Nimble Books LLC

Catch your lawyer cheating with your Kindle!

Fred Zimmerman — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:13:10 +0000

Catch your lawyer cheating with the free Kaplan guide to the Multistate Professional Responsbility Exam. Popular highlights include this gem:

The most common complaints to state bar associations are that (1) lawyers are not diligent (e.g., do not return phone calls, miss deadlines, etc.); (2) they are incompetent (do not handle cases effectively); and (3) to a lesser degree, they are dishonest (e.g., they commingle or misappropriate funds)

Quiz your attorney on the rules and laugh uproariously when he describes his procedures for avoiding conflicts.

The Kaplan guide to Constitutional Law is also available free. If you are at all politically inclined, this would be a good acquisition so that you are conversant with the state of the law on hot button topics.

Nimble book of the day:

Secrets of the Modern World: F.W. Maitland by Alan Macfarlane ($7.37)

In this long and brilliant work Maitland summarized and analyzed much of the greatest thought on ‘liberty’ in the two hundred years before his own work, including the work of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Coleridge, Mill and others.

The Kindle versions of legal classics often leave something to be desired, and the Internet Archive version are too often OCR’d scans from Google. I find Project Gutenberg is the most reiiable source. For example, Blackstone’s Commentaries in the .mobi with images version.

Publishing news: UK Kindle sales are low so far. Publishers are reporting UK unit sales in the area of 1-3% of US unit sales. Since there is no 70% royalty option in UK, that means UK sales are generally less than 1% of US, for now.

Kindle News from Nimble

Fred Zimmerman — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:43:12 +0000

COLD WAR SAGA by Kempton Jenkins (Nimble 2010, $7.27) has been nominated for the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon Award for Distinguished Writing on American Diplomacy.

Staples to sell Kindle 3s and DXgs in 1500 stores this fall. That’s good news for everyone in the Kindle ecosystem: readers, authors, and publishers. Ubiquity rocks!

An interesting free book: It Takes a Genome: How a Clash between our Genes and Modern Life is making us Sick by Greg Gibson.

Wondering how Kindle counts “locations”? I always thought that a location was a paragraph, i.e. an HTML

. Wrongo! The answer is 128 bytes, or approximately 23 words with no formatting—html markup counts). So to get a rough count of how many words are in a book, multiply the number of locations by twenty (i.e. double and add a zero).

Marketing Kindle books via mailing lists seems to work very well! Check out the rapidly increasing prices and long waits for sponsorship slots at Kindle Nation Daily.

Revealing quotations on Obama’s Oval Office rug

Fred Zimmerman — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:38:04 +0000

These are revealing; I am tempted to call them a monument to wishful thinking.

These are the quotations the president chose for his rug:

“The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Towards Justice” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“Government of the People, By the People, For the People” – President Abraham Lincoln

“No Problem of Human Destiny Is Beyond Human Beings” – President John F. Kennedy

“The Welfare of Each of Us Is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us” – President Theodore Roosevelt

via A New Look for the Oval Office – NYTimes.com.

W. Frederick Zimmerman gave 2 stars to: Random Walk

W. Frederick Zimmerman's Customer Reviews — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:30:56 +0000

W. Frederick Zimmerman reviewed:

Random Walk by Lawrence Block

one of Block's worst, August 31, 2010

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: Random Walk (Kindle Edition)

Lawrence Block is a great writer and, in his autobiography, Step by Step, he says that this is one of his favorite books and that he wrote it in a burst of energy in two weeks straight. Unfortunately, only the latter makes sense. This just isn't a very good book.

It is severely handicapped by a completely absurd line of silly mystic mumbo-jumbo that propels its characters on their "walk." They are boring because there is no conflict. They join the walk, they experience a miracle cure, they all get along. The other half of the book is from the point of view of a prolific serial killer. He is not boring, but he sure is super creepy, so much so that it's hard to enjoy the book.

The Kindle formatting is fine, no issues.

Skip this one unless you are a New Age loon, a serial killer, or a Block completist.

