Well, Friday morning I dashed over the Barnes & Noble and snatched up a Nook!  (I told my wife that was what she was getting me for Valentines Day.)  I have to say I really enjoy the format.  It’s small enough to slip into a back pocket, hefty enough that I don’t feel like I am going to break it, and reads PDF’s.  I’ll do a more in-depth review from a gamers perspective soon, but I did load some gaming PDF’s including the Traveller Main Rule book from Mongoose Publishing and found it quite acceptable for referencing.  If I put the text on it’s very samllest font size I could see an entire page of the book just as it appeared in print.  You have to have great eyesight to read it that small, but it’s doable.  Anyway, so far I am pleased with it and can’t wait to see the iPad.  They will fill two related but seperate roles.  The nook is for reading stuff like novels in a portable format and does a great job.  The iPad will be more of a multi-media platform but no where near as portable due to it’s size.

Friday night I hit the big gun show out here with a couple friends.  My buddy got himself the new P30 for HK in .40.  We bought a bunch of ammo cuz we’re doing a big range day this Saturday and we want some friends to be able to try out lots of different guns.  I was pretty good, I didn’t buy any guns; only some ammo, a couple T-Shirts and a knick-knack or two.

Saturday I spent all day with my wife and daughter doing the Valentines thing.  We saw a movie and ate a nice dinner and hung out at the mall. Stuff like that.  Sunday was church in the morning, brunch and then I had a nice long nap.  Spent some time with my daughter and the in-laws while my wife studied for her French class.  Not a bad weekend, but I didn’t get much publishing stuff done.

I did hear from two writers and two artists, so things are progressing an all fronts.  I’ll have some sketches for the big Fantasy Firearms project this week, and the other one is working on a SCARE release.  On the writing front another SCARE is approaching completion as well as a new Minor Race for the Traveller game.

We live in interesting times.  The Kindle has been out a couple of years.  The Nook just started shipping a few days ago and is expected to hit the shelves Friday.  The iPad is still sixty days out.  The Sony Reader frankly doesn’t matter because they suck.  So what lies in the future?

Prices will rapidly drop.  There is only a single eBook reader I can buy today; the Kindle.  By weeks end I might be able to buy a Nook, though I suspect they will be sold out. Some time in April I might be able to get my hands on an iPad. Once several options hit the market, expect the prices to south of $200 bucks fast.

Ebooks will come down in price.  Sure, the whole Amazon thing de-listing certain publishers and Apple setting a price point higher than the typical $9.99 is all the news right now.  Trust me, all it will take is *one* of the big publishers to realize that keeping prices low while more readers hit the market is the key to sales.  Remember when a CD with only a single (and maybe a B-side track) was $3.99?  That’s the same thing happening here.  Today you would be crazy to pay that much for a single thanks to iTunes. Publishers desperately want to keep the dead tree model afloat.  I don’t blame them.  But the first to see what’s coming and embrace it is going to win big.  And if they don’t, the little guys (That would be ME!) are going to eat their lunch.

But weather I am right or wrong about that doesn’t matter much.  The dust will eventually settle. Now check out what we should be able to buy just before Christmas.

Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York-based start-up specializing in touch-screen technology.  We all know what that means.  This, coupled with the Mirasol stories about something happening with Qualcomm’s color display and Amazon’s Kindle (with hints from Qualcomm reps), indicate we may see an additional, quite different Kindle by September-October or so, at which time the non-touchscreen models will likely go down in price.

The NY Times story by Nicky Bilton and Brad Stone reports that the staff of 6 for that start-up will merge with Lab126, Amazon’s Kindle hardware division, which has recently had ads for 40+ new technical employees)

Like the Mirasol technology, this one will be somewhat less expensive (relative to similar items of their types) for makers also.  The report says that

‘ Touchco uses a technology called interpolating force-sensitive resistance, which it puts into displays that can be completely transparent and could cost as little as $10 a square foot. The capacitive touch screens used in the iPad and iPhone are considerably more expensive. Unlike those screens, the Touchco screens can also detect an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points.

Touchco’s technology uses resistors that are sensitive to different levels of pressure. It has said its screens can distinguish between the touch of a finger and the pressure of a pen or similar pointing device. The company had designed its technology to work well with full-color LCD screens, similar to those used in the iPad and Hewlett-Packard’s coming line of tablet PCs. The technology could allow Amazon to introduce a full-color touch-screen Kindle, raising the question of whether the device’s current displays, which are made by a company called E Ink will play a role in the next round of reading devices. ‘

The caption under the photo describes a feature not mentioned in the body of the article: “Touchco’s technology is fully flexible, as pictured here, which would allow for a more robust Kindle.“

Couple that with the demo of the Marisol technology for video along with Touchco’s $10 per square foot screen technology and the future is looking to be quite interesting.

