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Cory’s criticism of Harper Collins’s “free download” release of American Gods is spot on. I’m a huge fan of Neil Gaiman, and I read on the screen all day, but the annoying loads, scrolling, and graphic image text format had me bouncing out after a couple pages.

This is a real shame because as Cory and others (Baen especially have been very forward thinking with this) have shown, ebook distribution is a positive thing (Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom had hundreds of thousands of downloads, and ended up selling out multiple hardcover print runs (10K each)). I’ve bought books from John Scalzi (Old Man’s War) and Charlie Stross (Halting State) based on reading the initial chapters. The way that the Kindle does free chapters like this is absolutely the right way to go in terms of encouraging people to buy the book.

In terms of Ebook promotion/distribution, Cory seems to have it down down to a science – create a minisite w/ news blog, collected reviews, author info, and easy “buy me” links. For the downloads, offer it in a plethora of formats, including most notably, plain text, HTML, and PDF, as well as where possible, mobile versions. (BooksInMyPhone does a good job of this; my favorite multi-formatting app is ManyBooks.net).

In the realm of books, it seems like that publishing houses still have a large window of opportunity because of the superiority of the physical distribution medium (paper books) to the alternatives, but as the market declines, and alternatives improve, it seems that book publishers will start facing the same curves as in other markets. Here’s hoping they learn the right lessons about how they can provide value to the parties they serve.

It’s hard to believe, but the last mix that I published on the ol’ blog was almost a year ago. Now that I have some spare time, I’ll be trying both to post more regularly and to make it easier for me to do so, but in the spirit of kicking things off, here we go:

Today was my last day in the office. Schedule for the next couple weeks:

• Mar 2-7: ETech in San Diego
• Mar 7-17: SXSW in Austin
• Post Mar 17: whatever I want

I spent the past couple of nights taking notes. Who doesn’t love photobooths?

adidas Originals LA and HVW8 Presents: 83 ORIGINAL WAYS TO SUCCESSFULLY WASTE YOUR TIME from Jaime Maci­as on Vimeo.

I haven’t been keeping track much on movies lately, but apparently, the film adaptation of the Watchmen (March 6, 2009 release date) has just wrapped and the first still from the film has been released. Zack Snyder is directing, so it’s not really surprising that it looks great – very evocative of the original comic. Now the question, I suppose is whether it’ll be a good filmic adaptation (for those that haven’t read Watchmen, it’s probably one of the best graphic novels ever published and is well worth your time)…

(Anyone think that WB having official movie preproduction blogs is awesome? I didn’t notice when they started doing that… It’s running on MT3. Also, they have an official Flickr stream too!)

Update: I tracked down and read all three major versions of the Watchmen scripts online: the horrible Hamm version, the much lauded Hayter version, and a draft of the Tse revision (based off the Hayter script) that Snyder is shooting with. Although it’s been much maligned in online reviews, I think the Tse revision actually made a lot of improvements to Hayter’s – it’s better paced, a lot of clunky dialogue and devices are dropped, and overall it gets the tone of the Watchmen a lot better, while keeping Hayter’s main accomplishment – a core structure that is both faithful to the original story and that also works as a filmic narrative. If you want to read a good summary of the different versions (spoilers of course), there’s a good comparison @ io9. I threw in my 2 cents on the main thing I didn’t like about the Tse draft.

A couple days ago, I had the pleasure of encountering this error on YouTube:

Now, the reasons for capping favorites are manifold, but primarily, I suspect to limit gaming/vote inflation on the top favorites leaderboards. That being said, the method of capping (flat cap @ 500) seems like one of the worst ways to do it. Abusers who wish to game the system can simply create new accounts, and an increasing number of good active users will start hitting these limits.

My account, for example, was created in January 21, 2006. That’s about 750 days ago as of today. So a 500-favorite cap means that I’ve favorited an average of 0.67 vids a day. The 1,686 video view count seems low to me, but if we go w/ that, it’s about 30% favorite ratio. I use favorites to mark things I like and want to find again, so that’s probably fairly representative, if not completely accurate.

Since the flat-cap is broken, these numbers point to easy ways to fix things…

• You could actually have a much lower ‘base’ cap (200?) and then add a number based on account age (5/day) — the actual numbers are arbitrary and would depend on analysis of the user activity
• You could add additional complexity like favorite/view %s to flag for abuse or for use in the next scenario
• Alternatively, you could approach this differently by separating the external use case of favorites (leaderboards) with the internal (bookmarking) by simply stopping to count a favorite against a the scoreboard of a video after a certain daily limit. This might introduce complexity the counts are generated, but may overall be a better solution if fake account creation for gaming is a problem.

Lastly, the alternative currently available for users that have run into the cap is to add/move videos into playlists (200 video limit). Unfortunately, adding videos to a playlist is a couple extra clicks vs favoriting, and also the favorite/playlist editing interface is quite clunky for managing hundreds of videos:

• 500 videos, 10 checkboxes/pg = 50 pages
• There is no “move” action, so you have to use a pulldown to “copy” and then click a button to “remove” (you need to reselect all the videos each time! – I mean seriously, which one of you guys thought that was a good idea?)
• There is no “check all” option, meaning you have to manually check each video
• The checkboxes don’t have labels, meaning you can’t just click the row, but you need to hunt and peck for the tiny checkbox
• There is no write API so you can automate this (although a GM script is conceivable, ie for check all or labels

In any case, YouTube favoriting: FAIL!

Update: I started up a simple GM script that would start fixing some of the UI issues w/ the Favorite editing UI. I did the easy ones, allowing a check/uncheck all button and row-clicked selection. The next steps would be to create an AJAX function to copy/remove as a move option and then maybe some sort of AJAX loading function that could allow a user to work on say 20-50 videos at a time.