The Pirate Coelho
The Alchemist is a seminal book, simple yet oddly profound, one that almost everyone seems to have read at one time or another.
With over 100 million copies of his titles sold worldwide, the Brazilian author must be doing something right. But who would have guessed it was supporting the online piracy of his own works?
Fortune Editor David Kirkpatrick sat down with Coelho at this year’s Davos and the result is a must-read.
Intrigued by his growing sales in Russia, Coelho used the Bittorrent site - a favorite for illicit distribution of media - to seek out and download online translations of his books as well as audio versions. By 2006 he was hosting an entire sub-site he called The Pirate Coelho, with links to books in many languages. While he did not play up his own role, he did quietly include a link on his official site.
Also of interest is Coelho’s vision of a movie version of The Witch of Portobello:
None of Coelho’s books has ever been made into a movie. But now he is using the Internet to let his readers make one for him, based on his latest book, The “Witch of Portobello.” It tells the story of its protagonist from the point of view of multiple people who knew her at various times in her peripatetic life. Now Coelho and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) have created a competition, inviting anyone worldwide to submit a segment as they envision it. Coelho plans to knit together 15 winners and release the film.
Enjoy.
For those wanting more, this is Coelho’s speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich which prompted Kirkpatrick’s article:
From the The Pirate’s Dilemma site.
Sundance ‘08 Panel: “Going It Alone”
An absolutely incredible panel from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, full of insightful and practical information on how to self-distribute films and succeed — both online and off — and much of it entirely applicable to self-publishing as well.
I’ve been preparing a rather long post pondering if 2008 will be the year of the Independent, and this panel leads me to further believe that it indeed will. The post is nearly ready, but until a major project I’ve been working on launches, I may not have a chance to put on finishing touches.
In the meantime, sit back, enjoy, and take a moment to appreciate what incredible times we live in…
Big shout out to Zoom In Online for making this available. Watch the video here.
Full title: Going It Alone: Digital Distribution For The Indie Filmmaker
“Self-Publishing with Print-on-demand (POD)”
A repeat of my October UMKC Communiversity workshop: “Self-Publishing with Print-On-Demand” will take place on March 4, from 6:30-8:00. The last class was very, very interesting — participants went away pleased and I learned even more about just how POD is really beginning to take hold and exactly who can benefit.
This is the class description:
Ever dream of being an author? It’s time to dust off that manuscript. New developments in printing mean self-publishing and no longer require a large upfront investment. This class will introduce you to the leading companies offering Print-on-Demand services, teach you how POD works and what it takes to publish your book. Course will also cover CD-on demand options available to musicians and audiobook producers.
If you’re in/around Kansas City, please join us!
A Word on BookSurge :
Conscious Images® LLC is a BookSurge affiliate, yet I didn’t publish with them. Why?
My original contact with them came when preparing literature for the POD class mentioned above. I found them friendly, open and helpful — an excellent sign that they were treated well and truly wanted to help their clients. The more I looked into Booksurge the more I was impressed. Their tight integration with Amazon (they are owned by Amazon) can help in many ways, mostly through helping authors explore little-known but potentially powerful features. To this date my contact with them continues to impress me.
But mostly I’m a fan because publishing with a company like BookSurge means, essentially, that someone has your back. If the dream comes true and your book takes off, they are extremely well placed and it is in their own best interest to help you publicize your book.
An example is Jules E.D. Shepard’s Nearly Normal Cooking for Gluten-Free Eating. The book touched on a timely issue and the recipes were a hit. A profile in The Washington Post didn’t hurt, and now her next book is to be put out by Da Capo. I don’t know the inside story — who courted who, how the profiles and reviews were negotiated, but I have a strong feeling that it was a combination of the author’s hard work and BookSurge’s connections.
Do I regret my decision to use a strict printer? Not at all. But do I wish someone was there making a couple calls on my behalf? Of course!
High on my blog to-do list is a post on “Why I Did It,” and it will touch on all of these issues and more.
Here’s a bonus Gluten-Free Chocolate-Chip Cookie recipe from the book, courtesy of The Washington Post.
Johnathan Goodwin: Eco-Hero
Last moth (November ‘07) Clive Thompson in Fast Company profiled an auto mechanic from Wichita, Kansas, Johnathan Goodwin, and wondered, “has this guy in far-off Kansas figured out the way to save Detroit?”
I keep returning to the article because in many ways I feel like it’s a perfect summary for the state of affairs we find ourselves in as a nation. And of course, it’s the story of a local boy made good.
I’m also surprised it didn’t get more coverage in the blogosphere — it’s truly a mind-blowing article. At it’s best, it’s the story of a man who started with nothing, at 13 forced to seek work in auto shops to help pay the family bills. Along the way he acquires an unrelenting need to experiment as well as to push the boundaries of what is mechanically possible. He creates his own tools when necessary, including what he calls ‘the McGuyver,’ a tool Thompson describes as, “an octopuslike tangle of wires” used to disable the Hummer’s legendary security meant to prevent exactly what he does — switch out engines and transmissions.
Now in his 30’s, Goodwin’s the man responsible for some of the most high-profile eco-conversions in the nation, including the Governator’s Hummer and Neil Young’s 1960 Lincoln Continental. He was also chosen to head-up a conversion team for the 2007 Earth Day eco-edition of MTV’s Pimp My Ride [available online].
