Really what you're describing here is the computer revolution. The iPad is a computer, nothing much more, nothing much less. It has a different form factor, and interacts through touch screen rather than keyboard, but nothing about that is really revolutionary. In the same vein, laptops or desktops or netbooks or smartphones are not revolutionary different from the basic computer. The revolutionary concept of interactive content is decades old by now. UI and technology improvements make it progressively easier to use, but the big "printing press" leap is quite a while ago. Given his involvement in GoGoD, I would surmise John was actually one of the pioneers in embracing the concept for go.

Yes, it is a handheld computer. One could have made SmartGo Books for a computer, but the tablet lends itself to such usage more than a computer, even a laptop.

I don't see that John had anything to do with the SGF format. That he's used it in GoGoD is incontestable; all the more reason for him to see that a new format does indeed offer appreciable improvements.

I have a friend who was involved in creating the first interactive "books" back in the 90s. He's pointed out that much of what he did with the company he worked for at the time is being reproduced now, the hardware is what is making the difference. Ebooks have been around for many years, though their popularity was limited. What SmartGo Books does is take the standard ebook and add diagrams, hence marrying two existing technologies. Again, pre-iPad, I don't think anyone would have considered that as useful.

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I'm not contesting that SmartGo Books does something useful and interesting, I'm just pointing out that the comparison with the printing press is way off the mark.

Also, I would like to point out that there is a lot more to GoGoD than a collection of SGF files. To dismiss it on the basis that John did not invent SGF is completely missing the point. It contains problems, essays, tournament results, a names dictionary, and much more. Besides third party tools (such as kombilo or smartgo), it has several programs written by John and/or T Mark themselves. It really is an interactive version of several types of books combined.

While I am happy enough to be used as the whipping boy for those frustrated by not seeing the rest of the world roll over in awe at the iPad, I'm not the only voice in the go-book market. I'm not even the main one. The publishers and booksellers are the ones who put up the money and take the main risks. But authors do have a say, and so far it seems the prominent ones are of like mind to me.

I do understand that people would like to justify a very expensive purchase by finding more things to do with it - and I don't mean that in a snide way, as I use expensive equipment too and deceive myself I need it. But you can't expect the rest of the world either to make sacrifices or risks on your behalf, or to be as entranced by the new gizmos when they get by quite happily without. Taking that stance is not Apple-bashing or being antediluvian. It's normal.

Of course things may change in future. But the present situation is that there is a small but established market for paper go books. There is a tiny market (still in the tens, probably) for e-book equivalents. A publisher is faced with a dilemma. He can print up a certain number of paper books and know that he is likely to sell them, without making a loss, over a certain period of time. Sales depend on price, so he has to achieve an optimum unit price based on how many he prints up but he has been around long enough to know what level works.

If he now decides to split his market, even just by way of an experiment, by producing a paper and an electronic version, he has to reduce the paper print run substantially, which pushes the unit price way up, which reduces sales, and he ends up in a vicious circle. He may make a loss. At present, electronic sales would make hardly any impression to counterbalance that.

People who theorise instead of getting involved in practicalities will pipe up that if the book was produced purely electronically, there would be no need to worry about printing costs. There are many flaws in that view. Not the main one, but one that matters to me is that many people who love paper books and who have been loyal supporters over many years would be kicked in the teeth. But even those who don't care about that have to face the fact that the electronic market is far too small to make it worth getting out of bed, unless you're young and still have a career to make. Also, e-books are not going to be as cheap as people believe. True, printing costs disappear, but the apps developer wants recompense for the vast amount of time he has spent in writing software and dealing with apps wholesalers, and so on. Because the market is small, and he may prefer bread now as opposed to cake tomorrow, he may impose a fairly large burden on the unit price of each e-book. Which may slow sales, but one way or another there is going to be minimal return for the foreseeable future.

