Randal C. Gibson's Blog
September 1, 2017
Book Addendum Number 1
In the past two months, I have discovered some information that I will include in any second edition of my first book “Hi-Fi For Low Dough”. So let’s consider this blog post the first addendum to my book. The first new thing I discovered concerns a small portable music player that I wrote about in the book. It’s called the FiiO X1, and it plays digital music files that you put on a microSD card that you insert into the player. When you rip a music CD onto your computer with no compression, you will get digital music files where the data has been sampled 44,100 times per second and each of those sample numbers is a 16-bit number. That’s 16 binary bits (0 or 1) that can represent decimal numbers from 1 to 65,536. This data is commonly represented by the shorthand of 44/16. Musical data of that format is commonly called “CD Quality.” The reason I wrote the book is to let people know that music has been recorded at higher resolution than that for many years, and now that computer storage is bigger and cheaper, and cable modem broadband speeds are so much faster, you can now download digital music files that contain much more information than the old standard of “CD Quality.” One of the new standards for “Hi-res Music” is digital files of data sampled at 96/24. That’s 24-bit numbers (1-16,777,216) sampled 96,000 times per second.
Now, you can find many opinions on the internet, of people that cannot hear much difference between “CD Quality” and “Hi-res”. And I agree that if you only listen to music in high-noise environments (like driving in your car) or using inexpensive ear buds, headphones, or speakers, you probably won’t hear enough difference to warrant the extra expense of building a hi-res catalog of music files. You may also need to invest in new hardware to handle higher resolution digital files. If you decide that hi-res music is worth investigating, there are two new options to check out. First, to be able to hear the higher quality and bigger stage presence of “Hi-res”, you need some modern headphones or speakers. For new speakers, I recommend you check out the Elac Debut F5 or F6 speakers. If you’re into headphones, check out the HIFIMAN HE400S or the HE400I. You can find a lot of good reviews of those items on amazon.com. Secondly, you now have some new options for hi-res music on smartphones. I recently bought a new phone called the HTC U11. This phone will record video at full HD and 4K with hi-res audio up to 192/24. The display is 2560 x 1440 at 534 ppi (pixels per inch.) You can insert a microSD card up to at least 256GB. I inserted a card that had 96/24 flac music files and they sound great even using the included noise-cancelling, adaptive earphones. I also listened to the smartphone using my HIFIMAN HE400S headphones and the sound produced is flawless. You can easily add playlists using the music player software on the smartphone, and then hook up the smartphone to your auxiliary jack in your car for an incredible audio experience when you travel.
I discovered this smartphone just in time. On my recent cross-country trip, I discovered that my FiiO X1 portable hi-res music player has a problem with hi-res files. It will play CD-Quality files perfectly, but when it plays 96/24 flac files, it will sometimes have a hiccup. You have probably streamed a video from the internet that doesn’t have enough of a buffer memory built up yet and it skips some frames or you see a jumbled video picture for a split second. The same kind of thing was happening with my music player. The pitch and quality of the music playback would skip and jumble once every minute or so. I don’t know if the problem was the quality of the microSD card, or the transfer of the files to the card, or the player itself, but I would no longer recommend this player. I would now recommend getting a newer player or a new hi-res capable smartphone.
Now, you can find many opinions on the internet, of people that cannot hear much difference between “CD Quality” and “Hi-res”. And I agree that if you only listen to music in high-noise environments (like driving in your car) or using inexpensive ear buds, headphones, or speakers, you probably won’t hear enough difference to warrant the extra expense of building a hi-res catalog of music files. You may also need to invest in new hardware to handle higher resolution digital files. If you decide that hi-res music is worth investigating, there are two new options to check out. First, to be able to hear the higher quality and bigger stage presence of “Hi-res”, you need some modern headphones or speakers. For new speakers, I recommend you check out the Elac Debut F5 or F6 speakers. If you’re into headphones, check out the HIFIMAN HE400S or the HE400I. You can find a lot of good reviews of those items on amazon.com. Secondly, you now have some new options for hi-res music on smartphones. I recently bought a new phone called the HTC U11. This phone will record video at full HD and 4K with hi-res audio up to 192/24. The display is 2560 x 1440 at 534 ppi (pixels per inch.) You can insert a microSD card up to at least 256GB. I inserted a card that had 96/24 flac music files and they sound great even using the included noise-cancelling, adaptive earphones. I also listened to the smartphone using my HIFIMAN HE400S headphones and the sound produced is flawless. You can easily add playlists using the music player software on the smartphone, and then hook up the smartphone to your auxiliary jack in your car for an incredible audio experience when you travel.
I discovered this smartphone just in time. On my recent cross-country trip, I discovered that my FiiO X1 portable hi-res music player has a problem with hi-res files. It will play CD-Quality files perfectly, but when it plays 96/24 flac files, it will sometimes have a hiccup. You have probably streamed a video from the internet that doesn’t have enough of a buffer memory built up yet and it skips some frames or you see a jumbled video picture for a split second. The same kind of thing was happening with my music player. The pitch and quality of the music playback would skip and jumble once every minute or so. I don’t know if the problem was the quality of the microSD card, or the transfer of the files to the card, or the player itself, but I would no longer recommend this player. I would now recommend getting a newer player or a new hi-res capable smartphone.
August 17, 2017
Vagabonding
Four months? Yes, it’s been four months since my last post. Did I give up on my blog? Yes and No. The pretty small number of views and comments so far has allowed me to put the priority of blog posting on the back burner. But I do have a long-term goal of having a blog that my future readers can go to, to see where I came from and who I was when I started my writing career. I do enjoy writing, but I’ve just been too busy this last four months. I sold my home and moved from one side of the country to the other side. I did all the packing by myself and then I drove 3000 miles to my current home town.
I wasn’t going to move any furniture because I had decided to live in an apartment or condo. That gave me the option of moving my “stuff” (mostly books, DVDs, Blu-rays, and computer equipment) by boxing it and putting it all in a PODS container and paying them to transport the container while I drove my small hybrid cross-country. Since you can store the PODS container at its destination, that gives you the flexibility of taking as long as you want on your trip.
I guess most people fly out to their destination, find a place to live, fly back, schedule their move, and schedule their hotel rooms during their trip so that it can be done as quickly as possible so that they can get to work and keep earning a living. I had quit work and decided to try writing for a living even before I had thought about moving, so I had the freedom of time to travel on any schedule I wanted. As I thought about the route I would take on my trek, I visited my local library to see what books they had about travelling the U.S. There, I came across a book about vagabonding:
https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Un...
Vagabonding is the art of travelling with no set schedule and no set itinerary. What most interested me, was the ability to decide how long to stay in one area while you are there. Every trip I had taken in my life, had a schedule of hotel rooms set ahead of time. If you wanted to spend two days in an area instead of one, you would just have to return to the area at a later time. If you are vagabonding, you have no hotel rooms booked ahead of time, so if you want to stay in an area one day or five days, you have the ability to do that. And maybe even more alluring is the ability to change your route. If you hear about a place to visit from a local clerk or waiter, you can go there without backing up the rest of your schedule of hotel room bookings.
