I’ve been thinking about options for making some of my out of print novels available again. There’s still some hope I can get a mainstream publisher to reissue the four books in my Ware series, but my other out of print books are more problematic. I’m thinking of Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere in particular, and maybe eventually The Secret of Life, which is available only in ebook form.

I can’t presently find any small press willing to republish them in the usual manner (printing books and selling them in book stores), so I’ve been looking at some other options. The first set of options revolves around the print-on-demand route, also known as POD. The tech is now at the point where you can store a clean Adobe PDF file of your book and cover somewhere in the Web, and an unseen giant machine (plus staff) somewhere else can print and mail individual copies as orders trickle in.

Perhaps the simplest route to POD is to sell facsimile editions, which resemble bound Xerox copies of your book. A published author can do this via the Authors Guild Back-In-Print program. You send them one of your out-of-print books, they rip it apart and scan it, and the iUniverse POD publisher prints and mails off nicely bound copies on demand, with the books marked as “An Authors Guild backinprint.com edition.” I haven’t seen these books, but have in the past seen (other companies’) facsimile editions that are a bit smeary-looking, or kind of light gray, with broken letters — the inexpensive “classic library” books you seen on bargain racks in stores are usually facsimile editions. But I understand the Authors Guild boods are printed on nice paper and with a color cover. The books’ prices depend on page count, a 200 page novel might go for $15. The cost to the author: you have to pay $90 a year in dues to be in the Authors Guild, which could be severe if you have to keep this up year after year.

[Most of today’s pix are left over from the Big Sur trip — what a contrast between these images and today’s subject matter, sigh…]

The other routes to POD involve (a) scanning the book, (b) running some optical character recognition software (OCR) to get an electronic file such as a Microsoft Word file, then (c) using a tool like Adobe InDesign (or just Word) to design a book which you save as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.

There are two ways to do this. Either you turn this work over to a specialized company, or you do it yourself (DIY).

On the turn-it-over front, I like the looks of E-Reads , a specialized company reissuing books (including SF novels) in both POD and in ebook formats. A nice thing about E-Reads is that they have a real SF editor working there, in the person of John Douglas (who edited my books Freeware, The Hollow Earth, and The Hacker and the Ants at Avon). E-Reads publishes ebooks as well as POD books, and I see their ebook editions listed on Amazon in the Kindle format,as well as for sale on their site. E-Reads does not make every single one of their books available in POD format. One of their books might typically list at about $17 with a royalty to the author of about $2.

There’s a newer publisher getting into POD reprints of SF books as well, ARC Manor, and they also seem like a good outfit. By the way “ARC” is short for “high speed Electro-Arc Printer” which is how POD books are made. Like other POD publishers, they farm out this printing to a superbig company like Ingram’s LSI service (More about LSI below). Their philosophy is to keep the book prices down in order to up the numbers sold. One of their books might typically list at about $10 with a royalty to the author of about $1.

On the DIY POD (do-it-yourself print-on-demand) front, carrying out the scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) process is bound to be time-consuming, but not devoid of geekly interest. I haven’t done a test run yet.

To start with, I’d tear the books up and scan them into PDF files at 300 dpi. I’m about to get a new copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0, which supposedly has decent OCR. Otherwise I might need to buy the Omnipage OCR ware for $100. In principle you can do OCR on scanned TIFF files with Microsoft Document Imaging, but I don’t think I’d want to do a whole book that way.

Once I get the text in electronic form, I’d get my designer-pro daughter Georgia to help with the InDesign creation of a book PDF. Most of all, I’d like to make paintings for the covers, as POD books otherwise tend to have rather generic public-domain cover art.

As for DIY POD distribution, I learned about some possibilities via a Make #12 article “Book Yourself” by Kevin Kelly. The basic idea is that you send a print-ready Adobe Acrobat PDF file for the book and its cover to a POD printing company, and let them fulfill your orders and send you your cut.

