Last month, we went to Poland for a holiday. In fact, I’m writing up that trip as a small non-fiction book, titled IT’S 10AM, WHY AM I STILL SOBER?, to be released next month. (Ahem) Okay, I’ll get over myself now but the reason I mention it is because, as a writer, of course I was going to include my observations on Polish bookshops. What will be in the book is an abridged version of what I’m setting down now because I don’t think the average reader is really interested in the minutiae of book innards.

Bookstores appear to still be big business in Poland, although one woman in a bookstore in Sosnowiec (Sauce-no-vee-ets) complained that, since the small chain she worked for had been bought out by Germans, she was forced to give bookshelf space to non-book merchandise, much to her personal dismay.

The bookstores stock a lot of local works. A lot. By that, I mean a shitload. You can find Nora Roberts, Robert Ludlum and even Jack Vance translated into Polish (I say “even Jack Vance” because when was the last time you saw a Vance paperback still in print?), but the bulk of the offerings are books by Polish writers. Genre fiction, especially fantasy, occupies shelf after shelf and, when you crack open an edition, there are several things that strike you.

One, the typeface is rather large, as are the margins. The idea of maximising print on a page in order to minimise production costs is one that obviously hasn’t occurred to Polish publishers.

Two, the paperback size of choice is trade not mass. That is, the larger-format paperbacks. Hardcovers also seem to be popular and there is usually a decent audiobook section tucked away in one corner of the bookshop.

When was the last time you saw a healthy audiobook section in your bookshop? The media is cassette tape and CDs, which proves that yes indeed, Poland is behind, say, North America in terms of digital books and general book tech. But now we have something that I found rather interesting:

Three, the quality of the final book trounces your average Western print book. Let’s take one example. There is a current anthology out called “Deszcze Niespokojne”, which roughly translates to “Unsettled (Driving) Rains”. It contains twelve stories of alternate happenings during World War Two. Each story has three pieces of black-and-white artwork associated with it. I’m no art expert, but they look like they were all done in pencil by the same artist. The first piece of artwork takes up one page and encapsulates elements of the story you’re about to read. As you turn the page to begin, there is a second, smaller and different piece, like a drop-cap drawing, if you will. And, at the end of the story, there is a third piece, centred, below the last line.

There is also the layout. (And, for us digital authors, I note that this print edition has the Table of Contents at the back of the book.) Each individual story has the following layout:

Right facing page – blank
(Turn page)
Left facing page – a bio of the author
Right facing page – the author’s name again and the name of the story
(Turn page)
Left facing page – blank
Right facing page – full-page illustration of the story
(Turn page)
Left facing page – blank
Right facing page – the story begins a third down the page with its own introductory miniature artwork piece

So, for this one anthology, we have thirty-six separate and distinct drawings plus what we in the West would consider a criminal waste of six times twelve, or seventy-two, pages devoted to nothing more than sparse formatting and some artwork.

For the purposes of this post, I put two books side by side: the Polish one I mentioned earlier and another recent anthology, “Engineering Infinity”. Here’s a look at their formats. Note the larger Polish book:

Here is the interior of ENGINEERING INFINITY, showing the title page. The thing to note is the economical use of space. One story finishes, the other begins on the very next page, with only a paragraph for the author’s bio (I’m not making any kind of recommendation here or singling out this particular author for any reason, I just chose this page at random):

Here is an interior of DESZCZE NIESPOKOJNE, showing the succession of pages I described above, choosing the first story in the book because I didn’t want to bend the spine while scanning. First, there’s the author bio and the story title:

Then there’s the blank page and artwork:

Then there’s yet another blank page (that the author used for a poem fragment) before the start of the story proper (and note the second piece of artwork):

And there’s a third piece of artwork, roughly the size of the one you see above, at the end of the story. The size of the Polish book is, as I said before, closer to a trade paperback, there is ample white space between and around lines, and the entire anthology clocks in at almost six hundred and forty pages.

The recommended retail price of ENGINEERING INFINITY is US$8.00 (if you shop Amazon and live in the States). I paid US$11.07 for it (after a 20% discount) at The Book Depository. The retail price of DESZCZE NIESPOKOJNE is US$12.00 which, when you think about it, is not a bad deal at all.

I mention these prices because USians have an unrealistic picture of what paperbacks cost. They assume that, just because they pay US$8 for an average paperback, everybody else in the world pays the same amount. That’s not true.

