For the latest chapter in my scanning saga, I purchased Nuance Omnipage 18, a highly recommended OCR product.
So far this has worked about as well as everything else I've done to try to scan in documents. That is to say, not at all.
Here my problems are simpler, and seemingly insoluble.
First problem: I can't install the software. It goes through the involved installation procedure, tells me it has installed successfully, then nothing. No icon on the desktop, no entry on the list of installed programs, zero.
There's more to the story, of course, including a blown install, a messed up email address (mine, mea culpa) and much fooling with the stuff. All to no avail.
Okay, time to call tech support == and that leads me to the next problem. After playing ring-around-the-rosy on the web site several times, I still can't find the tech support number. Everything seems to indicate there is one, but I can find no trace of it on Nuance's pretty but seemingly useless web site.
As I say Nuance comes highly recommended, but if you can't install the program it's useless.
Now all I've got to do is figure out how to send the damn thing back for a refund. And I'm still without OCR software.
--RC
Friday, July 15, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
First Web Page Up
The first in my new series of web pages is submitted and should be up by Friday (July 15) It's for rickcook.biz (which also happens to be the URL) and just now it is a single, extremely basic page for displaying my work.
This will be expanded over the next couple of weeks as I get around to adding more content.
This will be expanded over the next couple of weeks as I get around to adding more content.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Help In Publishing For The Kindle
The final stage in publishing an ebook is formatting it. This used to be a pretty simple deal. Essentially you converted your file to HTML added a couple of tweaks and the cover art, all zipped into a single file.
Amazon's Kindle is no longer that simple. Amazon now insists that book submitters use the .ncx file format to submit the table of contents. Ncx is an XHTML format for tables of contents, so it's sorta HTML, but not quite.
This has the advantage that it allows things like a hyperlinked table of contents for the talking book version. It has the disadvantage of being so arcane there's little information on how to do it available.
Fortunately someone stepped up to the challenge. April K. Hamilton, author of "The Indie Author Guide to Publishing" (good book) has come out with "The Indie Author Guide For Publishing For The Kindle With Amazon's Digital Text Platform, Mobipocket Creator And MS Word 2003 Or Higher." In it she walks you through the steps involved in taking your book from a text file to a ready-to-submit zip file.
Hamilton is owed a vote of thanks by everyone in the e-authoring community for untangling this tangled tale. Be warned: The process still isn't easy, but at least you can more-or-less understand it.
Amazon's Kindle is no longer that simple. Amazon now insists that book submitters use the .ncx file format to submit the table of contents. Ncx is an XHTML format for tables of contents, so it's sorta HTML, but not quite.
This has the advantage that it allows things like a hyperlinked table of contents for the talking book version. It has the disadvantage of being so arcane there's little information on how to do it available.
Fortunately someone stepped up to the challenge. April K. Hamilton, author of "The Indie Author Guide to Publishing" (good book) has come out with "The Indie Author Guide For Publishing For The Kindle With Amazon's Digital Text Platform, Mobipocket Creator And MS Word 2003 Or Higher." In it she walks you through the steps involved in taking your book from a text file to a ready-to-submit zip file.
Hamilton is owed a vote of thanks by everyone in the e-authoring community for untangling this tangled tale. Be warned: The process still isn't easy, but at least you can more-or-less understand it.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
"Shift Happens" is almost out
"Shift Happens" my new ebook on the revolution in publishing is at the formatter and should be published in two or three days.
Another long slog done.
I will say the process of publishing an e-book is a lot easier, and a lot faster, than a conventional paper book. Now that royalties on ebooks are hitting 70 percent from Amazon I have to wonder how much longer paper books will remain the preferred way to publish popular fiction. The advantages for both author and reader just keep piling up.
--RC
Another long slog done.
I will say the process of publishing an e-book is a lot easier, and a lot faster, than a conventional paper book. Now that royalties on ebooks are hitting 70 percent from Amazon I have to wonder how much longer paper books will remain the preferred way to publish popular fiction. The advantages for both author and reader just keep piling up.
--RC
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Scanning -- again
Still the scanning saga continues.
I finally got the document scanned and OCRed and started on the corrections. I quickly discovered I'd been two optimistic when I said that one error in 200 was acceptable. It's not really.
In an 18,000 word story that amounts to several thousand errors and some of them are things like substituting an "l" for an "I" which are hard to spot.
What's worse, several sections of the story didn't scan so I've got holes I've got to refill by retyping several pages at a stretch.
Now I am not a proofreader, I'm a writer. I don't have the kind of detail-oriented mind it takes to ferret errors like this and fix them.
And then there's the other problem.