The DIY POD printer company I’ve looked at most is Lulu. For about $100 you can get an international standard book number (ISBN) that gets your book listed on Amazon and similar databases, also your book can be in the databases of libraries. When you buy the ISBN, you can select your own publisher name, like Big Pig Press or whatever. You can terminate your relationship with Lulu anytime.

The retail price for a Lulu book goes like this. Say you want a 6” x 9” perfect bound (stack of pages glued at the spine in the usual fashion) black and white (with color cover) 175 page trade paperback—Lulu charges $5.00 to print it, I add on $2 for royalties, Lulu charges a fourth of my royalties $0.50, making $7.50, and a retailer adds on a little over half of that for themselves, say $3.50, so Amazon might list the book at $15 and discount it to $12.

Amazon has their own DIY POD printing company called BookSurge. They pay you 35% of the sale price of books that they themselves sell, and you can terminate the contract with 30 days notice. You send them a print-ready PDF file, and the books sell for about $15. So far as I can tell, the minimum startup charge to the author is $299. The core business of BookSurge seems to that of a vanity press, meaning that they want to sell their authors a wide range of editing and promotional packages; this is also the case with LuLu. But, again, you can put your own publisher name on the book.

For their own POD printing, many publishers use Lightning Source, Inc. (LSI) which is a division of Ingram, one of the larger book wholesalers in North America. In principle an individual can use LSI — by becoming a publisher — here’s a page discussing LSI and Lulu. I registered here, and a polite lady called me back from LSI, and said they’d be willing to produce my books. The LSI registration fee (includes getting an ISBN and so on) per book is something like $105, with the understanding that you’re sending in a completely finished PDF file for book and cover.

What about electronic book publication? Only three of my books are available as electronic books:

(1) Spaceland, electronic version from Tor, available on Diesel (about $10), eBookMall (about $11), or Fictionwise (about $10), in each case, formatted for the secure eReader (which can run on a wide range of handheld or desktop devices). Also available in the Amazon Kindle format (about $9).

(2) The Secret of Life, electronic version from ElectricStory, available on Diesel (in Mobipocket or MS Reader formats) (about $6) or the ElectricStory site (about $7), also available as a Kindle edition from Amazon (about $6)

(3) Postsingular, Creative Commons version permitted by Tor Books, available on my Postsingular site or on ManyBooks in unencrypted text, HTML, PDF, and other forms. Price: free.

Except for a very few megaellers at the high end of the power-law curve, marketing ebooks has thus far been pretty much a waste of time. My Spaceland from Tor has sold only a few dozen copies, while, over seven years, my The Secret of Life from ElectricStory has sold less than a hundred copies, even though no paperback edition ever appeared.

The fact that about 30,000 people downloaded my free ebook version of Postsingular shows me that people are willing to read books on computers…but, at least a present, they aren’t willing to pay for them.

Will the easy-on-the-eyes e-ink devices like Kindle change this? Maybe in 5 or 10 years, but for now, for most authors, selling ebooks is likely to be less profitable than selling POD books.

A different angle is to simply give the ebooks away, and think of your POD book a cost-effective printing service that people can use.

Cory Doctorow — who inspired me to do the Creative Commons release of Postsingular — argues passionately against encrypted ebooks and for making ebooks free.

If you’re living way the hell out on the long tail, why not get a few bucks from the rare passers-by? Yes, says Cory, but you can’t get money selling ebooks. Focus on the POD.

It’s worth making the distinction between an unencrypted “multiformat” ebook and the encrypted “secure” format with digital rights management (DRM). DRM is widely believed to be a Bad Thing, as it can make your ebook hard to read.

I tend to agree with Cory that DRM is such a big hassle that it’s not worth doing. But, this said, could there ever be a middle way between free ebooks and DRM ebooks, this would be selling ebooks in an unencrypted multiformat mode?

Unencrypted multiformat editions are less hassle to read, and, as a practical matter, it’s easier to create them than to create DRM ebooks. Yes, there’s some danger of people buying an unencrypted ebook and then giving out copies to their friends — but that’s a familiar kind of risk, and there are of course laws against doing this.

