Ebooks: Scarcity, abundance and economy

A recently revived subject by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Scarcity and Abundance, examines the ebook industry in terms of the shift from a “scarcity” economy, in which things are valued and priced due to their limited availability, to “abundance,” in which items are available in effectively unlimited supply, turning the old economic model upside-down or destroying it entirely.

The hybrid and electric future is still “almost here”

Thanks to an accident last fall, my 2000 Hyundai Tiburon is probably not going to last until 2015 as originally planned.  So, I’ve started looking for the car to replace it… and at the moment, that car is the Toyota Prius C.

Concepts presented in Steven Lyle Jordan books

A recent customer asked me to list the significant science and engineering elements that have been featured in my novels.  The idea was that the list would give an idea about the kind of science I was interested in, and the general slant of my books.  This is not to suggest I “invented” all of these ideas myself; but some of them are unique and created by me, or independently of its use in other books.

Once I finished the list, I thought it was a pretty good list to share… so, here goes:

The danger of the “easy route”

When I first began selling ebooks, there was no Kindle store; Sony hadn’t yet begun to sell ebooks, and Smashwords was not yet heard of.  So there weren’t a lot of examples for a newbie like me to follow in setting up my site.  Fortunately, I knew HTML, so I was able to design my own site.  But when it came to collecting money and sending products, I didn’t have the programming savvy (or money) to figure it out on my own.

Worldfarm One and the End of the American Century

When I originally wrote Worldfarm One—the story of a man from the United States who travels to Brazil to work, and learns the hard way how hard immigration can be—I expected there to be comments about the characters, about the sexuality and sex-role-reversals, the casting-couch business practices, the feed-the-world model, the prejudice, even my descriptions of Manaus and the surrounding Amazonian regions in the book.

I was surprised, therefore, to discover the greatest number of comments generated by the book were about the idea that the United States would, in the future, lose its status of “greatest nation of the world,” and because of economic hardships, American citizens would be forced to immigrate to other countries with greater opportunities to make a living.

Review of Star Trek: The Immortal Coil

I’m well past the time when I would gladly devour Star Trek novels; in fact, I left that era before The Next Generation and subsequent Trek sequels ever came along.  Still, there’s a draw to Trek novels… the well-detailed history of Trek lore gives the reader a background universe that, at times, seems richer than real life.

It was with this inherent background, and the promise of the book, that I picked up Star Trek: Immortal Coil.  The book promises to answer a question that has nagged the Trek universe for decades: Star Trek: The Original Series seemed to run into androids and artificial intelligences every few weeks; when the Next Generation came along, it seemed Commander Data (and later, his brother and “mother”) seemed to be the only ones anyone knew about or had ever heard of; so what the heck happened to the universe of androids?

Read an E-Book Week 2012: Same great content, easier to find freebies

Once again I’ve thrown in my hat with Rita Toews, designing and producing a new website for Read an E-Book Week 2012.  (And why not?  Web design is my day job.)  We both felt it deserved the new look, what with the Canadian Parliament passing a motion this year establishing the month of March as Read an E-Book Month and all!  (Want details?  You know where to go.)

I had no qualms about putting my own projects on hold to do this.  Rita’s efforts to promote Read an E-Book Week every year have been exemplary, and I think we all agree that promoting reading in general, and ebooks in particular, is a noble and valuable cause.  Also, while Rita may be a great promoter, she’s not an HTML expert, and her website skills are not quite up to major site design.