Novelr - Latest Comments

Re: Word Needs To Die

Mary W Walters — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:38:32 -0000

I've been editing for a long long time using track changes. I love it, and so do my clients. To each her own.

Re: Word Needs To Die

Nancy Norbeck — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 10:30:51 -0000

As a writer, proofreader, and editor, I disagree most strongly that Word's Track Changes feature is anything like wonderful. It's difficult to read, difficult to manipulate, and if there are more than a few edits, it results in a document that will make you blind long before you manage to decipher it. Editing should not be this hard, and the way Track Changes works, it'll send more people running screaming from the editing process than it'll bring into the fold. (Not that I'm at all sure the masses give a good goddamn about well-edited documents/books anymore anyway, given the comments they leave on those abysmal self-pubbed volumes on Amazon, especially if anyone tries to point out that there's a need for editing.)

Re: Suggest A Link!

Umair_hp — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:48:18 -0000

http://www.binary-store.com
Latest reviews on electronic products.

Re: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules For Writing Fiction

Brimshack — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:40:47 -0000

Always happy to see what wisdom this man left behind.

Re: The Troubling Dual Nature of Books and Websites

JohnnyPat — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:38:42 -0000

It depends on what your definition of "non-fiction" is. Cookbooks and reference materials might be converted to apps and websites, but long-form journalism, essay, memoir, biography...these require the same deep immersion engagement as long- and short-form fiction.

Re: The Troubling Dual Nature of Books and Websites

Eli James — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:14:00 -0000

I'm not sure I want to say that straight-text novels will compete against interactive/visually rich fiction. It strikes me that the two are very different things.

But yes, publisher do argue that books compete with video games and movies and Youtube videos. It's a different argument, though - one that I'm not making here.

What I wanted to focus on was the ability for websites to replace books today, which was something that was unheard of just a few years ago. This strikes me as having huge repercussions for certain portions of the publishing industry.

Re: The Troubling Dual Nature of Books and Websites

Eli James — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:06:11 -0000

It's too hard to generalize about non-fiction's future as books, I think. Non-fiction is too large a category to generalize effectively. Certainly it's more obvious for some kinds of non-fiction than others - reference books, for instance, as opposed to idea books.

Re: The Troubling Dual Nature of Books and Websites

Eli James — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 02:04:09 -0000

Thank you for giving us a good argument for cookbooks, T.L. I must admit that I google for recipes (and save them to a local file on my computer) more often than I flip through cookbooks. But then again - that's me, and I don't cook as much as a lot of people.

Re: Word Needs To Die

zoetewey — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:09:10 -0000

Also, it's not particularly expensive--not as expensive as Word anyhow.

It's actually currently free on Linux (on the other hand the Linux version is currently in beta).

Re: Word Needs To Die

Clare K. R. Miller — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 18:08:02 -0000

Yes, Scrivener will export as PDF, mobi, epub, HTML, doc, odt, and pretty much any format you can think of. That's one of the (many) extremely cool things about it. It does cost money, though (but you can try it free for 30 days). If you're looking for a free word processor you may want to check out OpenOffice and/or LibreOffice.

Re: Word Needs To Die

Radh — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:46:48 -0000

I think my problem is, I don't know any alternatives for Word, really. I usually write in a .txt format through a very minimalist text editor like Notepad or Writer, and then format it in Google Docs or wherever I am posting it online.

Does Scrivener have the option to export as a PDF or a MOBI? I honestly don't have the money to buy a new word processor. I've had the same Word for 10 years, and that itself was a copy from a friend.

Re: The Troubling Dual Nature of Books and Websites

Thip — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:58:00 -0000

Hmmm... Agree AND disagree. Books, i.e., fiction storytelling, are not safe from the web, but interactivity is against their nature. If you think about what storytelling really is - as distinct from other kinds of entertainment - it becomes obvious.

My purely personal IMHO-theory is that fiction storytelling is qualitatively different from non-fic and games. Non-fic is LEARNING, meaning you want to be able to search, pick, ask questions, etc. Games are role-playing, virtual or not. Fic-stories are (clunky description, but it's the best I can do) guided daydream hypnoses which you want to lose yourself in. You do NOT want interactivity - it would break the very spell you're trying to allow being cast on yourself.