It turned out that I didn’t end up going anywhere that I hadn’t planned to ahead of time. I had a route planned and I ended up sticking to it. I rode to the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and I visited some beautiful national parks. But I didn’t want to drive too many hours in a day and risk falling asleep at the wheel, and I really don’t like the “too soft” beds in most of the chain hotels that I stayed in, so I wasn’t interested in spending many weeks “wandering” around the country just because I could.
I was curious to see if I would have any problem getting hotel rooms for that night at anywhere from 4-8pm. I only remember having one hotel that had no vacancies and I was able to find another one nearby that had a room available. Of course, you end up paying full price to have that flexibility. But when I thought about this as being a once in a lifetime event, I was willing to pay that price.
Then I had to find an apartment, get and build a little bit of furniture (there is a huge IKEA in the area,) move my stuff to a long-term storage space, explore all the new stores in the area, etc., etc. While I was doing all that, I thought about two ways of making some money that don’t involve writing. But they both do involve a financial risk. I’ve decided to stick with something I have enjoyed doing to this point in my life. They say, “Once you become a teacher, you’ll always be a teacher.” For me, this might apply: “Once you’ve written a book, you’ll always be a writer.”
I wasn’t going to move any furniture because I had decided to live in an apartment or condo. That gave me the option of moving my “stuff” (mostly books, DVDs, Blu-rays, and computer equipment) by boxing it and putting it all in a PODS container and paying them to transport the container while I drove my small hybrid cross-country. Since you can store the PODS container at its destination, that gives you the flexibility of taking as long as you want on your trip.
I guess most people fly out to their destination, find a place to live, fly back, schedule their move, and schedule their hotel rooms during their trip so that it can be done as quickly as possible so that they can get to work and keep earning a living. I had quit work and decided to try writing for a living even before I had thought about moving, so I had the freedom of time to travel on any schedule I wanted. As I thought about the route I would take on my trek, I visited my local library to see what books they had about travelling the U.S. There, I came across a book about vagabonding:
https://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Un...
Vagabonding is the art of travelling with no set schedule and no set itinerary. What most interested me, was the ability to decide how long to stay in one area while you are there. Every trip I had taken in my life, had a schedule of hotel rooms set ahead of time. If you wanted to spend two days in an area instead of one, you would just have to return to the area at a later time. If you are vagabonding, you have no hotel rooms booked ahead of time, so if you want to stay in an area one day or five days, you have the ability to do that. And maybe even more alluring is the ability to change your route. If you hear about a place to visit from a local clerk or waiter, you can go there without backing up the rest of your schedule of hotel room bookings.
It turned out that I didn’t end up going anywhere that I hadn’t planned to ahead of time. I had a route planned and I ended up sticking to it. I rode to the top of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and I visited some beautiful national parks. But I didn’t want to drive too many hours in a day and risk falling asleep at the wheel, and I really don’t like the “too soft” beds in most of the chain hotels that I stayed in, so I wasn’t interested in spending many weeks “wandering” around the country just because I could.
I was curious to see if I would have any problem getting hotel rooms for that night at anywhere from 4-8pm. I only remember having one hotel that had no vacancies and I was able to find another one nearby that had a room available. Of course, you end up paying full price to have that flexibility. But when I thought about this as being a once in a lifetime event, I was willing to pay that price.
Then I had to find an apartment, get and build a little bit of furniture (there is a huge IKEA in the area,) move my stuff to a long-term storage space, explore all the new stores in the area, etc., etc. While I was doing all that, I thought about two ways of making some money that don’t involve writing. But they both do involve a financial risk. I’ve decided to stick with something I have enjoyed doing to this point in my life. They say, “Once you become a teacher, you’ll always be a teacher.” For me, this might apply: “Once you’ve written a book, you’ll always be a writer.”
April 12, 2017
How Good Can Spotify Be
This blog has been about the steps I followed to write and self-publish a non-fiction book. I’m almost finished with the process I went through with my first book. I want to continue this blog even before I get very far with my next book, so I will have to expand the topics I cover. Don’t worry, I’m not going to be talking about what I had for breakfast or the crazy thing that happened to me at the grocery store. I will be writing about things that I have a passion for and that I may write a book about in the future. This post will be an example of that. I powered up my computer yesterday, wanting to write a post about the next step in publishing my first book, but something happened that I have to write about.
I sometimes listen to music while I’m doing things on the computer. My first book is about that. Hi-Fi For Low Dough details what I discovered about high resolution music on the internet. One of the most interesting things I discovered was the music streaming service called Spotify. Just visit http://www.spotify.com and click on Get Spotify Free. After signing up for a free account, you can download the program to your computer. You want to use the program instead of your browser because you will get higher streaming rates with the program and a broadband connection. And a higher streaming rate gets you much better sounding music.
Now, you may be wondering about how my book can be about hi-res music and Spotify, which is a service that streams low resolution, compressed music. Spotify Free is lower resolution than CDs, but it is better than the first generation mp3 files, and the basic service is free, so I use it mostly for music discovery. They have over 30 million songs to play and over 2 billion playlists to try. Being compressed, a lot of the music on Spotify sounds flat, not spacious, and, well, “compressed.” But, some of it is not that at all.
I like a lot of different kinds of music. Rock, Jazz Fusion, New Age, Electronic. But some of my favorite music is music that is mixed and mastered better than most music is. Some artists just have a passion for detail and are willing to spend the time to master their music so that you can hear every instrument and vocal while listening at a very high volume. Other artists don’t have the time or the money to spend worrying about every detail. They can still make good music. But I really like artists like Tears For Fears, Steely Dan, Donald Fagen, Michael Jackson, Rush, Yes. Two of the best concerts I’ve ever been to were Tears For Fears and Steely Dan, because even their live shows were mixed so well that they sounded like studio sessions.
I’m giving you all of this information so that you can share the experience I had yesterday. While my computer was booting up, I thought about the fact that I hadn’t listened to any good music in a while. Before I started writing my next blog post, I wanted to listen to some music to relax and get in a creative mood. But before I could even do that, I saw a note that I had left myself about a music artist that I had seen on a TV show. I wanted to hear more of their music to determine if I liked them enough to buy some of their CDs or hi-res downloads (if available.) So, I ran my Spotify program and typed in the search box: “broken social scene”. I then typed the same thing in the search box of https://en.wikipedia.org, where I discovered that this is a Canadian group that has produced four albums so far. And they are all available on Spotify.
I started by scanning some songs from their first album “Feel Good Lost”. Wikipedia says that they are an indie rock band and a “musical collective” that has included as few as six artists and as many as nineteen, playing their music. Their first album has some ambient influences – no vocals – and a lot of their music is what is called post-rock. It’s mostly instrumental, using rock music instruments. Lots of guitars and drum and percussion sounds. Most of their music is good, even if a little “experimental” and unusual. But they do have one song that absolutely blew me away. It is called “Pacific Theme” and it is the sixth song on their album “You Forgot It In People”. It is 5:09 long and you must listen to it – all of it – with your best headphones. NOW.
