In comparing the EULA with the agreement I’ve signed with other publishers, I decided that Apple’s EULA wasn’t so bad.

I don’t believe the iBooks Author EULA has anything to do with Apple wanting to make money off of your creation. I don’t think it’s even about keeping you from creating for the Kindle bookstore with their software either.

Apple is wary of allowing authors to “Write Once, Publish Anywhere”.

Back in the early days of programming with Java, “Write Once, Run Anywhere” or WORA was the central Java value proposition. Write your app in Java and you’ll be able to target all of the platforms with a single code base.

Do you remember those client apps that ran on the Mac in the old days? There weren’t many of them and they either looked like Windows apps on the Mac or they were just plain hideously generic. There was nothing particularly Mac about them.

So Apple has released iBooks2 and created this new freely available tool for producing high quality books that include video, audio, slideshows, photo galleries, 3D images, annotated images, and more.

Apple wants to see high quality interactive books that include these widgets. If you use iBooks Author to target many different platforms you’re going to have to only include the least common denominator of features. If any one of the platforms you’re targeting don’t support a particular feature then you can’t use it.

Suddenly, the books produced for their store using their tool aren’t so special anymore.

You can see that in the initial offerings from the text book publishers. The digital books are essentially paper books that you can load on your iPad.

That’s not very exciting.

I’ve been asking the question from the opposite perspective. If my book will never be printed on paper, then what can I do differently? How can I tell stories that better explain the topics I’m teaching?

I may want to target multiple platforms but I completely understand why Apple wants me to deliver the best book possible for their platform.

It’s the same difference of opinions they had with Adobe. Adobe wanted the Flash experience to be the same on all platforms. Apple wanted the experience on the iPhone to be consistent with other iPhone apps.

For now, this approach is meeting my needs. I’m excited about what I can author with Author.

The tool is free to everyone and apparently – at least from the tweets and the blogs that I’ve read – Apple has done a horrible thing.

What has everyone up in arms is their EULA which specifies that if you are going to sell the book that you produce using Apple’s free tool then you are restricted to doing so through Apple. Essentially, this tool is only intended to help you write books for Apple’s iBookstore.

The folks complaining are looking at Author as standalone software. It’s not.

It’s very easy at an Apple event to have your eye on the wrong thing.

I remember the iPad debut where Steve Jobs sat in a chair and browsed the web for a very long time. The big screen behind Jobs showed a feed from the iPad so we could all see what he was seeing. It seemed like a boring demo as he showed us that the web looked pretty much like the web always looks even on this new device.

But the thing many people missed was Jobs himself. The point of the iPad wasn’t what the iPad was displaying web content it was watching Jobs sitting comfortably in a chair immersed in the web as he reached out and touched it. The demo was of our relationship with this new device and that was exactly what Apple changed with the introduction of the iPad.

Similarly, this week. The point of the demos at the Guggenheim was not iBooks 2 or the new Author app or even iTunes U. The point was that Apple, like Amazon, is taking over the role of the publisher for many of us.

When an author signs to write a book for the Pragmatic Programmers or for O’Reilly or for Pearson or any publisher they get some help from that publisher. The publisher provides them with tools and support people. Many of the things that publishers used to do, they do less and less of. For the last three books I wrote I was responsible for doing the bulk of the visual layout. I was responsible for doing the indexing in one and splitting the cost of the indexer for the other two.

The publisher gave me editorial guidance and distributed the book.

That first point should not be understated. On my Cocoa book, Dave’s feedback made it a much better book. He suggested structural changes and code level changes that resulted in the best book I’ve written to date. On the other two books I received no editorial feedback beyond copy edits.

The second point is what publishers mainly do for authors these days. They take what the authors write and produce a print book that they get on shelves and in Amazon. They also take what the authors write, and produce a digital book which they sell on their web sites, integrate in a subscription service like Pearson and O’Reilly’s Safari, and they may distribute it to Amazon’s Kindle bookstore and Apple’s iBookstore.

So what Apple said last week is that they have a plan for helping with the second point. It will still be up to us to provide great content. In fact, they were careful to refer to the traditional publishers as content providers.

