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Pema Chodron Online Weekend Retreat

Creating e-books (also known as eBooks or ebooks) for Shambhala Publications has been a major goal for the past 2 or 3 years. Finally in October 2009 we began — in earnest — to create a business strategy for converting Shambhala’s list of approximately 1,000 books in print into digital formats suitable for reading on the conventional e-book reading devices. We struggled with the various options for conversion, distribution, and sales, deciding ultimately to handle all these processes from within our office. The only outsourcing would be the actual conversion from hard copy or PDF format into digital — meaning in this case into epub, mobi and ePDF formats.

We had proposals from Code Mantra, Random House, Ingram’s Core Source, and Libre Digital We decided that learning the actual conversion process, understanding the specifics of uploading the converted content and metadata directly to the various vendors, learning about the various vendors and having direct contact with them — all these factors were overarching factors in convincing us to handle the e-book process ourselves.

This decision may not have initially been the most cost effective one, but the learning opportunity in managing the process and also having direct contact with Amazon, OverDrive, BarnesandNoble, Sony, and Apple provided the strongest arguments in favor of managing this business directly. So how did we do, and how are we doing? The 5 areas of focus in this process were:

1. Selecting and prioritizing the books to digitize
2. Managing the digitizing process — working with our Indian partner
3. Negotiating the contracts with our e-book wholesale and retail partners
4. Managing the collection and formatting of the metadata for each ISBN
5. Uploading the content to each of our customers — in each case using a different system with different levels of feedback and support

Each of these steps was multiphased and multilayered.  Nothing was particularly straightforward and none of our initial assumptions was correct. The necessary resources were greater than budgeted and the time required was off by a factor of around 5! In other words, what we thought could be accomplished in 2 months actually took 10 months! I’ll explain over the next few postings, and provide some insight on this process — for documentation purposes and also as a help to others who find themselves in a similar quandary.

I recently installed a stand-alone version of Teambox.com for a university client of mine (I would tell you who, but I don’t have permission, yet!). I’ll write more about our interest in Teambox soon, but for now I wanted to just post this shout-out to Pablo and his hard-working, friendly and helpful team.

Here’s an example of the kind of support I get from him:

[8/25/10 2:06:00 PM] Joshue Jacobs: I just got this in from my client: It would be great if there was a way to see, from the organization level, which projects a user is enrolled in. Not sure if this is possible right now. I need to be able to make sure each team member is included in all the necessary projects.

[8/25/10 2:14:54 PM] Pablo Villalba Villar: this is not implemented currently

[8/25/10 2:18:29 PM] Pablo Villalba Villar: You can build it in a quick way by editing the code for members.haml

[8/25/10 2:19:05 PM] Pablo Villalba Villar: sorry, that would be app/views/memerships/index.haml

[8/25/10 2:19:23 PM] Pablo Villalba Villar: you could add something like

[8/25/10 2:19:32 PM] Pablo Villalba Villar: – if @organization.is_admin?(current_user)

[8/25/10 2:20:05 PM] Pablo Villalba Villar:   = user.projects.collect { |p| p.name }.join(“, “)

[8/25/10 2:20:13 PM] Pablo Villalba Villar: after line 30

I don’t have time to test the code snippet, but I will. Amazing support from the Teambox.com team, and a delightful and promising product.

Thanks!

When I finished refining the Magento layout for checkout on http://shop.shambhala.com today, I proceeded to commit to git when I received this error:

You have some suspicious patch lines

Turns out that Git cares a lot about whitespace. While this is great for those Python devs, I’m not interested. To get past the error, I added this flag:

–no-verify

All better

I’m learning Magento and I recently encountered Alan Storm’s tutorial filled blog.  Unfortunately, while trying the most trivial of examples I encountered this error message:

ERR (3): Warning: include(Alanstormdotcom_Configviewer_Model_Observer.php) [<a href='function.include'>function.include</a>]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in [host path]/includes/src/Varien_Autoload.php on line 93

There are quite a few references to this type of error in the Magento forums with no good explanation. I finally resolved this for my server. What I needed to do was re-run the page compilation. Apparently, the include_path value gets cached during compilation. So, the best thing to do on a dev server is most likely to disable compilation. Re-running compilation did the trick for me:

System -> Tools -> Compilation.