Category: Books

It’s not about copy protection

Charlie Owen read all four of my posts about Sony’s customer-hostile DRM and asks (with tongue in cheek, I think):

Why has Ed picked a delivery system for his latest professional writing with such unfriendly DRM and obvious disrespect for my fair use rights?

I could blame Gutenberg. Or I could be a spoilsport and answer Charlie’s question seriously: The printed book is difficult and expensive to copy, and it’s nearly impossible to make a copy that looks and works like the original. That’s certainly not true of conventional music CDs, which allow nearly perfect digital copies.

But in the case of every version of Windows XP Inside Out, which is published by a division of Charlie’s own company, an unrestricted digital copy of the book (in PDF format in recent editions) is included on a CD bound into the back of the book. A certain number of readers will abuse the trust of that decision and make the PDF copy available for others, but we trust that most of our customers will do the right thing and that treating them like criminals by locking down the PDF copy is neither fair nor smart.

I’m not opposed to copy protection in the abstract. If a company chooses to make its products more difficult for customers to use, that’s their right. But along with that right comes the responsibility to fully disclose their business decision. And they never, ever have the right to install software on my computer without providing detailed notice, acquiring my informed consent, and providing an easy and straightforward way for me to completely undo the changes if I so choose.

I’ve been working…

… on a couple of new projects. Exciting stuff.

I haven’t been on vacation, even though I’m inspired by the example some people set.

Oh, and Carl and I have finished every last ever-lovin’ bit of Windows XP Networking and Security Inside Out. It should be in your favorite bookstore before the end of October. It’s available for pre-order here.

Looking for a copy of Windows XP Inside Out?

I’ve got a small number of signed copies of Windows XP Inside Out, Deluxe Second Edition that I want to pass along to readers of this site. I can’t post the price here, but suffice to say it’s the absolute best deal you’ll ever see on this title. If you’re interested, send a note to books@bott.com. First come, first served, and preference goes to anyone who’s ever posted a comment on this site.

This is how a book review should be written!

I toyed briefly with the idea of picking up New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s new book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. Until I read Matt Taibbi’s review, that is. It is the single most devastating book review I have ever read. Funny, perceptive, and absolutely vicious. A sample:

The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I’ll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here’s what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

There’s so much more, including some great observations on outsourcing, wireless technology, the Konica Minolta Bizhub, and uber-steroids. Great reading. Maybe I’ll get Blink instead.

Woody Leonhard has a new Web site

Woody and I write books together (Special Edition Using Microsoft Office 2003 and Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP, for instance), but because we live on opposite sides of the earth, we rarely see each other in person. So it was a real surprise and treat when I discovered that Woody and his family were in Redmond last week and we had a chance to have dinner together.

Woody’s doing well. He lives in Phuket, Thailand, which was devastated by the tsunami but is swiftly being rebuilt. And he’s got a new Web site. Go say hi at Ask Woody. (And tell him he needs an RSS feed!)

A few thoughts about e-books

Joe Wikert, a VP and publisher at Wiley and Sons, just started his own blog (Scoble made him do it). In the comments to one of his first posts, I asked Joe what he thought would make electronic publishing take off. His answer was thought-provoking:

…until we get past the notion of just porting a tree-book to an e-book, we’ll probably never see enormous adoption rates.

The biggest barrier I see is this recognition that an e-book needs to be developed with the delivery platform in mind. Wouldn’t it be great if you could introduce the concept of a hyperlink to a printed book so that someone could just touch a phrase they don’t understand and they’re magically taken to a definition of that phrase or the first place it appears in the book? Instead, you have to flip back to the index, look it up, and then jump to that page. Oh, and while you’re doing that, you need to keep a thumb on your original page so that you don’t lose your place. That capability obviously already exists in the electronic world, but it’s not something that’s generally built in to e-books. Plus, I believe you have to construct the material in more bite-size chunks in an e-book, allowing users to read just the essentials, then drill down further (with links) if they want.

Imagine how fast you could get through the last book you read if it was constructed this way. I’m not just trying to save time though — since we’re all different, this model would allow us to dip in and out to different levels on any given topic, depending on how far you want to go. What would enable you to do this? It would be possible because the author constructed the book this way. That’s not so easy in a printed book. It’s this sort of layering of the content that I believe needs to be taken into consideration to build a truly effective e-book.

I think Joe’s on to something here. Most of my recent books are available in electronic editions, either as PDF files or in Windows compiled Help format. The electronic versions are useful because they offer the capability to search the entire text instead of just relying on decisions that an indexer made. You can search for a word that appears in a dialog box or error message and have a pretty good chance of finding some relevant content, which may in turn suggest other words or phrases to search for.

But the experience of reading a book in Acrobat or in a Help window is pretty poor, and even if we used every advanced feature in the Adobe toolkit we couldn’t make it nearly as interactive as Joe’s vision. The cool features he describes require three things that don’t currently exist:

  • Some sort of standardized handheld device (the size and weight of a paperbook book) that can read e-book files and deliver them in a digestible format on the screen, complete with jump points and graphics and “drill down” functions. I don’t think any hardware device like that exists yet, although people have been envisioning them for as long as I’ve been in the computing industry, which is a long time.
  • Software tools to create these intricately linked, discoverable, expandable, deep storehouses of information. Somehow, I don’t think Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat are going to get the job done.
  • An economic structure that rewards authors for doing the hard work of creating these e-books. It’s already difficult and time-consuming writing a linear manuscript that steps through these complicated technologies with clear explanations and accurate information. Would it be easier to create one of these e-books? Could I do it faster? I don’t know, but I sure hope that the economics would work.

It’s fun to speculate about this stuff. If anyone out there is working on projects that can get us closer to this new format for delivering information, add something in the comments.

Tell Microsoft Press how you use computer books

Juliana Aldous is a Product Planner for Microsoft Learning – the division that publishes books under the Microsoft Press imprint, including Windows XP Inside Out. She’s looking for a few good reviewers. If you use Office or Windows and you’re not an industry expert or another author, you can help. She promises that it’s just a “simple questionnaire.”  Visit her blog and click the e-mail link to add your name to the list.

Best computer books of 2004? Not!

I was so excited to read that Amazon.com had selected their Best Computer Books of 2004. Surely Ed Bott’s Your New PC or Windows XP Inside Out, Second Edition or even the massive Windows XP Inside Out Deluxe, Second Edition would be on the list!

Fat chance. I don’t know who was in charge of assembling this collection, but I sure would like him to pass along whatever he was smoking.

The list gets off to a promising start with Excel Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools. Lots of people use Excel, and this “small, fact-dense book” is probably going to be very useful. I might even learn something from it.

But then the selection just heads off into the woods.

How many people do you know who are planning to take the Sun Certified Web Component Developer 1.4 exam and need to learn more about Head First Servlets with JSP? Is the American public really just dying to learn about the “extract, transform, and load (ETL) phase of the data warehouse development life cycle”? Is a strategy guide on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Edition really a computer book? Were 30% of the best computer books of the year really all about the nuts and bolts of using advanced workstations to create big-budget Hollywood movies?

And while The World’s 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems sounds like a fascinating read, it is billed as a look at “current debates in astronomy and cosmology, physics and astrophysics, biology and paleontology, neuroscience, geology, chemistry, and energy.” So why is it on a “Best Computer Books” list?

Nothing on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. Nothing on Linux or Mac OS X or cascading style sheets or PHP or Adobe Photoshop or computer security or digital music or photography. You know, topics that lots of people might actually be interested in.

From all of us computer book authors, thanks for the support, Amazon. (Not.)