Author: Andrew Huey

Amazon – used books

Just for yuks, I put a couple of old books up for sale on Amazon today. Apparently, this is my storefront. (Impressive, huh?)

Looking at the way they handle used book sales, and looking at all the folks selling their books for a penny, there’s really no way for an individual small-time seller to make any money selling readily-available books.

I put my books up at $1. Amazon apparently takes a minimum $2.50 commission, but they credit you $4 for shipping. So, the end result is that I would get $2.50 total, which would have to cover my shipping costs. It looks like a one-pound media mail shipment costs $2.13 now, so that doesn’t leave much room for profit. Since they don’t charge for listing stuff, though, I guess it doesn’t hurt to list some stuff and see if anybody bites.

Steve Gerber

I just came across the news of Steve Gerber’s death. Mark Evanier has written a very good blog post about Mr. Gerber. I have very fond memories of reading his Howard the Duck comics when I was a kid. At the time, Howard was pretty much the strangest thing to come out of mainstream comics (e.g. Marvel and DC). And I loved Destroyer Duck too. The first Destroyer Duck comic would have been one of the first independent (e.g. NOT Marvel or DC) books I’d ever picked up.

Along with a few other guys, like Don McGregor, Steve Englehart, and Jim Starlin, Gerber redefined mainstream comics in the 70s and early 80s. I never got a chance to meet him or hear him speak at a con, but I loved his work, and it sounds like he was a nice guy. RIP.

more Kindle thoughts

I’ve been thinking about the Kindle again. I still haven’t quite decided to buy one, but I’m getting closer.

Here’s a scenario that’s got me thinking:
(It’s kind of a long story, so bear with me.)
I bought the audiobook version of Brad Meltzer’s “Zero Game” from iTunes awhile ago. I’ve been listening to it in the car, and enjoying it quite a bit. I hit a point, though, where the audio just cut out and skipped ahead about five chapters. I went back and forth with Apple about it, and eventually got a refund. (They tell me that they’ve now posted a corrected version, so if you’re interested in the book, don’t let this glitch stop you from buying it!)

While I was going back and forth with support, though, I really wanted to just continue reading the book. If I’d had a Kindle, I could have just bought it from Amazon, and picked up reading the missing parts the same day I hit the glitch.

I did wind up buying a used hardcover copy of the book from Amazon so I could read the missing part. Now, while that obviously took longer to get to me than the Kindle version would have, it was a bit cheaper, and I can (theoretically) resell it, or just give it away, when I’m done reading it.

However, I’m sitting here right now looking at the book, and thinking that I’m probably going to just toss it on the floor in a pile of other old books when I’m done with it. The used book system on Amazon is great for buyers, but they’ve driven down prices on used books so much that there’s not much point trying to sell it after I’m done with it. And I don’t know anybody who’d really be interested in reading it who I could hand it off to. And I know I’ll never talk myself into just throwing it out.

I’ve got a whole bunch of books that fall into this category. Basically, books that I’m probably never going to want to re-read, and have almost no resale value, but I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

In some ways, the economics of this seem almost perverse, but I think I might be willing to pay a little extra to buy a book that doesn’t leave any physical footprint in my tiny little apartment. Something I can keep on a device, or my computer’s hard drive, or wherever, for however long I want. It’s annoying that the DRM scheme on any e-book reader (Sony or Amazon) will prevent me from loaning or giving away my old “books.” And it’s a little galling that the e-books generally cost more than a used copy in hardcover or paperback. But I’m looking at this apartment full of old books, and thinking that I could really reclaim a lot of space if I could just get rid of some of them!

Having said that, though, there are certainly still a lot of books I’d like to keep in hard copy form. Jasper Fforde’s books, for instance, wouldn’t work well on a Kindle, since he plays with fonts, footnotes, and other odd stuff that wouldn’t translate well into the single-typeface Kindle. In fact, Fforde’s concept of the “UltraWord” system, introduced in “Well of Lost Plots”, is, in some ways, a parody of DRM’d e-book systems. One of the characteristics of UltraWord was that you could only read any given book three times, then it would just refuse to open.

I’m aware that buying DRM’d e-books right now, for any platform, will probably leave me with books that I won’t be able to read again past, say, five or ten years, since whatever platform I buy now will probably be gone by then. I bought Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy in Microsoft Reader format several years back, and read them on my old Toshiba Pocket PC. While I still have those files around somewhere, I don’t have the Pocket PC anymore. If I want to read those books again on the Kindle, I’d have to repurchase them. (And, hey, I see that I can get them for the Kindle, for $3.19 each. That’s actually not a bad price. Cheaper than the average used copy, even.)

GTD after a move

I haven’t posted anything about GTD in a while. I fell behind in my general filing & organizational stuff back in November, when we were preparing for our big move at work. I’ve gradually gotten things back into some kind of order now, but I’m still behind in some ways. I’ve got about 80 messages in my inbox, for instance, that I haven’t gone through and filed. And I haven’t done a proper weekly review yet in 2008, really. But my desk (and general work area) is pretty well organized now. I know where all the important stuff is. My files are alphabetized and in my drawers. All the books are on the bookshelves. The whiteboard is up on the wall. I have a fair number of random papers on my desk, but not in a big undifferentiated pile, or anything like that.

