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* This post is from boingboing.net, one of the best blogs about computers/tech/lifestyle on the web. If you haven't ever visited I urge you to do so and bookmark the page for daily visits. I get the author's point about ebooks but I don't totally agree. I think he's right *now* but I don't think he'll be right in the future. Eventually someone will devise a way to make ebooks profitable, probably by bundling them with the 'dead tree' version (meaning books that use paper, i.e., "dead trees"). Eventually they'll catch on and then another nail will be driven into the coffin of traditional publishing.

You can write a comment about this article by clicking on the Add Comment link at the end of the post.

From boingboing:

My pal and collaborator Charlie Stross has a fantastic essay up today,
"Why the commercial ebook market is broken." He covers a lot of ground
-- DRM stinks, publishers have mucked things up, writers have said dumb
things -- but where he really sings is in puncturing the balloon that
is the fear that an ebook reader will make ebooks into substitutes for
print books.

First of all, if overlooks the point that publishers don't manufacture
ebook readers; the consumer electronics industry does. And the consumer
electronics industry will not cut off its own nose to spite its face by
producing an ebook reader for $20, if it can produce one with extra
bells and whistles that sells for $350. We've had the tech for a $20
(or $50, anyway) ebook reader for a decade; it would resemble a
grey-scale palm pilot, albeit without even the PDA functionality. But
the parts are dirt cheap these days! If a manufacturer thought they
could sell the beast, they'd be churning them out by the bucketload
— and it's perfectly possible to read ebooks on a 160x160 green
screen. I used to do it all the time in the mid to late 1990s. The
reason nobody makes such a beast is because it's simply not profitable
to do so. Explaining why this is so ought to lead into a long essay on
the cost structure of consumer electronics, but basically, unless the
Chinese government decides to subsidize its indigenous manufacturers in
order to deliberately destroy the western publishing industry, it ain't
gonna happen.

Secondly, and more devastatingly for the sky-is-falling promoters
of the "pirate ebooks will doom the publishing industry" theory, until
ebook readers cost no more than a hardback, 90% of readers will ignore
them. And that's regular readers, not the folks who own four books (and
one of them is a Bible). Expecting people to cough up $200 for a reader
so that they can then pay $25 for new novels to read on it — as
opposed to buying the novels for $25 (less discount) in hardcover and
having the cultural artefact — is, well, it's just bogus.

We might see such a device (at $200) take off in the book club
market. Imagine you join the e-book club. Your first sign-up gets you
an ebook reader loaded with five titles for $20. Then you have to buy a
book a month for the next year before you can leave, and you're paying
$20 a pop. After a year you've got 17 novels and an ebook reader, and
you're out $240 for a $200 reader. Most abook-clubbable people will
stay in (they're set up for the club and they've already got a small
bookshelf on their reader) and over the next year the club can make the
profits to pay for that first year's loss-leader.

But 80% of readers don't do book clubs. I've seen my book club
sales, and they're piss-poor (except in France, which is different).

Basically, the universal ebook reader is a non-starter —
at least for this generation — for the same reason that it's
near-as-dammit impossible to sell hardcover midlist novels for more
than US $24; consumers don't like being milked.

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Alpha Geek: Make Microsoft Word less annoying

By Rick Broida

Microsoft
Word can drive you nuts. It piles on features few people need, plagues
you with annoying auto-corrections and just generally acts like a pain
in the ass.

No more. It's time to take back the word processor,
to put Word in its place and make it your ally instead of your
adversary. Follow these tips and you'll be a much happier writer.

Note:
Everything here applies to Word 2003, though earlier versions may
benefit as well. I haven't seen enough of Word for Vista to know if
it's equally annoying (oh, who am I kidding, of course it is).

Turn off unnecessary toolbars

The more toolbars you've got
stacked up in Word, the less space you have for viewing your actual
document. So banish the ones you seldom use. Just right-click anywhere
on any toolbar, then left-click any toolbar that has a checkmark next
to it. It'll immediately disappear from the screen. (You can restore a
toolbar using the same method.) For the record, most users need only
the Standard and Formatting toolbars.

