Editing is a huge job. An education editor will spend a lot of time working on the layout of the work as well as on the writing; a trade (i.e. popular fiction/non-fiction) editor will also interact with an author at every stage of the writing process and help sculpt the finished work. Just look at how much thanks fiction authors give to their editors in their acknowledgements to get an idea.

Amongst other things, yes. Publicity is pretty vital in getting your book noticed. But I suspect most go through the major publishing houses to (a) get the services of a good editor and (b) get an monetary advance ahead of publication to support their writing.

Yes, I'm sure that publishers are making a bit more profit on ebooks than on p-books. But I'm not sure it's as much as you think it is, and most authors don't have the ready cash to be able to replace all that infrastructure and support through hiring freelance staff.

Well, at least with linux we have the choice to switch to whatever we want :)

Fair enough. Personally, I like that behaviour (I have so many windows open all the time that I'd never have any space for a description left in a taskbar if I had one (hell, I often have so many PDFs open at once that even when they do their expose-thing I can't find the window I want ...) But I can see why it would irritate. FWIW, I believe the latest incarnation of Unity allows you to scroll on the dock icon to cycle through the windows of that app (but since I haven't upgraded from 12.10, I can't verify this ...)

Actually, you can do this one -- just middle-click on a dock icon to launch a new instance (the middle-click-opens-new-window paradigm is standard in many apps, so it shouldn't be a surprise). It's a minor point, though.

I guess I'm lucky/unlucky in that Unity fits my brain absolutely perfectly -- it's by far my favourite WM ever (and I've used pretty much every WM that was ever written for X over the years). Both the dock and the dash make my life so much faster, it's not funny. But I agree it's not a very customisable WM (and I'm not sure why either -- Shuttleworth and his design-gurus are clearly very particular!)

Well, I agree with that too :)

With regards to your first point, I do hope that ebooks will eventually move to a DRM-free format just as has happened with digital music. But we'll see ... in the meantime, thank god it's easy to strip the DRM straight off my kindle books.

How does Unity hide your windows??

My point was simply that people shouldn't begrudge paying for ebooks ...

Personally I quite like supporting authors whose works I enjoy by buying their books. I have this naive theory that if enough people buy their books, they might write some more. But maybe I'm just dreaming ...

(Not dissing PG for a minute, incidentally, and more power to it -- but there's times when the classics don't cut it)

Am I the only person who removes DRM from their ebooks?? (I mean, seriously, this is /. -- we're supposed to enjoy this sort of challenge!) A few google searches will tell you how to do it for most popular formats, and then you can give the book to your friends without issue.

What we should be pushing for is DRM-free ebooks at purchase, of course. A switch from DRM to DRM-free formats eventually happened with music files so I have every hope that it will happen with ebooks as well.

Dunno ... a nexus 7 is pretty light. Personally, the reason I still use a kindle is because of the battery life. If tablets ever ran for a couple of months without needing a recharge then I might consider swapping.

Thankfully, neither a kindle nor a 7" tablet is particularly bulky or heavy, so when I travel I carry both.

Um, I think reading novels (and non-fiction books) is the market. E-readers obviously can't replace reference works that you need to jump around randomly in -- page turns are far too slow on e-Ink.

Why on earth would you need any better font rendering than freetype happily provides?

Not to split hairs, but an anecdote is very much a single point of data.

I think you were looking for "the plural of anecdote isn't data", which isn't quite the same thing ... :)

Maybe so, but it seems silly in retrospect. That original Mac changed everything -- there just wasn't much software for it in 1985.

Wasn't referring to the specs, just the coolness. (plus ça change, and all that ...) However, I've just realised that the IIc came out in the same year as the original Macintosh, so I clearly am on crack :)

Oh, the IIc was *the* computer of the mid-80s. My family only had an "Orange" (an Apple ][ clone) ... but it did have a 128k card and 80-column-text card (and a dinkly little black box to switch between text modes, IIRC). From there it was MacOS via a Mac SE30 and a Powerbook 100 (still very fondly remembered). And then I discovered Pentium chips, and how much faster they were than the Motorola chips Apple was still clinging to -- that started a brief and sordid affair with Windows. It all ended with my transition over to linux (back in 1998 with RedHat 5.1) and it's been Linux ever since for me.

Nothing's ever been as amazing as that first Apple ][ clone, though -- I still remember my Dad teaching me to code in BASIC when I must have been four or five, and the thrill of

10 PRINT "HELLO!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

No computer before or since has been so welcoming, so encouraging, so ... insistent ... of programming. Good, happy times.

What's more concerning is that Tim Cook just came out and said that Apple wouldn't be considering larger screen sizes in the foreseeable future. I'm not entirely sure what I think about 5" phone screens either, but trying to deny they're not popular is as stupid as trying to deny that 7" tablet screen sizes aren't popular.

It seems too me that ever since the iPhone 4 Apple has reacted to the loss of its market share by not daring to change anything. The phone design is still the same (nearly three years old now, and it wasn't even a very attractive or practical design to begin with) and the screen is the same width (which feels too small and cramped to me, now that I'm used to larger Android screens). It's like they're caught in the headlights and don't dare move, not realising that standing still is what's killing them.