This one I can't blame on the OCR software. It seems that the magazine ended each line with a hard line break. Ducky, except that the story was set two columns to a page so to get the copy prepared I've got to go through and take out all those hard line breaks.
I won't bore you with a long, technical explanation of why that's a problem, except to say that very few word processors allow you to find and replace hard line breaks the way you can other characters. To do it you need to delve into regular expressions -- which are their own brand of magic -- and the regular expressions in LibreOffice are unusually arcane.
What it comes down to is I've got to go through the story and reinsert the paragraph breaks that were left after I got rid of the hard line breaks. By hand.
As a result I've got a headache and I'm still not done with this.
I've come to several conclusions here. The first is that I need better OCR software. FreeOCR just isn't accurate enough for long documents. So I'm getting Omnipage from Nuance, which is $150 but comes highly recommended. The second conclusion is I may need more than that if I'm going to scan in all my stories for my collection "Cooks Book".
I'll try OCRing with Omnipage, but if that doesn't work I'll either have to get a better scanner or farm the job out to a service bureau.
Which reminds me of something John W. Campbell told me once: "Always use the right tool for the job. The right tool to fix a television set is a television repairman."
I finally got the document scanned and OCRed and started on the corrections. I quickly discovered I'd been two optimistic when I said that one error in 200 was acceptable. It's not really.
In an 18,000 word story that amounts to several thousand errors and some of them are things like substituting an "l" for an "I" which are hard to spot.
What's worse, several sections of the story didn't scan so I've got holes I've got to refill by retyping several pages at a stretch.
Now I am not a proofreader, I'm a writer. I don't have the kind of detail-oriented mind it takes to ferret errors like this and fix them.
And then there's the other problem.
This one I can't blame on the OCR software. It seems that the magazine ended each line with a hard line break. Ducky, except that the story was set two columns to a page so to get the copy prepared I've got to go through and take out all those hard line breaks.
I won't bore you with a long, technical explanation of why that's a problem, except to say that very few word processors allow you to find and replace hard line breaks the way you can other characters. To do it you need to delve into regular expressions -- which are their own brand of magic -- and the regular expressions in LibreOffice are unusually arcane.
What it comes down to is I've got to go through the story and reinsert the paragraph breaks that were left after I got rid of the hard line breaks. By hand.
As a result I've got a headache and I'm still not done with this.
I've come to several conclusions here. The first is that I need better OCR software. FreeOCR just isn't accurate enough for long documents. So I'm getting Omnipage from Nuance, which is $150 but comes highly recommended. The second conclusion is I may need more than that if I'm going to scan in all my stories for my collection "Cooks Book".
I'll try OCRing with Omnipage, but if that doesn't work I'll either have to get a better scanner or farm the job out to a service bureau.
Which reminds me of something John W. Campbell told me once: "Always use the right tool for the job. The right tool to fix a television set is a television repairman."
More on the world changing
Ran across a fascinating post by Robin Sullivan at
http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/06/self-published-ebook-authors-earn-living/
dealing with the changes in epublishing. Sullivan (whose husband is Michael J. Sullivan, a fantasy author) keeps records of her husband's sales and also tracks the Writers Cafe forum on the Kindle Boards. And she documented the change.
Basically it happened a lot faster and more sharply than I thought. According to Sullivan, the change started with an increase in sales in November-December in 2010 and accelerated from there. Michael Sullivan, for example, went from sales of about $1,500 a month for the self-published and ebook versions of his novels to making just over $100,000 in the first five months in 2011. Almost all the increase came in ebooks.
In her blog post Sullivan then analyzes the reports from Writer's Cafe. Of the authors reporting, the number of writers selling more than 800 copies a month of their books went from about 30 a month to around 80 a month in the same period. By the end of the period, the top ten writers were making between $3900 a month and $16,000 a month from their ebooks.
To which I can only say: "Write on dudes and dudettes!"
http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/06/self-published-ebook-authors-earn-living/
dealing with the changes in epublishing. Sullivan (whose husband is Michael J. Sullivan, a fantasy author) keeps records of her husband's sales and also tracks the Writers Cafe forum on the Kindle Boards. And she documented the change.
Basically it happened a lot faster and more sharply than I thought. According to Sullivan, the change started with an increase in sales in November-December in 2010 and accelerated from there. Michael Sullivan, for example, went from sales of about $1,500 a month for the self-published and ebook versions of his novels to making just over $100,000 in the first five months in 2011. Almost all the increase came in ebooks.
In her blog post Sullivan then analyzes the reports from Writer's Cafe. Of the authors reporting, the number of writers selling more than 800 copies a month of their books went from about 30 a month to around 80 a month in the same period. By the end of the period, the top ten writers were making between $3900 a month and $16,000 a month from their ebooks.