Streamline the toolbars you keep

Ever
use the "show/hide paragraph" button? How about "decrease indent"?
Didn't think so. Even if you keep just two toolbars, they're probably
so bloated with unused buttons that you have to keep them stacked.
Fortunately, you can excise extra buttons with ease. Here's how:

Click
the little down arrow at the right end of any toolbar. In the menu that
appears, click Add or Remove Buttons > Formatting, then clear the
checkmarks from any buttons you don't need. Remember, removing these
buttons doesn't eliminate their corresponding features--it just
streamlines your toolbar.

Once you've trimmed the fat, you should
be able to fit some or all of your toolbars side-by-side, thus giving
you even more extra workspace.

Add a word-count button

With
all that button-bloat, Microsoft doesn't see fit to include one for
word-count? Maybe it's because I'm a writer, but I use that feature
constantly. To add a word-count button, click Tools > Customize, and
then click the Commands tab. In the Categories section, click Tools. In
the Commands section, scroll down until you find Word Count, then drag
it out of that box and onto a toolbar.

Turn off hyperlinks

Word
just loves to hyperlink e-mail addresses and URLs. Sure, this might
come in handy from time to time, but mostly it's just distracting. To
remove all the links from an individual document, select all the text
by pressing Ctrl-A, then press Ctrl-Shift-F9.

To stop Word from
hyperlinking in the future, click Tools > AutoCorrect Options, then
click the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Clear the checkbox for "Internet
and network paths with hyperlinks." Then click the AutoFormat tab and
clear the same checkbox. If you want to manually add a hyperlink, select the desired text, right-click it and choose Hyperlink.

Expand the recently used documents list

By
default, Word shows only four of your most recently used documents when
you click the File menu. I don't know about you, but I'm usually
juggling a lot more documents than that. If you click Tools >
Options and then the General tab, you'll see an item called "Recently
used files list." Click the arrows to bump the number up to nine, the
maximum Word allows.

Turn off "smart quotes"

Word's
curly quotation marks may look nice, but they can wreak havoc when you
copy and paste them into blogs, other applications, web forms, etc. To
turn off these "smart" quotes, click Tools > AutoCorrect Options,
hit both the AutoFormat and AutoFormat As You Type tabs, and clear the
checkbox marked "straight quotes with smart quotes."

Turn off entire-word selection

Ever notice that when you select text, Word automatically selects entire words at a time? Hey, guess what, Word? I'll
decide how much of a word I want to select, thank you very much. To
turn off this "feature," click Tools > Options and then click the
Edit tab. Clear the checkbox for "When selecting, automatically select
entire word."

Turn off automatic numbered lists

Once
again, Word assumes facts not in evidence--in this case, that when you
put a number in front of a new line, you're planning to create a
numbered list. Stop these unwanted assumptions by clicking Tools >
AutoCorrect Options, then the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Clear the
checkbox for "Automatic numbered lists."

After that, if you want to
number a list, just select the text and click the Numbering icon (or
click Format > Numbering if you turned off that icon to reduce
toolbar clutter).

Turn off superscripting and fractions

If
you're creating text that's headed to a blog or other web-based
document, superscripted text and fraction characters will usually come
out looking messed up. Word automatically turns ordinals (e.g., "1st")
into superscript and fractions into special fraction characters. To
stop this pesky behavior, click Tools > AutoCorrect Options, hit
both the AutoFormat and AutoFormat As You Type tabs, and clear the two
checkboxes relating to fractions and ordinals.

Access full pull-down menus

Because
Word's pull-down menus are so freakin' cluttered with unused features,
I can understand the logic behind the abbreviated menus. Of course, the
feature you actually want is never visible, so you have to click again
at the bottom of the menu or wait a few seconds for the full menu to
appear. Bleh.

To override this annoying obstacle, click Tools >
Customize, then the Options tab and then the "Always show full menus"
checkbox.

Ditch Word altogether

You
knew this was coming. If Word simply causes you too many headaches (or
you're looking for a free alternative), consider beloved open-source
alternatives like AbiWord and OpenOffice.org. Heck, if you have modest word-processing needs and you're always online, it's hard to beat Google Docs and Zoho Writer, both of which are also free (and make it easy to access your documents from nearly any PC).

Know
of any other ways to keep Word from driving you insane? Share your
insight with the world by posting in the comments! In the meantime,
check out our post on keyboard shortcuts for Word.

Rick Broida, Lifehacker associate editor, has lived in Word for years, but living with it hasn't been easy. His special feature, Alpha Geek, appears every Monday. Subscribe to the Alpha Geek feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

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