Also, authors and publishers who produce e-books will themselves need to buy equipment on which to produce and check their products. At the moment that means buying an iPad. With the necessary accessories, I would end up wiping out the best part of what I make from go books to pay for a gizmo I don't want or need (I know I don't need it because I've got a drawer full of unused toys like Palm Pilots). If the market develops and I have to buy pads and phones by other makers as well, I would end up in hock. It is also worth remembering that people like me do what we do as a stress-free retirement hobby. I for one don't want to get involved in all that sort of palaver.

A quite separate point is that I think much of the benefit of iPads is overrated. I obviously can't expect to change Kirk's fascination with it, but I have seen SmartGo Kifu on an iPad (nice but nothing I want to pay for) and an iPhone. That latter was my daughter's and she was lucky that it is still intact, as it enraged me so much I wanted to stamp on it.

I do, though, challenge Kirk's view that this is some new dimension of technology that will change the way we view go. As I've said before, people said the same sort of thing when the Ishi spec was written, when the Palm Pilot came out came out and so on, and the paper book sky still hasn't fallen down. When I produce my books I do it with a combination of Microsoft Word, MultiGo, Kombilo and GoGoD database all open on my PC. It's hardly any less seamless than an iPad, really, and it's just as pretty. It's even portable, and already paid for. But when it comes to the end of the book process and it's time for a proper proof-read, I always put the PC away and get out my paint-spattered and grandchild-battered katsura board and chipped stones and play the games through that way. It's not that's it's more satisfying - by then I'm pig sick of the book anyway and would rather not have to proof-read at all - but I find it by far the best way to make sure I've understood the commentary. Using a PC to do that makes you glib, inattentive and slovenly.

None of that means that I expect the world of go publishing to be the same in a couple of years time, nor does it mean I won't go along with any changes. But I'm afraid I don't want to be the one that makes the sacrifices, even temporary ones, to help establish an e-market, as I get little enough out of go books as it is for the inordinate amount of time I put into them.

All the Ishi Press format did was provide a way to view games on computers. The textual annotations attached to them were, like those with SGF, too contextual; ie, they were linked to a specific move. The SGB format divorces text from diagrams, allowing you to read the text as you move through a diagram, something you couldn't do with Ishi or SGF. (Well, technically, you could, if you pasted the comments in after each move in a diagram...)

I'm a book person. I have thousands of books in my home, and I read a lot. But I am more than aware of how much a revolution tablets are (drop the "iPad;" while it's the only viable one today, it won't be for long).

Interestingly, look at the chess world. There some young grandmaster - is he the world champion? - who doesn't even own a chess board. He does everything on computers. Sure, you may think that is aseptic and boring, and I would agree. But does that make him glib, inattentive and slovenly? Nevertheless, he does it. Go has started down that path in recent years, in part because of GoGoD. With SmartGo Books, there are plenty of opportunities to create far better "books" than before - in terms of usability. You can deny it, but it's funny that you're one of the people who got us there, through your work on GoGoD.

You mentioned the cost of an iPad today; that will change over time. This is a first generation product, and what's interesting is that, compared to say the Palm Pilot in its time, there have been far more innovative apps and projects for the iPad in just over a year. I don't doubt that the competition when the Android tablet makers can figure out how to market their tablets will reduce the price and increase the features. (In case you think I'm making that up, read this: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20062940-64.html)

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How representative do you think your experience of wanting to throw the iPhone against the wall is (I take it you were using SmartGo)? As you say, your evaluation of go software on the phone is separate from the points you make about publishing, but it does bear on your evaluation of the technology's potential.

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Don't rely on my experience of any phone. I'm deaf and so can't use a mobile phone in the usual way, so I can't judge even its main purpose. I was looking at SmartGo but it was the other features - the ones my daughter wanted to show off - that drove me mad, mainly navigation but also a droppy ISP (she went for the cheapest, which doesn't have much of a presence in my area) and of course that's not the phone's fault.

The SmartGo app worked, but my feeling was that it's sad if you have to get your go fix on a phone. It's like junk food instead of four-square meal, a magazine from the top shelf instead of birds and bees. Not to mention the danger of becoming a Meanderthal.