So if Apple, like Amazon, has their sites on moving from being a channel to being a publisher what do they need to do?

They need to provide authors with the tools for easily providing properly formatted books for their brand.

That’s what Author does.

When I wrote books for Pragmatic Programmers, O’Reilly, and Pearson I wasn’t free to take the book I’d written for them to another publisher. I wasn’t free to use their tools to produce books for other publishers or to self publish. In fact, if I decided I didn’t want to complete a book I’d contracted for them then they could at their whim assign the book and whatever share of the payment they felt appropriate to another author. In addition, if I did finish the book they had the right to not publish it.

Look at the Author EULA in the light of a publisher’s agreement.

It’s pretty generous. This is a tool that Apple gives you for producing books to sell through Apple. Perhaps they’ll change that in the future but that’s the agreement for now.

In addition, if you want to give your book away you can use Apple’s tools to produce a book that you distribute any way you want. I don’t have those rights when I write for any other publisher.

Author is not a standalone piece of software. It’s part of a publishing strategy.

Actually, I’ve been a little casual with the name. Folks are calling the software “Author” but its real name is “iBooks Author”. That kind of sums it up. This is software designed to help you author books for iBooks.

The channel aspect does worry me a bit. I’d like my books to get as wide a distribution as possible.

On the other hand, the work is my own. I’ve been told by a publisher that they want a second edition of one of my books. Their conditions on me are that I drop this series of ebooks I’m working on because it might compete with the title. When I said no they responded that that’s ok they’ll just get someone else to revise my book.

My book.

It’s not really mine. Even though the copyright is in my name, that turns out not to mean very much.

So am I bothered by the iBooks Author EULA? No. But maybe that’s because I’ve been signing contracts with traditional publishers for so long.

I’m fairly certain the terms of iBooks Author will change. But, whether it does or doesn’t change, I’m very excited about the future.

It seems like a good idea.

We’ll get a fresh start when a new week, season, month, or year begins. This year I quietly started on some of my resolutions early. I decided that that way, when the New Year started I would have a week or two under my belt with the new behavior I’ve resolved to follow and so it would be easier to stick to my resolutions.

January first I won’t be waking up cold turkey to begin a lot of new projects and to adopt a lot of new behaviors—I’ll just need to keep doing what I’m doing.

What about you? Are there things you’re planning to start soon? What are you waiting for?

It’s a good book. He’s responded to his editor’s suggestions. He’s made modifications based on the tech reviews. He knows it could be a better book – every book can – but the book is ready to ship.

This book will sell for $40. His percentage is based on net. That is, he gets his royalty percentage based on how much the publisher gets paid. For ease of calculation, let’s assume that that’s 50%. It’s actually slightly lower.

So the publisher gets paid $20 for each book sold and keeps $18 and my friend makes $2. As a first approximation the publisher’s share is nine times what my friend’s share is.

If the book is wildly successful and sells ten thousand copies my friend will make twenty thousand dollars. This would actually be a very successful tech book. There are some that sell a lot more than this, but when I was at the Prags we considered a book to have been very successful if it sold more than four thousand copies. (By the way, this is not a story about the Prags – they pay a higher royalty than my friend is receiving and they assign costs to authors differently)

So if the book is very successful my friend will be paid about $20K which is roughly $10/hour.

The publisher is paid $180K. Now they have to pay to print the book – that’s about $2/book so the publisher’s share is reduced to $160K. The publisher also has to pay a copy editor, indexer, and typesetter. Let’s wildly overestimate these as costing another $10K – heck let’s double it for other costs like this and call it $20K.

That leaves the publisher with %140K. So the publisher’s share is really only seven times that of my friend.

The publisher has spent less than 200 hours on the book (we’ve already counted the time they hired out for copy editing, indexing, and typesetting). So the publisher’s take is approximately $700/hour. This is seventy times my friend’s share.

Of course the publisher has to pay for their offices and other staff members not really working on my friend’s book. They have to pay for books that don’t do as well as my friend’s book.

My friend has these same costs. He has to pay for his house and food and for family members not working on projects this financially successful.