How hard is it to convert a book into an ebook? I’ve heard one editor say that conversion to ebooks costs considerably more than they recoup per book — and that may have been true five or ten years ago, but it’s hard to see why that would be the case anymore. Could it be that it costs a lot of money to get the codes to put DRM on a file? If that’s the case, it’s just another reason to deep-six DRM. But maybe the editor was just talking about adminstrative overhead…internally billable budget hours. In any case, the nub of hte problem is still this: ebooks only sell dozens of copies, so why bother?

In making the free version of Postsingular, I got the PDF file for the book from the publisher, used Acrobat Pro to save it as an RTF text file, munged that in Word until it looked nice, then saved that as a PDF file, as an HTML file, and as a text TXT file. It took me maybe two hours, tops.

But if you want a whole range of formats, like for Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, and the Ereader, then you need to do some more conversion work. Here’s a wiki that discusses ebook conversion.

Once you have your book in some ebook formats, how would you distribute it for sale?

If you wanted to sell ebooks in a DIY fashion, you could post them for sale at a pay-per-download site like PayLoadz. But probably hardly anyone would find your book there.

If you can pass yourself off as a publisher, you might get the ebook listed by Ingram’s electronic end of things, Lightning Source. So far as I can tell, it appears that all a publisher has to do is send them a file for the book and pay $12 per year per title to have it be an ebook. I’m guessing that LSI has the ebook conversion process automated and you just send them maybe the official PDF file plus an electronic text RTF file and/or maybe an unformatted ASCII file and they can spew out the other formats (like MS Reader and Palm) on demand. But I’m not sure about this; you have to register with LSI as a publisher to get info about how this works — if I succeed in doing this, I’ll post what I learn.

Another approach would to send a PDF image of your ebook to Amazon Kindle, who will encrypt it for their Kindle reader. You have to make a Kindle account and sign in to look at the info about how this works; so far as I can tell they want exclusive e-book rights.

Yet again, youmight approach the behemoth ebook sellerFictionwise — although they want at least ten (!) books as electronic RTF files, and they want exclusive rights to sell the ebooks.

I’m lost and I’m groping my way. But I like being lost. Kind of. The purpose of this blog entry (which I keep revising) is to organize my thoughts and assemble some links. Feel free to comment with your two cents worth…

My wife and I were in Big Sur for a few nights this week. First we went to good old Esalen and took a course on mindfulness meditation with a great Bay Area teacher called James Baraz, who often teaches classes in Berkeley.

There’s a zillion of James’s talks online, like a talk on mindfulness.

I might also mention the books and talks of Thich Nhat Hanh.

I really enjoyed the class meetings. All my life I’ve wanted to meditate — for a variety of reasons: to damp down my worry loops, to experience mental ecstasy, and to be more compassionate and balanced. I’ve tried to learn it from books, but it made a difference to be in a group, and to be able to ask the teacher a question like, “What if it gets boring?”

To this question, James said, “You can focus on the boredom and analyze what underlies it. A feeling of wanting more, anxiety of missing something, desire to be working. Stay with it.”

As I understood the talks, you want to stop getting caught up in passing thoughts and instead focus on something immediate, such as your breath or (variations) on the sounds around you, or the feelings in your body or even (in my case) a wind-rocking branch.

James suggested that, as a part of doing this:
(1) Notice what’s actually going on inside you,
(2) Stay in the present,
(3) Be aware that this moment will pass,
(4) Don’t judge your thoughts or the things you see and if you (inevitably) do judge something, don’t burden yourself with another layer by judging yourself for judging.

And, he added, when your mind (inevitably) wanders, don’t scold yourself, just bring the mind back, lovingly, like bringing back a puppy to his or her spot. And, at the end of a session, resist the temptation to think “that was a good one,” or “that was a bad one.”