Networks — not size — give cities competitive advantage

Fred Zimmerman — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:14:50 +0000

Good. I was just thinking about how much I dislike living in large cities. They just seem to go on and on and on with more of the same everywhere you look. Ann Arbor is a highly networked city.

Zachary Neal found that although America’s largest cities once had the most sophisticated economies, today that honor goes to cities with many connections to other places, regardless of their size. The study was published online Aug. 30 in the research journal City and Community.

via Networks — not size — give cities competitive advantage.

Kindle 3 metareview; Mockingjay; Manga; hackers; WPA2 for K3

Fred Zimmerman — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:38:16 +0000

This issue of the newsletter is brought to you by the 28 military and naval histories available for Kindle from Nimble Books.

Excellent and very thorough meta-analysis of Kindle 3 reviews at Amazon by Switch11 at Kindle Review. Who knew: people hate the Korean font (image here). Most ominous finding was that there are a lot of reports that Kindle 3 freezes more often than its predecessors.

The much-anticipated (and embargo-busting) YA fantasy Mockingjay is out on Kindle for a reasonable $8.02.

Did you know about Mangle, the Kindle program for manga? It seems to do a pretty good job with manga on the Kindle 3.

Kindle 3 hackers having fun.

How to hook up your Wifi Kindle 3 to a WPA-authenticated wireless network. Hint: if it’s not easy, it’s going to be a hassle.

Nielsen Bookscan for e-books

Fred Zimmerman — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:39:00 +0000

Nielsen BookScan, which provides hard numbers about print book sales, is working on an offering to track e-book sales. If you publish e-books in any format, they need your help. Reach out to your retail partners and encourage them to participate in Nielsen’s new offering. Better data helps everyone.

Michigan will crush UConn Sep. 4

Fred Zimmerman — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 13:00:35 +0000

My official game prediction: you heard it here first. Led by Denard, we will score at least 40, and the defense will hold them to 28 or under.

And the flyover will be awesome, too:

Make phone calls from your Kindle! royalty math; Nielsen eBookScan

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:05:17 +0000

Make phone calls from your Kindle? The Kindle 3 has a microphone, the web browser can access Gmail, and Google has just added the ability to place Voice calls from within Gmail.

Important post with royalty math at Mike Shatzkin’s Idealog. You must take a look at his tables. The problem with his analysis is that the market is exerting inexorable downward price pressure on e-books. If you consider solely those royalty plans in his table where e-books are priced at $10 or under, authors can expect to be making between $0.80 and $2.80 per copy. The only hope that authors have for seeing hardback-like per unit royalties in the future is if the market will support as many ebook sales at $12.99 as it currently supports hardback sales at $25. That is iffy, IMHO.

Occasional mention: consider joining the 1600-member mailing list, POD_PUBLISHERS@GROUPS.YAHOO.COM, which is focused on the business and marketing aspects of just-in-time publishing. I am a co-moderator.

I just received my first iBooks sales report from LSI’s CoreSource distribution program, covering the month of July. A title that sells about 50 copies a month on Kindle sold 1 copy in July. This is consistent with what others are reporting.

Nimble Book of the Day:

Bearing the Unbearable: Coping with Infertility and Other Profound Suffering by Karl A. Schulz

Toasted Almond Bar BRILLIANCE

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 18:22:47 +0000

Tragically, there are no grocery stores within a 15-mile radius of Ann Arbor where one can buy a six-pack of Toasted Almond bars.

Brilliantly, I just struck a deal with the owner of a local party store that he will buy me a box from his distributor. I can pick them up Friday. Toasted Almond Bar diet here I come!

Go me!

Bored Fire Scout drone copter decides to visit Obama

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:18:14 +0000

Hat tip to Scoop Deck’s Phil Ewing for this gem. LOL.