The takeaway point from this is, Poland produces a superior print product at a price point that nearly matches or is a little cheaper than what the rest of the English-reading world pays. I’m sure they’re not aware of it, but it was pretty obvious to me. To go back to my recollections:

Other novels and anthologies I perused also had that same attention to detail that drew my eye in the first place: size, formatting, with an extra “fillip” of aesthetics (with the exception of a series of mass paperback-sized “classics” by such luminaries as Robert Louis Stevenson and Jane Austen). You get the impression that buying a book in Poland is something significant. Yes of course, there are the words, but there is also great care lavished on the way the words are presented. My personal opinion is that the average Pole would look with horror on the USD7.99 paperbacks that cram Wal-Mart shelves. As anyone who’s involved in the publishing world will also attest, the Poles have an unbeatable reputation for cover art. This was as true during the days of the Soviet bloc as it is now. Their enthusiasm for literature cannot be underestimated.

And that’s why I wonder whether the Kindle phenomenon that’s sweeping North America and the United Kingdom…may not gain as much traction in European countries where there’s a different mindset at play.

Okay, and now we come to the digital part of this post.

Books are incredibly popular throughout Poland. The Czech Republic boasts the highest book-reading population per capita in entire Europe. Moreover, the books these people read are different to what you and I are used to. Individual artwork, two-tone printing, border flourishes. And that’s just for the fiction!

It’s obvious that the philosophy that led to the printing of paperbacks in the Anglo world is completely different to the philosophy that led to paperback printing in Poland. And that tells me that the two sets of people perceive “value” in different ways.

The Anglo reader — faced with a rather utilitarian, monocolour typeface on cheap paper — sees value in the words themselves. Does it matter, then, how the words are presented? Probably not.

The Polish reader — faced with oodles of white space, custom drawings, two-colour border flourishes on good paper — sees value in the entire package. Does it matter, then, how the words are presented? Yeah, it probably does.

I’m not making any surefire predictions here. If ebooks are priced less than print books, then of course there’s going to be an uptake of ebooks across Europe. However, we have to realise that we’re also dealing with a population of a different mindset. They are as interested in the packaging as the words themselves. I translate this to mean:

There is a lesson there for digital authors and that’s to make our ebooks as interesting as possible. Ebooks don’t have the costs associated with multi-colour printing, so we can afford to let our imaginations soar.

I’ve taken this tack, particularly with the PDF version of THE CHECK YOUR LUCK AGENCY (not the Smashwords version, but the one appearing at XinXii and AllRomanceeBooks), adding the kind of flourishes that I saw in Polish print books. The feedback has been very positive. It’s like showing the reader that we care to present our words in a way that puts them first, that tries to give them an experience they’ll find enjoyable beyond the text itself. There is certainly an extra investment of time involved in doing this, but that investment dwarfs the cost of doing the same thing in print.

Last week, ripping on Charles Tan’s post, I related my experience of self-publishing through Amazon and the fact that I can’t even download (or even buy) a copy of my own book to check the formatting.

This is not to say that I’m against self-publishing. I’m not. I’m still convinced that, after getting several agent reactions to the tune of “love the writing, can’t sell the story”, self-publishing WAR GAMES was the only principled way I had of getting the novel to readers. I also feel that self-publishing is the best option for an urban fantasy series featuring mostly non-Anglo characters set in the non-Anglo environment of south-east Asia (The CHECK YOUR LUCK series).

What I am against is one playing field for Anglo readers and publishers, and another playing field for everyone else. And I am particularly leery of Amazon, with which I have a love-hate relationship.

I have no doubt that if we were to pin the digital book revolution on one factor, it would be the Kindle. Despite very serviceable ebook readers being around for years prior to that, there was something about the Kindle that spoke to consumers and boom!, the phenomenal rise in ebook sales began. Was it the device itself? The timing? The advertising? All three, plus other factors I don’t even know about? Possibly. The end result was that Amazon and Kindle ended up holding immense power in this new world.

My own first niggling doubts about the Wonderfulness of Amazon was sparked then when I discovered that, not only wouldn’t Amazon publish in that international standard of EPUB, but it wouldn’t even publish in Mobi, despite the fact that it bought Mobipocket. No, the Kindle would read “Kindle format” books, its own Mobi-deviant standard.

