Over the course of Saturday and Sunday we’ll be trying out some new themes.
Please be patient with us, as the layout and look of the blog will be changing without warning for a little while.
Thanks!
I’ve been receiving some complaints about errors in the Young Wizards US/Canadian (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) edition ebooks over the last few months, primarily having to do with typos and scanning errors. See Chris Meadows’ posting here, for example, at Teleread. (Please note: this problem has nothing to do with either the new Young Wizards international editions that are coming out from Errantry Press, or with the upcoming revised Author’s Cut editions.)
So I took this problem to my editor at HMH. She got in touch with their digital editions department, the head of which got back to us a day or so ago, saying:
As you may know all titles are put through extensive error checking but some do slip through especially in books we have had to scan rather than take from production files. [DD’s note: and this means at least my first four books at Harcourt, if not the first six.]
The type of error most likely to slip through is a replacement of one perfectly good word by another during optical character recognition — “die” for “the” is common.
We have now developed additional error checking that looks specifically for all of these incorrect substitutions that we know about.
What I would suggest to you and Diane is that before she does anything we run all of her books through this additional process.
Then in one way or another she can look at them and tell us if we missed anything. That would be very valuable information to me because we could add it to our error checking.
This correction would be done at the xml level, not the epub level. This is a more basic level and would ensure going forward that these errors would never occur again.
If this is agreeable to her and to you that’s what we’ll do.
And it’s definitely agreeable, so that’s what I’ll be doing. My editor tells me that this process will take about two months to complete. I’ll report back then on how things look. (The publisher is also sending me a complete set of the ebooks so that I can see what US / Canadian buyers have been seeing.)
And a side note to those interested: I gather from the interchange of emails on which I was “copied-in” that customer feedback is one of the factors that has been driving the development of these extra layers of error-checking. So, those of you who have been writing directly to publishers about these issues — keep doing it! It’s having an effect.
More on this as the business goes forward.
Here are two more wallpapers for those who might be interested in DL’ing them. Once again, these were produced in the wonderful Terragen 2.2.
The location is in Syrtis Major, and that shiny object is the “superegg” that the wizards find buried in a dune by an outcropping there. (I have removed the sand in these shots because I like seeing the whole superegg shape: I find it very cool.)
This first one is a late afternoon shot —
The second is a reverse angle on the same position, and you can see a proper Martian “blue sunset” in the b.g. The superegg is plainly about to start misbehaving in this one.
Both of these are 1920×1200 pixels. The images are hosted at Box.net, so that’s where clicking on the images will take you for your download.
Enjoy!
Just going through the blogroll and revisiting some old favorites preparatory to cleaning the present list up.
One I’ve always liked is “Rubber Slippers in Italy”. Here Rowena posts about the Carnivale in Schignano and its traditions about the Bei and the Brut — “the Beautiful and the Ugly.”
Peter read this over my shoulder and said, “Isn’t it interesting how cultural stereotypes shift over time. Once if you had a big belly, or were pale from not having to work outside in the fields, it was a sign you were wealthy and successful. Now it’s all tans and abs…”
23/24 Mar 2011: ETA: There’s been an important change in the situation described below. Please read the posting and then check this one for news on recent developments.
I love Canada. A lot. Peter and I pass through there as often as we can. I have done book tours there: have assisted in the business of helping Peter’s Mum (God rest her) hook up with her fandom, which often appeared to be larger than either or both of ours: have been marooned in Ottawa due to fog and found myself still awake at 2 AM and sitting on some hotel room’s floor singing 50s sad-dead-teenager songs in company with Dave Hartwell and Stephen King; have eaten the cassoulet in La Rapiere in Montreal (apparently shut now, O woe), have explored the Salt Beef havens in that city and in Toronto the Good, and (in merely transitory mode) have taken the train from Toronto to London ON a bunch of times before crossing the world’s busiest land border. (Though is it really? Has anyone done numbers at the crossing at Basel Bad in the middle of Fasnacht? I wonder.) I have in that fair land taken pics of the only salmon stream I’ve ever seen inside an airport. And I still remember passing through Canada Immigration and being asked “What’s the purpose of your visit today?” and being able to say, honestly, “Lunch.” (The CI inspector looked at me and grinned and said, “That must be some lunch.” “It will be,” I said. And it was.
Yet Canada and I are seemingly at odds, because it appears that no one can buy the Young Wizards ebooks there from their North American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And this just seems wrong.
Before I go to the publisher, who definitely do own the Canadian publication rights, and start shaking their IT department’s tree to get this problem solved, I need data from the book-buying base. Canadian readers especially — for the hardcover and paperback YW books are distributed in Canada via Raincoast — your kind assistance is requested.