Sorry to yell at you – lol. This is one of the best mixed songs that I have ever heard. Even listening to it streaming from Spotify, you can hear every one of the 10-19 musicians on this recording equally well. Their use of stereo separation and/or spread and echo and other effects, places you right next to the artists as they play this song. This is – by far – the best sounding song I have ever heard on Spotify. Now listen to it again – only louder!
Your welcome. And yes, I have already ordered the CD from Amazon. If it sounds even better in that format, I will let you know. I don’t think it’s available in higher resolution. If you have heard anything about that please leave a comment.
Just some final words. If you really want to appreciate how good this song sounds, search on YouTube for “broken social scene pacific theme” and listen to some of the live recordings. Unfortunately, they are nowhere near as good as the studio recording. Just shows you how hard this was to accomplish. Some of their other songs have good stereo space and mixing, but nothing even close to this song. Now you know one of my passions. If you have heard anything even close to the soundspace produced by this song, please leave a comment for the rest of us, so we can hear it too. Thanks.
I sometimes listen to music while I’m doing things on the computer. My first book is about that. Hi-Fi For Low Dough details what I discovered about high resolution music on the internet. One of the most interesting things I discovered was the music streaming service called Spotify. Just visit http://www.spotify.com and click on Get Spotify Free. After signing up for a free account, you can download the program to your computer. You want to use the program instead of your browser because you will get higher streaming rates with the program and a broadband connection. And a higher streaming rate gets you much better sounding music.
Now, you may be wondering about how my book can be about hi-res music and Spotify, which is a service that streams low resolution, compressed music. Spotify Free is lower resolution than CDs, but it is better than the first generation mp3 files, and the basic service is free, so I use it mostly for music discovery. They have over 30 million songs to play and over 2 billion playlists to try. Being compressed, a lot of the music on Spotify sounds flat, not spacious, and, well, “compressed.” But, some of it is not that at all.
I like a lot of different kinds of music. Rock, Jazz Fusion, New Age, Electronic. But some of my favorite music is music that is mixed and mastered better than most music is. Some artists just have a passion for detail and are willing to spend the time to master their music so that you can hear every instrument and vocal while listening at a very high volume. Other artists don’t have the time or the money to spend worrying about every detail. They can still make good music. But I really like artists like Tears For Fears, Steely Dan, Donald Fagen, Michael Jackson, Rush, Yes. Two of the best concerts I’ve ever been to were Tears For Fears and Steely Dan, because even their live shows were mixed so well that they sounded like studio sessions.
I’m giving you all of this information so that you can share the experience I had yesterday. While my computer was booting up, I thought about the fact that I hadn’t listened to any good music in a while. Before I started writing my next blog post, I wanted to listen to some music to relax and get in a creative mood. But before I could even do that, I saw a note that I had left myself about a music artist that I had seen on a TV show. I wanted to hear more of their music to determine if I liked them enough to buy some of their CDs or hi-res downloads (if available.) So, I ran my Spotify program and typed in the search box: “broken social scene”. I then typed the same thing in the search box of https://en.wikipedia.org, where I discovered that this is a Canadian group that has produced four albums so far. And they are all available on Spotify.
I started by scanning some songs from their first album “Feel Good Lost”. Wikipedia says that they are an indie rock band and a “musical collective” that has included as few as six artists and as many as nineteen, playing their music. Their first album has some ambient influences – no vocals – and a lot of their music is what is called post-rock. It’s mostly instrumental, using rock music instruments. Lots of guitars and drum and percussion sounds. Most of their music is good, even if a little “experimental” and unusual. But they do have one song that absolutely blew me away. It is called “Pacific Theme” and it is the sixth song on their album “You Forgot It In People”. It is 5:09 long and you must listen to it – all of it – with your best headphones. NOW.
Sorry to yell at you – lol. This is one of the best mixed songs that I have ever heard. Even listening to it streaming from Spotify, you can hear every one of the 10-19 musicians on this recording equally well. Their use of stereo separation and/or spread and echo and other effects, places you right next to the artists as they play this song. This is – by far – the best sounding song I have ever heard on Spotify. Now listen to it again – only louder!
Your welcome. And yes, I have already ordered the CD from Amazon. If it sounds even better in that format, I will let you know. I don’t think it’s available in higher resolution. If you have heard anything about that please leave a comment.
Just some final words. If you really want to appreciate how good this song sounds, search on YouTube for “broken social scene pacific theme” and listen to some of the live recordings. Unfortunately, they are nowhere near as good as the studio recording. Just shows you how hard this was to accomplish. Some of their other songs have good stereo space and mixing, but nothing even close to this song. Now you know one of my passions. If you have heard anything even close to the soundspace produced by this song, please leave a comment for the rest of us, so we can hear it too. Thanks.
February 23, 2017
Getting Ready to Publish
When I finished writing my first book, I wanted to follow the procedure that I had read about in some books on self-publishing. That is to publish to paperback on createspace.com first, because at the end of that process, they will ask you if you want to then publish to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for your e-book.
You don’t have to complete this entire process at one time. After you’ve accomplished a few steps, you can stop and come back and finish at a later date. But, I was ready to do it all at once. My e-book was ready, so I wanted to create the book cover for it next. When you create your separate cover for your paperback, you start with your e-book cover and just add a spine and a back cover using a template you can download from createspace.com.
Before you even think about designing your book cover yourself, google: “bad book covers” and look at drawings that could have been better done by a ten-year-old, too many picture elements just thrown together, text that can’t be read because the font is too hard to read, text that can’t be read because of badly contrasting colors, and visual themes that don’t tell the reader what the genre of the book is. If you’re still interested in doing your own covers, go to amazon.com, bring up the “Books” search box, and type in “book cover design”. If you would like to explore paying for a cover design, google: “hiring a book cover designer”.
If you really want to create your own book covers, I suggest that you buy Photoshop Elements and at least two books about it. Your first step should be to go to a large bookstore and browse their books on Photoshop Elements. As a first book, you should look at a “For Dummies” or a “Missing Manual” type book for the latest version of Photoshop Elements. For a second book, you should get a book about how to use the layers function of Photoshop.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the KDP Guidelines states that the preferred image for an e-book cover on Amazon is a .jpg file 2560 pixels tall by 1600 pixels wide, at a resolution of at least 350 pixels per inch. It is easy to create a blank canvas of that size using Adobe Photoshop Elements. You can download Photoshop Elements on amazon.com. You can also download a discounted package of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Photoshop Elements is for creating, editing, and cataloging digital pictures, and Premiere Elements is for editing and cataloging digital videos.
When you have finished your image, be sure to save it in Photoshop format so that all your layers remain, in case you want to modify or improve your image later. Then, perform a “Flatten Image” and save in the .jpg format using the “Maximum Image Quality” setting. That’s the file you will upload to KDP during the publishing process.