That first decision was a clear indication of the direction of Amazon. They weren’t here to join or expand the market; they were here to completely overwhelm and dominate it. And that’s okay for a business to aspire to, but don’t go imputing any kind of selfless motives to them that they don’t have. They are a business and everything that they do leads directly to their business. Not yours. Theirs.

Remember the “disappearance” of pro-homosexuality books and books tagged with the “erotica” label? The automatic price-adjusting? The agency argument with the disappearance of the “Buy Now” buttons on all Harper Macmillan books? The walled-in mentality to readers outside the reach of its franchise that I mentioned last week, despite the fact that I specified “No Geographic Restrictions” when I published my books. How naïve was I?

The fact of the matter is, with just a couple of keystrokes (“a glitch in the software”…yeah right), Amazon can make entire categories of books appear and disappear in seconds. Now that scares the hell out of me.

I know people like Joe Konrath have done very well via Kindle and best of luck to him, Locke, Hocking and the others, but I’m not Joe Konrath. In one old blog post, Konrath describes how helpful Amazon Support have been to him and how he talks to A Real Person when he has issues about something. As I said, I’m no Konrath. When I have an issue (and, to my reckoning, it’s a Damned Big One), all I get are occasional emails that say nothing at all from a low-cost Support service based in India. Go me!

I’m not saying this to disparage Konrath, who has worked long and hard for his success. All I am saying is that each self-publisher must find their own path, their own way of making things work. And, since I’m not Konrath, I’m more for democratisation of venues than monopolisation.

You see, here’s my dilemma. Amazon have now moved into the publishing arena themselves by setting up imprints left, right and centre. They’ve choked off Lightning Source, a distributor they’ve dealt with quite amiably for years, even after buying the competition, CreateSpace. And they wouldn’t hesitate to shut down those self-publishers who have only, say, sold less than an arbitrary number of books. Why do I say that? Because, by choking distribution and opening imprints, Amazon is turning into one of those legacy/traditional publishers we love to hate (except with greater control of the end-to-end business process) and the time will come when they view all the little self-publishers milling around their feet in the same way that the Big Six do. As ants to be crushed with nary a thought. Annoying little critters who, none the less, are eating into Amazon Imprint’s bottom line. Put yourself in their shoes. And be honest. What would you do if you wanted to dominate the entire business?

(Maybe that’s all Kindle was ever meant to be?  A long-term loss-leading strategy for Amazon to be The Biggest, Perhaps The Only, publishing house/distributor in the entire world!)

So where am I leading with this? Diversification. Of course I distribute through Amazon; I’d be a fool not to. But you’d better believe that I’m also distributing through other channels as well. As a corollary, the idea that there are self-publishers out there who only use Amazon is incredible to me. Why do that to yourself? Why give Amazon the opportunity to completely shut you down at some point in the future via a software “glitch”? For the same reason, as a reader, I refuse to buy a Kindle (or an iPad). I don’t like the idea that one business has that much control over what I have access to. Maybe, as a consumer, I may be able to let it slide. (Not me, but obviously a sizeable portion of the tech-savvy population.) But, as a producer, there’s a word for letting such control slip from my hands and it’s STUPIDITY.

But back to digital distributors. I don’t like Smashwords so much because that’s another venue where I have to give up control and rely on their Meatgrinder software. I do like XinXii, which is why I’ve now priced my books there at the same price as Amazon (a reverse of the Amazon price-matching strategy if you will) and I’m prepared to eat the VAT surcharge because I’m betting the time will come when that VAT will disappear, and I want a loyal cadre of readers at XinXii when that time comes.

If you’re a self-publisher, don’t blindly follow what other people say. (Even me!) It’s your business and you have to weigh each decision carefully. You can change your mind — of course you can, that’s the beauty of being your own publisher! — but you have to make decisions based on your own circumstances. And nobody knows those better than you do. Not Hocking, not Konrath, not me.

(A related issue to all this is the move of Amazon into Europe. I have a take on this that I’ll share next week. Needless to say, it bucks the trend.)

Earlier this week, the indefatigable Charles Tan had a post up entitled “Publishing Favors the West”. I started replying to him but it got so long I thought I’d turn it into a separate post on this blog.

Charles starts off with a blunt question:

First, there’s the “Big Six” publishers. Guess where they’re based and who their primary audience is?