The problem comes in two pieces. I get reports that:
(a) Canadian would-be purchasers of the YW books from Amazon.com cannot purchase Kindle / .mobi versions of the books from either Amazon.com or Amazon.ca. Is this the case?
(24 Mar 2011, ETA: My editor at HMH tells me that this problem has now been fixed. Can Canadian readers please confirm? Just search for one of the books and let me know if the upper-right-hand-corner block that says “This book is not available in your area: CANADA” fails to come up. …25 March 2011: thanks to those who checked! This problem seems to have been solved. Now we can go on to address quality control issues. )
(b) B&N.com (which is apparently the only seller of .epub versions of the books) will not sell Young Wizards .epub books to readers with Canadian addresses. The question I need answered is: does B&N sell any ebooks to readers with addresses outside the USA? If they don’t, fine. HMH needs to find another distributor for ePubs. But if they do, why won’t they sell YW books?
I would be seriously grateful if the Canadian contingent of YW fans would attempt such purchases (don’t complete them, just proceed until they fail — or alternately are about to succeed) and report back in the comments under this message, telling me what happens, so that I have data to take to HMH when I talk to them about this. Please feel free to send screengrabs to verify your experiences. You can send these to our Web lady at lee.enfield.burke@googlemail.com : please put CANADA in the subject line.
The links to the Amazon.com US-and-theoretically-Canadian Young Wizards ebooks are here: http://www.dianeduane.com/ebooks-by-Diane-Duane#youngwizards
The Amazon.com / Kindle and B&N / .epub editions are broken out into separate blocks. Amazon comes first, and then B&N.
Those of you who hear about this issue via Twitter, please retweet to other Canadians at your leisure / pleasure and spread the word. The more data I have, the better.
Thanks for your help, everybody!
ETA: The excellent Nathan Maharaj has provided us with a complete set of links to the ePub editions of the YW series now available at KoboBooks.com. These are available to Canadian .ePub readers:
So You Want To Be A Wizard (eISBN 9780547545110) | Deep Wizardry (eISBN 9780547538662)
High Wizardry (eISBN 9780547540306) | A Wizard Abroad (eISBN 9780547546797)
The Wizard’s Dilemma (eISBN 9780547546827) | A Wizard Alone (eISBN 9780547546803)
Wizard’s Holiday (eISBN 9780547546834) | Wizards at War (eISBN 9780547546810)
A Wizard of Mars (eISBN 9780547487953)
(…Still remembering the version of The Anthem that Peter wrote on the plane on our way in, last time. “O Canada! We’re just here for the beer: O Canada! The Beer is clear near here!” … There was more, but perhaps mercifully, I’ve forgotten.)
(And one other thing: does anyone else remember who got the American Embassy staff out of Tehran, all that while ago, at the risk of their own lives? “Oh, CANADA!” 🙂 I have a former roommate and very good friend who works for State — she’s in Yemen at the moment, not exactly the quietest place on the planet… and it could have been her, all those years ago. So when I wear the Maple Leaf on a jacket… I have subtext. Thank you, cousins.)
It’s just after midnight of what many native Irish call “The Day That’s In It,” and as a result, only maybe a third or a quarter of the people coming to “Out of Ambit” for the next twenty-four hours have some vague interest in what I do professionally, or what I write, or what I think about stuff. All the rest of them are here to get an answer to the question “What part of the cow does the corned beef come from?”
I can’t even remember what impelled me to put the posting in here in the first place, as it really doesn’t belong here. It ought to be over at EuropeanCuisines.com, the recipe website that has been hobby, casual pleasure and pet project for me since 1995. But EuroCuisines wasn’t always so organized. It started out as a rant.
The Rant is here, and every year for quite a while I’ve linked to it from the blog on or around St. Patrick’s Day. Very shortly after we settled here in the late 80s, I started becoming aware that North Americans who talked to us about Irish food always, always mentioned corned beef and cabbage as something they assumed Irish people ate all the time. The joke — at least it seemed like a joke at first — was that I never saw or heard of any of our native-Irish neighbors eating it. Over time it became clear that they never did, and had no idea why they ought to be eating it. They didn’t even have a clue where the idea came from.
As time went by I got more and more annoyed about the way my people assumed that a whole nation ate pretty much one thing, and never bothered to question whether this assumption even made any sense. I did the research that would allow me to put The Rant online for the first time, and pretty much (I thought) got it off my chest. The only thing I would feel like adding to it these days would be the minor point that while corned beef definitely is Irish — after all, salting beef is hardly any culture’s unique invention — in my experience it only appears here in sandwiches. The cooked stuff with cabbage on the side is fed almost exclusively to tourists.