You don’t have to complete this entire process at one time. After you’ve accomplished a few steps, you can stop and come back and finish at a later date. But, I was ready to do it all at once. My e-book was ready, so I wanted to create the book cover for it next. When you create your separate cover for your paperback, you start with your e-book cover and just add a spine and a back cover using a template you can download from createspace.com.
Before you even think about designing your book cover yourself, google: “bad book covers” and look at drawings that could have been better done by a ten-year-old, too many picture elements just thrown together, text that can’t be read because the font is too hard to read, text that can’t be read because of badly contrasting colors, and visual themes that don’t tell the reader what the genre of the book is. If you’re still interested in doing your own covers, go to amazon.com, bring up the “Books” search box, and type in “book cover design”. If you would like to explore paying for a cover design, google: “hiring a book cover designer”.
If you really want to create your own book covers, I suggest that you buy Photoshop Elements and at least two books about it. Your first step should be to go to a large bookstore and browse their books on Photoshop Elements. As a first book, you should look at a “For Dummies” or a “Missing Manual” type book for the latest version of Photoshop Elements. For a second book, you should get a book about how to use the layers function of Photoshop.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the KDP Guidelines states that the preferred image for an e-book cover on Amazon is a .jpg file 2560 pixels tall by 1600 pixels wide, at a resolution of at least 350 pixels per inch. It is easy to create a blank canvas of that size using Adobe Photoshop Elements. You can download Photoshop Elements on amazon.com. You can also download a discounted package of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Photoshop Elements is for creating, editing, and cataloging digital pictures, and Premiere Elements is for editing and cataloging digital videos.
When you have finished your image, be sure to save it in Photoshop format so that all your layers remain, in case you want to modify or improve your image later. Then, perform a “Flatten Image” and save in the .jpg format using the “Maximum Image Quality” setting. That’s the file you will upload to KDP during the publishing process.
February 12, 2017
Print-on-Demand
If you wanted to publish a book twenty years ago, you had two choices. You got a book publisher to decide that your book was good enough to take a chance on, or you self-published with a vanity press. If you signed a contract with a major publisher, they paid you an advance fee, and if your royalties ever got higher than the advance amount plus the publishers printing and marketing costs, you could eventually get paid more for a book with a lot of sales. If you couldn’t get a big publisher deal, you could pay a vanity press to print a minimum of hundreds of books, that you could then try to sell on your own.
In 2007, Amazon released its first Kindle reader, and in 2010, Apple released its iPad tablet. By 2011, Amazon started selling more e-books than printed books in the U.S. By this time, Amazon had already acquired some print-on-demand companies so they could start their CreateSpace service for publishing paperback books. If you know how to format your content and create your book covers, you can put e-book and paperback versions of your book on amazon.com for free. Of course, you should probably buy a copy of your e-book and at least one copy of your paperback for proof copies, even though you can electronically proof them as you are uploading your files to KDP and CreateSpace.
As I was writing my first book, people were saying that you should first publish your book to CreateSpace, because at the end of that process, they would ask if you wanted to also publish to KDP. If you said yes, you would be sent to the KDP website, and after publishing your e-book, your paperback listing would eventually be automatically combined with your e-book listing on the same sales page.
Now, if you’ve been investigating KDP, and discovered that they now have their own paperback publishing option, you may be wondering why you wouldn’t take advantage of that. If you check out this help page at KDP –
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A...
you’ll see a feature comparison chart showing the differences between KDP Paperback and CreateSpace. As of 2/12/17, with KDP you cannot order cheap proof copies or “wholesale author copies”, and you cannot get automatic expanded distribution to bookstores. Since my book was uploaded in an “industry standard” size, the on-demand paperback is currently listed for sale on the Barnes and Noble website, and a few other sites around the world. You can just google your ISBN number to see where yours is listed.
By the way, the quality of my paperback is very good. I compared it to an O’Reilly paperback and a Wiley “For Dummies” paperback, and the CreateSpace product is like 98% as good. If you look at the type using a magnifying glass, you can see that the typeface resolution is not quite as high (maybe it’s something like 270 dots-per-inch as opposed to more than 300 dpi,) but looking at it from a normal reading distance you really can’t see a difference. And, the paper thickness and binding is just as good as the major publishers’ product.
In 2007, Amazon released its first Kindle reader, and in 2010, Apple released its iPad tablet. By 2011, Amazon started selling more e-books than printed books in the U.S. By this time, Amazon had already acquired some print-on-demand companies so they could start their CreateSpace service for publishing paperback books. If you know how to format your content and create your book covers, you can put e-book and paperback versions of your book on amazon.com for free. Of course, you should probably buy a copy of your e-book and at least one copy of your paperback for proof copies, even though you can electronically proof them as you are uploading your files to KDP and CreateSpace.
As I was writing my first book, people were saying that you should first publish your book to CreateSpace, because at the end of that process, they would ask if you wanted to also publish to KDP. If you said yes, you would be sent to the KDP website, and after publishing your e-book, your paperback listing would eventually be automatically combined with your e-book listing on the same sales page.
Now, if you’ve been investigating KDP, and discovered that they now have their own paperback publishing option, you may be wondering why you wouldn’t take advantage of that. If you check out this help page at KDP –
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A...
you’ll see a feature comparison chart showing the differences between KDP Paperback and CreateSpace. As of 2/12/17, with KDP you cannot order cheap proof copies or “wholesale author copies”, and you cannot get automatic expanded distribution to bookstores. Since my book was uploaded in an “industry standard” size, the on-demand paperback is currently listed for sale on the Barnes and Noble website, and a few other sites around the world. You can just google your ISBN number to see where yours is listed.
By the way, the quality of my paperback is very good. I compared it to an O’Reilly paperback and a Wiley “For Dummies” paperback, and the CreateSpace product is like 98% as good. If you look at the type using a magnifying glass, you can see that the typeface resolution is not quite as high (maybe it’s something like 270 dots-per-inch as opposed to more than 300 dpi,) but looking at it from a normal reading distance you really can’t see a difference. And, the paper thickness and binding is just as good as the major publishers’ product.
February 3, 2017
Self Publishing
You’ve finished the text of your first book. Congratulations. You are now a small part of the way to being published. Now comes the really hard part for a new author. You have to design – or at least approve – two book cover images, and you have to format your text for your paperback edition, before you can finally upload your files to CreateSpace and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
After reading a lot of books and other material about Kindle publishing and marketing, I believe there are six important steps to successful Kindle publishing. The first is the size of your book’s market and the uniqueness of your content. If you want a lot of book sales, you have to have a large reader base for your genre and you have to offer your reader well written content and/or some information that is rare or unique. With all the people out there just slapping together some blog posts or combining some Wikipedia articles and calling it a book, it’s no wonder that the most common complaint I see in Amazon book reviews is: “All this material is available for free on the internet.”