Esalen—what a place. It’s so outrageously pleasant. Makes me frikkin’ proud to be a Californian. The hot mineral baths make your skin all smooth. I always think of Terence McKenna here because we taught an Esalen seminar together once. Life goes on and on.

We’ll see if I can keep up the meditation back home. I often do yoga in the morning, and maybe I can manage to tack on some meditation. I was in fact trying that today, but I was tempted to move and stretch instead of just watching my breath. And then when I’m moving my mind drifts off. That’s okay.

After Esalen we went further south to Lucia Lodge, a place I’ve always wondered about—it’s these old, like 1930s, cabins right on the edge of a cliff. Very comfortable, and nice to be so totally at the ass end of nowhere. “The end of the continent,” Sylvia kept saying

We drove up the obscure Nacimiento Road just after the Kirk Flats Campground, amazing views of the big elephant-like Sur hills.

Pushing it even further we drove five miles along the super-obscure, dirt South Coast Ridge Road and picknickicked it on a knoll, high pelikaans eyeing the wrinkled sea.

Some guy with a chain saw had cut a square out of a hollow tree. Kind of interesting looking. Like one of my characters Frek Huggins or Gibby the Grulloo lives in this tree.

Reminds me of the house in The Little Fur Family, published 1946.

We saw an oak tree from Mars as well. And then I encountered a guy with a backpack. “You camping here?” I asked him. “No, I live on that side of the ridge, and I’m hiking over to visit a friend on the other side. You’d best go back out of here the way you came.”

Then back to at Lucia Lodge, incredible to be so near the ocean. I’m hardly ever at Big Sur at night.

On the way home we stopped by the classic “dimensional gate” at Pfeiffer Beach—I’ve blogged about this place several times, for instance it was a big inspiration for Mathematicians in Love.

The clouds were interesting, with dangling wisps. Here we see a jellyfish on the left, and flying ghost on the right.

All the while, we kept remembering, off and on, to be mindful. When you remember that time is really passing, you have all the more impetus to experience the now. “You must be present to win,” says James Baraz, quoting a sign seen in a Vegas casino…

I’ve been rereading The Letters of William Burroughs 1945-1959, edited by Oliver Harris (Viking 1993). I’m focusing on the letters from Tangiers, Tangier, Tanger, Tangers as it’s variously spelt—these run from 1954 to 1958, and a lot of them are to Allen Ginsberg. This particular edition came out in 1993, and I read in it then. It’s a nostalgia trip for me, reading this stuff, fitting as spring itself is a nostalgic season. The return of youth. The drifting blossoms. I’ve been into Burroughs for almost fifty years, I first read him in my brother’s copies of Evergreen Review when I was 12 or 13. See also my blog entry on Burroughs and his Yage Letters.

I also read a lot of his letters in an earlier collection, Letters to Allen Ginsberg, edited by Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman (Full Court Press, 1982), I remember reading that in my office on Church St. in Lynchburg, Virginia—I’d set up as a freelance writer there in fall of 1982, and was greatly heartened by Bill’s depression, frenzy, and hysterically funny turns of phrase.

In October, 2006, I wrote a story, “The Imitation Game,” in which Alan Turing escapes being murdered by the British secret service on June 8, 1954, and makes his way to Tangier, disguised as his Greek boyfriend Zeno. Turing has actually grown a copy of Zeno’s face which he’s glued to his face—and he left behind a copy of his face glued to the cop-poisoned Zeno’s face so that the Pig thinks they’ve offed Turing himself. That story is supposed to come out in Interzone magazine next month, the editor meant to put it out sooner, but lost track. You can, however, hear me reading “The Imitation Game” via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

In his letters, Burroughs talks about his work in progress as being called Interzone, a phrase he probably coined because Tangier was at that time an International Zone, governed by France, Spain, Britain and Italy. This amalgam of “routines” became Naked Lunch.