He talks about the issue that the flow of books is one-way; that is, away from the developed world towards the underdeveloped. (Not that the underdeveloped/developed divide is even true any more. As far as infrastructure goes, I’d much rather live in Malaysia than the United States. For a start, the roads are better. But, for simplicity, let’s stick to cliches for the moment.)

Charles talks about how the size of the North American market naturally lends itself to economies of scale, something that can’t be taken for granted in a lot of other countries:

If you’re wondering why local [Filipino, but also s-e Asian --kaz] publishers don’t have Advanced Reader Copies or ARCs, it’s because they can’t afford to do a separate print run.

There’s public perception:

Import books get their own diverse shelf categorization: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Romance, Horror, Science Fiction, etc. Local books get one shelf….

It’s true here in Malaysia too. We have a “Local writers” category that, in addition, is never at the front of the store. Fancy that. And we sure don’t have an Amazon with all that wonderful free shipping, gift wrapping, streaming video, and so on. Book Depository comes close but, while I love them to bits, they just don’t have the range of stuff that Amazon has.

Charles goes on to talk about ebooks and you really should go read his essay because it’s chock-full of home truths, but let me diverge at this point and talk about Amazon and my experiences with them as a self-publisher.

Together with hubby, J, we are running our own little publishing house called Sandal Press. And because I want to get my books in front of the widest audience possible, of course I’m going to sell them through Amazon. Here are the problems:

– Because I’m not in an “Amazon” country, I cannot install the Kindle tools that are available to content creators in countries where Amazon exists. When I pointed out that it was ridiculous inviting non-Western content providers to publish on Kindle but refusing to give them utilities available to their Western counterparts, the India-based Support team told me they’d “pass along” my suggestion to the Marketing team. Gee thanks.

– I’m not even allowed to download the Kindle reading app for my PC!

– I can’t see my own books after they’re published. This is not so bad for my Sandal Press books because I can get sideways access to the pages via my KDP Administrative panel but, for my books that are not published by Sandal, Amazon behaves as if they — and I — don’t even exist.

Charles’ essay bites especially deep because I’ve just finished uploading a book by my alter-ego Cara d’Bastian. Yes, the first book in The Check Your Luck series, The Check Your Luck Agency, is finally up and being processed. But do you know the kicker?

I won’t know what it looks like.

I know I passed through clean clean code (having been an ex-programmer) that’s been validated by every HTML engine I can find, but the fuzzy preview tells me that the first letter of each chapter (which I coded as an image, with its corresponding text character as an alternative display) isn’t appearing!

It’s driving me completely batshit because I can’t check to see if it’s my problem or the previewer software’s problem. And I can’t take a post-conversion copy and pass it along to an American friend to check because Amazon doesn’t allow any content provider to download a free Kindle copy of their own book.

Am I pissed? You bet I am. The deck is stacked so much against any person of initiative who happens to reside outside the Holy Western countries, that I’m completely wrung out — mentally and physically — whenever I hit the “Save and Continue” button.

Uploading to Amazon is nerve-wracking because it’s like baking a calzone for the first time. You’ve followed the recipe exactly, you’ve listened to all the advice available, the thing looks good when it comes out of the oven, but you can’t tell how it actually tastes because the calzone is for someone else. All you can do is guess and when it’s your own professionalism at stake, that is a terrible terrible thing.

Charles finishes with:

[W]ill eBooks be the great equalizer? They could be. Just not in the ecosystem of Apple or Amazon….

Damn straight. Apple is as much a restrictive closed-garden environment as Amazon is. I watch every day for news of successful competitors to these two arrogant behemoths, which is why I also publish with Kobo (they’re not without their own problems though), Smashwords and XinXii. (And don’t get me started with those poxy bastards at Nook, who even — amazingly — make Amazon seem tolerable at times.) With recent news in mind, I’m hopeful that Apple will repeat its history and disappear down the drain. Hopefully, this will open up the field a bit. I’m waiting.

I originally penned this story for Maria who’s just been through an operation  (just rest up, M!) and thought you might get a chuckle from it as well.

We were overseas recently. And discovered, upon returning, that life at the tropics doesn’t stand still. Due to our diligent pre-trip spraying, we didn’t get the Invasion of the Ants that we so feared, but we did get a mini-infestation of cockroaches that has now sent the kids into a regular cleaning frenzy (can’t be all that bad then, can it?), a spider the size of your fist (and they bite too, as J can attest), as well as two other critters.