The second most important step is the keywords you select when you publish your book. If you are self-publishing, you are not going to have a large advertising or marketing budget. The only way a large number of readers are going to find your book is by having relevant, popular search terms for keywords. The third step is closely related to search keywords: your book’s title and subtitle. It’s obviously best to have some of those keywords in your title and your subtitle. Just not too many – if your subtitle is just a string of keywords that doesn’t sound natural, your potential readers may think your book is one of those garbage books a lot of people are putting out just trying to sucker the huge Amazon customer base.
The fourth most important step is creating, or buying, your Kindle book cover. First, it has to be in color. Many people read on their computer or tablet, but even Kindle device owners will often search for new books using their computer, tablet, or smartphone. The “Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines” publication states that the preferred format for a Kindle book cover is an image that is 2560 pixels tall by 1600 pixels wide at a resolution of 350 pixels per inch. KDP will accept an image in either .jpg or .tif file formats, but my cover in the .tif format was more than 11MB in size and the Guidelines says the cover file should be no more than 5MB in size. I just brought up both my .tif and my .jpg files and they really look the same, so .jpg at the highest resolution should be good.
Just be aware that this same cover picture will be used on your book page (at its largest size,) on search results pages in a browser on your computer or tablet, and on your Kindle Store search results on a black and white Kindle device display. You should make sure your cover looks good and your book title is legible when your image is compressed to a very small size and shown in black and white. I created my cover in Photoshop Elements, saved it to .jpg, loaded the .jpg file, used Image Resize to create an image the size that I see on my Kindle device, saved that to .jpg, loaded up my Microsoft Word program, used Insert Pictures to load the small .jpg file and the larger cover image, saved the Word file, and then attached the Word file to an email that I sent to my Kindle. When I looked at that book file on my Kindle device, that was as close as I could get to seeing my cover the way it would look when I searched the store for my book after it was published. If your cover comes up in a search and the reader can’t tell what genre your book is, or can’t read your book title, or it just looks really cheap or quickly produced, you probably won’t get a sale.
Don’t worry about your name or your subtitle being legible at that small search listing cover size because both will listed in the text to the right of the cover.
The fifth most important step is writing your book’s blurb. That is the wording that is displayed right after your book title and price, on your book page. You can also have the same or similar wording on the back cover of your paperback cover. For examples, go to the Books department on amazon.com and click on “Best Sellers”. Check out the blurbs for some of those books and then look at the categories to the left side of the Best Sellers page and select some close to your own book and read some of those blurbs too.
The sixth most important step is choosing two categories for your book. People can search by category, but this selection may also be used for other listings like “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” and “Products Related To This Item”, depending on how high your sales are ranked in each category.
After reading a lot of books and other material about Kindle publishing and marketing, I believe there are six important steps to successful Kindle publishing. The first is the size of your book’s market and the uniqueness of your content. If you want a lot of book sales, you have to have a large reader base for your genre and you have to offer your reader well written content and/or some information that is rare or unique. With all the people out there just slapping together some blog posts or combining some Wikipedia articles and calling it a book, it’s no wonder that the most common complaint I see in Amazon book reviews is: “All this material is available for free on the internet.”
The second most important step is the keywords you select when you publish your book. If you are self-publishing, you are not going to have a large advertising or marketing budget. The only way a large number of readers are going to find your book is by having relevant, popular search terms for keywords. The third step is closely related to search keywords: your book’s title and subtitle. It’s obviously best to have some of those keywords in your title and your subtitle. Just not too many – if your subtitle is just a string of keywords that doesn’t sound natural, your potential readers may think your book is one of those garbage books a lot of people are putting out just trying to sucker the huge Amazon customer base.
The fourth most important step is creating, or buying, your Kindle book cover. First, it has to be in color. Many people read on their computer or tablet, but even Kindle device owners will often search for new books using their computer, tablet, or smartphone. The “Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines” publication states that the preferred format for a Kindle book cover is an image that is 2560 pixels tall by 1600 pixels wide at a resolution of 350 pixels per inch. KDP will accept an image in either .jpg or .tif file formats, but my cover in the .tif format was more than 11MB in size and the Guidelines says the cover file should be no more than 5MB in size. I just brought up both my .tif and my .jpg files and they really look the same, so .jpg at the highest resolution should be good.
Just be aware that this same cover picture will be used on your book page (at its largest size,) on search results pages in a browser on your computer or tablet, and on your Kindle Store search results on a black and white Kindle device display. You should make sure your cover looks good and your book title is legible when your image is compressed to a very small size and shown in black and white. I created my cover in Photoshop Elements, saved it to .jpg, loaded the .jpg file, used Image Resize to create an image the size that I see on my Kindle device, saved that to .jpg, loaded up my Microsoft Word program, used Insert Pictures to load the small .jpg file and the larger cover image, saved the Word file, and then attached the Word file to an email that I sent to my Kindle. When I looked at that book file on my Kindle device, that was as close as I could get to seeing my cover the way it would look when I searched the store for my book after it was published. If your cover comes up in a search and the reader can’t tell what genre your book is, or can’t read your book title, or it just looks really cheap or quickly produced, you probably won’t get a sale.
Don’t worry about your name or your subtitle being legible at that small search listing cover size because both will listed in the text to the right of the cover.
The fifth most important step is writing your book’s blurb. That is the wording that is displayed right after your book title and price, on your book page. You can also have the same or similar wording on the back cover of your paperback cover. For examples, go to the Books department on amazon.com and click on “Best Sellers”. Check out the blurbs for some of those books and then look at the categories to the left side of the Best Sellers page and select some close to your own book and read some of those blurbs too.
The sixth most important step is choosing two categories for your book. People can search by category, but this selection may also be used for other listings like “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” and “Products Related To This Item”, depending on how high your sales are ranked in each category.
January 24, 2017
Z
I was sitting in a mall food court yesterday, having a nice Subway sandwich for dinner, when I saw a man walking along nearby. After looking at him for a few seconds, I thought to myself, “Is that my old friend from work about ten years ago? What’s his name? Jim? Hell yeah, that’s Jim!” He was just about to walk by me when I spoke up and said “Jim!” When he turned and looked at me, I said “How ya doin’ man?” He recognized me and said “Haaaeeey” and smiled. We shook hands and then he said “fa qoo zha te”. He was still smiling and looking at me like he was waiting for me to reply. I tried to process the sounds I had just heard. It definitely was not a language I had heard before, plus the sounds were so short and quick, I couldn’t tell if they were separate words or parts of one or two words. My next thought was: Am I ok? Did I hear that wrong or miss something? Other people were still walking by in regular motion, so I didn’t think it was me. His expression started to change as I looked at him a little weird and said “Are you ok?”
He laughed and said “Sorry, man. You used to be a nerd, right? I thought you would’ve learned Z already.”
I was relieved that I could understand him now, and I said “OK, what the hell is Zee?”
He said “Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you.” After we sat down, he said “Z is a new language that all the geeks are using now.”
I said, “A new language?”
