss us off.
It's a _book_. We are trying to read the _text_. Please _present_ the text to us. k thx bye
Yep. I have a script that strips out embedded fonts, simply because I read often enough that I don't like having to readjust my eyes to a new font every time I open a new book.
and it gets us epubs with _line breaks_ in the middle of paragraphs to 'make sure none of the words wrapped'
I've seen that actually! Looks awful when you adjust the font size, and I had to clean it up by hand. I assumed it was an accident from a really bad PDF conversion -- that's horrifying if it was done on purpose.
I've seen that actually! Looks awful when you adjust the font size, and I had to clean it up by hand. I assumed it was an accident from a really bad PDF conversion -- that's horrifying if it was done on purpose.
You'd be amazed at what people do on purpose. 'Oh, this long word wrapped and made this line too short. Let's wrap three words early in the line before, and one in the line before that, then it will look right!'
That's the sort of stuff I heard in the web design universe, as I facepalm and try to explain that the lines are that length only on that specific monitor, and changing them will screw up everyone else. (What's really fun is explaining that, no, I cannot make text boxes that only have enough width to show X characters, as the size of characters varies in almost all fonts. WWWWW is longer than IIIII.) So I am assuming that's happening in ebooks also.
Although you're right, it's likely some of those are just really bad PDF conversions. Which is why I love calibre, which has an option to undo that. It can 'unwrap' lines, which works unless the bad conversion also has no paragraph breaks. (At which point just give up.)
I don't understand why anyone thinks ebooks should start from a PDF or LaTeX file. No, they should start from whatever the 'last format' is that the author/editors used, the thing containing the proofed text but _not_ the layout.
Because I am not in the publishing industry, I am not sure what this is, but it's almost certainly RTF or Word or just plain text. Convert that to RTF, make sure it has the images and bold and italics, throw it through calibre or other conversion software, and, hey, an perfectly good ebook. (Often people give me PDFs with text to put in a web page, and for some unknowable reason the text copies out with line breaks in it. And I'm like 'Good, but next time you can just send me the Word document or whatever you used to make this'.)
Book publishers have spent a lot of time believing that layout is very very important, focusing on fonts and kerneling and line spacing and the position of pictures on the page and all sorts of things I don't even know about. Perhaps it _is_ important to print books, I don't know.
But at some point they're going to have to get over that for ebooks, which we read in the typeface we want, at the size we want, with the justification we want, on the size screen we want, etc etc. Give us the text, give us a table of contents and chapter breaks, give us some inline images that show up roughly in the right spot, and we're good. Give us something that is nice and fancy looking and laid out exactly right on one device, and blows up when we pull it up on our iphone, we're annoyed.
Some publishers have realized this, some haven't.
document conversion (Which is in my industry, and I have in fact made ebooks from documents.
Matter of interest -- what type of documents have you had the experience of converting and to what form of ebook? Because my own experience in attempting to buy good conversions of certain forms of original documentation is that it is sometimes extraordinarily difficult to get good conversions (that is, conversions that capture all the needed aspects of the original.)
Some things are, I know from experience, almost trivially easy to convert, and other things cost enormous amounts of time and money.
The geekery in this thread makes me so happy. Do you ever visit MobileRead.com?
I'm on both sides, because I'm a software engineer by day, a writer by night, I speak HTML pretty well (CSS less so), and I am a goddess at XML and XSLT. Er, that's what several people tell me in my industry, anyway.
Anyway, I can tell you that converting from Word, which is how Smashwords does it, is dreadful. Microsoft crams that format with dross.
But save it off as HTML and slap that into Sigil, and it's easy to clean up and save to ePUB from there. You still have to get in the code nuts'n' bolts, but it's not half bad.
I can take a high quality PDF through ABBYY into HTML and then Sigil in about an hour or two, I've done it so many tines now. You do have to proofread, though, so that really is an inferior method if there's a better format available already.
'Course, some stuff has to be PDF when the layout REALLY matters. Like Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food. But I've yet to meet a fiction book that didn't behave nicely in ePUB when I was done with it.
If you ever start writing yourself, Scrivener outputs to ePUB directly. But I still tweak for cleanliness.
(Course, I should add that ABBYY Fine Reader is was several hundred dollars when I bought it. So it's not a toy and not for everyone.)
