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Post by BlueAndGold on Mar 21, 2023 19:24:41 GMT
That's a magnificent automobile! They sure don't make them like that anymore. It has more steel in it than my truck!
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Post by potet on Mar 21, 2023 20:54:11 GMT
That's a magnificent automobile! They sure don't make them like that anymore. It has more steel in it than my truck! My father was allowed to drive it. Cars were rare in France at that time, and he was one of the happy few who could cruise with it.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Mar 22, 2023 0:52:53 GMT
One problem with trad publishers is they are controlled be economists and marketing people, not to mention, lawyers. Marketing people I can see, lawyers to a lesser extent.
Lesser maybe, but still used.
Traditional Publishers each have a particular market or niche [at times several under various imprints] they cater to. They also have to deal with the average adult reading level for the countries where they operate.
In what way? They create books to the usual age levels, regardless of where sold. Many publishers use the same rating as films do. They have to do. But that's mainly for fiction. On places like Amazon books there are age related filters, not to mention KDP insist that you rate according to age, and they do check.
The reading level for the average adult in the US is 7th to 8th grade or roughly 13-year-old to 14-year-old.
In England [per UK sources I looked up] the average adult has the reading level of a 9-year-old to 10-year-old.
I too looked it up, and it's a meaningless statistic. It can be adjusted according to who considers what people should be capable of at those ages, and it's debatable, very much so in the UK, after M. Thatcher decided that every child can be educated to 'genius' level, which is BS. The TES magazine (the magazine for teachers in the UK) say teachers should be very wary of such statistics, but you have to be a subscriber to read all the article, and I am not! Having said that, what level of reading skill do publishers expect a reader to have when selling them books? Apparently of Mice and Men is rated at a level 10 year old's reading ability. Is that who it was aimed at?
The point I'm making is that Traditional Publishers cater to their audiences in order to turn a profit, and that often means cycling through formula material the audience can enjoy and comprehend.
They publish what they know many people will buy, because they collect data about it. Marketing includes the collection of data.
In turn it means those who read at much higher levels may quite often be dissatisfied with the available selections.
There are still books published for everyone though, and I am sure people do not buy books they know they will not like. Reviews are very useful. At least honest ones are.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Mar 22, 2023 0:58:11 GMT
Another delightful and useful result of the POD industry is the ability for people to create books of a personal nature. I have family members who have created lasting hardbound records of family history that will be available for generations (hopefully). Those are priceless. Once again, a traditional publisher wouldn't touch such a project. POD fills many niches. Paul et Berthe is the biography of my paternal grand-parents in two volumes. I took me two decades to collect all the data necessary. It's a private work only sold for the cost price to members of my family. Some refused to buy it when I told them my grand-father's father was unknown and that his mother did not acknowledge him although she accepted to bring him up. Yet, they should be proud of him because, starting from scratch, he created a dry-cleaning business in Dijon, the capital of the province of Burgundy, France, with a branch in a nearby town. The car he owned on the eve of WWII, is proof enough that he was successful, and that his family enjoyed a good life. (The privileged young man is my father.) View Attachment Gosh, people are strange. What does it matter who's father was who's over a 100 years ago?! And it's surely better that it's not known, than discovering he was an axe-murderer.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Mar 22, 2023 1:00:23 GMT
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Mar 22, 2023 1:02:48 GMT
Not to mention this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther_De_Ville but such cars are often made of GRP. It's cheaper than huge steel pressing machines! Oh, and a used one can be had for £90,000. A snip.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Mar 22, 2023 23:50:49 GMT
The above is based on the Bugatti Royal. I made a bit of a joke about it in one of my stories.
“No Milly Morris. Nothing so common. It’s a Bugatti Royale, the seventh of only six built, in 1933,” he informs her, still smiling. “The Master does not like common, and likes to keep up to date.” He sniggers, at some private joke perhaps. She frowns about that entire statement, “but ...”.
It's a contemporary story. Basically, it's a butler/driver hinting that his master is very rich and influential, and potentially very long lived.
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Post by Mag2024 on Apr 2, 2023 16:12:25 GMT
Yes. It has changed my life. At least they are nowhere near as expensive as the first 'mass' printed books were! The first Gutenberg bibles cost the average earner three years wage, so I doubt that person bought one! They were only for the very very rich. But still a lot cheaper than the hand-copied ones.Good point.