“Yeah, you haven’t even tried it yet?”
“Tried it? I haven’t even heard of it before. Where in the world is it used?”
He laughed and said, “No, you don’t understand. It’s not from somewhere else, it’s brand new.”
“OK, is there something wrong with English?”
“Well, nothing other than it’s too damn slow.” He laughed and then said, “Some kid in Silicon Valley invented it a few years ago, and lots of people are learning it because it’s the fastest, most concise language on the planet.”
“Really. So, you learned a new language to save time?”
“Of course. And, you save a lot of wear and tear on your throat muscles.”
“OK. But I watch a lot of cable TV news, how come I’ve never heard of this ‘New Language’?”
“Don’t know. But you should really try it man, it is so cool.” He looked at his watch and said, “I’m sorry man, it was really good to see you again, but I gotta run. Take it easy.”
As he got up from the table I said “Nice seein’ you too, Jim. Bye.”
As I watched him walk away, I wondered if he really thought a new language would overtake the world’s most universal language just because it was “faster?” I thought to myself: Not in the next fifty years anyway. Or until we get computer chips implanted in our brains. What did he call it? Zee? I’ll have to Google that later.
In case there are a few of you who haven’t caught on yet, or if you haven’t read my previous posts about the Dvorak Keyboard Layout, everything prior to this was fiction. I just now created it after just reading a line in a book called “The Iron Whim” by Darren Wershler-Henry. That is a book about the history of typewriters. In it he says, “QWERTY is so ingrained, even today, that it is almost invisible to us.” “And, as ‘The Story of the Typewriter’ smugly declares, ‘The Universal Keyboard has a hold similar to that of language itself.’”
That made me think: What if somebody tried to introduce a new spoken language to the world just like August Dvorak tried to introduce a new keyboard layout 84 years ago. Are you ready to learn a new language that less than 1% of the population would ever use, just because it might be 10% faster than English? Maybe this will give you a little insight into why August Dvorak has yet to succeed in replacing a well-entrenched standard.
He laughed and said “Sorry, man. You used to be a nerd, right? I thought you would’ve learned Z already.”
I was relieved that I could understand him now, and I said “OK, what the hell is Zee?”
He said “Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you.” After we sat down, he said “Z is a new language that all the geeks are using now.”
I said, “A new language?”
“Yeah, you haven’t even tried it yet?”
“Tried it? I haven’t even heard of it before. Where in the world is it used?”
He laughed and said, “No, you don’t understand. It’s not from somewhere else, it’s brand new.”
“OK, is there something wrong with English?”
“Well, nothing other than it’s too damn slow.” He laughed and then said, “Some kid in Silicon Valley invented it a few years ago, and lots of people are learning it because it’s the fastest, most concise language on the planet.”
“Really. So, you learned a new language to save time?”
“Of course. And, you save a lot of wear and tear on your throat muscles.”
“OK. But I watch a lot of cable TV news, how come I’ve never heard of this ‘New Language’?”
“Don’t know. But you should really try it man, it is so cool.” He looked at his watch and said, “I’m sorry man, it was really good to see you again, but I gotta run. Take it easy.”
As he got up from the table I said “Nice seein’ you too, Jim. Bye.”
As I watched him walk away, I wondered if he really thought a new language would overtake the world’s most universal language just because it was “faster?” I thought to myself: Not in the next fifty years anyway. Or until we get computer chips implanted in our brains. What did he call it? Zee? I’ll have to Google that later.
In case there are a few of you who haven’t caught on yet, or if you haven’t read my previous posts about the Dvorak Keyboard Layout, everything prior to this was fiction. I just now created it after just reading a line in a book called “The Iron Whim” by Darren Wershler-Henry. That is a book about the history of typewriters. In it he says, “QWERTY is so ingrained, even today, that it is almost invisible to us.” “And, as ‘The Story of the Typewriter’ smugly declares, ‘The Universal Keyboard has a hold similar to that of language itself.’”
That made me think: What if somebody tried to introduce a new spoken language to the world just like August Dvorak tried to introduce a new keyboard layout 84 years ago. Are you ready to learn a new language that less than 1% of the population would ever use, just because it might be 10% faster than English? Maybe this will give you a little insight into why August Dvorak has yet to succeed in replacing a well-entrenched standard.
E-Book Formatting
When I started writing my first book, in 2016, I was still worried about getting the formatting right for my e-book. For years, I had read books about writing and self-publishing a book on Amazon. The first things I read, said that you would have to save your Microsoft Word file to HTML and learn how to modify that, to really get your e-book formatting just right. Then, as I was writing the book, I read Rick Smith’s book “Self-Publishing Masterclass”. He wrote that the KDP software that allowed you to upload your book in the doc and docx Word format, had been so improved, that he recommended not bothering with HTML anymore. I know some HTML, but I’m far from any kind of expert with it, so I decided to upload my book in the docx format and hope for the best. I have a Kindle Voyage e-reader, and as I was writing my book, I would email my current file to my Kindle, and it always looked good.
Just be aware that the final published product will be a little different. The documents I sent to my Kindle and my iPad before final publishing, do not have automatic hyphenation, and lines that you have setup in Word with non-breaking spaces and hyphens will display exactly the way you want. But if you buy your published Kindle e-book, it will have automatic hyphenation and your non-breaking spaces may be broken.
Let me explain in more detail. When you preview your file by sending it to your Kindle or iPad, the only hyphens you will see at the end of a line, will be ones that you put there. Words like e-book, hi-res, and 18-year-old, may be split at the end of a line, but no words that don’t already have a hyphen will be split. Your published e-book will have some words that are split at the end of a line by the Kindle device software and the Kindle Reader app for iPads and iPhones. I think that’s because Amazon wants their devices and apps to read like a real book, so they have full justification and auto-hyphening just like professionally published physical books.
The extra hyphening doesn’t bother me. I just read parts of my published e-book, and it amazed me how easily we read right through split words without even noticing them. But the breaking of non-breaking spaces is a little more worrisome. I have a few lines in my book that represent listings of filenames in a computer directory. These are lines of text that are longer than the line length of a normal Kindle display, so extra spaces have been inserted for full justification, and some auto-hyphenation has occurred where there is no hyphen in the file name. So, I will spend some time investigating to see how easy that may be to fix. When I find that out I will report it in a future post. If you know anything about it, please leave a comment. In the meantime, if you are writing a book, continue using non-breaking spaces if you need to, because your paperback edition will appear exactly as you see it in your Word Page Layout View. That’s because your upload to CreateSpace for your paperback will be in pdf format, and that is created by saving your Word file in pdf, and that process will not change your final result.
By the way, if you want to have a hyphen that isn’t broken automatically, just type Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen. If you want a space that isn’t split at the end of a line, type Ctrl+Shift+Space. One last keyboard shortcut, the copyright symbol © can be typed by pressing Alt+Ctrl+C.