The first was a juvenile spitting cobra. Yeah, you know those snakes you see on National Geographic, where the camera is up close and waving around, and this snake rears up and shoots venom and it smears on the camera lens? Yeah, one of them. We found it in the pantry. They are endemic to this region and can just as easily be found in urban areas as forested ones. (It doesn’t help that our house sits in a combination of the two.)

The poor thing was just looking for a place to call home but we didn’t have a choice. At first we looked around for something to trap it in but we barely had two long sticks! How the hell could we manoeuvre it into a jar or something? Where’s that little noose on a long stick thing when you need it? In the end, we had to kill it and did so with regret. The juveniles are supposed to be more aggressive than the adult cobras, but this one was so desperate to just get away and only got angry when J pinned it against the wall with one end of the broomstick. You would have lost your temper before it did.

Meanwhile, the dogs were going berserk on the other side of the baby gate to the kitchen. They couldn’t see what was going on but they knew that Something Bad was in the pantry and were rearing to have a go at it. They didn’t get the chance. J had brought in Squeak to help him out but all Squeak wanted to do was get out and go back to lazing on top of the scratch post. (This is not the first of Squeak’s iniquities.) J finally despatched the snake, we toasted it that night for the forbearing animal with unfortunate choices that it was and moved on.

But then, a couple of days later, Sausage started sniffing around the library like a bloodhound, culminating in one solid hour barking at the shoe cabinet. I didn’t think it was another snake, but I did think it was either one of those large-arsed spiders again or a cockroach. The kids and I got ready. Various insect sprays. Check. Torch. Check. Broom. Check. Dustpan. Check. A long stick. Check.

I took the torch and shone it around and between spaces. Didn’t see a thing. But Sausage was still barking like mad. The Wast brought Fluff and Squeak into the room to help out Sausage but they looked as if they didn’t know what was going on. No sniffs, no curiosity. Nothing. So I tried moving the cabinet a little, shifting one side, to give us more working room. Little Dinosaur and I saw a flash of grey-brown and a long tail before we all ran screaming from the room. (I’m not ashamed to admit that.)

We regrouped in the living room. “Right,” I said, “it looks like we’ve got ourselves a rat.” Meanwhile, Sausage was still barking around the cabinet because she didn’t see the rat take off for one of the bookshelves. “Let’s go get some rat poison.”

We piled into the car, drove to the nearest supermarket, purchased some poison and headed back. Meanwhile, from Sausage’s investigations, we gathered that the rat was penned up around a particular bookshelf. The kids hightailed it upstairs to their room but I had my working machines in the library, so I didn’t have a choice. I did put some shoes on though.

When we went to pick up J from the bus-stop a couple of hours later, I thought we had a plan all figured out. We’d pack up the cats and dogs for the night, put out some poison, then collect it (and, hopefully, a dead rat) up the next morning before letting our pets out again.

It wasn’t to be. While we were gone, Rat obviously decided to head for somewhere safer. She must have darted to another bookshelf but, unfortunately for her, Sausage saw her this time. Our dog pawed an entire bottom shelf of books out of the way and Rat must have panicked.

Instead of heading back to the sanctuary of the shoe cabinet, she must have decided to chance it in the rest of the house. Under she went, below the library baby gate, and that would have stopped Sausage cold. However, what Rat wasn’t to know was that Cookie was on the other side of the gate.

Now, while Sausage is fast, Cookie is faster. Our smaller mini bully loves to run, looks like she’s half-whippet and is able to catch arrogant birds in mid-air on take-off from our front garden. Rat didn’t stand a chance.

When we came home from the bus stop, we found a dead rat in the dining room with its throat crushed, but otherwise intact. I pieced the rest together from the evidence available. Lowest bookshelf in a mess with network switch unplugged. Squeak still in the middle of the library, having a nap. (Fluff had buggered off back upstairs, the lazy sod.) Baby gate moved out of position but still holding. (Sausage must have slammed into it, chasing Rat.) Said dead Rat. Cookie outside sunning herself by the koi pond.

We were never so proud of our dogs than at that moment. They may not be what people think of when they think of working dogs but it looks like they’re our working dogs, perfect for our current environment. They got extra treats that night and the cats got a lecture on the responsibilities of being part of the household…but I don’t think it took.

Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

That’s my issue of the week. As well as this name (KS Augustin, just to remind you!), I’m just about to start an urban fantasy series under another name of Cara d’Bastian.

At first, the decision seemed very simple. Two different genres, two different pen-names. Augustin sometimes writes erotic stuff and mostly sf, d’Bastian keeps it fantasy and sweet.

The problem, however, is how to cross-pollinate between the two. Now, I’m not sure I want d’Bastian readers to follow me back to Augustin (especially as the UF books can be read by my kids with my full blessing, whereas some of my Augustin books…ahem, not so much). On the other hand, being a greedy little writer, I’d like some of my Augustin readers to try my d’Bastian books.

I have no answers here, I’m just thinking it through on this blog. Maybe I can put a link here somewhere to d’Bastian? Would that work? I’ll try to get that up next week while I continue thinking.

I had the dubious pleasure of opening a new bank account recently and it made me wonder why we bother to stick with banks? I swear, if someone was to invent an alternative to banks, I’d be there like a shot.

I’m not talking about investment banks, those Ponzi-scheming, blood-sucking, Crown-of-Thorns starfish devouring institutes of everything in their paths. Ahem. I’m talking about your normal, run-of-the-mill banks that, now that I think of it, are little better.
Think about it. You’re giving the bank YOUR hard earned money. And the bank will be using YOUR money to make money that they supposedly survive on. Remember when banks were like that? But now….

You want the flexibility of a daily working account? Well, you ain’t going to get a cent in interest from any money there. And if you underestimate your expenses one day and overdraw your account, the charges rack up at an alarming rate.

You want something with some interest? After all, you should get something back from essentially giving your money to an alien concern that may or may not guarantee your cash deposit, right? Sure, you can have some interest, but the bank won’t make it easy for you. You can’t have a cheque book or ATM card associated with YOUR money. You have to pay for any over-the-counter transactions associated with YOUR money. You have to maintain a minimum balance of YOUR money.

As the conditions of the accounts available were explained to me, you can probably guess that I was getting more and more unhappy. You can bet that if I had a more client-friendly place like a credit union available, I wouldn’t have given the bank a second glance, but I didn’t have a choice.

I hate the way banks pour on the charges for each thing you want to do with your own money. I hate the way banks give exchange rates that are worse than you can get from a High Street money-changing booth. I hate the way banks expect to make many percentage points of profit between the paltry rate you wrangle out of them and the rate at which they loan out your money. And I hate the fee they charge every month to keep your money in their virtual building. It’s obviously not good enough to make money the regular banking way. Oh no, they have to rub salt into the paper cut by then taking away your money whether you’re using it (transaction charges) or not (account-keeping charges).

Anyway, that’s my weekly rant. The account was set up, the service exactly as I was expecting (I was dressed casually), but I do not count myself as a happy customer. If anyone is thinking of setting up alternative banking options, please let the world know. It’ll be more popular than inventing a new mousetrap.

As a lacksadaisical aquarist, I made a terrible mistake recently. I bought some new fish but didn’t quarantine them and ended up killing four out of five of my very big, very graceful angelfish when I introduced the newcomers to the tank. All that was left was one lone angelfish, the newcomers also having succumbed to stress and who knows what else, as well as passing their malaise to a small school of tetras. Sigh. Expensive lesson well learnt.

This gave me a problem. I have an automatic fish feeder and, with only one fish left, the feeder was dumping way too much food in the tank. I needed more fish, I told J. But not from Teh Evil Aquarium Supplies. I’d have to scout farther afield. I decided to go to Gelang Patah.

Gelang Patah is a small town of around 20,000 inhabitants, essentially forgotten by time. I can say this because, four years ago when we first clapped eyes on it, we noticed that the curbs were crumbling, the buildings were unpainted, and trash littered every centimetre of open ground. We couldn’t figure it out because GP is very close to the Singaporean border and all the glitz and glamour thereof. If you wanted a contrast of countries, you couldn’t do better than, say, Jurong and Gelang Patah.

GP has improved since then. With the influx of Singaporeans looking for cheaper housing on the other side of the border, it didn’t have a choice, but progress is slow and there are still some things that are startling.

