Homegrown Hops 2013

Today, April 5, I planted 6 hops rhizomes (2 each of Chinook, Willamette, Cascade) on the south side of the house, a few inches down in a compost/manure mixture and covered in mulch.

This is my third attempt at growing hops at home. The first year nothing came up. Last year, half the rhizomes broke through the earth only to be destroyed time and time again by a mix of lawnmower, gale force winds, and japanese beetle. I feel much more confident to combat all 3 this year.

Intro to eBooks for Journalists and News Publishers

“ebook” is shorthand for at least 3 different file formats:

  • PDF (you’re likely familiar with this one), it’s been around for 10+ years and almost all devices and browsers can render a PDF. Publishers have a great deal of presentation control in a PDF but PDF renderers on mobile devices aren’t very sophisticated – making the readability questionable.
  • ePub – that’s essentially a compressed folder of HTML and CSS files. It’s preferred by Apple, Barnes & Noble, and most everyone else except Amazon.
  • .mobi – Amazon’s file format that previously was an non-human-readable binary file – but in the latest version ‘Kindle Format 8‘ is a very comparable to ePub 3.

In may ways you can think of ePub and .mobi files as an offline archive of a webpage. Like a webpage, ebooks can support video, complex styling, links, scripting for complex interactions. Everything you would expect of a modern web experience – but all without a persistent internet connection.

You can think of PDF as, um, well, a frozen Word doc.

Technical publishers like The Pragmatic Programmers and O’Reilly Media (and essentially any publisher that doesn’t have a line of ebook readers) make their publications available in all 3 file formats as a way to serve all their customers.

The annoying thing is each ebook reader (whether a device or a software application) has it’s own presentation and functionality constraints. Some support color – others don’t. Some support tables of data or code samples or embedded fonts well – others completely not at all. In many ways – this is very analogous to publishing a website where, despite the publisher’s intentions and technical potential – presentation & experience is still completely up to the reader’s choice of vendor.

In many ways, the ebook retail space feels identical to the mobile application space. Each ebook retailer takes substantial cut of the purchase price and may or may not have a completely opaque approval process that you may or may not be able to coordinate a market launch against. Thankfully, generating ebooks is very inexpensive compared to app development. There are number of tools that can generate ebooks from pre-existing content – InDesign, Pages, as well as many open-source toolchains like Adobe InDesign, Apple’s Pages, as well as many open-source toolchains like eBook Export for WordPress, Booktype, easybook, bookshop, Bookie, and likely more.

Content that’s primarily text will render fairly well across all ebook readers with these converter tools – some more manual/detailed tweaking may be required to really polish it. Again, similar to web development in this regard.

Unlike the web space, people are accustomed to paying some, how ever paltry, amount for ebooks (and mobile apps).

I see two opportunities for news publishers relative to ebooks:

The first is repackaging existing content into focused, collections on a topic that serve a niche audience in a fuller, more comprehensive manner. A couple examples of this are Neiman Lab’s “The Future of News As We Know It” series of epubs and locally StarTribunes The Cookie Book: 10 Years of Winning Recipes from our Holiday Baking Contest.

The second is longer form work that may not fit in a larger, more general audience print publication. These are articles that really go in-depth and highlight journalistic expertise. Something so good that I’ll want to re-read it again and again. The definitive telling of an issue – that will likely take multiple sittings to finish. Recent examples include the Star Tribune’s In the Footsteps of Little Crow and the New York Times’ Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.

The thing is, web browsers are now technically sophisticated enough that they elegantly support offline access. In fact, in 2012 O’Reilly acquired the browser-based epub reader ibisreader.com and the company behind it – merging them into Safari Books Online, their on-demand content service.

This just leaves the bigger challenge of getting fans and customers comfortable with paying a meaningful amount for content.

Just Stop Being an Unpaid Documentary Filmmaker

“The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focussed on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media. So internalise that experience instead. Think about it. Go home and think about it some more. Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel.” – James Shakespeare

Yanking the Receiver

The Current is launching a new stream dedicated to music from Minnesota’s north shore. Online only stream.This stream is in addition to their primary stream, their MN local stream, their kids stream, and the American Heartland stream. That’s 5 streams. Only one of which has an over the air presence.

Which means, today, 80% of The Current’s offerings aren’t available over your car audio. This problem has frustrated me for years – actually a decade (since podcasting’s bootstrap).

Receiving those streams in a car means a cheap enough and reliable enough data connection covers every street and interstate. It also means having at least an auxiliary port in the dashboard. Two of my last 3 vehicles (1997, 2004 model years) didn’t even have that very primitive technology.

“Alert: Within two years, AM and FM will no longer be offered by two automakers. According to the Convergence panel, radio will be gone from all new cars within five years. Since the automotive companies work three years in advance, these decisions are being made now. It appears that radio really will be gone from the dash unless it’s heard through an Internet radio distribution platform.”

This is huge. I predict this will be an extension of the OnStar service.

Get Better

“Like everyone, though, I did have relationships — a spouse, friends and family — and none of them got the best version of me. They got what was left over.…I didn’t have to be on my BlackBerry from my first moment in the morning to my last moment at night. I didn’t have to eat the majority of my meals at my desk. I didn’t have to fly overnight to a meeting in Europe on my birthday. I now believe that I could have made it to a similar place with at least some better version of a personal life.” – Erin Callan

It reminds me, the Japanese have a word for death-by-work, karōshi.

I hope there’s a word for life-after-work.

BBY Cleaning out the Fridge

On Thursday, I wrote this:

“For years Best Buy has sold and installed car stereos. Though, it’s never felt like they really cared about that part of the store (same for home appliances)”

In today’s STrib, there’s a feature store on how Best Buy is focusing on the larger, higher margin home appliances, in a higher-end brand (Pacific Kitchen) as a way to compete with online-only retailers and the tight margins on electronics.

Excellent Move.