Tag Archives: Publishing

Microsoft Stirs the Pot on Spaces After a Period

Recently, Microsoft reignited the long standing debate on the proper number of spaces after a period by having Word flag two spaces as an error and offering to fix it. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball is not impressed. He … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Making Money in Self Publishing

Those of you who have been with Irreal for the long term know that I’ve always been highly skeptical of the publishing industry’s claim that almost the whole cost of publishing a book is editing and marketing and that things … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Making Us Root for Sci-Hub

A couple of months ago I wrote about Jason Shen’s article on how Sci-Hub was blowing up academic publishing. I said I was conflicted about Sci-Hub because they basically make journal articles from academic publishers available for free and that’s … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment

Blowing Up Academic Publishing

Jason Shen has a very interesting post on how Sci-Hub is blowing up academic publishing. For those who don’t know, Sci-Hub is a site that offers free access to over 51,000,000 scientific journal articles. These papers are collected when a … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 2 Comments

The Publishing Workflow for ProGit v.2

As most of you know, I’m fascinated by publishing workflows. These days, my preferred scheme is write in Emacs/Org-mode and export to whatever final format I need. This strikes me as ideal. Not everyone agrees, of course. Scott Chacon, one … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Amazon and the Publishers

Over at Vox.com, Matthew Yglesias has a provocative article on the contretemps between Amazon and the publishing industry and with Hachette in particular. It’s mainly been portrayed in the press as an argument over prices but Yglesias says that’s just … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | Leave a comment

Turnkey Publishing

I’ve written several posts about the challenges facing the publishing industry and how their continued existence—at least in their current form—is looking increasingly tenuous. Just today Charlie Stross described the Internet as a “communication tool that tends to disintermediate supply … Continue reading

Posted in General | Tagged | 1 Comment