To which I can only say: "Write on dudes and dudettes!"
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Roots of Revolution, Part 2: The Day The World Changed
Americans love fixed dates for any important event. Thus, we celebrate the 4th of July to mark American independence and we mourn Sept. 11 as the beginning of the war on terror.
Of course most such dates don't mark when the real event happened. Both the American Revolution and the War on Terror started considerably before those dates, but we like the comfort of having a nice solid date we can quote like a mantra.
The change that's taking place in publishing has a special date as well. January 20, 2010. Like the others, the tidal wave didn't start then, but it is significant. In future years I wouldn't be surprised if authors get together to raise their glasses and party on that day.
(Not so much because most authors will remember the date, but because authors love an excuse to slack off and party.)
What's so special about January 20, 2010? That's the day that Amazon kickstarted the epublishing revolution by announcing they would be raising the royalties on their ebooks to 70 percent of list prices. (Amazon actually raised rates on Jun 30, so you can celebrate that date too.) That makes it a convenient date to mark as the day the Revolution began.
The higher royalties were actually the second step in the events starting the revolution. The first one was the ebook readers took off. Today something like 12-15 percent of all American readers own an ebook reader and Amazon sells more ebooks than it does conventional books. Between them, those facts set off the explosion in publishing.
There is a third factor leading to the revolution as well. Ebook publishers do an absolute minimum of gatekeeping. If you write an ebook, Amazon or Smashwords or whoever is just about sure to publish it, no matter what the subject. (I will admit I've had a little trouble selling the concepts for The Serial Killers' Handbook and The Official Hannibal Lechter Fan Club Guide And Recipe Book, but those are about the only limits.)
So, anyone gets to publish anything they want, charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for it and collect a royalty of 70 percent of the price. That's a minimum of $2.10 per book.
Both buyers and sellers were energized by the changes. Buyers responded by buying more ebooks readers than even the most sanguine marketers imagined -- and they're still buying them. Sellers started cranking out books so the buyers would have a large choice of reading material at very low prices. The cycle rapidly became self-perpetuating and it shows no sign of slowing down.
We'll leave the quality of the new books for another post. Here we'll simply observe that there is a huge amount of dreck being published. Illiterate dreck, mostly. However there are also some gems that rival the best printed books being published (never mind the stuff that makes the best seller lists)
So the next time January 20 rolls around, buy a writer a drink and raise your glasses to the Revolution.
Of course most such dates don't mark when the real event happened. Both the American Revolution and the War on Terror started considerably before those dates, but we like the comfort of having a nice solid date we can quote like a mantra.
The change that's taking place in publishing has a special date as well. January 20, 2010. Like the others, the tidal wave didn't start then, but it is significant. In future years I wouldn't be surprised if authors get together to raise their glasses and party on that day.
(Not so much because most authors will remember the date, but because authors love an excuse to slack off and party.)
What's so special about January 20, 2010? That's the day that Amazon kickstarted the epublishing revolution by announcing they would be raising the royalties on their ebooks to 70 percent of list prices. (Amazon actually raised rates on Jun 30, so you can celebrate that date too.) That makes it a convenient date to mark as the day the Revolution began.
The higher royalties were actually the second step in the events starting the revolution. The first one was the ebook readers took off. Today something like 12-15 percent of all American readers own an ebook reader and Amazon sells more ebooks than it does conventional books. Between them, those facts set off the explosion in publishing.
There is a third factor leading to the revolution as well. Ebook publishers do an absolute minimum of gatekeeping. If you write an ebook, Amazon or Smashwords or whoever is just about sure to publish it, no matter what the subject. (I will admit I've had a little trouble selling the concepts for The Serial Killers' Handbook and The Official Hannibal Lechter Fan Club Guide And Recipe Book, but those are about the only limits.)
So, anyone gets to publish anything they want, charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for it and collect a royalty of 70 percent of the price. That's a minimum of $2.10 per book.
Both buyers and sellers were energized by the changes. Buyers responded by buying more ebooks readers than even the most sanguine marketers imagined -- and they're still buying them. Sellers started cranking out books so the buyers would have a large choice of reading material at very low prices. The cycle rapidly became self-perpetuating and it shows no sign of slowing down.
We'll leave the quality of the new books for another post. Here we'll simply observe that there is a huge amount of dreck being published. Illiterate dreck, mostly. However there are also some gems that rival the best printed books being published (never mind the stuff that makes the best seller lists)
So the next time January 20 rolls around, buy a writer a drink and raise your glasses to the Revolution.
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