more print-on-demand goodness

An imagined scene:

You: “I’d like Just A Geek, because Wil Wheaton is funny and charming and he smells of lavender and whatever awesome smells like.”

Bookseller: “Oh, sorry, but the publisher promoted that as a Star Trek bio, and since those don’t sell, we didn’t stock it. We can order it for you, though. You’ll just have to wait two weeks.”

You: Well, how about Sunken Treasure?

Bookseller: Sorry, we’ve never heard of that.

Meanwhile…

Me: [::pained look::]

Anne: What happened?

Me: It’s like yet another person tried to buy my books in a bookstore, and cried out in anguish because nobody stocks them.

Nolan: But with the blastshield down, I can’t see anything! How am I supposed to fight?

Anne and me: What?

Nolan: I just heard you referencing Star Wars and I wanted to be part of it.

Me: I am so proud of you right now.

Man, it’s so vivid and real, isn’t it? I almost put a unicorn in there, but I thought that’d be silly. Anyway, joking aside, it’s really hard for indie authors like me to compete for shelf space in bookstores, which means that it’s harder for our reliable and potential customers to get our books. It’s just a matter of economics, really: there’s a finite amount of physical space in each store, and it makes more sense for booksellers to fill up a lot of that space with multiple copies of heavily-promoted, mainstream stock that’s going to sell like gangbusters, instead of a couple copies each of lesser-known stuff by guys like me that isn’t guaranteed to move as quickly or consistently.

Well, the rules are changing:

Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London:

It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Signaling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll’s original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

“This could change bookselling fundamentally,” said Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings. “It’s giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon … I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that’s pretty compelling.”

(Emphasis mine, because holy shit.)

I need to figure out how to get my books into the distribution stream for the Espresso Book Machine, because this is a fundamental game-changer for indie authors and publishers like me.

it’s all inside the wrist. it’s all inside the way you time it.

Some more Memories of the Future edits, for your (and my) amusement.

Here’s the original:

After a bit of exploring, they find themselves in the lab of Data’s creator, Dr. Noonian Soong. Riker, Geordi, and Tasha all join forces to be sort of an Exposition Voltron, informing the audience that Noonian Soong was the Earth’s foremost neuroscientist, until he tried to build Asimov’s positronic brain and failed. Everyone thought he did the walk of shame off the planet, but it turns out he just moved to Omicron Theta to continue his work until he got it right. (Coincidentally, on Omicron Gamma, there’s a group of former Microsoft employees still working on an MP3 player).

And here’s the rewrite, which I must tell you, made me giggle more than it probably should have:

They make their way to the exact spot where Data was discovered: it’s sort of a hollowed out area beneath a bunch of rocks, where Data tells them he was found wearing nothing more than a layer of dust. Before anyone can make a saucy reference about “The Naked Now” to Tasha, Geordi’s VISOR reveals that the rocks aren’t naturally hollow, and the “wall” opens up, revealing a twisty maze of passages, all alike.

After a bit of exploring, they find themselves in the lab of Data’s creator, Dr. Noonian Soong. Riker, Geordi, and Tasha all join forces to be sort of an Exposition Voltron:

Riker: Noonian Soong was Earth’s foremost neuroscientist, until he tried to build Asimov’s positronic brain…

Tasha: Everyone thought he did the walk of shame off the planet, but it turns out he just moved to Omicron Theta to continue his work until he got it right.

Geordi: And I’ll form the head!

And this is essentially unchanged from the original, but it still makes me happy:

Data flees to Sickbay where he meets up with Dr. Crusher and shows her his on/off switch—or, as he describes it, “an android alarm clock.”

Then he smirks, and asks hopefully, “Is that amusing?”

Dr. Crusher slowly shakes her head “no.” It’s the first genuinely laugh-out-loud moment of the episode, and the last time we’ll be laughing with “Datalore” instead of at it.

After a brief encounter with soon-to-be-ex-Chief Engineer Argyle, Dr. Crusher promises Data that she’ll keep the existence of his mysterious off switch to herself. Data asks her if she would want people to know about her off switch, if she had one. She laughs, and nervously glances at a bottle of Jägermeister in her office.

I got my first glimpse of the cover comps earlier this week. I think it’s going to be awesome.

there is said to be a demi-lich who still wards his final haunt

Edits on Memories of the Future are coming along quite nicely. It’s always a good sign when I’m having fun and enjoying myself, instead of gnashing my teeth and pacing around my office listing all the reasons I suck and should never pick up a pen again in my life. (It happens more frequently than I’d like.) I’m under a lot of pressure to get this and another incredibly overdue essay finished, but it’s a good pressure that feels more like excitement than dread.

Anyway, before I dive back into those projects, I wanted to share something I came across on Reddit earlier this week: The classic D&D module The Tomb of Horrors, updated to 3.5.

If you don’t instantly know what the Tomb of Horrors is, this probably won’t mean anything to you, but I’m going to try: it’s one of the hardest, most devilish, brutal, evil, nasty, deadly, TPK delivering modules ever designed.

It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.

A very brief history of the Tomb of Horrors, from Wikipedia:

Tomb of Horrors is a 1978 adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, written by Gary Gygax. It was originally written for and used at the 1975 Origins 1 convention. Numbered “S1,” the module was the first in the “S” (for “special series”) series of modules.

The module’s plot revolves around the tomb of the demi-lich Acererak. The players’ characters must battle their way past a variety of monsters and traps, with the ultimate goal of destroying Acererak. Tomb of Horrors is considered one of the greatest Dungeons & Dragons modules of all time, as well as one of the most difficult.

I wouldn’t read beyond that if you’re planning to play it, because there are spoilers. Oh, and if you are planning on playing it, I’d suggest having a nice long talk with your character, making sure that you guys are okay with each other, and that there isn’t anything left unsaid or unresolved, because there’s a very good chance you won’t be seeing each other again.

This is probably old news to a lot of you, because it was released in 2005, but it’s new to me, and I thought I’d share with one final caveat. Someone jokingly suggested that I use Tomb of Horrors to introduce a new player to D&D, and I responded with something like: “Ha. Ha. Ha. The idea is to leave him wanting to play D&D again. Starting a new player out with Tomb of Horrors is like introducing someone to Rock Band with Green Grass and High Tides.”

Also: Have I ever linked to the incredible Top 10 D&D Modules I Found in Storage This Weekend at Geekdad? Well, if I haven’t, I just did. (There are several posts in that series. You can find them all right here.)

“Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.”

Prepare to be awed:

"We are so tiny. Come on people, let's make Earth a better place, even if Earth doesn't give a damn about us and will survive happily with us extinct, thank you very much. Recycle. Don't waste stuff. Give us a kiss." –Gizmodo.

Prepare to be humbled:

Pale_Blue_Dot

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

[…]

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
– Carl Sagan.

Now take good care of our planet, okay?