Just be aware that the final published product will be a little different. The documents I sent to my Kindle and my iPad before final publishing, do not have automatic hyphenation, and lines that you have setup in Word with non-breaking spaces and hyphens will display exactly the way you want. But if you buy your published Kindle e-book, it will have automatic hyphenation and your non-breaking spaces may be broken.
Let me explain in more detail. When you preview your file by sending it to your Kindle or iPad, the only hyphens you will see at the end of a line, will be ones that you put there. Words like e-book, hi-res, and 18-year-old, may be split at the end of a line, but no words that don’t already have a hyphen will be split. Your published e-book will have some words that are split at the end of a line by the Kindle device software and the Kindle Reader app for iPads and iPhones. I think that’s because Amazon wants their devices and apps to read like a real book, so they have full justification and auto-hyphening just like professionally published physical books.
The extra hyphening doesn’t bother me. I just read parts of my published e-book, and it amazed me how easily we read right through split words without even noticing them. But the breaking of non-breaking spaces is a little more worrisome. I have a few lines in my book that represent listings of filenames in a computer directory. These are lines of text that are longer than the line length of a normal Kindle display, so extra spaces have been inserted for full justification, and some auto-hyphenation has occurred where there is no hyphen in the file name. So, I will spend some time investigating to see how easy that may be to fix. When I find that out I will report it in a future post. If you know anything about it, please leave a comment. In the meantime, if you are writing a book, continue using non-breaking spaces if you need to, because your paperback edition will appear exactly as you see it in your Word Page Layout View. That’s because your upload to CreateSpace for your paperback will be in pdf format, and that is created by saving your Word file in pdf, and that process will not change your final result.
By the way, if you want to have a hyphen that isn’t broken automatically, just type Ctrl+Shift+Hyphen. If you want a space that isn’t split at the end of a line, type Ctrl+Shift+Space. One last keyboard shortcut, the copyright symbol © can be typed by pressing Alt+Ctrl+C.
January 18, 2017
Dvorak vs. QWERTY
In previous posts, I’ve discussed the history of the layout of keyboards and why the vast majority of keyboards sold today, still have a layout that was designed in 1878. The QWERTY layout was a redesign with a goal of minimizing the jamming of mechanical typewriter mechanisms. Why we are still using it today, boils down to something that can be described in different ways: momentum, standardization, resistance to change. In this modern, digital world, why does the U.S.A. still use old measuring systems such as feet, yards, miles, pounds, quarts, and gallons, instead of digitally friendly systems like meters, grams, and liters? You can read more about this battle of standards in an interesting five-page web article originally published in Discover magazine:
http://discovermagazine.com/1997/apr/...
The Dvorak keyboard layout was designed from scratch with one goal in mind: efficiency. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, spent 17 years studying everything they could think of, to determine the optimum layout of the alphabet to allow the least motion of the human hands, and to provide the fastest speed and the fewest errors in typing the English language. There are some interesting statistics in the literature available, showing how much an improvement the Dvorak layout is over the QWERTY.
Your fingers rest on the middle “home” row of the three alphabetic rows of a keyboard. Only 32% of typical English language typing is done on the home row when using the QWERTY keyboard. When the same typing is done on the optimized Dvorak keyboard, 70% of the keystrokes are performed on the home row.
Typing words that cause you to alternate hands between as many keystrokes as possible, is obviously going to increase speed and decrease muscle strain by some amount. One study found 3000 English language words that are typed by the left hand only and 300 words typed by the right hand only, when using the QWERTY layout. Using the Dvorak layout, they found only a few words that are typed with only the left hand and they couldn’t find a single word that could be typed with only the right hand. That comparison is hard to imagine until you realize that all the vowels and the letter Y are on the left side of the Dvorak keyboard, and the thirteen most common consonants are on the right side.
All these statistics got me thinking about something I discovered when I wrote my book “Hi-Fi For Low Dough” about hi-res music and digital file compression. When I wrote about MP3 audio file compression, I wanted to describe the limits of audio compression as compared to the compression of computer text files. I knew that one simple way to compress text, is to take the 100 most used or the 1000 most used words and convert those words to a number using a lookup table. The most used word would be changed to the number 1, the second most used word to 2, etc. If you came across a word not in your table, you would use the number 0, followed by the actual word. The only reason I bring this up, is that I found a list that is claimed to be the 100 most common words in the English language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_co...
I decided to use that list to compare the efficiency of the Dvorak and QWERTY layouts, because that article claims that these 100 words actually make up about 50% of all the printed and written English text in history.
I had to decide how to score each of these words in this comparison test. I decided that any letter that would be typed without having to move any of your eight fingers would get 0 points. Also, any time you type the same letter twice-in-a-row, that second letter would get 0 points. With this scoring, any word that can be typed without moving any of your fingers laterally, would get a total score of 0. I then decided that any time you have to move your index finger one key over to type (GH/ID), that would cause 1 point to be added to the score. If you have to move a finger up or down to the top or bottom row, that would add 2 points to the score. Finally, if you have to move one finger up or down and then use the same finger two rows away on the next letter, that will add 3 points to the score for that second letter. Let’s use a word that’s not in the list as an example: “much.” On the QWERTY keyboard, “m” is typed by the right index finger moving down one row – that’s 2 points. “u” is typed by the same finger having to move two rows up from the “m” – that’s 3 points. “c” is typed by moving the left middle finger down – that’s 2 points. “h” is typed by moving the right index finger over one key – that’s 1 point. Add that all together and you get 8 points. On the Dvorak keyboard, “much” is 4 points because “u” and “h” are in the eight finger rest spots “aoeuhtns”. I hope you can see that each point scored represents a distance travelled by your fingers when typing.
After scoring each of the 100 most used words for both layouts, the most interesting result is that there are only three words that get a total score of zero using the QWERTY layout (a,as,all). How many words required no finger travel when using the Dvorak layout? 21. Of course, all of these are three letters or less, except for four “th” words: that, than, then, and these. But still, that’s seven times as many words that don’t require any lateral finger travel. The total point figure is also interesting: QWERTY: 494, Dvorak: 224. So, your fingers are going to travel more than twice as far when using the old QWERTY layout as compared to the optimized Dvorak layout.
Your fingers, not mine. Like most people, I started typing on the QWERTY layout, but I only used the “hunt and peck” method. When I eventually read about the Dvorak layout, I decided to learn to touch-type using the optimized Dvorak design.
http://discovermagazine.com/1997/apr/...
The Dvorak keyboard layout was designed from scratch with one goal in mind: efficiency. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, spent 17 years studying everything they could think of, to determine the optimum layout of the alphabet to allow the least motion of the human hands, and to provide the fastest speed and the fewest errors in typing the English language. There are some interesting statistics in the literature available, showing how much an improvement the Dvorak layout is over the QWERTY.
Your fingers rest on the middle “home” row of the three alphabetic rows of a keyboard. Only 32% of typical English language typing is done on the home row when using the QWERTY keyboard. When the same typing is done on the optimized Dvorak keyboard, 70% of the keystrokes are performed on the home row.