What is the publisher giving my friend? They gave him editorial advice that he followed until his editor was satisfied that this was a good book and ready to go to press. They will produce and distribute the book. They don’t really do marketing anymore.

So not a whole lot. They probably have spent more like 100 hours on this book which pushes their rate up to $1400/hour spent. So the publisher gets more than one hundred times what my friend gets based on their efforts.

Granted I haven’t forgotten that his is only their reward for a successful book. They incur a lot of risk. What if the book isn’t successful? They lose the advance they paid the author, they don’t make back the money for their time spent, they lose the money on the books they’ve printed that never sell. Shouldn’t the publisher be compensated for the risk they are agreeing to take on?

On the other hand, my friend has risk too. Somewhere between the time that they told him the book was off to the printer and the time when the book actually would have gone off to the printer, the publisher decided the book wasn’t ready. They weren’t going to publish the book. This publisher has a record of canceling books very late in the process.

On the one hand, that’s great. It doesn’t help the publisher’s reputation to publish books that aren’t very good. It doesn’t serve the reading public to have a bad book out there that they might buy. But this isn’t a bad book. This is a good book. I’ve seen it.

The publisher just changed their mind on what they want.

There’s really nothing my friend can do. He has no power. He can either rewrite the book yet again or he can walk away from it. Authors, it turns out, have a fair amount of risk too.

One of them was part of a very popular technology network. We didn’t have much of a budget but we paid a little bit for articles and the editors of the various sites tended to be very good and plugged into the needs of their technologies so they knew what topics and authors to pursue.

Articles were signed, written, edited, rewritten, and then passed over to a copy editor and graphic designer and producer to put the finishing touches on them.

At some point revenues dropped a bit and someone well above my manager’s level decided that the thing to do was to cut costs. Ironically, a keynote speaker at a conference they were hosting had just explained that you can’t save a business by cutting the bottom line—you must work to increase your top line.

So they started paying authors a little less and a little less until one day they decided that they could just find bloggers to produce the content for them for free. The bloggers would get the prestige of publishing on this high visibility site and the site would get the content of these well known authors.

This was the early days of blogging. In those days, if someone wanted to read your blog, they generally didn’t subscribe, they navigated to the website you published on and looked for your latest.

Soon the tools for writing and hosting and discovering and consuming blogs improved to the point that the well-known bloggers decided to just publish their own blogs on their own sites. They weren’t getting anything out of the publisher really.

And so they did. The web sites withered. The bottom line was cut more and more. The web sites died.

Maybe it was time for them to die. I don’t know. I really value a well run website with strong editorial direction. The editor is filtering the site so I don’t have to spend a lot of time wading through noise. I don’t need to agree with the editorial stance to benefit from it. I need to understand the editorial biases of a particular site.

Yes. This is going somewhere.

Maybe that’s not quite right. Have reasonable and meaningful goals but make sure that you have short term measurable achievable milestones.

For example, I’ve never been fond of goals such as “I have to lose 20 pounds by Christmas.” I don’t mind goals such as “I have to lose 20 pounds” and short milestones such as “I’ll walk at least 30 minutes a day for the next week.”

My current goal is to write a book during the month of November. The book is ending up much shorter than I planned – but that is a topic for a different day.

My measurable goals were to sit down and write for at least an hour a day last week. Most days I wrote for much more than that. Today I have thirty pages towards my larger goal. I have thirty pages that would not have been written if my only goal was to write a book during the month of November.

If you focus on the total stack of paper you need to produce then you’ll never achieve your goal. Instead, focus on today’s activity. What do I need to do today.

I’m thinking the answer is: write for at least an hour.

I’d say about a quarter of them fall into our yard and need to be raked and left in a pile on our tree lawn.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rukakuusamo/

This has always seemed fine with me. Kind of a leaf tax. I enjoy the tree year round. It shades the back part of our yard. Sure, if it sat back another ten feet, fewer leaves would make it into our yard.

I never think, as I rake, that it’s just not fair. That it’s their tree and they should come to our yard and rake up their own stupid leaves.

We have two trees in the front yard and neighbors on each side have to rake up leaves that fall from it.