It must get really tiresome being a Fire Scout unmanned helicopter. Your human operators are always making you take off, fly your stupid old waypoints, look at boring objects through your Forward-Looking Infrared sensors, and then go back to base or the ship. Sometimes you want to just… break free, y’know? Well, after more than 1,000 hours in the air for the Navy’s various test models, one Fire Scout finally did:

via The Scoop Deck – The day the Fire Scout went rogue.

The geography of a recession

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:15:12 +0000

Michigan fades to completely black (10% or more) as 2009 progresses.

by LaToya Egwuekwe.

#GoBlue goosebumps

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:00:03 +0000

for the first time in a long while.

Michigan 80, Mons 74.

Pastor’s Plan to add DRM to Korans Adds to Tensions – NYTimes.com

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:13:50 +0000

Shades of Fahrenheit 451. But really, what is the harm in burning a pile of books? It would be different if they were e-books and he was putting DRM on them.

If building an Islamic center near ground zero amounts to the epitome of Muslim insensitivity, as critics of the project have claimed, what should the world make of Terry Jones, the evangelical pastor here who plans to memorialize the Sept. 11 attacks with a bonfire of Korans?

via Pastor’s Plan to Burn Korans Adds to Tensions – NYTimes.com.

for once I agree with Krugman: This Is Not a Recovery

Fred Zimmerman — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:55:03 +0000

Krugman hits the nail on the head this time.

this isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policy makers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.

The small sliver of truth in claims of continuing recovery is the fact that G.D.P. is still rising: we’re not in a classic recession, in which everything goes down. But so what?

The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment. We need about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising, and much faster growth to bring it significantly down. Yet growth is currently running somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, with a good chance that it will slow even further in the months ahead. Will the economy actually enter a double dip, with G.D.P. shrinking? Who cares? If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.

All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial.

via Op-Ed Columnist – This Is Not a Recovery – NYTimes.com.

Filipino wordlover on “amok” re murder of bus hostages

Fred Zimmerman — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:58:18 +0000

An unusually interesting discussion of the interaction of linguistics, culture, and religion.

“AMUCK” NOW appears in English dictionaries to mean going out of control, usually expressed as “run amuck.”

The Encarta Word English dictionary cites its roundabout origins: “Directly or via Portugese am(o)luco ‘homicidally violent Malay’ from Malay amuk ‘fighting frenziedly’.”

I am going to use “amok,” which comes closer to its pronunciation in Malay. It is also “amok” that now appears in UP’s Diksiyonaryong Filipino, acknowledging that the term has entered local usage, as in tabloids occasionally reporting someone as “nag-amok,” usually in a hostage-taking incident, as in the recent terrible tragedy at the Luneta.

via Amok – INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos.

There’s more –

Kindle Collection Manager for Windows; +1 for Kindle 3 “mouse”; Wylie was bluffing

Fred Zimmerman — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:18:00 +0000

Brilliant beta (really, alpha) software: Kindle Collection Manager for Windows.

Kindle 3s are shipping. People like the new “mouse” 5-way controller. No surprise; I hate the Kindle 2’s joystick.

The literary agent Andrew Wyle has cancelled his exclusive deal with Amazon for classic backlist books. That was quick. Chris Walters at Kindlerama has a good insight that the minimalist covers suggest he was bluffing along.

If you were worried about the environmental footprint of your Kindle (I wasn’t), relax. Just buy 23 Kindle books and you are good.

This summer our daughter became a knitting fanatic, so this one goes out to Kelsey: The Knitgrrl Guide To Professional Knitwear Design [Kindle Edition]. Interesting to see a crafts book for Kindle … these are tough to convert. If you are interested in meeting craft publishers for Kindle, check out this thread.

test AOM post

Fred Zimmerman — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:33:43 +0000

Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

		Buy New: $22.00
(more)

Super-gross huge tumor removed from Argentine woman

Fred Zimmerman — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:23:27 +0000

via Agence-France Press.

intl fusion restaurant replacing old Chi-Chi’s in Ann Arbor on S. State

Fred Zimmerman — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:18:39 +0000

Via AnnArbor.com.

The maize and blue sign is a good omen.