Archive for October, 2009
Mobipocket No Longer Accepting New Publishers
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on October 12th, 2009
If you’ve visited the Mobipocket site recently with the intention of setting up a new publisher account, you no doubt encountered this message on the publisher welcome page:
Effective September 2009, we will no longer open new accounts for publishers to sell titles through the Kindle Store or MobiPocket.com. If you have an existing account, there will be no change and you can continue to upload and sell titles using Ebookbase. New publishers with a US address and bank account can sign up to sell ebooks in the Kindle store via our self-service publishing channel at http://dtp.amazon.com.
While I haven’t seen any confirmation, this certainly looks like the first big step in Amazon absorbing Mobipocket into the overall Digital Text Platform (DTP) service, which is the other route – besides Mobipocket – for getting book into the Amazon Kindle store (note: for independent publishers; mainstream publishers have their own distribution channel for Kindle).
So, the upshot is that if you have an existing Mobipocket account, you’re fine for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some changes in the next year. The big question will be if Amazon will continue to use Mobipocket as a distribution platform for the many independent ebook retailers out there. Stay tuned!
The Glitch with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on My Aspire One
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in Reviews on October 8th, 2009
Well, I regret to report that Ubuntu Netbook Remix isn’t quite perfect on the Acer Aspire One: the on-board microphone won’t work (at least on mine). It’s basically a driver issue, and I’ve researched a ton of ideas of how to fix it, but nothing seems to do the trick – and a couple of the ideas messed things up so badly I had to reinstall the OS.
I’m sure there are some smart folks out there who could probably get it to work, but I’m not one of them, and I’m basically tired of messing around with it. That’s the reason I wanted to try out Linux to begin with: because I was tired of messing around with Windoze all the time!
Now, is this a killer problem? Not necessarily. If you don’t need the built-in microphone – if you don’t use Skype, for example – it won’t matter at all. For me it was a bit annoying because we wanted to have a Skype video chat with someone at our September KindleBoards meetup in the D.C. area: we could see them and hear them, and they could see us – but couldn’t hear us.
Anyway, just beware that this could be an issue if you have an Aspire One and want to run Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
Salt Lake City – Working on In Her Name: Legend of the Sword
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in Book News on October 7th, 2009
My wife, Jan, is a “ScrapGirl” (see ScrapGirls.com) and they’re having their annual convention in Salt Lake City. I’ve never been to Salt Lake before, and it sounded like a great way to get away from my day job for a while and do some writing to move In Her Name: Legend of the Sword (my current work in progress) a bit further along.
The flight in last weekend was great, with some awesome views out the window of our Southwest 737 as we left Baltimore, climbing above the clouds, and when we came in for landing at Salt Lake.
We stayed the weekend with Jan’s cousin, who’s really cool. But she has a 1947 Piper Cub, which in my book makes her way cooler! We couldn’t get a ride last weekend, though, because the weather was totally crappy: it poured rain and was really gusty. So we just stayed inside and chilled out, reading, writing, and playing with her Abyssinian cat, Martini.
We did manage to get out and have some excellent Indian food at the Himalayan restaurant downtown. Then we took a quick tour of the Mormon Temple square in the evening drizzle. I have to say, the Temple is pretty spectacular at night!
After we left Jan’s cousin’s place on Monday, we headed to the University of Utah where the ScrapGirls convention is being held this year. It’s a beautiful campus, which incorporates Fort Douglas, which was established in the late 1800s. The convention itself is actually in the old officer’s club, so that’s kinda cool. The view from the Guest House hotel isn’t bad, either!
We’ve been exercising every morning since we got to the Guest House, running and/or doing the stationary bike. Well, I had to do the stationary bike this morning, because I strained my right calf at Jan’s cousin’s place and it’s still not very happy. Jan also went down and demonstrated Beachbody’s Insanity workout to some of her fellow ScrapGirls. Lotsa sweat there!
While the girls were going bonkers greeting each other (you haven’t heard a racket until you’ve been to an almost-all-female convention like this!), I staked out a corner in the hotel lobby and got to work on In Her Name: Legend of the Sword. I’m up to chapter 7 now, and while it hasn’t come together quite as readily as First Contact, it’s starting to weave together. A lot of this story focuses on the character of Tesh-Dar, the warrior high priestess who’s appeared in all the In Her Name novels so far. In fact, the name of the novel – Legend of the Sword – is a term of endearment, for lack of a better term, given her by the Kreelan Empress. I haven’t made a ton of progress since we’ve been here, simply because there’ve been a lot of pleasant distractions. But tomorrow the ScrapGirls convention will be in full swing, so while the girls are scrapping, I plan to be hammering out some serious wordage. I’d like to get the draft of this novel done by the end of the year, which doesn’t leave me a lot of time. Faster, fingers, faster!!
So, I’ll post more pics and information as we go…