Anyway, getting back to the story, I bundled the kids in the car and we went exploring to GP. And we found it hard to find a spot to park (most of the main car-park being occupied by empty stalls waiting for sunset and buka puasa (end of the day’s fasting for Ramadan) to start selling food) so we parked behind a busy row of shops (in front of a much less busy row of shops). After purchasing some beautiful gourami, I decided to stop at a shop that advertised frozen meat in blocks. The sign itself was stark and so was the shop. The floor was unfinished bare concrete and half a dozen chest freezers lined one badly painted wall. One young Malay woman was present, loading one kilogram sausages of chicken mince into one of the chest freezers. There was no air-conditioning, only two fans swirling in the increasingly humid heat of mid-morning.

The whole place, with a couple of shelves holding some groceries with faded labels, reminded me of nothing more than a big ole fish bait shop in Queensland, Australia. If you’ve ever been driving north of Brisbane, up Bundaberg way and beyond, you’ll know what I mean.

The young woman seemed content to parcel chicken mince into a freezer and I was about to leave when a tacked-up sign in plastic against one of the walls caught my eye.

Burger Arnab – RM8.00

“Burger arnab?” I repeated in disbelief. “That’s rabbit.”

The young Malay woman turned to me. “Yes,” she replied. “We have rabbit.”

“May I see it?” I asked.

She smiled and opened one of those old freezers. And there, stalwart reader, I found more than just rabbit burgers. I also found ostrich burgers and local deer meat (rusa) burgers.

Ostrich! Local venison! Rabbit! All Johor produce (made up in Kulai) and distributed — not to one of the snazzy supermarkets that have sprung up like weeds, but — to a basic, hidden away shop in a small town that barely looks as if it can support any kind of exotic business whatsoever.

Of course I had to buy one pack of each and we tried the ostrich and venison burgers for breakfast the next morning. They were nicely seasoned and delicious. I’ll be going back and hunting through the freezers of that shop with a little more diligence next time. And the family can enjoy ostrich and deer burgers for breakfast every now and then. (I’m waiting until J’s at work one day before trying the rabbit. He has some aversion to eating past domestic pets, I think.)

Just goes to show you never know what you’ll come across unless you try exploring a little.

As you know, stalwart reader, I’m homeschooling the kids. Part of their curriculum includes the use of technology and the concept of blogging. For their very first blog, I asked the kids to write a short post on anything that took their fancy. This is Little Dinosaur’s 9yo effort. After she came up with a title, being about herself (yes, she’s a vain little thing), she goes on to say:

I wake up in the morning to eat my breakfast.

If there is noting to do on my computer then I go up stairs to watch TV[.]

I watch Animal planet, Mhtbusters [sic] and and TVIQ so that[']s what I watch.

Okay, we’re working on her punctuation and a bit of her spelling. Ahem. You’ll notice she doesn’t say anything about school though! In any case, here is her 11yo brother’s comment to her post:

The whole family knows what you are doing. It’s not like we don[']t pay attention.

They have wonderful arguments and all J and I can do is try to stifle our laughter as we listen to them. Ah, kids. I know I keep threatening to sell them but I think I’ll hang onto them for a little while longer. Hope your weekend is an entertaining and I’ll catch you next week.

Recently, a news article hit the papers. An immigrant family, new to Singapore, was complaining about the smells coming from their Indian neighbour. You see, the Indian family was cooking curry on a regular basis and the immigrant family (mainland Chinese) found the aroma objectionable.

The Indian family would close all doors and windows before cooking their curry but it appears that wasn’t enough. So much so that the Chinese family took the Indian family to a mediation centre. The ruling was that the Indian family could only cook curry when they were sure the Chinese family wasn’t at home. (Insert eyeroll here.) You can read the article here.

In retaliation, some Singaporeans organised Cook and Share a Pot of Curry day last Sunday (21 August) (it’s on Facebook somewhere) to show that curry is part of the Singaporean national cuisine and that it should be encouraged, not discouraged.

Feeling warm and fuzzy yet? Not so fast.

Five years ago, there weren’t as many mainland Chinese in Singapore. The city-state was thriving with a large white-skinned expat community. The banks were living high off the hog (still are, but there were more bank employees around then) and there were Europeans everywhere. In this environment, J and I went apartment rental hunting. And almost the first question we were asked (during our initial telephone enquiries) was whether we were Indians or if one of us was married to an Indian. Remember that the rental agencies we were talking to were run by Singaporeans.

