The problem with having too much to do and too many different projects is it becomes impossible to keep on top of all the relevant discussions.  Two Bits was reviewed on Lambda The Ultimate, a weblog about programming languages.  There are some great comments, including an extensive one about how I am wrong (though I think it is more accurately about how the poster is right than it is about my book being wrong, but that often happens).  Metafilter picked it up.  The spike in traffic was an order of magnitute larger than anything I’ve gotten since the book was published, and I only just noticed

sorry I missed the discussion…

The Society for Cultural Anthropology’s 1st annual Gregory Bateson prize was given to Barray Saunder’s CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting. Two Bits was shortlisted alongside some other great books. More here…

Kiran “Jace” Jonnalagadda (a veteran silk-list member) created an epub version for the Sony e-Book reader (thanks jace)!

There was a very nice editorial in the NYT this week by Steve Crocker, author of the first, and many subsequent RFCs.

Two Bits has sold 1142 paperback copies (which doesn’t include publicity or review copies) since its release last June, and we are now preparing to reprint it. At this point we can correct any typos or mistakes that may have made their way into the final book. We cannot make any substantial or editorial changes. However, if you have noticed any misspellings or small factual errors, please let me know. You can send me a list with the corrections, and I will pass them along to our production
department.

The production department plans to send the book back to the printer as soon as possible. If you could get any corrections to me by February 9th, that would be great. If you don’t think you would be able to get corrections to us by then, please let me know and we can talk to production about either delaying the order slightly, or putting the corrections on file for the next reprinting.

Since I’m all about open source, and since, given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow… if anyone has noticed a typo or factual error, I’d love to hear about it, so I can take advantage of this little moment!

I particularly appreciate this because Andreas’ work is on the Ubuntu project, and his observations of that project will be very important to understanding the ongoing process of maintaining Free Software.  Since my book ends about the time Ubuntu emerged, it’s nice to know others are continuing to ask questions like Andreas’.

SISU is a formatting language (created by Ralph Amissah) that is very simple (simpler than HTML) but powerful enough to allow translation of a document into multiple formats (XML, HTML, PDF, ODT and so on). It even has a word-concordance and an MD5 hash of the text–just like I like it! Check out the manifest page for the book to see all the different formats it is now available in. What’s more, it includes the index terms with links to their appearance in the text, and all kinds of tasty metadata (like Dublin Core). Computers can read my book now! Go computers: read, discuss!

In some ways, this is such great proof of concept: it’s a free software markup language and command-line oriented processing tool, with an emphasis on both ease of use and power. It’s not iTunes for books (we need that, sort of, but without the DRM), but it’s also not SGML (we have that already) or the TEI DTD for XML (which some of us need, but not all of us). It strikes me that SISU is an excellent example of the UNIX philosophy detailed in the book, and the kind of tool that should become a standard not necessarily for presses, but for academics and authors who want to allow their work to be transformed and/or widely distributed. Finding the time to encode things with metadata and markup is not easy, any tool that makes it easier is worth its h in gold.

I am simply awestruck by the ingenuity, and honored to be an example text among others…