I can take a high quality PDF through ABBYY into HTML
And that is exactly where I have seen some of the most crashing fails ever. As in material totally useless for the people who need it.
Extraordinarily precise graphic layout and design, one of kind (idiosyncratic) fonts, spacing that is funky at best and what you get is vague approximation of the original.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply I was in the document conversion industry, which is a whole nother kettle of fish. Converting old documents and stuff to newer stuff, I don't do that. I'm a web designer. (That is, that hat of my job is web designer.)
What I do is get handed Word documents and have to make web site from them. Or PDFs. Or turn a Word into a PDF and (for printing) and an epub. Almost always I'm making a web site, so frankly I end up just having to copy out all the text and make the web page first, and then convert from there.
Another common one is spreadsheets to web sites.
And, in one incredibly annoying circumstances, turning a folder of JPEG pamplet pages into a web site, which I then turned into a PDF. (The logic was 'You can turn PDFs into a web site, right.' And then 'You can turn JPEGs into a PDF, right.' ignoring the fact that there's a difference between pure-image PDFs and text PDFs.)
Clients often seem unaware of what sort of services are included under 'managing a web site', and think that includes 'Putting this random collection of junk we have in random files in some sort of usable format as a web site. And also let give us something to put on a Kindle. And a PDF to print.' And, if they pay for it, it _does_ include that.
But if LibreOffice or MS Office or Adobe CS5.5 or calibre can't read the file, I'm going to be baffled. (Or at least act baffled. Yes, I know how to strip text out of completely random file formats and get something...but that is not my job, and stripping formatting is a good way annoy people. So the trick is to start with 'I cannot do it', and then later compromise to 'I can do it, but it won't have any formatting'.)
Well... I absolutely believe you when you say that you've seen Fail that way, but I absolutely believe that the people involved didn't know what they were doing. Because I know what I can do, and I am extremely good at it. :)
Now, again, I am talking about *fiction*. I do agree there is non-fiction not suited for ePUB.
But! One of the fun things about being disabled is that sometimes form has to be sacrificed for the words underneath. I rather suspect those idiosyncratic fonts carry over badly to Braille, too. ;)
<>i>Now, again, I am talking about *fiction*.
Well, it gets a trifle fraught when it is fiction written in a different alphabet -- and with fonts that we would consider almost unreadable with scans that are made from crumpled materials or such.
And some of these people are world renowned for what they do so if they cannot get it to work (and therefore don't charge you the huge fees they could) I tend to believe them.
They are specialty firms. And yes, Braille gets really, really problematic at times. As do screen readers. And a number of other technologies.
I did say "high quality scans" for a reason. :)
I've played around with a lot of PDFs. The more expensive the scanner, the better the conversion. Most people don't have mega-scanners in their homes. I'd guess most publishing companies don't either. A specialty service is needed.
There's not one perfect technology for conveying information. Not even paper. :)
I did say "high quality scans" for a reason. :)
Yeah, one of the problems with most digital archival conversions is that one cannot "do" or "get" high quality scans. There may only be one or two copies of the book/document/poster available. Those copies may be in dodgy condition at best. The very process of scanning them can endanger them.
One of the big problems is books/newspapers/magazines from the two world wars -- paper was rationed and much of it was very low quality. A friend of mine did archival digital reclaimations in areas of Africa and that has its own challenges. Then you have stuff that was created electronically but is, let us say, non-standard, as much of the stuff that came in after eastern Europe started opening up again.
I actually have a friend who is doing graduate work right now that involves having to learn both the most modern technological bells and whistles and specialized training in dealing with older documents.
Oh, absolutely. I would say the difference in conversion based on PDF quality is practically exponential. Which is one of the many reasons why I say "don't convert from PDF if you can avoid it!" even though I convert from PDF all the time. Not all PDFs are equal, sadly. :(
Extraordinarily precise graphic layout and design, one of kind (idiosyncratic) fonts, spacing that is funky at best and what you get is vague approximation of the original.
And now it's my turn to get (historically) geeky.
Did you ever see a medieval New Testament manuscript? If it has even one "illustration", it will be this strange set of pages at the beginning of the Gospels, that looks for all the world like a random collection of letters and numbers, placed within a fancy architectural framework: columns, arches, sometimes elaborate little rooms.