Typing words that cause you to alternate hands between as many keystrokes as possible, is obviously going to increase speed and decrease muscle strain by some amount. One study found 3000 English language words that are typed by the left hand only and 300 words typed by the right hand only, when using the QWERTY layout. Using the Dvorak layout, they found only a few words that are typed with only the left hand and they couldn’t find a single word that could be typed with only the right hand. That comparison is hard to imagine until you realize that all the vowels and the letter Y are on the left side of the Dvorak keyboard, and the thirteen most common consonants are on the right side.
All these statistics got me thinking about something I discovered when I wrote my book “Hi-Fi For Low Dough” about hi-res music and digital file compression. When I wrote about MP3 audio file compression, I wanted to describe the limits of audio compression as compared to the compression of computer text files. I knew that one simple way to compress text, is to take the 100 most used or the 1000 most used words and convert those words to a number using a lookup table. The most used word would be changed to the number 1, the second most used word to 2, etc. If you came across a word not in your table, you would use the number 0, followed by the actual word. The only reason I bring this up, is that I found a list that is claimed to be the 100 most common words in the English language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_co...
I decided to use that list to compare the efficiency of the Dvorak and QWERTY layouts, because that article claims that these 100 words actually make up about 50% of all the printed and written English text in history.
I had to decide how to score each of these words in this comparison test. I decided that any letter that would be typed without having to move any of your eight fingers would get 0 points. Also, any time you type the same letter twice-in-a-row, that second letter would get 0 points. With this scoring, any word that can be typed without moving any of your fingers laterally, would get a total score of 0. I then decided that any time you have to move your index finger one key over to type (GH/ID), that would cause 1 point to be added to the score. If you have to move a finger up or down to the top or bottom row, that would add 2 points to the score. Finally, if you have to move one finger up or down and then use the same finger two rows away on the next letter, that will add 3 points to the score for that second letter. Let’s use a word that’s not in the list as an example: “much.” On the QWERTY keyboard, “m” is typed by the right index finger moving down one row – that’s 2 points. “u” is typed by the same finger having to move two rows up from the “m” – that’s 3 points. “c” is typed by moving the left middle finger down – that’s 2 points. “h” is typed by moving the right index finger over one key – that’s 1 point. Add that all together and you get 8 points. On the Dvorak keyboard, “much” is 4 points because “u” and “h” are in the eight finger rest spots “aoeuhtns”. I hope you can see that each point scored represents a distance travelled by your fingers when typing.
After scoring each of the 100 most used words for both layouts, the most interesting result is that there are only three words that get a total score of zero using the QWERTY layout (a,as,all). How many words required no finger travel when using the Dvorak layout? 21. Of course, all of these are three letters or less, except for four “th” words: that, than, then, and these. But still, that’s seven times as many words that don’t require any lateral finger travel. The total point figure is also interesting: QWERTY: 494, Dvorak: 224. So, your fingers are going to travel more than twice as far when using the old QWERTY layout as compared to the optimized Dvorak layout.
Your fingers, not mine. Like most people, I started typing on the QWERTY layout, but I only used the “hunt and peck” method. When I eventually read about the Dvorak layout, I decided to learn to touch-type using the optimized Dvorak design.
January 16, 2017
Dvorak Keyboard Layout
After 17 years of research, August Dvorak designed a typewriter keyboard layout to replace the QWERTY layout that is still the standard keyboard layout used today. He completed his Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout design in 1932 and a U.S. Patent for it, was awarded in 1936. In 1962, a man interviewed Dvorak, and was told that he’d been trying to introduce his keyboard for 30 years, and had been blocked at every turn. Dvorak said “I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race. They simply don’t want to change.”
From 1933 to 1958, IBM alone sold one million typewriters. In the early 1960s, worldwide sales of typewriters was over two million per year. And, in 1974, 25 manufacturers around the world produced an estimated 3-4 million typewriters annually. Probably more than 97% of those millions of typewriters sold, had QWERTY keyboards.
Imagine you’re a poor girl in the middle of the 20th century. An office job that includes some typing is one of the most secure and lucrative jobs you could find. The only classes available for typing, use QWERTY keyboard typewriters and all the secretarial jobs available, require you to type on a machine with a QWERTY keyboard. Even if you were among the few people in the world that had even heard of the Dvorak layout, if you wanted a career as a secretary, you had to be able to type on a QWERTY keyboard.
To really get a large proportion of users to switch to a different keyboard layout, you would’ve had to convince at least one manufacturer, a whole state full of hundreds of school systems, and hundreds of large companies, to spend millions of dollars - all at the same time. When you think of the scale of the problem, you can understand the frustration of August Dvorak.
Today, there aren’t any jobs in the U.S. that require you to know how to use a typewriter, but have you ever seen a laptop computer with a Dvorak keyboard? I haven’t seen any that come that way from the manufacturer. I have modified one myself, but it wasn’t for business use.
So, Dvorak keyboard use is mostly driven by individuals doing it for their own reasons. I would assume most of them are people with repetitive stress injuries that cause chronic pain, or self-employed or retired people like writers.
I’ll make my own case for using it in an upcoming post. In the meantime, here are some more links for further reading:
http://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/
http://www.theworldofstuff.com/dvorak/
http://www.dvorak-keyboards.com/
Let me know if you find any of these links informative.
From 1933 to 1958, IBM alone sold one million typewriters. In the early 1960s, worldwide sales of typewriters was over two million per year. And, in 1974, 25 manufacturers around the world produced an estimated 3-4 million typewriters annually. Probably more than 97% of those millions of typewriters sold, had QWERTY keyboards.
Imagine you’re a poor girl in the middle of the 20th century. An office job that includes some typing is one of the most secure and lucrative jobs you could find. The only classes available for typing, use QWERTY keyboard typewriters and all the secretarial jobs available, require you to type on a machine with a QWERTY keyboard. Even if you were among the few people in the world that had even heard of the Dvorak layout, if you wanted a career as a secretary, you had to be able to type on a QWERTY keyboard.
To really get a large proportion of users to switch to a different keyboard layout, you would’ve had to convince at least one manufacturer, a whole state full of hundreds of school systems, and hundreds of large companies, to spend millions of dollars - all at the same time. When you think of the scale of the problem, you can understand the frustration of August Dvorak.
Today, there aren’t any jobs in the U.S. that require you to know how to use a typewriter, but have you ever seen a laptop computer with a Dvorak keyboard? I haven’t seen any that come that way from the manufacturer. I have modified one myself, but it wasn’t for business use.
So, Dvorak keyboard use is mostly driven by individuals doing it for their own reasons. I would assume most of them are people with repetitive stress injuries that cause chronic pain, or self-employed or retired people like writers.
I’ll make my own case for using it in an upcoming post. In the meantime, here are some more links for further reading:
http://www.dvorak-keyboard.com/
http://www.theworldofstuff.com/dvorak/
http://www.dvorak-keyboards.com/
Let me know if you find any of these links informative.