By a routine, Burroughs means something like what we’d now call a rap or a rant. It’s kind of a vaudeville term. He starts talking about routines in his early 1950s novel, Queer. In a letter from June 24, 1954, he says a routine “is not completely symbolic, that is, it is subject to shlup over into ‘real’ action at any time (like cutting off finger joint [which Burroughs once did to impress a lover] and so forth).”

The routines are compressed short stories, long on affront, very in-your-face, often very funny. If you’ve read Burroughs you know what I mean. “Like snap, wow.” A phrase he uses a couple of times—a bit ironically of course—in one of his happiest and longest letters, written Oct 29, 1956, when he’s temporarily off junk and swinging with Miss Green. Even the threat of jihadist attackers amuses him. “It’s like the sight of someone about to flip or someone full of paranoid hate excites me. I want to see what will happen if they really wig. I want to crack them open and feed on the wonderful soft stuff that will ooze out.” Like snap, wow.

On Nov 1, 1955, once again after kicking junk and having a few words with Miss Green: “Watching a glass of mint tea on a bamboo mat in the sun, the steam blown back into the glass top like smoke from a chimney. It seemed to have some special significance like an object spotted in a movie. I was thinking like a book you read which also has pictures and accompanying music. Of course couldn’t approximate life itself which is seen, heard, felt, experienced on many different levels and dimensions…”

This dovetails synchronistically with the recent posts on RR vs. VR.

On Feb 18, 1955. He writes about an SF theme he hopes to weave into Naked Lunch. “…an anti-dream drug which destroys the symbolizing, myth-making, intuitive, empathizing, telepathic faculty in man, so that his behavior can be controlled and predicted by the scientific methods that have proved so useful in the physical sciences.”

Der Meister’s words hitting me like tracer bullets.

Synchronistically again, this is a theme in Hylozoic, where I write about the Peng birds siphoning off the world’s computational gnarl. I push it a little further, in that I don’t see a big distinction between the deep creativity of humans and the computationally irreducibility of matter. In Burroughs’s time, people didn’t yet realize that the physical sciences can’t in fact predict jack in terms of actual details, like which sand grain goes where in a slide.

In a letter of April 22, 1954, Burroughs mentions knowing Brian Howard, a dissipated graduate of Christ Church, Oxford, who might have known Alan Turing. Howard is in town for a cure of his (perhaps imaginary) TB. Howard in turn mentioned Burroughs in a letter, see Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, edited by MJ Lancaster, 1968, in particular this page online, from Howard’s letter to his friend John Banting, in March, 1954: “a nice, if slightly long-winded, ex-Harvard creature of forty who is endeavoring to cure himself of morphinomania by taking this new medicine which the Germans invented during the war. There are several trade names for it. He uses two. Eukodal and Heptenal.”

If I fudge the dates a bit, I can suppose that Howard was still in Tangier in mid-summer of 1954, when Alan Turing hit the town. I want to write a story about him meeting Burroughs. I think I might write it in the format of “lost” letters from Burroughs. I’ll call the story “Tangier Routines” and publish it in Flurb. Flurb will print it for sure—I sleep with the editor (me).

It could be significant for the end of my story that Burroughs’s grandfather founded the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, later Burroughs Corporation, which was just beginning to get into computers in the mid-1950s.

To really emulate Burroughs in the composition of “Tangiers Routines,” I need to be pasting the thing together from scraps in letters. Or scraps in blog posts.

Perhaps Alan finds a way to form himself into something like a slug. He crawls across the room and schlup, he assimilates Burroughs. Or rather merges with him. In any case, the process ends with only one eccentric forty-year-old in the room. Feeling very full, Alan/Bill went into the outhouse in back and took a seventy kilogram dump — eliminating redundant parts. Like a corporation that’s “right-sizing” after a merger. And then home to re-organize the Burroughs Corporation!

Or maybe they’ll be wearing ruffs of shelf-mushrooms on their necks. And I want a Happy Cloak routine (more on that later). If it’s routines, then I don’t have to choose. It can all come down.

Dear Allen…