If that's true, then the DELIVERY of the text that runs you into, and through, your "guided daydream" can easily be e-text, presented on any non-intrusive reading device. Doesn't matter which one, as long as it is easy to forget it's there, so's you can sink into the daydream.

And I think you are quite right that the sole reason that e-books are still in the "horseless carriage" stage (i.e., they mimic their paper predecessors) is that the novel-as-a-book, i.e., as a self-contained "chunk", is still the easiest (only?) way to monetize the damn thing. You've written lots of splendid analysis of the depressing difficulty of monetizing web fic right here on Novelr.

So I think fictional storytelling is quite safe from interactivity. It is not, however, safe from the web. Meaning it is not safe from the challenge of monetizing them when the reading public realize that e-books are just "proprietarized" webpages with pagination - and are made so purely to drive said reading public to pay for the pleasure of reading ;o)

Re: The Troubling Dual Nature of Books and Websites

T.L. Bodine — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:18:27 -0000

Speaking as a foodie, I'm also not sure I agree with the supposition that cookbooks are entirely supplanted by websites. If that were the case, all of the prestigious food-bloggers I know wouldn't be releasing books! While I certainly use the internet to find recipes, I still buy -- and read, cover to cover -- plenty of cookbooks. A good cookbook is more than a collection of recipes...it's a personal treatise on food, something that can only be fully appreciated as a coherent whole -- what's included, what's left out, the text that cones with recipes, the choices an author makes. Maybe these bloggers getting cookbook deals is a short-term happening and it won't always be that way...but for this generation of foodies, at least, it'd be a real shame to lose cookbooks entirely.

Re: The Troubling Dual Nature of Books and Websites

Christopher Wright — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:42:07 -0000

Non-fiction straight text will still have a place. If you need your information portable and you can't rely on an internet connection, it's hard to beat a user manual. Keeping your documentation separate from your application is a good idea for those situations when you want to use the documentation to troubleshoot why the application doesn't work.

eBooks have an advantage over paper books in that they're more portable (you can fit an entire documentation library on an SDcard) and are, in some cases, cheaper to produce. And a tablet makes a fair documentation reader because you can get away with providing screenshots in the documentation, etc. But the author was talking about interactive media specifically, and I don't have any real experience with that...

Re: The Troubling Dual Nature of Books and Websites

AdamGurri — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:08:06 -0000

I'm not sure it's quite right to say that fiction is "safe" vs non-fiction. The challenges that traditional, straight-text fiction will face are the same that traditional, straight-text non-fiction will face--there will be more interactive and visually rich alternatives.

The thing is, fiction has basically already fallen off of this cliff; it fell off of it years ago when TV and movies and comics started seriously competing in the same space as prose. And video games have been giving us interactivity for decades now.

The web and the digital sphere in general are just going to multiply the number of options available to us, and give birth to entirely new forms--as the essay you quote discusses. But the written word has been facing ever steeper competition for people's attention for a very long time.

What I'm trying to say is, I don't think it's useful to say that prose of any sort will really be replaced--it's simply going to be entering a more highly competitive arena. This goes for non-fiction as well--someone who just wants to publish a book of essays is going to have to compete against the super interactive, infographic-heavy websites out there, just like someone who wants to publish a novel is going to have to compete with Mass Effect or an interactive webcomic.

Basically, it continues to get more awesome to be someone who loves content, and the markets for content continue to get more competitive and diverse.

Re: Linked: Strategies for Switching from Word to Pages

Eli James — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:13:47 -0000

Thanks, Jim. I'd forgotten about Scrivener.

Re: Linked: Strategies for Switching from Word to Pages

zoetewey — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:45:24 -0000

As does Scrivener for what that's worth.

Re: Suggest A Link!

sean markey — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:58:27 -0000

Sent an email about this, THEN I saw the suggest a link button. http://www.writingprompts.us is a site that hosts many cool images, videos, texts, and more to help writers get inspired, get unstuck, or get a prompt for a writing exercise.