Along the way he’s always searching, discovering, for instance, the work of German engineer Uli Kruger, who has experimented with injecting hydrogen directly into a combustion engine to boost both performance and efficiency. Goodwin has now adapted the same technology.
The article’s contradictions are amazing: Goodwin’s love of Hummers and performance against his intense drive to reduce emissions and dependence on foreign oil; one guy using GM’s own parts to disprove their claims that this isn’t possible (90% of the products Goodwin uses are GM’s own, including the stock diesel engine and transmission); a country so driven by innovation finds one of it’s most celebrated industries, the industry it alone invented and perfected, decayed, stagnant and averse to the realities of the new century.
“They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” he tells me [Thompson], slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. “The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use.” He doesn’t have an engineering degree; he didn’t even go to high school: “I’ve just been messing around and seeing what I can do.”
What he’s done to a Hummer is this: taken Kruger’s technology and mashed it up with his own diesel conversion. By adding a tank of hydrogen in the back (which lasts up to 700 miles), diesel consumption is cut in half and horsepower is doubled. Emissions are cut. And according to Goodwin, you can feed the monster “… hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil–pretty much anything but water.”
Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry’s most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation’s biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer’s manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin’s H2 looked modified. “Does it have a diesel engine in it?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“No way,” they replied.
He opened the hood, “and they’re just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out,” he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He’d filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn’t believe it was really on. “When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil,” Goodwin says, “you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it’s just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they’re like, ‘Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.’”
One engineer turned and said, “GM said this wouldn’t work.”
“Well,” Goodwin replied, “here it is.”
For those of us not interested in Hummers, his company SAE Energy will be offering a $ 5,000 home conversion package in early 2008, something which seems to me both much more affordable and eco-conscious than buying a new Prius. The products page says it will allow any turbocharged diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% less emissions.
I’m wondering why this guy isn’t more of a hero to the Green movement? I think once his products are widely available, this will change. Watching the food-chain on this one (The Earth Day MTV special, then an article in Biodiesel Magazine, then the Fast Company article) I think wide-scale publicity and acknowledgement can’t be far away.
“Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now,” he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. “I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we’re good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.
“Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to,” he adds.
And this is what I keep coming back to: over and over, Detroit’s plight seems to mirror our Nation’s. A failure of leadership — of vision — so profound and inexplicable that it boggles. A nation of such potential stuck watching the same reruns (political, business, entertainment…) over and over. Amusing ourselves, as someone has said, to death.
Our only hope is in our legendary ability to innovate. Goodwin shows us that not only is it possible, but people are out there doing it. Even if you haven’t heard of them yet.
Props to Pimp My Ride for breaking this one into the media spotlight.
Photo from fastcompany.com
Goodwin appearing on Media Talk:
Usability Horrorshow
Playing .qcp files on Mac OS X
I’m going to keep technical postings to a minimum, but here’s a tip that I discovered after much ridiculousness. I couldn’t find an answer anywhere else (but did find a couple of lonely unanswered questions on how-to), so here it is.
How to play .qcp files on OS X 10.4:
- Using classic, launch the oldest version of Quicktime you have (5 works, 6 should too) from your OS 9 applications folder.
- From Quicktime, open a .qcp file. Select “convert”. Save the converted file as prompted.
- Back in OS X, launch your latest version of Quicktime and load the converted file.
It’s that easy.
So I have to do that for every file I have. This time over 50. Ouch.
Here’s the deal: I love the voice memo option on my phone that according to my reading of the users manual doesn’t actually exist. I found it by accident. I use it all the time.
I wanted to get the files over my Mac so I could insert them into my journal software and transcribe them. But after exporting the files via micro SD card, I discovered they had .qcp extensions and OS X thought they were UNIX files. I’m no stranger to codecs and couldn’t remember seeing this one before.
None of the usual suspects would load it. QuickTime, VLS, Audacity…
So I googled ‘mac .qcp player’. And the news: there’s no OS X player that works. Nothing at all. QualComm makes a player for OS X and the OS 9 version no longer installs in classic. I tried restarting from my OS 9 disk and installing that way. I don’t recommend it. Ugly.
I found a post that seemed to indicate that QT 6 would play a .qcp file, so in classic I ran the old QT file and that did the transcoding trick.
But why all the hoops? Why would Apple remove a perfectly useful function? It’s not like my phone or the codec is outdated. Why would the manufacturer decide to use a codec not widely supported? And my provider? If you email yourself the notes, they’re transcoded to .wav files along the way. But the catch? You have to pay for it.
The more time I spend with phone, the more I am convinced that usability was deliberately sabotaged to make sure that the simplist option is always purchasing.
I can’t transfer my files via bluetooth, so I have to keep plugging in and out the tiny Micro SD card to transfer between my computer and the phone if I want to load .mp3s or custom ringtones. The other option is I buy songs and ringtones directly from them on my phone.
I could email myself the file and pay them, or I can plug in the card, move the file, unplug the card, plug it into a USB reader, plug that into my Mac, transfer the file, then finally load and transcode the file using two different versions of Quicktime on two different OS’s.
Which would you prefer?
How much time can you literally afford to waste?