This is the "Canon Table", also called the Ammonian or Eusebian apparatus, which functioned as a table of contents / index in the times before the scriptures were divided up into chapter and verse. They also were intended to make a specific hermeneutic argument, since they purported to show how the four Gospel accounts were substantially "in harmony" with each other (while any cursory open-minded reading demonstrates definitive differences, even contradictions.)
Why is this relevant?
These tables were first formalized in the fourth century CE, and dutifully copied by hundreds of generations of scribes. But they function as TABLES, and as such are only functional if the precise layout, fomatting, and even font is preserved. As the centuries progressed, more and more errors crept in, until the form of the tables we see in an even an early ms such as the Book of Kells is fairly useless. By the High Middle Ages, they were essentially nonsensical. But they still were considered an indispensable part of every Bible manuscript, not because of the immediate practical information they contained, but because of the fundamental ideological statement (about the Divine authority of the text) they conveyed.
I'm not sure that's directly relevant to any of this discussion.
But I should perhaps confess that I am one of those (apparently mythical) readers, for whom layout, font, even the kerning are an integral part of the work I am reading, and contributes to the total experience -- yes, just as much in fiction. (And yes, I have read the same text in different fonts, and yes, they are different stories. YMMV)
But I should perhaps confess that I am one of those (apparently mythical) readers, for whom layout, font, even the kerning are an integral part of the work I am reading, and contributes to the total experience -- yes, just as much in fiction.
Well I am one of those readers as well. I like me my ebooks for annotating and searches but there is a sensual beauty to a printed book. Both my father (before he went into the army) and my grandfather worked in the printing trade -- so I grew up around people who saw print "expertly."
And yes, I have had the experience of reading the same text in a variety of fonts and you are right -- each provided me with a different experience.
Have you ever had a chance to listen to one of Edward Tufte's presentations on the graphical presentation of quantitative data?
Omigosh, Tufte. A *genius*.
I've never heard or seen one of his presentations, but hapaxspouse has THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION as required reading for his graduate students.
I've never heard or seen one of his presentations
Spouse and I went to see one of his presentations in 1992 and I was completely and utterly blow away -- we have The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information.
Not only does he write well (and his books are, without exaggeration, works of art) but he also did a fabulous presentation.
That's very pretty! I do feel a bit like a... well, I wanted to say "a blind person hearing about color" but I actually think that's probably something I shouldn't appropriate because I've never been born blind!
So I'll instead say I feel like someone who can only really read in reflowable text hearing about non-reflowable layout -- it sounds very interesting, and I'm thrilled to hear about your experience, and happy that you are happy, but it's essentially inaccessible to me. (Well, I suppose I could read upright on a computer, but that has problems for me as well.)
It's a very pretty picture, though!! :)
And now I'm off to get into a more comfortable horizontal position. Night ya'll! *hugs*
That's very pretty! I do feel a bit like a... well, I wanted to say "a blind person hearing about color" but I actually think that's probably something I shouldn't appropriate because I've never been born blind!
You could probably still use colour metaphors if you went for synesthesia. The level of subjectivity might change the metaphor, though. "Is the green I see the same as the green you see" is mostly a moot point with a blade of grass, but the blue I see in a song is clearly not the orange you see*. I don't know if that makes it a better or worse comparison.
*Ask five people for the colour of Pachelbel's Canon and you get nine different answers, four of them mine. (I know this because I had this conversation a few days ago on Tumblr.)
You are literally saying I have no right to say things I believe to be true, because saying those things aloud is somehow insulting to you because you know otherwise.
I'm just going to make this simple:
You yourself acknowledge that you don't have proof for your assertion.
Therefore it's only a speculation. Perhaps a correct one, perhaps not.
Therefore when you state it as if it were an incontestable fact, you are overstating.
It's not because I disagree with you, or because I'm intimidated by your verbiage. It's simply that when you declare flatly that people are irrational to worry about X because X can never happen, even when you yourself can't prove that X can never happen, you're being unreasonable. It's rude to call people irrational without good reason, and the only reason you have here is that they're speculating in a more cautious direction than you are. And they're more cautious because unlike you, their livelihood depends on this kind of issue.