When we went to visit apartments, the landlord (or his/her agent) would ask what kind of food we cooked. “Er, mostly Western,” was my reply. “No curries?” they’d persist. I’d shake my head. With my big Slavic husband by my side, it was a lie they easily accepted. The landlords we met, and their agents, were all Singaporean Chinese.

At one complex we visited, we were told quite proudly by the agent that there were “no Indians” living in the block.

By now, J and I were completely stumped. “What’s wrong with Indians?” we asked.

“Their food is very smelly,” was the reply. “We don’t like renting to Indians.”

Every single one of these comments came from Singaporean Chinese. It seems to be a well-known fact that the moment an agent gets an Indian family looking to rent a place, they get shunted to the less salubrious properties with less discriminating landlords. NIMBY* for curry.

Yeah sure, mainland Chinese are bigoted. They make a big show of belonging to an older culture and thus are “superior” to everyone else. They have paler skins than the south-east Asian Chinese and make a big deal out of that as well. (Malaysian Chinese we’ve met have a particular antipathy towards mainland Chinese, calling them arrogant peasants.) Mainlanders also have singularly undeveloped senses of humour. (We know, we’ve worked with a few of them.)

BUT…don’t blame them for an already existing problem. Singaporean Chinese were discriminating against Indians and complaining about the smell of their food long before one million mainlanders flooded the country. But I do applaud them for a neat sleight of hand. Now none of this is their fault At All. Well played, Singaporean Chinese. Well played.

(*) NIMBY = Not In My Back Yard

POSTSCRIPT: J reminds me that we also had to confirm that we weren’t mainland Chinese when we were apartment hunting. You see, the Indians may stink out the place (snort), but those same agents told us that mainlanders trash apartments. If you can see a bigger problem looming beneath this little feel-good band-aid, you’d be right.

You may have noticed that, in the WAR GAMES giveaway, I specified EPUB as the reading format. Why did I do this?

Well, first, because EPUB is an international standard put together by the International Digital Publishing Forum and I’ve got the hots for international standards. I love them. Without international standards, you wouldn’t be able to have your luggage tagged from one international destination to another, make phone calls or send a postcard to a friend, for example.

Let me admit something to you. I’m also an open-source fan. I don’t like proprietary systems. I like to rip things apart to see how they work. EPUB fills those criteria.

PDF, while widely known and used, is an Adobe product and, while I adore FrameMaker, Adobe has been notoriously antagonistic (or indifferent, take your pick) towards Linux. What really bites in this regard is that Adobe products are available for Apple (a *NIX variant) but they will not go that bit further and port across to Linux.

Secondly, you have to understand the philosophy behind the two products. PDF was created as a screen alternative to print, at a time when most documents were still being sent from place to place in paper form. In order to win over those print fans, Adobe created the Portable Document Format (PDF), that had all the advantages of a printed document, but without the horrendous shipping and time costs.

Because Adobe was targetting print fans, PDF gives you a printed page on a monitor. You see the page as the author intended, complete with the typefaces, margins and positioning as the author intended.

The production of a PDF, then, is a completely different proposition to the production of an EPUB, where the size of screen, margins and even typefaces and their colours vary according to the reader’s choices on her/his screen.

PDF has another problem. Where the PDF hasn’t been constructed to be reflowable, it will look terrible on your screen. I know this because I’ve tried (and failed) to read dozens of PDFs on various ereaders and they are a pain. Having to depend on the PDF author/publisher to do the right thing is a risk I am no longer willing to take, and one I don’t wish to impose on readers.

And, lastly, because PDF is a faithful rendition of a printed page, all the considerations that didn’t have to go into an EPUB have to go into a PDF. That is, I have to cater for widows, orphans, gutters, rivers, hyphenation, and so on. This is not a trivial task if I want to do it properly and, believe me, I want to do this properly.

Having said all that, I haven’t ruled out the possibility of having PDF giveaway versions of my Sandal Press books, but it’s just going to have to wait until I have a bit of spare time. (Although, if you really want a copy, Smashwords has WAR GAMES in PDF to sell you.)

Hope this explains the reasoning. Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you next week.

ADDITIONAL: Oops, I forgot to mention. The winner for the WAR GAMES giveaway ended up being two winners and copies have been sent to Cathy Pegau and Barbara Ann Wright. EPUB, natch!