Click the picture above and go check out the video of it playing…um…video.  As a PDF Publisher digital content publisher I am fairly excited about where we are heading.

I managed to get S.C.A.R.E. Vol. 3 out yesterday before the Super Bowl.

Behind that I worked on the latest Adventurer’s Wanted poster.  I just need to change the font on the Dwarvish version of the poster as it would not embed in the PDF due to licensing restrictions.  I need to pick another font apparently.  That is a quick fix so that will be ready to go as soon as the SCARE goes off the front page.

I have to say, the Fantasy Firearms book is looking awesome.  I have some top-notch art on hand; most of it specifically commissioned but some surprisingly great stock art as well. I have several other large projects that are now moving to the front burner; Black Tokyo II, some more Traveller stuff and of course Pathfinder.  Did I mention that I’m also editing a horror movie?  All of a sudden there are not enough hours in the day!

I woke up at like 4:30am cuz some dude was out shoveling his car out from under the snow, spinning his tires on the ice and generally making way too much noise for so early in the morning.  So I called the snow line at work to see if we were open for business; no surprise it was normal operating hours.  So I hit the shower, get dressed and leave the house.  The roads were not good, but they were passable and I rolled in to work a few minutes ahead of my schedules 7:45am start time.  What do I see when I get to my desk?  Apparently there was a two hour delay that they never put on the snow message line. Grrrrr.  I anticipate a slow day at work since most people will not be in.

With the snow falling fast and furious I planted my butt in a chair and started the day working on the big Fantasy Firearms project.  It is coming together beutifully!  I got two full chapters laid out, and then send off notes to an artist for a mess of pictures I would like to round out the project.  Stuff like magic items, races and monsters.  After that it was time for a break.  When I got done with the break I started in on the S.C.A.R.E. Vol. 3 project for Traveller.  After a while I decided it was time to go shovel snow, and two back-breaking hours later I was back inside where it was warm.  (No we are not finished shoveling!)

A hot shower, dinner and some XBox (Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2) rounded out the evening.  Then I was back at the computer and I just finished putting the S.C.A.R.E. project to bed.  It’s done, the PDF is created and I’ll be posting it on Sunday during the day sometime.  Behind that I want to whip up a few more Adventurer’s Wanted Posters to go out as well.  I’ll keep plugging away at the larger Fantasy Firearms project as well.  It’s after midnight here, so I’m off to bed.

Coming “soon-ish” from Skortched Urf’ Studios -a 100+ page sourcebook for adding firearms to your campaign.  This will be our first dead-tree product.  More details soon.

So we are supposed to get a metric ton of snow this weekend, which is a good thing for me as I can plant my butt in a chair and work on some projects.  Well, I plan to make some serious headway on the Fantasy Firearms project and so I decided to organize the art I have for the project into a single folder.  In conjunction with that I decided to go look for some high quality stock art for the project to mix in with the for-hire stuff I have.

[Begin Rant]

After wading through the dozens and dozens of pages of utter crap that fills the Publisher Resources section, along with scrolling past all the 3D generated uber-babes, I did manage to find a few likely prospects.  But so many of them did not show you what you are buying it rapidly degenerated into a crap shoot.  If you have a Stock Art selection of magic items, or armor or whatever, why in the *fcuk* can’t I see a thumbnail of the image? Seriously, you want me to spend my money on artwork *THAT YOU WILL NOT SHOW ME*? Who thinks thats a good idea?  How about you show me what I am getting like Shamman’s Stock art or the Image Portfolio line or even my very own stock art offerings the Skortched Urf’ Studios Sketchbook line? But no, instead I had to waste my time sifting through the crap, checking licences and squinting at near-microscopic thumbnails.

I spent damn near three hours last night sifting stock art. Did I find some useful art?  Yes, I actually did.  But it was far harder than it should have been.

So, rather than just bitch about the current state, I figured I would offer a few suggestions…

If you sell stock art; please for the love of all that is Holy include a good preview or thumbnail!  Preferably embedded in the listing itself rather than some external file or other means that will take me away from the listing.  The RPGNow flip book is ideal, or a large image as Shamman’s stock art uses would be fine.  While your at it, it would be a good idea to include the license terms *in the sales listing* so we know what we can and can’t do with it once we purchase it.  Can I color it?  Can I modify it?  Must I include your logo inside the image? These are important considerations to a publisher, and we prefer not to be surprised after we have dropped the money.

