eBooks and eArticles

[Orwell1984]

For example, Adam Thompson and I have been working on a unit history of the short-range reconnaissance units 2.(H)/14 and 4.(H)/12

I'd buy one of those 400 copies at least!

[AndreasB]

Me too. But given the choice of paying EUR 15 for an E-copy or EUR 50 for print, I'd go for the former.

All the best

Andreas

[edwest]

Gentlemen,

Imagine the following. You are commander of a task force in World War II. "Men. The enemy has fielded two new weapons. We must find a way to counter them. Are you with me?"

May I suggest a new way to fund book projects called kickstarter? Here's an example:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...hape-of-design

The basics are this: you submit your book project for review. If accepted, you set your funding goal and time frame. Let's say, two weeks. You tell others in your niche community about what you're doing. Funding is all or nothing, but, in my view, it's worth a try. Finally, if successful, kickstsarter gets 5% of monies raised and there is a credit card processing fee of 3%.




Ed

[Jukka Juutinen]

Originally Posted by AndreasB

Me too. But given the choice of paying EUR 15 for an E-copy or EUR 50 for print, I'd go for the former.

All the best

Andreas

But is the choice between 15 euros or 50 euros? How many pages in what size would the end product have? Are we talking about a properly laid out work (not just a text file with illustrations thrown in) with the only difference being the digital vs. printed format? Doing the layout costs considerable amount of money, if done by a contracted person/company.

[Nick Beale]

As a person of taste and discernment I naturally buy vinyl LPs. All the better when one comes with a code to download the music, offering you digital convenience alongside analogue quality. In the same way, I'd love to get a real book accompanied by a download offering searchable text, zoomable illustrations etc.

For reading I'd prefer a real full-length book, for smaller scale things I'd be perfectly happy with an electronic item, especially one that exploited the medium's strengths.

Speaking as a writer, I'm intrigued Apple's iBooks Author software. It offers templates for creating books or whatever which you can then sell through the App Store. That also addresses the point about losing your books if your computer crashes because you can always reload your purchases from the store. It's incompatible with my OS version (which I don't want to change yet because I still need to run some older programs) and it's usually wise to let them get a version or two under their belt before you jump in. Also, templates notwithstanding, design is an issue with a number of the self-published books I own. I enjoy a book more if it's well laid out and that skill isn't so widespread.

[Jukka Juutinen]

Nick, designing a book shouldn't be that difficult as long as the designer keeps in mind that he is designing the book for readers, not himself, nor his colleagues. One can't go wrong by emulating older books, say from the 1960s. At that time the designers were proud people who didn't resort to gimmicks like ragged-right some modern "designers" do. It was also a time when hyphenation wasn't a crime in English text. And time when dots were not omitted from abbreviations and initials!

[edwest]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

As a person of taste and discernment I naturally buy vinyl LPs. All the better when one comes with a code to download the music, offering you digital convenience alongside analogue quality. In the same way, I'd love to get a real book accompanied by a download offering searchable text, zoomable illustrations etc.

For reading I'd prefer a real full-length book, for smaller scale things I'd be perfectly happy with an electronic item, especially one that exploited the medium's strengths.

Speaking as a writer, I'm intrigued Apple's iBooks Author software. It offers templates for creating books or whatever which you can then sell through the App Store. That also addresses the point about losing your books if your computer crashes because you can always reload your purchases from the store. It's incompatible with my OS version (which I don't want to change yet because I still need to run some older programs) and it's usually wise to let them get a version or two under their belt before you jump in. Also, templates notwithstanding, design is an issue with a number of the self-published books I own. I enjoy a book more if it's well laid out and that skill isn't so widespread.

Hi Nick,


The books my company publishes (fiction) often include interior illustrations and charts. The Kindle, for example, if you read their technical fine print, is not yet at the point where this can be done or done well. I am unfamiliar with what Apple is offering.

I'm sure there are competent layout people out there, with some working freelance. The skill is not too difficult to master, but selecting a text font, leading (the distance between lines), and the best places to insert art and photos does require a good design background. Once again, the basic principles are not that hard to learn. In the "real" book business, there are dedicated cover designers since we know that a well designed cover sells books. A good general Art Director can master the basics, and there are a number of good rules that have stood the test of time, but the difference between a very good cover and a great one takes a bit of additional skill and some inspiration. As an assistant art director myself, I help approve the four different pencil cover sketches we get in and I'm expected to explain my choice in 5 minutes or less. Once a sketch is approved, it has to go through review again as a color rough, and my comments have to cover all the bases quickly and succinctly.

With our latest book cover, we had the artist at our office, and the head art director and myself provided additional minor corrections and fine tuning before the piece was fully completed. This was done on a graphics tablet hooked up to one of our computers. Then the front and back cover text was composited onto the finished cover.

I think PDFs are the way to go if you want that, but there are two problems: piracy and "sharing." As the copyright holder, only my company decides how the book is distributed, so if we add copy protection, it's there for that reason.



Ed

[Richard T. Eger]

Dear All,

My, we've had quite a discussion here!

I made a comment in my previous missive about sharing a photo in a book with someone else, which I think struck a nerve with Ed. The law allows libraries to let their clientele do precisely this for research purposes.

What to one person may seem to be a photo of little particular interest may be one that holds a brand new piece of evidence for someone else, a real treasure.

