At Home with John and Debbie

New Scientist’s cover headline today is: “The Santa Delusion”.
Ho ho ho.

Yesterday, I did some experimenting with Amazon’s DTP — “Digital Text Platform”. This is the service that allows anyone to create eBooks for the Kindle, and sell them on Amazon. Or rather, it allows Amazon to sell them, and give you a 35% cut.
What I discovered is that this publishing lark isn’t as easy [...]

In wondered what the details of the Kindle’s main file format, AZW, was. It’s well know that it’s based on the common .mobi format, which has been used by MobiPocket for eBooks for some time. But where is that format documented? Nowhere public, it seems.
There are enough interested parties to be working it out, [...]

More Kindle-inspired thoughts.
I’m fairly convinced that, at least in principle, an ePaper screen with accessible buttons for flipping pages, can be as comfortable way to read a novel as an ordinary book is. For other kinds of book, my opinions vary: certain kinds of textbook or technical manual work better than others; a pop-up [...]

Since talking about the Kindle the other day, I’ve been reading articles and comments, and thinking about eBooks some more.
A pervasive attitude is one of reverence towards the book’s form. You can’t replace a book, people say, because the shape of a book, it’s cover art, its smell. All these things are important, they [...]

Courtesy of XKCD. 

On Sunday, I had arranged to meet old gaijin family friend Zak and his wife Kanako, at their home in Shin-Urayasu. I repeated a mistake from my previous visit, in which the Metro map does not indicate that a pair of linked stations linked by a mile of pedestrian tunnel. Still, I made it [...]

Did I mention I was in Tokyo? This follows a sequence of exchanges with my management chain which, if I were to personify a bunch of managers as once voice, could be paraphrased thus:
Management: Hey John, there’s a possibility you might be needed in Japan in the next couple of months. Would that me [...]

My friend Sean McManus has announced his self-published first novel, University of Death. This is me doing my bit to help publicise it.

I have only read the two preview chapters, as you can too if you click through the links, and anyway, I doubt I could detach myself from my friendship with the [...]