On March 24 I arrived at my parents home to take care of them. Both 89, they live in the outskirts of Split, Croatia. They both had pneumonia and when I arrived the household was in a "state." They are much better and I'm pleased to have had a calming influence. And, what a pleasure to be treated like a rather young man again.


Split grew out of a palace built by Emperor Diocletian as his retirement place, around 300 AD. Literally. The mideaval buildings sprout like mushrooms out of the large Roman walls. The number one thing that's different from Greewich, CT is not the language, nor the culture--it's the climate. Reliable and mild, Mediterranean weather is soothing like a good, old friend.

From this distance my publishing thoughts keep returning to one issue: publishing online. For me the essence of publishing is editorial--getting the writing and presentation to be good and useful, and doing it in good time. Printing, distribution, and even promotion and selling are all distractions. We should be able to create the content, post it, and be done. But here's the rub. Actually, two rubs:

1 People steal our content. A recent example was our Bitter EJB. During a casual conversation Rick Ross once took a look and reported it was being distributed from 70 peer-to-peer nodes out there. In the meantime the book's performance in the stores has been weak. Worse yet are the sites that resell our ebooks. I get furious when I see them. The last one I saw was a Chinese site that accepted donations for a free download of our books, among others. The combination of theft, giving, and asking for charity strikes me as truly weird.
2 People prefer printed books. Our ebook sales keep rising but so do our overall sales. Whenever I check our ebooks are steady at a single digit percent of our totals.

What a pity.