Conversation

It’s easy enough I might get back into doing my own manuscripts, modulo cover designs. Don’t know if last inch PDF tweaking is any better now. When I did Tempo in LaTeX in 2011, Lulu screwed up initial print. Print-stability and ebook-render-stability are still unsolved problems
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For Tempo, I eventually went with Lightning Source, which delivered solid print stability, but by demanding a weird old stable PDF version that I couldn’t generate myself, and had to outsource to who also did the cover. Updates are therefore hard, so I have never updated.
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Tempo ebook was weird. I outsourced to a pro shop that asked for Word as input but grudgingly accepted LaTeX generated PDF instead. This was 10y ago. Tools outputting ePub directly have improved, and conversion to mobi is also easy. But the auto layouts are generally atrocious.
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For my ebooks 2 and 3 (be slightly evil and Gervais principle, circa 2013), a friend wrote a script to convert blog/mailchimp export html to LaTeX first and then render as ePub/mobi. Weird, but worked.
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ebooks 4-9 were done by using some custom wrangling, and ebook 10 by … I genuinely have no idea wtf they did but the manuscripts turned out okay, and better than any of the auto-layout half-ass pathways I’ve tried.
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Basically, ~15y since first Kindle reader (2007), ebook production is still janky. But Vellum suggests we’re close to getting to the sort of low-skill predictability and stability that LaTeX+Acrobat delivered (with 10x pain) for print. And might be light enough for easy updates.
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I’ve never considered print again after Tempo partly because of climate, but partly because of sheer jankiness of web-to-print workflows, since poor production is far more visible in print. But since Vellum produces print too, I am experimenting again.
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But this time I’m not doing the whole heavy lightning source pathway. The higher margin and theoretical non-Amazon sales are not really worth optimizing for. Gonna use kindle paperback unless they screw up. You’d be surprised how much can break in production print.
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But more generally, I’ve been musing about a fundamental distinction between natural stream publishers like me, who basically publish flow content (tweets, newsletters, serials, blogs), and manuscript publishers, who publish archival stock content (papers, books).
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Flow publishing wasn’t an option until ~2006 or so, but is truly natural for me. Stock publishing always felt like media dysphoria to me, even though I’ve done a fair amount of it. LaTeX was fun in academia because it was an elegant nerdsnipe, but it’s not a good model for me now
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The flow/stock publishing distinction is human, not tech. It’s like the difference between people who like dressing casual everywhere and dread formal events, vs people who live for dress-up occasions. I’ll go to print about as enthusiastically as I’ll put on a suit and tie.
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I don’t even enjoy reading “dressed up” content anymore Webpage over pdf paper Ebook over print Photo stream over coffee table book
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Basically do you like to dress up formally for your encounters with “content” both as producer and consumer? Or do you live in shitpost land? I don’t know if there’s an in-between psychologically. So I wonder if high-production-values static sites will ever take off.
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I’ve never been big on marginalia 🤔 I rarely take notes or even highlight. My preferred model now is kindle highlights and very limited notes emailed to myself for the very few things I close read. Or screenshots. Or with new iOS photos with OCR.
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Replying to @vgr
I still much prefer physical books when reading a book. Writing marginalia, I don’t want to type something. Typing feels like proofreading/editing and that’s distracting work, not enjoyment
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This is a new thought for me btw. Used to think of paper fetishists as luddites but now with “formal dress up vs casual” metaphor, I think of both as enduring modalities. Since clearly, even after a century of sartorial casualization, a big fraction of people still love dress-up
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So I’m newly willing to accommodate dress up crowd if I can do so easily. You want nice print volume, I’ll try to oblige. But there’s now a new medium/message coupling problem. Half my content *can’t* play dress-up easily even if it wants to. Twitter is the big example.
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I’ve promised myself I’ll publish a book of threads once this meta-thread hits 100. Thanks to I now have a shortlist of ones I may have missed. But I’m dreading it because pulling even threads (which are less conversational) out of twitter feels like taxidermy.
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I think it’s time to start making my thread of threads and begin reeling in my dissipated brain. 1. Boundary intelligence twitter.com/vgr/status/915…
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This is not a new problem specific to twitter btw. All flow publishing lives in an intimately entangled conversational context. The only reason my blogs and newsletters have even been ebook friendly that I never wrote in “catalyze huge comment threads” ways.
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For comment heavy blogs, losing the comments context is similar to losing the reply/quote context of twitter. Even if you manage to navigate shaky copyright issues (rights to publish comments or twitter replies) how do you actually “dress up” that content in suits and ties?
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But the solution was a weak one. Fundamentally, turning flows into stocks is a highly lossy process. The faster the flow, and the tighter the REPLs underlying it, the more lossy it is. Printing twitter threads is like 70% lossy. Printing blogs is like 50% lossy. Newsletters, ~20%
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Of course old media books and papers are flow-to-stock too. A paper is the end result of a bunch of collaborating academics working together with whiteboards, meetings, and emails. But that doesn’t feel lossy because it was ephemeral to begin with.
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Unlike twitter or blogs, most oral conversations/video conferences aren’t recorded. Most whiteboard states aren’t photographed for posterity. Most email and text messages isn’t preserved. You can’t “lose” what had little to no archival potential to begin with.
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Revealingly, I photograph most of my whiteboard scrawls, most recently directly into Roam 😆 I use digital notes where possible, though paper notebooks are still a big part of working notes (because I like to draw/diagram/math in ways that are still not easy even on iPad/pencil)
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