I recently had such a happening. Actually, two. I now have a copy of Mark Proulx's Wings of the Black Cross, Number Nine. Now, I ordered this book because it was described as having photos of the Me 262. And, true to advertisement, there they were, although nothing particularly spectacular. As I thumbed through the book I did run across 5 photos taken at the end of the war at Kassel. There, at the top of page 29 was a rather unique photo showing the cockpit to a Ju 388, the fuselage to an Fi 103R manned V-1, 3 BMW 003 jet engines upside down, 1 Jumo 004 removed from an Me 262, and, the biggest surprise of all, 2 bare metal Me 262 tail sections. Now, were parts for the Me 262 being manufactured at Kassel? That was news to me. An uncorroborated Googled Internet forum suggested such, that parts for the Me 262 were being made at Kassel for REIMAHG Kahla. I'd sure love to pin that one down, as tracking down the manufacturing of the Me 262 is a particular fascination of mine.

But, that wasn't the only goodie that Mark had come up with. Three other photos showed photos of fuselages of the Junkers EF 126 Lilli. In one is also a P-61 Black Widow and a nose of a C-47, so these were definite U.S. photos, not postwar Russian developments. Heck, I never knew that any EF project ever saw cut metal. Now, I gave a call to my friend Manfred Boehme in Germany, who I know has an interest in such rarified developments, and he about flipped out, similarly unaware of any such production. In this case, I ordered a second copy of the book for him.

But, my point is that we, as researchers, are constantly trying to connect the dots. A photo may appear in one book and a photo taken from a different view of the same aircraft may appear in another and the two, when combined, provide a key missing when either photo is viewed alone. Thus, scanning and sharing to enhance our knowledge seems a very reasonable thing to do.

Is there a risk that I will detract from the sale of a book? Perhaps. Or, my friend may be so anxious to see the original for himself, that he obtains a copy. A printed book, in and of itself, is a deterent against duplication of the book as a whole. To do a really good job of it, you would need to literally tear the book asunder and scan each and every page, then reproduce it to sell to others. As has been pointed out, the market for our specific interests is not going to generally exceed a few thousand copies, making the whole effort of dubious value.

Now, as much as I like great photos in books, scanning them can be a really big headache. Photos in books are frequently, if not always, half tone prints and your scanner really loves to create barre/moire with them. You can try to fix this in a number of ways, with probably the most effective way being to scan at 1200 dpi, in which case you scan the individual dots. It's a slow process. You still end up with a half tone image. Yes, I can hear the argument that says, ah, but if we supply you an eBook, you might actually get a better image. True enough, if you provide it at high enough resolution. So, you then are faced with the question of do I allow the buyer to extract and make a nice print of the photo or do I lock it up, in which case it is look, but don't touch, and I lose the capability to share the photo, which is information, with other researchers. It is researchers, putting their heads together, as here at TOCH!, that can unlock mysteries that an individual researcher might not be able to accomplish.

As for reading a book on my computer or, even if I had an eReader, I fully agree with Ed's point of view that I hate reading anything lengthy on a screen. I write very long letters to Manfred and I guarantee you I don't proofread them on a screen - I print them out and mark them up with a red marker. Doing such on a screen is an unmitigated pain in the ass, although I have done so once for an author who asked me to proofread his book in .pdf format. I did it, but it was painful.

A book is to be held, to be enjoyed, to be thumbed through, to work back and forth through. I rarely start at the beginning. I find the subject matter of greatest interest and dig in. If I want the preliminaries, I'll go back for them. If it is a well referenced book, I'll be back and forth between the text and the chapter notes. I want to know if the author has done his research. Where did he get his material? Does he have a citation to support a specific claim? That means a lot of back and forth. That could be very painful with an eBook.

Regards,
Richard

[Andrew Arthy]

Hi guys,

Many thanks for the interesting comments and debate.

Morten and I will proceed with the eBook and eArticle idea, producing .pdf versions of articles and smaller books using exactly the same layout style as used for our printed books. However, our main focus will continue to be our two main printed book projects, Air War Courland and Fw 190 Defending Southern Italy. We’ll keep you all updated.

All the best,
Andrew & Morten

Air War Publications – www.airwarpublications.com

[edwest]

Dear Richard,


I also purchased a copy of Wings of the Black Cross Number 9 and like you, could not believe my eyes when I saw the EF 126 fuselages. Although there is a list of contributors in the book, who took this photo? What is its provenance? I don't doubt that it's genuine. As an aside, I keep reading about private collections or photo albums on eBay that disappear in a heartbeat. I have seen a few photos of an Fi-103 R with a small wooden box on the top of the tail assembly on an American trailer with unknown contents, and a photo of a Messerschmitt P.1101 inside an unknown building in an undamaged state. As I recall, it was not missing the side fuselage piece that is commonly seen in books. And it disappeared a moment later.

Regarding libraries. They buy the books they lend out. Yes, one is allowed under the "fair use" law to photocopy pages from books and magazines for research purchases. But, whether people realize it or not, sharing such material over the computer amounts to distributing it. Even though pieces of paper are not involved, it's still distribution.

We have an old but top of the line scanner which we use for scanning artwork and photos that we own. These are either reprinted as is or used for printed books.

Convenience is nice. And we all don't want to do more work than is necessary but sometimes this subject is brought up as a one-way street. If a publisher produced an e-book, I would contact them for a physical print-out even though I would pay more, including shipping it to me. Just speaking for myself, I want data. Photos are good but we've printed photos, even in color, on our own equipment and again, from my point of view, that would be fine for the kind of information I'm looking for, namely the existence, location and actual photos of aircraft, missiles, rockets and other secret projects that supposedly never went beyond the drawing board or officially never existed.

In the much ignored book, T-Force by Sean Longdon, there is mention of "electrically charged rockets" being guarded by the Dutch Resistance. A google search revealed a reference to such rockets in a Czech scientific publication and the name Eugen Sänger. Dr. Sänger first published his ideas about this subject in 1953.




Best regards,
Ed