Maybe, for me, the issue is that it basically evens out. I rake some leaves that aren’t mine and someone else rakes some of my leaves.

But my neighbor on one side has no trees of his own out front. The balance is never in his favor.

I try not to count. There are always ways to account for things where you come out on the short end of things and ways to total things up where you come out ahead.

For me, life is pretty good. It’s three days into November and I was able to spend the morning outside at our picnic table pounding out today’s pages. The puppy alternated between lying at my side and running at a full sprint at squirrels, birds, and falling leaves.

Before we listened to radio on our iPhones and iPods (and Zunes?), before we listened to our music on Pandora, internet radio, satellite radio, and genius playlists, before there were music stations on our cable and satellite television, there was radio.

You might not listen to radio except to catch the weather, traffic, news, talk, or a game now and then.

There’s little reason to listen to most radio stations any more because they all sound the same and the amount of local programming continues to shrink.

At one time there was a rule that you could only own a handful of AM, FM, and television stations. There weren’t these big chains that own a ton of stations nationwide and a block of stations in one market. In the old days it was a big deal if a company had both an AM and an FM station.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What’s on the radio has changed, but one of the bigger changes has been in the devices we listen to it on.

In the old days there was a dial. You know like the theme song from the TV show “WKRP in Cincinnati” says “up and down the dial.”

You would tune into a station by rotating the dial until you got close and then slowly turning the dial until it sounded clearer while pointing the antenna in the right direction for better reception.

In those days, it was harder to flip between radio stations and that meant that radio stations were programmed differently. If I could get you to go to bed with our station then chances were you would wake up with us in the morning. So stations that ran baseball or basketball games at night knew that a big portion of their audience would wake up with the morning show. If I was a progressive rock station I might do commercial free complete album sides at ten so you’d wake up with my morning team.

The morning team would give you some reason between 7 and 7:40 to tune back in between 9 and 10 because if I could get you to tune in at the beginning of your work day then I might keep you all day at work.

For the restless who were spinning the dial every time there were ads or news, I wanted to be the first station back into music so as you rolled by my station we would reach out to you.

You know what changed everything?

Radio buttons.

Some stations adapted. Some stations stopped giving approximate dial locations like 101 and replaced them with the more digitally correct 100.7. These stations knew that listeners had buttons for them and for their closest competitor so the way they programmed changed.

The world is changing. Are you changing with it or are you still spinning dials in a push button world?

Three years ago I was editing for a technical publisher and launching a new series that was very special to me that focused on the other side of their lives. NaNoWriMo was coming up so I tied myself to their coat tails and encouraged people who didn’t want to write a novel to try a non-fiction book.

I said then, and I say now, the point of the exercise is for you to have a dedicated period in which to find out if you can write that book you’ve always wanted to write. The point is not to get published. If you want to get published, that’s great. But the mark of whether or not you are successful this month is simple:

Did you put words on a page?

At the end of the month you’ll know more about yourself. Each day this month you need to take some time to write. Some days the pages will pour out of you and some days it will be a struggle.

When I started this project as PragProWriMo I wrote:

“You’ll have a pile of pages or you won’t.

“On one hand, if you don’t, then you are one of the many people who wants to have written a book but doesn’t want to write a book. There’s nothing wrong with that. In a month you’ll know if that describes you or not.

“On the other hand, you might find that you love writing. You’ve got something to say and you love the hard work it takes to craft words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into passages that people want to read. Then you are meant to write a book. You won’t be able to stop. You still might not be able to publish your book, but that doesn’t keep you from being an author who has written a book.

“In between those two hands are the vast majority of us. We write when the planets align. We have blogs but weeks or months might pass between our posts. We can participate in this month of writing by posting a solid blog entry every day for the month of December. Then we might go back to the once in a while or we might continue.”

I’m going to work on a short technical book this month. It’s a proof-of-concept for a series I’ve been talking about starting for almost a year. I was just in the process of putting it off again because I have an book on iOS programming I’m writing for someone as well as other projects in progress — but I’m up for embracing this time-boxed month long sprint.

Join me.