Under those circumstances, it is not polite to declare people irrational and boast about how superior your judgement is to theirs.
(Tangential to the discussions at hand - in my field, we had a happy moment seeing that Potter ebooks were going to Overdrive, so the massive market of people who want Potter on ereader could borrow it from the library. Reading the thread, was that a mistake to be happy?)
This may be tangential to the actual discussion, but my issue with ereading is usually DRM and reader/format incompatibilities. I would like e-content to be governed by the same rules and exception writ into the copyright law, rather than having to navigate a usually more-restrictive EULA on top of that, as well as having to deal with antipiracy measures as well. If I have a legally-purchased copy of a work, I should be able to do with it what the law allows, including conversion to a format that is most comfortable for me to read.
I do understand the concerns of publishers and the fact that technology now allows marginal costs of copying to be virtually nil in electronic form. But why are we closing out exposure and access and potential new customers because we're afraid the people who aren't likely to buy are going to get the work for free? (Is that bad logic? It seems like it.)
It occurs to me that there are two "official" texts of the Potter books in English: the Bloomsbury which most of the English-speaking world reads, and the Scholastic which is what you normally find here in the U.S., which is "translated" from English to American. If the high-quality pirate texts are made from the Scholastic texts, then Bloomsbury may still be afraid of facilitating piracy of their version.
Therefore when you state it as if it were an incontestable fact, you are overstating.
With you, of course, being the verbage police, and no one being allowed to speak in ways you do not like. But I'm going to make this simple, too:
I utterly disagree with your premise. When people are discussing things, they state them as if they are true. It is not the job of the writer to prefix every sentence with 'I believe this to be true but I could be wrong'. That is inherent in speech. When people talk they are assumed to be stating things they believe.
But more to the point, _everything you originally said_ was phrased as if it was a fact. I quote 'Publishers worry about e-books because they're so easy to pirate.'. That's stating something you believe as if it's a fact. You have no proof of this. You have no evidence. Your entire first reply to me is you stating things as if they are true.
In fact, I replied to your assertion 'It's a not unreasonable speculation that if there are some pirated versions online when there's just a print book, there will be more if you release an e-book...'. That sentence, by you, was fine. But when I basically replied 'That _is_ an unreasonable speculation in this case.', you say there is a problem with it.
Really? I ask you to point out a single difference in those statements. You assert it's reasonable, I assert it's not.
I suggest, if you're going to object to how I say things, you reread your posts and try to come up with an objection to how I say things that isn't how _you_ (and in fact everyone) say things.
Although I'd rather you just stop talking about how I say things, as that is utterly pointless, and you discuss the substance of my argument, namely, 'There is not a way that releasing Harry Potter ebooks would increase the pirating situation of Harry Potter', and you reply and point out ways it could. Or you can choose not to, and we can just consider your original argument conceded to me. (Which I have, frankly, been doing every time you wander off-topic about how I say things. At this point, I'm assuming you're doing that because you can't think of a real response.)
It's rude to call people irrational without good reason, and the only reason you have here is that they're speculating in a more cautious direction than you are.
I only called people 'irrational' in your rephrase. In the real world, I called specific behavior not rational. And that's now _twice_ I've pointed that out.
There is a difference between saying 'Person X is irrational' and saying 'Now, presumable tic-tac-toe players are not always rational, and it is possible they think they should start by taking a side instead of the middle or a corner. But that thought is objectively wrong and nonsensical.'
One of those is an attack. One of those is a claim that a specific belief a person holds has not been appropriately considered. Such a claim is only rude inside your head.
And, no it didn't become rude because they're in an 'industry' and I'm not. Industries sometimes practice amazing amounts of self-delusion, I point you to banks. Now, in general, an industry is probably more right than I, but that doesn't make me _rude_ to disagree with them. (As I keep pointing out, 'wrong' and 'rude' are not the same thing.)
Also, I also find it astonishing that you feel it's your job to call out 'rudeness', considering the amount of name-calling you've done in this conversation.
Testing
Saw this and thought of you, Ana. The Harry Potter ebooks have finally hit the Pottermore shop. Hope that if/when you're in hospital, you'll be able to read the series. http://shop.pottermore.com/en_US/harry-potter-ebooks?c=USD
THANK YOU!!
