books

TRX
April 13, 2012
121:
> Like it or not, browsing ebooks via a
> storefront like Amazon is much harder
> than browsing p-books on a shelf.

I live on the outskirts of a suburban metro area, near a US state capital. The last bookstore within 25 miles closed some years ago. With little fresh product in the supply chain, most of the used book stores have closed as well. If you want to buy a paper book locally, you have the short rack at Wal-Mart and a few video stores. The racks in most grocery or convenience stores vanished long ago. The Wal-Mart and video store stocks are the same old Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, JA Jance "best sellers", new or reprints.

When I visit elsewhere, the first thing I do is check out the local book situation. *Most* places, judging by the phone book and talking with the locals, are no better off. Fewer people read now, and in most places there's simply not enough reader density to support a retail book outlet. The stores are gone, and I don't see them coming back.

Even if the situation is rosy in the urban areas, they're still only about half of your potential customers.

It seems many people think of local vs. online as a convenience issue, but for a huge chunk of potential customers, online (either paper or "e") is the only way they're going to find out about or purchase your book.

I found a hardback copy of one of your books in a flea market. It didn't come from anywhere around here; it most likely came in via someone at the local military base.

TRX
April 13, 2012
125:
> the VAT liability is calculated on
> where the delivery is made to, just
> as for physical goods

So *THAT* is where the state legislature got that whacktard idea a few years ago! And announced it December 14, to go into effect January 01... while the whole state government effectively went offline for their holiday vacations, and were thus unavailable for answering any questions at all.

I'm still catching up on the sleep I missed while patching a client's billing system to deal with that mess.

I just hope they don't get the idea of "tax holiday", or I'll have to go back in there...

TRX
April 13, 2012
136:
> Where are the crazy Beriev design
> bureau trans-Atlantic 6000 ton
> Ekranoplans

I was smitten with the Ekranoplan idea decades ago, but while they have potential applications, there are problems.

First, you're basically dealing with a seaplane. Seaplanes fight a continuing battle with corrosion, which means frequent inspections (in the USA, by Federally-certified A&P mechanics) and have higher maintenance costs than regular aircraft.

Second, fuel efficiency isn't all that great. They need multiple engines to spread airflow across the lifting surfaces. Besides the added purchase and maintenance expenses, one big engine is generally more efficient than two or more small ones.

Third, they can't be operated in heavy weather. Once the chop gets too high, you park it until things calm down. Commercial cargo and passenger services like nice neat schedules.

Fourth, they're loud. There are always people just waiting to form citizen's action committees over that sort of thing.

Fifth, even if you ignore some of the (IMHO fanciful) claims for speed, or decide to limit them to only, say, poking along at 100mph, traffic on the sea tends to run in "lanes", just like air traffic. Plus there are the small boats, which might crop up anywhere, and sailboats, which are a special problem for marine right-of-way. You have a 100mph lawn dart that is probably no more maneuverable than an ocean liner when at speed, and its maneuverability is also dependent on how calm the sea is.

You also have the problem in that the Ekranoplans are watercraft, while their main competitors are aircraft. You have to have a seaport for an Ekranoplan, but a cargo plane can go inland anywhere there's an airport.

For military use, an Ekranoplan would be a dandy high speed landing craft. But as far as I know the USSR had no immediate plans to invade Britain or Hawaii, and even then, it would look just like an airplane to an air-to-air missile.

"The Future" was going to be giant rigid airships, flying cars, and supersonic airliners, and space travel. Somehow it turned into microwave ovens, satellite TV, cellular phones, and the internet. I have a good understanding of the vast array of technologies behind the keypad of the cellular phone, but in the end, it's just a telephone, a handset with a voice in it, same as the hand-crank jobs my grandparents grew up with. Somehow it doesn't seem a fair trade for a 3G launch on the Oklahoma City to Nantes suborbital...

TRX
April 13, 2012
139:
> I'm actually thinking that the hub of
> the service industry might be in the
> copy editing element.

As the publishing industry continues to collapse, the pool of formerly- employed publishing industry professionals continues to grow.

TRX
April 14, 2012
177:
> flaky

I don't know about Amazon, but twice now I've caught eBay giving me different prices depending on which browser I was using. Yes, I was logged in both times. In my innocence I thought the seller decided the "buy it now" price, but obviously something weird is going on behind the scenes.

I normally smurf with Konqueror, which is enough faster than Firefox to keep it as my default browser. However, actually purchasing anything on eBay goes off into some kind of Flash neverland that only works properly in Firefox, which is where the price differences showed up. (about 10% cheaper with Firefox)

I had flashbacks to the browser wars of the '90s, when major commercial web sites would simply tell you to go away if you weren't riding their particular browser hobby-horse...