The site is safe for teens (no inappropriate content).

http://www.writingprompts.us

Re: Word Needs To Die

Thomas — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:08:06 -0000

Olé!!! Word's a pain in the backside. Fine app for setting up paper docs, but dinosaur for e-docs. Personally (don't shudder), I write in Markdown in any text editor I happen to have access to (Android, Win, Google, iPad) and just make sure I keep a "master copy" on the web (Google Docs, in my case). When I'm done I just convert to html. From there, as you point out, one can go everywhere with ease.

Oddly enough, noone seems to care that if you "spread" your documents to lots of users/readers, html can ALWAYS be read, regardless of the gizmo you read it on, since every gizmo nowadays has a browser. Moreover, it is easy to convert decent html to mobi or epub - or pdf, for that matter. But you're right, it's a social thing - or perhaps simply a thing of innocent ignorance and lazy habit ;o)

FWIW, it's not worth your time to have a go at a decent Word converter. Concentrating on a pain-free end-to-end authoring tool for e-books - such as Pandamian - would be a far better use of your time. Again FWIW, I'd suggest you think a bit about separating the "read-books-here" part of Pandamian from the authoring part. Offering Pandamian as a sort of Google Docs-like web-based "Scrivener" seems (to me) to be what Pandamian's potential is really all about. When you look at the frustrations in the forums of KDP, it seems to me that the indie author world is ripe - VERY ripe - for such an authoring tool : "Switch to writing in this online word processor and forget all your troubles with converting to an uploadable Kindle, Kobo or iBook - just use "Save As" ;o)

Just my 0.2 Euros ;o)

Re: Word Needs To Die

Nancy Adams — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:55:14 -0000

Hear! Hear! I use Mac's Pages software and LOVE it. When I self-published my Christmas short I wound up going straight from Pages to pdf for the print file I downloaded to CreateSpace.

Re: Linked: Strategies for Switching from Word to Pages

Eli James — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 03:00:27 -0000

It's not perfect, naturally, but I had forgotten that Pages has EPUB output built right in. That's at least worth considering as a stopgap solution.

Re: Linked: Strategies for Switching from Word to Pages

Christopher Wright — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:02:51 -0000

... so the solution is to switch from one proprietary product to another? That's not much of a solution.

Re: Word Needs To Die

Leon Paternoster — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:51:48 -0000

It'd be good if the *idea* of markup (i.e. separating content and presentation) was taught in schools. It won't happen, but there's no reason why it shouldn't when UK students are currently taught Word and Dreamweaver.

From the comments it sounds like the stuff around Word (such as track changes) is what writers would miss. So a Markdown editor with lots of collaboration features that exports to HTML, ePub and PDF would do the trick.

Another alternative is a WYSIWYG editor that generates markup. This sounds contradictory, but I find Markdown Pad works pretty well.

Re: Word Needs To Die

Clare K. R. Miller — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:50:20 -0000

I don't know about other "programs like" Scrivener, but Scrivener itself has no problem exporting as PDF.

Re: Word Needs To Die

zoetewey — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:20:51 -0000

Personally I haven't used Word in a few years now. I use Libre Office for any documents that Word users share with me. I use Google Docs at work and when I want to share documents with people.

Both Libre Office and Google Docs have comments and some level of versioning available (in the form of Track Changes). That's okay when I want to work with others on something.

When I'm working on something and I don't have to share it with anybody (or need them to make edits at any rate), I use Scrivener.

It would be nice if Scrivener did versioning. Though it does have a lot of features that make writing easier, that's one that I miss. That and being able to share the full project as easily as I can share a Word doc through Google Docs (or in a worst case scenario, by email).

On the bright side (if this is one), I can always export things into Word docs and RTF so that Word users can edit. Scrivener's pretty good with exporting into various formats.

I'd agree that Word's formats need to die, but I don't have strong feelings about the program itself--with one exception.

On the rare occasions that I've had to use it to do layout, it was horrible. Better to use Publisher (if you must use something from Microsoft Office), and even better to use Adobe Indesign.