I said I would still make announcements. A new e-book, the first in the GoGoD Vintage series, has just appeared in the Kindle market place. It is a little frippery on Inoue Genan Inseki.

It is a frippery because it is short and has already appeared on the GoGoD CD, and because I did it simply to learn about the procedures for creating and publishing such books, especially the interface with Amazon and handling their pricing, DRM and minimum requirements procedures. I'm still low on the learning curve. In particular, if anyone is kind enough to buy, I'd like to know if it works on tablets and smartphones as Kindle claims. It was meant to be minimum price, but the regulations about VAT confused me, so I'm not sure if that worked out as planned.

The link is http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005WDEFNS.

This is all preparation for a substantive work, a long biography of Shuei. I don't think go diagrams work all that well on the Kindle, so that book will be nearly all text.

To pick up on a related theme of Robert Jasiek's in another thread, personally I think even text looks clunky on the Kindle, but against that I've used my Kindle rather more than I expected, as reading is so easy you soon forget the ugly part. And of course carrying it while holidaying or commuting in place of a dozen heavy books is a godsend. Diagrams will display, of course, but getting text and diagram together rationally can never be guaranteed, and I agree with Robert that this is the most important feature. I'm also inclined to agree with him (if I understood him correctly) about the ability to play out variations dynamically on a tablet being much less significant, even overrated. For instructional material, a static display which forces you to visualise the moves in your head seems to me pedagogically at least as useful, and maybe more so. I'm aware of a story this week that suggests brains are already changing because of the internet, but I still expect the dynamic feature will become a bit of a nine-day wonder like the Wii exercise suite or the rowing machine that now sits in the garage. In any case, I'm personally not looking to move in that direction and will concentrate mainly on text for the time being.

Flipped through it on my iPad. It works. I don't know how diagrams would work, but text and small illustrations will always work on any platform that has the kindle app.

I would guess at diagrams would work well on screens bigger than the kindle, but go either way on smaller screens.

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Occupy Babel!

Any chance your biography of Shuei will appear in some non-ebook format for those of us Shuei fans who are behind the curve in the electronic revolution?

While this may not satisfy, it is possible to read Kindle books in the browser or in an application that you download to your non-tablet computer. I don't actually know if that's possible if you have never owned a Kindle or iPad or iPhone to create a kindle account, but I bet it is just because Amazon wants to sell books to anyone it can.

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Occupy Babel!

Hi, it displays fine on my Asus transformer tablet. Also, I have not had any problems with diagrams in "So you want to play Go" (vol3), which you might like to look at (at least the free sample). I don't own a Kindle so I have no idea whether that displays correctly/nicely on that.

edit: oh and the UK link for it is:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Inoue-Genan-Inseki-Vintage-ebook/dp/B005WDEFNS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319169697&sr=8-1

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I am John. John-I-Am.

I don't own a Kindle but I have an Amazon account downloaded the free Kindle software for PC. I have several Amazon eBooks this way and they work great. John's text on Inseki looks great there.

Well done John! Even your announcements are better than most of what the rest of us post. If you sort out the meaning of the Amazon pricing scheme, I would love to know what you find out. FYI, my copy cost me $3.49 via the U.S. kindle store. I believe it is due to living in Japan (their Asia region). I frequently see an additional $2 added onto the price of books that I buy. Since it is by no means all of the books that I buy, I assume that it is somewhere in the settings per book. I will be interested to know whether you get your cut of the higher price. For your info, the transaction went through at 8:17 AM Oct. 21 Japan time, which I believe was 00:17 U.K. time. If they give you that detailed a statement, have a look!

By the way, I disagree with you and Robert on the value of dynamic diagrams. This is most evident in diagrams with more moves. For example, the electronic version of Go Weekly from the Nihon Kiin on the ipad is much more readable with dynamic diagrams. The difference may be less evident in SmartGo Books because many of the diagrams contain few/none plays, however, I venture to say that virtually any of your readers (short of say Robert's EGA 5-dan level) will find The Go Consultants easier to follow via SmartGo than on paper. I can claim to have read it both ways, so at least in a limited sample of one I have some evidence to back my view.

In any case, ship Shuei along as soon as possible. Now that the number of interesting historical posts on L19 has declined precipitously, the addicts are sweating and twitching hereabouts. Genan will definitely get us through the weekend, but what then?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

I second that!

Btw. looks well on iPad2 and iPhone4 too.

This is the first e-book I bought. Nice reading on my laptop or my android phone. I miss the game diagrams, though.

Anyway, John F. gave me a good reason to go with the e-books. It's all about substance.

Cheers,
Vesa

Looks good on a 3rd generation Kindle.

However, game diagrams don't work so well on one (John's book doesn't have any, so this is a general comment). The text associated with the diagram often ends up a page or more off, so you are constantly having to flip forward or backward to figure out what the author is talking about.