The Rant does a pretty brisk business this time of year, along with its companion article on “what do Irish people eat” (which does well all year round). But the really major issue at EuropeanCuisines.com is something much more fun. Over the next twenty-four hours, something like forty or fifty thousand visitors will drop onto the site looking for the soda bread recipe and techniques bequeathed to me by Peter’s Mum, who we both miss incredibly for hundreds of reasons that have nothing to do with her cooking.
The soda bread recipe has somehow or other become an incredible draw. Maybe because it’s just good, and because Mum absolutely knew what she was doing and how to communicate it. She taught me everything I know about the subject, and I wrote it down the best I could, added a couple of very basic video tutorials, and turned it loose.
After a while I started adding other recipes to the basic Irish collection. My favorite stuff has always been the central European food, the Swiss and German stuff, though we swing out in all kinds of directions (see, for example, the article on lepinje, the food with its own Facebook fan page: or the cake with its own publicity tour). I’ve always done most of the writeups for the site: Peter has increasingly been getting involved in the photography (which he’s a lot better at than I am). We test the recipes together, do the best images we can, and put them online for the delectation of whoever’s interested.
But the Irish stuff has always remained center stage over the years. So while I work for the next day or so, I’ll be using Woopra to keep an eye on the thousands of people who will be sitting down at their computers and typing the words “soda bread” or “Irish soda bread” or (best of all) “peters mums soda bread” into Google. (The most impressive one of these for me was the visitor who typed it in from somewhere in Ulan Bator.) It used to make Mum laugh in polite disbelief when we would tell her that for this week and a half or two weeks every year, no matter how often we might hit the Times list or how many times our names appeared in some movie’s or TV show’s titles, Mum would be far better known than we ever were.
My money says that somewhere she’s still laughing about it. All I know is that I hear that laugh unusually clearly, in memory, just before St. Patrick’s Day: and when we go down to the local pub to drown the shamrock with our neighbors tomorrow, we’ll lift one for her.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a Little Gem cabbage in the fridge. I think I’ll go make colcannon again.
If anyone’s interested: here are a couple of 1920×1200 wallpapers of Swiss alpine scenery generated with Terragen 2.
The first is one of a number of studies of the north end of the Great Aletsch Glacier in central Switzerland: specifically, the area where the three glaciers running down from the Eiger, Jungfrau and Monch converge, an area referred to as Place de la Concorde / Konkordiaplatz. The second is a view of the same terrain from a slightly different angle and with different lighting and cloud cover, and a crop from this was used as the cover for Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South. (It’ll eventually also be the wraparound dust jacket for the hardcover.)
Both of these images were generated using Swiss overflight radar data, which the Swiss government has kindly made available on the Web (though only to a certain level of accuracy. You wouldn’t want unfriendly eyes to know exactly where some things were…).
Both images are stored at Box.com, so clicking on the links will take you there.
Enjoy!
Looking north-northeast:
Looking northeast from a position a little further south down the glacier:
This essay appeared a couple of years ago in the Smart Pop Books release Through the Wardrobe: Your Favorite Authors on C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It was a chance to set down in detail some random thoughts that had occurred to me while rereading the books, or cooking. (If you want to read the article, you should use the above link fairly quickly, as the essay will only be available until March 22.)
A snippet:
…Somewhat later, while Shasta’s being held by the royal Narnians who think he’s Prince Corin, he is given a meal “after the Calormene fashion. I don’t know whether you would have liked it or not,” Lewis says, going on to describe a very acceptable hot-weather lunch of whole lobster and chicken-liver pilaf (though admittedly the snipe stuffed with almonds and truffles might give some people pause) with any number of ices and some cold white wine. But the writer’s enthusiasm seems a little muted. One also has to consider in this context the less-than-positive references to the garlic-and-onion smells of the marketplace in Tashbaan, contaminated by their nearness to “unwashed people, unwashed dogs . . . and the piles of refuse.” The “no-garlic-please-we’re-British” phenomenon was a very late Victorian development that took a good while to be shaken off, and there was also a general lack of experience with the more Mediterranean cuisines.
Lewis didn’t get down that way himself until rather late in life, and the at-home-British take on such food was pretty desperate until the great English food writer Elizabeth David came along and started showing people how to get it right. Either way, the “foreign” Calormene food never really compares positively to the Narnian, which is largely based on historical (or recent-memory) British cooking. You have to wonder what Lewis would have made of the modern Britain, where the number one favorite dish is chicken tikka masala.
I just want to direct everybody’s attention to Chris Meadows’ article here, which is brilliantly expressive of some of the problems I’ve been noticing a lot more acutely of late from early sorties into the production end of ebook management.