Maybe the post was too long for us with our short attention span due to checking simultaneously Facebooks tells, tweets, mails, news and the weather every minute because some app delivered an important pop-up ; )

He told us, he does not make the decision concerning changing the format. He said, as the author he has a say. He says:


How representative?


Technology's potential?




post scriptum: Hm, he answered for himself. Pity.

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SoDesuNe, it's very hard for me to understand what point you're making.

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Occupy Babel!

An author has three choices for a book: a) printed, b) PDF, c) ebook. If he chooses only (c), then then the market can be too small, especially because there are too many different file formats and not each customer can handle or wants each format. So, more likely, an author considering an electronic version of a book (a book - not a software, a database or a problem / game collection) wants to use more than one choice. He saves printing costs for the electronic versions but their price needs to be about the same as that of the printed version because smaller print run means higher printing costs of the book version, retailers of printed books want their investment protected and ebooks need extra work for the author or his royalty to programmers. PDF does not mean extra work but lacks the dynamics of software-like ebooks and, in the small go market, makes piracy copies all too easy; PDF might be a suitable format for books written in one or two weeks but not for those written over several months; OTOH, it is still a somewhat open question whether anybody is prepared to pay for a PDF while everybody expects PDF to be something freely available in the internet; the author would need to experiment and find out - again this is more suitable for the quickly written books.

Therefore I think that an author needs to decide on the planned publication media when he starts writing. He writes suitably for those media. A big publisher has an alternative: He can offer old books almost run out of print in a second medium as an additional marketing way.

OAT, the Old vs. New Fuseki book has a simplistic cover. I am a great fan of simple cover design; simple art with a strong expression is beautiful! In case of the aforementioned cover, I wonder though whether that is just a mimization of printing costs. The book does have a competitive price. I am surprized though: For a book with that title, I'd expect a cover as artful as the discussed game(s). The font alone does not achieve this purpose. The Introduction to Go cover convinces me more.

Robert, you're mistaken, especially because you're considering PDFs and ebooks as two different items.

I just published a new ebook:

http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/scrivener-2

As you can see from the site, you can download it in PDF, epub and Mobi formats, and you can also get printed versions. These are PoD versions, and most people don't buy the printed books, but my point is more that publishers generally sell in multiple electronic formats (PDF and various ebook formats).

FYI, plenty of people pay for the PDF ebooks that we sell on Take Control books. To be frank, I make more money, in far less time, than I've made for the dozen or so print books I've written. (This is, in part, because Take Control splits royalties, unlike print publishers, but since the distribution model is different, this makes sense.) As for piracy, sure, there's some, but it doesn't seem to stop sales. You can't necessarily apply this to the broader book market, but you could say that this is a niche similar to that of go books (though sales are substantially higher, I would guess).

Note that PDFs can have DRM.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

I don't doubt that some e-publishers offer download of several formats but that is not the norm. Especially in Germany I read about different file formats everywhere. (With the exception of scientific literature, which tends to be PDF.)

I guess that some sorts of books sell even better as ebooks than they would as books. For the go market, this still has to be proven / tried.

How much money you make depends, uh, on the book topic and the percentage you get. The, say, novel or computer advice book market gives only ca. 3% - 7% to the author. Of course, he earns much more if uses a different way of distribution like you do. 7% is nothing if the print run is small (typical for English go books), so being one's own publisher changes this. (Also some creative workers in other fields, e.g., singers, have noticed this.)

I need to inform myself about DRM for PDFs. OTOH, I hate DRM as a consumer. It feels like a punishment for being an honest customer. How does DRM work? With a password? What prevents people from circulating files together with the passwords? A writer is not the police and does not want to hunt customers. So while DRM might work technically to some extent, it is not being nice to the customers. I believe more in mutual trust. If the blue ray industry trusts me and omits copy protection, then I trust that industry (that it does produce easy to use media) and will buy some films. (Yes, like this it works. I do not possess any blue ray film so far. The music industry has already learnt its lesson: tough copy protection drives previously honest consumers into the piracy market.) Thus I guess I'd rather start with a plain PDF book (a quickly written one so that the risk of wasted effort is limited) and see if there is a consumer market for that or piracy kills the market.

