Blog: Why are e-books such a broken field? Big computer companies have stopped paying you.

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Why are e-books such a broken field? Big computer companies have stopped paying you.

January 4, 2023 at 11 A.M. Eastern Time

I'm still recovering my daily routine after some recent health setbacks. Obviously the sedentary life of an author includes a lot of laziness and computer use, unless you're living in one of those Richie Rich states like New York or California. So, given that diabetes is a recent diagnosis in my life, you can provably (probably) expect me diverting effort and time towards more smart and short writeups on the Facebook web site. I will make those available here when I have enough time to do so. As for my authorship, let me outline why I've kept writing off the public docket lately.

In September 2018, I found that a software update from Apple emptied the e-book download caches on my iPhone and iPad. Since I keep my e-book purchases downloaded onto my device, not on the server, I found that one of the books I purchased was rigged at Apple to not re-download. Ever since that incident, including the misfortunes of calling into Apple's technical support hotline for answers, and a job application that seems to have ultimately canceled the iPod line, it made me divert my expression and acquisition strategy to one of "necessarily openable", or, on the author side: I really need to make sure that what I put into my personal expression system comes back out of it. Right?

Ending my dependency on digital purchases wasn't an easy thing to do at the time, and as Google was made aware of the troubles I expressed with the Apple system, their later discontinuation of everyone's paid Google Play Music libraries so that only YouTube would benefit proved to me that the DRM system that sued me in 1999 failed. The pirates beat the field by running YouTube on-the-clock as administrators, and the company was complacent revaluing everything of interest to "evaluation versus devaluation". (I need to point out here that these two companies have been pirating my off-the-clock time by staging software problems to me to report. The Apple error is one of the earliest attempts I'd noted of this, and it's why I suspended their platform.)

It's my opinion that you should be able to buy my first book today, but I won't release it yet because I'm not as confident in paper or digital delivery as I once was. It does exist in finished form. But I see it as the reverse situation of the Apple and Google trials that put me into support-and-report hell until I stopped giving their user interface accurate information.

There is a very vociferous debate in authorship communities today about rights management while copyright itself as a protection mechanism hasn't evolved (necessarily, maybe) in what seems like an leveled 'excerpt-is-enough' playing field, where there used to be many interesting ways for us as prototypers to work in the favor of the reader.

I am confident in you as a reader if you are. I had been placing previews of my writings on the microblog system Twitter, of which I was a paid customer, but since it hasn't delivered on its networking promise, being more like some only-Hollywood-wins vertical integration stack with no answers from the moneymakers to users' questions, I've decided to return to authoring on my internet web site while Twitter decides how to keep itself in operation.

Please understand that while these technical difficulties place me now into the fifth year of this title being on my shelf, I'm instead going to prioritize looking for work to support my life situation. You should consider the collections that you deem vital to your life, as well as the dependencies that lead them to being where you expect them when you need them.

While I don't expose my methods of contemplation, it does require that I use my immense and complicated time-shifted library of what I've been through in life, as well as a very large effort to work through my disability of autism to perform the task that I do in authorship. It's no 44 billion dollar boondoggle factory of lethargy like Twitter was, but to me it's just as lively and hope-filled. It's never unimportant.