Technology

Can You Bring Business Along?

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Last week Rocky Agrawai of Venture Beat noted the simple painful fact that big box retailers have more online competition and need to upgrade.  He then documents his own painful big box experiences which you really don’t see in online retail (often because they’re screwups caused by being there).

Big Box retail needs an upgrade, he concludes.  I concur myself; most of my experience with Big Box these days is Frys, who has wisely chosen their own focus (crazy selections and sheer enthusiasm in bulk).

In fact, Rocky then went on to discuss how department stores need help too.  I imagine if he is going to fully explore businesses who are behind the times, he’s going to be very busy – and I encourage him, he’s got great insights.

We probably wouldn’t be complaining about this two decades ago as the stores wouldn’t have comparable experience.  We also probably wouldn’t be complaining as much as it’s a different economic and cultural time.  But in a day of cut-it-to-the-bone, short-term thinking, Big Box stores and many others often feel rather miserable.

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Conversion Experience

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So Quest for Employment is being put into iBookstore form.  By hand.  So far I’m going to say I’m finding iBook Author friendly in all the wrong ways, and not exactly helpful.  There’s some slick elements to it, but the hand-holding functions really don’t help.

It’s very odd, but I I suddenly realized just how many formats I have to work with – not on an intellectual level, but a visceral one.

  • First there’s the main doc, which I just do In Libre Office.  I do a few formatting tricks (avoiding bullet points) to make sure it’s very cross-compatible.
  • I bring it over into Jutoh.
  • In Jutoh I configure it for ePub (for Nook) and Mobipocket (for Kindle).
  • I view it in Calibre to make sure it looks OK, and maybe other devices.
  • Since formatting the book often reveals things to fix, once I’ve done these conversions, I get the spacing and organization right for exporting to PDF from Libre office.
  • Now, if I want a print book, then I also have to take a file and format it to have proper page locations, spacing, etc. for a print format.  This is exported as PDF Inevitably I’m going to blow tens of dollars running prints to get that right, or burn my printer out.  Or both.

It’s educational, but it teaches me one thing – I bloody well love being an author.  Otherwise I wouldn’t do this stuff.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

 

Deep Speculation on Gaming. Kind of

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Monday, I’ll have an analysis up at Fan To Pro on CES and disruption of gaming.  Well a rant and analysis.  With bullet points.  Anyway its 1200 words of painful insight and sarcasm.

With all the changes in gaming going on, I’ve asked myself what part it plays in my life.  I enjoy it, I grow from it, etc.  But as so many options come before me, I find myself asking what is it for.

This is actually a question many people are going to have to ask with so many options and so many changing options.  Consumer or producer, what gaming is for is going to have to be asked to spend time, money, insight, and throwing birds at pigs appropriately.

The thing is what gaming is for has changed as the scope has expanded.  There are many “non-gamers” who game.  The DS, the Wii, Facebook games, mobile games, etc. have brought in legions of non-gamers into the gamer space – and these people are gamers.  The sphere has expanded.

But what people want and need out of gaming differs along many axes.  We just don’t think about it very much because we treat gaming as all-too-often monolithic.  Sure, it’s not monolithic, but it’s far less of what it’s not now – if you’ll excuse my terrible contortions of language.

So for myself, with options, I have to ask what I get out of gaming and how, out of many options, to pursue it.

Developers, hardware makers, publishers, are going to have to ask what people want and need, and how to deliver it.  They will be unlikely to cover all markets.

Then of course there’s the question of what happens as the omnipresence of games expands . . . but we’ll see how that goes in the next few years.

What is gaming for?

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.