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Post by potet on Apr 4, 2023 8:49:13 GMT
The whole POD business depends on the internet - the greatest advance in communication that was ever imagined. Before the advent of the internet, I was confident something like that would be invented, so that I should eventually be able to publish my books with it.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Apr 5, 2023 0:02:32 GMT
Gosh, are you Nostradamus? Actually, the internet was born in the 1960s. It's The WWW you need to thank.
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Post by Retread-Retired-Cameron on Apr 5, 2023 1:04:08 GMT
The beginning was with an intranet in 1968, a scientific and academic network.
April 30, 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) put the web into the public domain. Per Popular Mechanics
January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. Per USG
The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network. Per History Channel
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Post by BlueAndGold on Apr 5, 2023 1:14:01 GMT
Yes. The internet existed long before "Windows" and the "mouse-clicking on icons" phenomenon came into the public consciousness. We operated from a Unix command line with a keyboard. (Do you remember 110-baud modems with a rotary dial?) FTP was the way it was done. Then the Usenet groups came along. When Windows 3.1 and other GUI's got rolling, and more people became computer savy to some degree, things started happening...
Remember Mosaic? Netscape? That made it easy. Windows 95 and IBM OS2 came along and it's been downhill ever since. I mean - uphill.
Now days you need not be computer savy. Everything is an icon and you don't even need to know how to read or write, it seems. No one even knows what a command line is.
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Post by potet on Apr 5, 2023 9:56:36 GMT
Kevin, I became aware of the immense opportunities offered by computers and the internet after I retired in September 1999, and was refused a book in English by a German publisher because the potential readership was too small for its publication to be profitable. I was so frustrated that it was then that I imagined POD, and concluded that if I, an average consumer, could imagine it, then surely some businessmen would think about it, and ask R&D engineers to devise the machines to make POD feasible.
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Apr 5, 2023 23:51:11 GMT
The beginning was with an intranet in 1968, a scientific and academic network. April 30, 1993, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) put the web into the public domain. Per Popular Mechanics The WWW was invented by a British chap called Tim Berners-Lee. Granted he worked at CERN at the time. He's currently head of the World Wide Web Consortium.January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. It is? But its been around since the 1960s, created by the US armed forces to make sure crucial information was not stored all in one place, but easy to get hold of. Basically they were worried about some eggs in one basket getting vaporised, then universities thought it was handy for sharing information. The WWW was only proposed in writing in 1989 and a lot of the protocol code conceived in the mid 1900s. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. Per USG That's prior to the WWW. Prior to that humans had to ring each other up asking if they could communicate via their roomed sized computers.The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network. Per History Channel There you go then. But the History channel is not always to be believed
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Post by And Kevin 2024 on Apr 6, 2023 0:06:21 GMT
Yes. The internet existed long before "Windows" and the "mouse-clicking on icons" phenomenon came into the public consciousness. We operated from a Unix command line with a keyboard. (Do you remember 110-baud modems with a rotary dial?) FTP was the way it was done. Then the Usenet groups came along. When Windows 3.1 and other GUI's got rolling, and more people became computer savy to some degree, things started happening... 'WIMPs'. Windows, Icons, Mice and Pointers. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs worked together once upon a time. It was Jobs who came up with WIMPs. Gates 'borrowed' the idea. I am not sure Gates came up with anything himself, except clever business practices. When he heard IBM wanted a DOS for their new idea of desktop PCs, he bought the DOS off some student for $300. He offered it to IBM as long as they paid $40 for each time they installed it. some exec at IBM, thinking desktops were a flash in the pan, agreed, no doubt laughing. He was so convinced desktops were just some very expensive gimmick that hardly anyone needed or wanted, they did not even bother to patent or copyright them. The things started to happen ... Remember Mosaic? Netscape? That made it easy. Windows 95 and IBM OS2 came along and it's been downhill ever since. I mean - uphill. And then came Android. And not let us forget Linux. Both free.Now days you need not be computer savy. Everything is an icon and you don't even need to know how to read or write, it seems. No one even knows what a command line is. Gosh, PCs are so reliable nowadays I have forgotten how to tinker with them! Does a command line not come from the wife?
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