I'm so happy, I could cry. This is really all I ever wanted. Well, on this topic, anyway. :)
More information here: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=173500
Hah, I just came here to tell you all the Harry Potter books are available as (legal) ebooks, too. They are excellent reads when you are not fully well.
I cannot even begin to express my excitement. I'm seriously considering moving my surgery up so I can start them early! (OK, I was going to try to move the surgery up for work-related reasons, but this is a MUCH BETTER REASON!!)
The illustrations in the US versions are so pretty. I'm enthralled!
Oh, you should get the UK versions if you haven't already bought the US ones.
And then I see that I cannot get the US ones, so presumably you cannot get the UK ones. Sorry.
I know, right? I thought that -- I *like* UK English, myself -- but apparently they're geo-restricted.
They're saying that the US versions are the only ones with the illustrations, though, so... yay? :)
I lived in the US when book 4 or 5 came out and THE WAIT IT WAS TERRIBLE. I was suffering! (Okay, I read it in US English. But I *bought* the Canadian version, which is UK.) It was worth it to have it mention Philosopher's Stone all the time. As the books went on, they did less and less changing the book to SAE.
I do recommend having handy one of those charts with all the changes, just to see.
I'll never understand that change. I'm American, and I knew what a Philosopher's Stone is/was! (I think we can thank the Disney Aladdin TV show for that little piece of knowledge.)
You were (I assume) older than 11 when the first book came out though. Still, it was a bad change (which JKR says she regrets, as I recall). I'm surprised they didn't change it back, since the movie was Philosopher.
You were (I assume) older than 11 when the first book came out though.
I was six when I read it, and I'm pretty sure my reaction to the explanation of the Sorcerer's Stone was "Oh, you mean the Philosopher's Stone. Why didn't you just say so?". (And later, once I learned about the different versions, "How come the Brits get advance warning of what the plot's going to be about, but we don't?".)
since the movie was Philosopher.
I think they must have shot two versions of a few scenes, because my copy of the movie calls it the Sorcerer's Stone. Oddly enough, the inner box (though not the outer) says Philosopher.
The movie is indeed Sorcerer's Stone in the U.S., and they specially reshot the scenes where the Stone is named so that each region would be consistent with its book.
And as an American, I'm extremely indignant that they felt a need to change the title in the first place. The Philosopher's Stone is a thing - the Sorcerer's Stone is some random fantasy nonsense. I will admit that I did not know about the Philosopher's Stone prior to the series (hey, I was around sixteen when I first read it and my love of medieval and Renaissance magic and alchemy was not fully developed). However, I doubt there are more Brits than Americans who know about the Philosopher's Stone anyway.
It says something about how many times I've read the series that I noted most of the edition differences from memory when I finally got to read the British edition. ("Oh, the British version doesn't bother to explain about soccer football penalties when Dean calls for a red card during the Quidditch match...")
re: Ana's post: I read a lot of that "you're not entitled to x", and usually I read it aimed at people who are able to experience something in an alternative format. Which I think furthers the point about invisible ableism in our country, but at least makes producers ignorant instead of arrogant (and possibly educable?). Heck, disability isn't the only reason to want other formats. My sister is perfectly able to cart her Harry Potter books to the beach each summer for the Ritual Reread. She has duplicated her entire collection in paperback to facilitate the tradition. And now she celebrates the frabjous day which allows her to repurchase the series a third time so as to keep all seven books on her Kindle rather than carry all that luggage to the beach. PWDs aren't the only ones to benefit from increased accessibility.
I know I'm late to the party, but...
I was recently diagnosed with a chronic health problem after (incorrectly) believing myself to be able-bodied my entire life. I've dealt with the lectures about "entitlement," and also some infuriatingly condescending behavior (I never realized how belittling people act toward an adult woman who's not allowed to drive).
The ablism behind assuming everyone can carry heavy books is definitely something I never thought about. I need to think about these things more. It makes me wonder how available electronic textbooks are to students... Textbooks were terrible enough for me to carry, and I had no disability that made it hard for me to carry things.
Also, it's a moot point now that the official ones are out, but if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't have had any guilt about downloading the illegal HP ebooks. I'm a bit confused why it took so long for Rowling to release them to begin with.
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