Standard royalties in the US are around 10%. You can get a bit more once you sell more books (ie, the first 10,000 at 10%, the next 5,000 at 12%, and so on). But you don't write for royalties, you write for your advance. Very few authors earn out their advance (sell more books than what the advance covers in royalties).

DRM for PDFs works with an Adobe system. I don't know much about it, because I've never had a PDF that was protected with DRM.

It's true that if you write shorter books, PDF is a good format. You can sell them cheaper, and make your money quickly, and not worry too much about piracy.

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There are no advances in the go world, and you typically have to wait a year for your first batch of royalties. Standard royalties are often 5%, and on the much lower price received by the publisher (standard in the US, I'm told), not on the retail price (standard in the UK, or at least used to be).



True as far as it goes, but not really relevant to the go scene. Writers are not trying to make lots of money, but are trying to do things like fill gaps in the literature. Short pot-boilers normally don't fill the gaps very well.

Piracy is definitely a big disincentive for some (I know of some projects, not mine and not just electronic, that have not happened because of fear of it) but the go community in general can give itself a big pat on the back for behaving the right way on this.

Yes, I naturally meant standard royalties for general books. Niche books with small presses are much different. You don't write them for the money for sure.

In the US, it is standard that royalties are on the publisher's net price, not the retail price. In the UK this is not the case, but percentages are generally lower, and advances are lower too (in part because of a smaller market, hence smaller print runs).

Short books don't have to be pot-boilers; they could be books on very specific moves, tesujis, or joskeis that don't merit 200 pages or so. Or even a handful of commented games.

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Returning to the actual topic of this thread, I received my copy of OFvsNF today. Quick service from Slate & Shell, as usual.

I haven't had time to do more than flip through it, but the first quarter of the book which discusses "hypermodern" openings appears very good. The actual game which comprises the main part of the book looks as detailed as JF's other fine recent works. I must say though that it's always his introductory material that I find most interesting.

Indeed. This is a major problem with the iPad fad. Someone asked about the price of book compared to the price of an electric book. Let's see:

A person buying 10 books a year, averaging 20€/book, costs 200€. Sells 5 books as used with 2€ each, second hand. Total cost per year: 190€.

A second person buying the same number of books per year: 500€/ year for a new tablet. 10 books, 10€ each, total 100€. Cannot sell any books second hand. Total cost 600€/year, plus the transition costs for moving the old books to the new reader.

Cheaper, eh? Do you really think the equipment producers and marketing will let you feel good about your old and clumsy equipment? You NEED to stay up-to-date, you know, or you will miss EVERYTHING!

<sigh>


Quoting from Wikipedia which cites another source for it: "Though the term trend may be used interchangeably with fad, a fad is generally considered a fleeting behavior whereas a trend is considered to be a behavior that evolves into a relatively permanent change."

iPad has only been on the market for a little over a year now, but thus far it shows no sign of waning popularity. What say we withhold judgement on whether it's a relatively permanent change in the computing landscape or just a fad for another couple of years?


One certainly does not need to buy a new tablet or phone every year to read ebooks. SmartGo Books (and the apps I use for other kinds of ebooks) work perfectly well on last year's ipad, and my nearly two year old iPhone 3Gs. One also doesn't need to spend 500€ on a device for reading ebooks. There are a number of far cheaper tablets & dedicated ebook readers in the range of $114 to $300, and their cost should rightfully be amortized over a period of at least 3 years.

That said, if the sole reason one wants such a device is for reading ebooks, then it would only be cheaper than buying paper books if one normally reads more than just 10 books per year. Of course if saving money is the goal then I advise borrowing books from the library and/or buying used books.

I'll noted that I asked about the marginal cost of producing an additional manuscript, book, or e-book, not about the fixed costs.

As with anything digital, all the costs of production (not storage, fulfillment or delivery) are with the first copy. For paper books, that depends on many variables: type of paper, number of pages, print run, etc. As for manuscripts, it depends on length, and whether or not you pay scribes.

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