I just spent some time thinking about GTD Connect, and whether or not I should drop out of it. I’ve decided to keep up with in for a few more months, at least. The forums, podcasts, e-mails, etc, do seem to be helping out a bit.

San Diego Comic-Con hotel stuff

As usual, it was nearly impossible to get into the Comic-Con hotel reservation site when it went live today. Eventually, I got through. Nearly everything was taken by then, but I managed to snag a room in the Sheraton San Diego Hotel and Marina. It looks like an OK hotel, but it’s not in easy walking distance of the convention center. And it’s right by the airport, so it may be noisy. I can cancel the reservation, if I decide it’s not worth it, but I think it’ll do.

There are a lot of interesting comments on the experience in this entry on The Beat’s blog, and more in the official Con blog. Lots of grumbling about moving to Vegas and/or dumping Travel Planners. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I actually find the whole process kind of fun. It takes just enough effort that I feel like I’ve accomplished something when I’ve got the reservation made, but not so much effort that it annoys me.

Giants 17, Patriots 14

Okay, color me impressed. And a little surprised. I never really doubted that we could win the SuperBowl, but I didn’t really think we would win the SuperBowl.

In the weeks leading up to the big game, by the way, I enjoyed following the blogs at the NY Times and Wall Street Journal. The WSJ blog doesn’t actually have a lot of stuff about football on it, but it’s still fun to read. The Times “Fifth Down” blog is much more focused on the actual football. The live blog entry they did during the game is pretty neat.

wireless networking

My Airport Express started flaking out earlier this week, so I decided to hook up a WRT54G that I had originally bought for my father, but never got around to installing for him. That went pretty smooth, and seems to be working fine. One nice plus to this is that I now have one box acting as my router and WAP, instead of the separate Linksys Router and Apple Airport Express that I used to have.

I decided to take the plunge and switch from WEP to WPA now too. Everything I have works with WPA+TKIP, except for my TiVo. I’m going to have to order a new USB network adapter to get that to work. It’s only $40 though, so I might as well. It looks like I can’t do WPA2, though, since my Sony PSP doesn’t do WPA2. Oh, and I realized that I now have six devices hooked up wirelessly: a MacBook, a Dell Inspiron, an iPod Touch, a TiVo, a PSP, and a Wii.

One more funny thing: I can now pick up 22 different wireless access points in my apartment. The airspace in here is getting mighty crowded! When I first hooked up my original Airport base station several years ago, there were no other WAPs broadcasting around here at all.

San Diego hotels

Comic-Con has started a blog on “Staying in San Diego.” Hotel reservations open up next week. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes. They haven’t even posted the list of con hotels and rates yet, so I have no clue how many hotels they’ve got deals with this year, or what the rates are. Their initial post in this blog even encourages you to try booking a hotel outside of the official con block, since that’ll obviously sell out quickly.

I’ve been scouting alternatives myself, and I haven’t come up with much. There are few downtown hotels you can book through normal channels, but they’re all $300+ a night. There are a couple of hotels in Mission Valley that can be had for under $200, but that’s a bit of a haul to get back and forth to the convention center every day. I think it can be done via the trolley, but I’m not sure about the logistics on that. One of the hotels I was looking at is across the highway from a trolley stop, but it’s hard to tell if there’s any way for a pedestrian to get across the highway.

Well, I guess I’ll try getting a room in the official block, and if that doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll consider skipping the con this year. The way the economy is headed, maybe that’s not a bad idea anyway.

Meanwhile, WonderCon is just a few weeks away!

random anime stuff

I watched the last two DVD volumes (V6 and V7) of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (2nd Gig) yesterday. I’d watched the earlier episodes on Cartoon Network a year or so back, but somehow I missed the last 5 or 6 episodes, so I picked up the DVDs. This is a pretty dense series. The episodes on V6, in particular, have a whole lot of exposition going on. The action ramps up in V7, and the series does indeed end with a bang, but there’s quite a lot going on beneath the surface.

One nice extra on the DVDs that was cut out of the CN showings is “Tachikomatic Days,” a bunch of funny little shorts that are stuck at the end of each episode. They’re almost funny enough to make me want to pick up the earlier DVDs just for these bits. (Maybe if I see the DVDs on sale cheap at some point.)

There seems to be a movie out that’s basically cut together from the 2nd Gig series. This guy has a review up, as does DVD Verdict. I’ll have to watch for this, if it shows up on CN or maybe Starz, though it sounds like it doesn’t contain anything that isn’t already in the series.

There’s a bit of a preview of the new PiQ magazine here. I mentioned this a little while ago — Newtype USA is basically being relaunched as “PiQ.” It sounds like it will be a more general “geek culture” magazine, with a smaller size and page count than Newtype, and a lower price. (And no bundled DVDs. Darn.) There’s one sentence in this preview that makes me a bit pessimistic about PiQ: “Essentially, the otherworldy Japanese ‘object’ that was Newtype USA is gone, to be replaced by something that very-much resembles Wizard in size… and in tone.” Um, that doesn’t sound good.

Right Stuf is having a blowout sale on ADV DVDs. They did this with Geneon a little over a year ago, and I would up buying a bunch of DVDs. I think I can manage to avoid buying 25 ADV DVDs. Most of the stuff from them that I like, I already have. I might go with the 10 for $50 deal though. There are a few things I wouldn’t mind paying $5 each for…