I have no real problem with the 3D generated stock art.  I especially like it for vehicles, guns and other things with sharp edges.  But I also feel it needs to be seperated out inside the stock art category.  I don’t want to use 3D stock art in my projects, so why must I scroll through pages and pages of it to find what I am really after?  I think we need to add some sub-categories in the Publisher Resources section.  I found fonts, page templates, cover templates, illustrations and 3D art all lumped in together.  I also found some very cool images that were not stock art, but intended only for private use in games.  I’m glad the publisher was careful to mention that in the sales listing, but a seperate category other that the broad Publisher Resources is in order. I would suggest sub-categories like Full Color Stock Art, B&W Stock Art, 3D Stock Art, Fonts, Design Elements, Personal Use Stock Art (i.e. not for publishers but for your GM to use), and a catch all Other Publisher Resources to round it out.

Let’s talk about quality for a second.  Some of the art for sale is, quite frankly, so bad that I felt it came out of a middle school kids sketchbook.  Seriously, do you really think people are going to buy this:

or this…

I’m not trying to be mean, but seriously how many of these do you think have sold?  I know we all want to make a few bucks, but slapping crap from a sketchbook or your kids scribblings up on RPGNow is not going to catapult you to fame and wealth.  A little self-policing is a good thing.  I am not proposing we institute some arbitrary quality standard; but I would suggest that quality will get you further than sheer quantity when it comes to stock art.

[End Rant]

Last night I got home and settled in to work on some layout for the big Fantasy Firearms project. I know I have said it before, but I can’t reccomend enough lynda.com for training to get the most out of the Adobe suite.  I am taking advantage of styles in CS4 that let me format the text with a click or two.  You work the text once, for example I was laying out magic item entries, and once you have it the way you want it you can copy the formatting into a style.  From then on you can simply click on a style and it formats everything consistently.  The styles work on words, paragraphs, cells and entire tables.  I was sitting there with the Pathfinder main rule book in my hand checking how they did the layout for certain entries, and found I could replicate the formatting quite easily.  I got through the entire manuscript save the last fifteen pages.

To be sure, there still needs to be some art inserted, and the text has to be massaged to make if fit nicely, but the basic formatting is done.  The project is really starting to come together, and is proving a great learning experience that will make future projects better.

I’ll also be putting out some more Adventurer’s Wanted posters this week, along with a couple Traveller releases later in the month.

The iPad announcement has generated a lot of discussion in the publishing field as a whole, as well as our little dark and dusty corner of it.  As I said on a forum post I am not a PDF publisher; I am digital content publisher.  PDF is just a format.  There are and will be other formats.  All in all I am very excited about the prospects for the future.  Which brings me to the idea I just had.  I was talking about a movie idea with a co-worker, and hashed together a throw-away plot for a generic action movie to make a point.  But that got the wheels turning and the germ from that throw-away idea was mixed with another idea or two I had rattling around in my Grey Matter Junk Drawer and I was off.  Inspiration had struck and I jotted down some furious notes.  Until this week all I had was a title, a cool sounding name that I knew I wanted to turn into a project.  Well, now I had the flesh to go over the bones of the idea.  I won’t bore anyone with the details just yet, but I will drop the title I came up with a few years ago.  I thought it sounded cool and knew some day I would do something with it.

Daughters of the Arcane Blade

It’s just five words that I thought sounded neat.  Now I had a cool idea to go with the title.  I was tossing the options around in my head on how best to get this idea “out there”.  Option one was to write it as a novel.  As I would be the writer this seems the least collaborative option and probobly the easiest and cheapest way to see the project finished.  Then I thought a comic book format would be great.  I can picture some great visuals to go along with the words that give life to the story behind the title.  More collabrative since I would have to work with an artist and maybe some ink/colorists as well.  And of course, what good idea doesn’t cry out to be made as a movie!?  I could write it as a screenplay and make a movie out of it.  (Or sell the screenplay to someone with the money to make a movie out of it, whichever.) I was honestly weighing the different options (including some RPG related releases to be sure!) when it hit me…

Why pick just one?  How many movies were first books or comics?  How many comics are based on TV shows, books or movies?  Heck, even video games are spawning novels, comics and movie adaptions.  All this gelled around the term “Transmedia” I first heard during the iPad/Publishing discussions.  The story wants to be told, and some formats serve better than others for telling the story, but in the new media reality a story need not remain locked in one form. As a publisher I can’t afford to keep ideas confined into one little box.

So who knows, in a few months time you could be reading Daughters of the Arcane Blade on your Kindle, Nook, iPad or dead-tree book.  Some time after that you might find the comic book on DriveThruComics or the iBook store.  It is even possible that some day you might be sitting on your couch watching my crazy idea as a movie full of action, adventure and gun-play!  It could also be that you sit around a table and play an RPG based on my idea.  Or maybe none of that will happen.  The exciting thing is that each and every one of them are indeed possible today, and will become even more likely in the future as the barriers to entry continue to be lowered.  It truly is an exciting time to be a small PDF digital content publisher!