Some of you will have noticed that I’ve been overseeing a project whose time (I think) has come — international editions of the Young Wizards novels. The YW books’ North American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, only holds publishing rights for the US and its possessions, Canada and (for whatever reason) the Philippines. When UK YW fans (who had print editions in the early 90’s) complained to me that they couldn’t purchase the books from Amazon in their ebook editions, I checked with my agent’s contract lady to make sure that self-published ebooks would be kosher, and then started to see what I needed to do about it.
It’s been an interesting journey. My first stab at ebooking happened over at Smashwords (where the Door Into… / Middle Kingdoms books are available). They make the induction into the process as easy as it can be made, I think, explaining the basic issues of how and why a document file (or previously typeset document) must be stripped for ebook formats. And I have no complaints about their distribution of the Door books, particularly into Barnes & Noble: for the past few quarters they’ve been doing pretty nicely.
But with the YW books I was forced into a situation that Smashwords could not be used to solve, due to the territorial restrictions attached to the works. Smashwords has no mechanism to control what territories books are sold into, and to prevent them being sold where you don’t want them to be. Amazon and B&N, obviously, do. I investigated all kinds of other possibilities that would enable me to run around this particular problem… but even the best of them (the DianeDuane.com site’s present implementation of Zen Cart) was imperfect. Finally I realized that whether I liked it or not, if I was to reach an audience of any size (LIKE SOME OF THE REST OF THE PLANET, shrieks the Auctorial Subconscious in ill-concealed irony) with the YW novels without violating my contracts with HMH, I was going to have to take up the cudgels of bottom-to-top ebook production.
Whoopee.
I have something new it’s been on my mind to start doing over here, but Lee the Tech Lady (who has increasingly been handling the details of the more twitchy stuff that goes on at the website) advises me that if I want to do that, our present install of WordPress needs to be updated. (Actually her language was a lot stronger than that, but never mind. “Antediluvian” was one word she used.)
So if things look a little peculiar at OOA over the weekend, or it vanishes completely for a while, please don’t be alarmed. It’ll be back shortly, and then I can start this New Thing.
More details about that later. 🙂
The International Edition of High Wizardry is now out in the Kindle Store at Amazon.com and the DianeDuane.com online bookshop.
This edition duplicates the text of the North American High Wizardry editions from the 1st ed. hardcover through to the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt mass-market and digest edition paperbacks. Please note that this is not the revised / expanded “Author’s Cut” edition: that will be coming out later in the year.
The International Editions are for readers outside the US and Canada only, so please don’t bother trying to buy a copy if your address is in North America. If you’re in the US or Canada and you want a copy of the High Wizardry ebook, please use this link for the Kindle / .mobi version and this link for the .ePub.
The High Wizardry International Edition sells for USD $5.35 at the DD.com Bookshop and USD $6.29 at Amazon.com.
For quite a long while now, the sold-but-never-published novel A Wind from the South has been available for free on its site at http://raetiantales.blogspot.com, and has done… okay. It’s also recently become available, again for free, at the DianeDuane.com bookstore, and again, has done… okay, but no more than that. It hasn’t been terribly visible to the outside world in either of those venues, perhaps.
So I’ve decided to try an experiment to see if the book’s profile can be raised a little bit. I’m going to move the Kindle / .mobi version of AWFTS over to Amazon.com. Its price there will still be quite low as ebooks go. ETA, June 2011: Having first made the (previously free) ebook available to a few hundred last-minute downloaders, it was then moved to Amazon in March 2011. For the first month it was offered at a very low price. After a month or so, the price was raised… at which point the book began selling considerably better. Go figure. It may be that when you’re a sufficiently established writer, pricing a book too low sends the wrong message.)
Anyway, the book is now on sale at the DD.com Ebooks Direct store at $3.99. (You can also get it at the Amazon.com Kindle store for slightly more.) .Epub versions of the book will only be available from the Ebooks Direct store, mostly because B&N won’t allow Amazon-style author self-publishing without a US bank account. (The minute they change this policy I’ll be only too happy to sell .epubs out of BN.com.)
The print version of the book remains available for the moment at Lulu.com, but this will be changing, as I get a sense that Amazon’s print side will allow a significantly lower price for paperback versions. I’m investigating this and will do something about it one way or another when we start converting the ebook versions of the Young Wizards international editions to print versions for publication and sale via Amazon.
Thanks, everybody!
*AWFTS was bought once in the UK, by Corgi — where it was set aside after the editors who had championed it departed for greener fields — and twice in Germany, for publishers which each time were bought by larger ones, and had their lists of books-to-be-published completely reorganized by new incoming staff who wanted to set their own marks on the new, reorganized houses’ lists. It happens…