#no isbn

[textbookdedications]

Impractical Python Projects - Playful Programming Activities to Make You Smarter

by Lee Vaughan

[seawardboundsammy]

so @extreme-neutral made this post about in universe chargestep shippers, i printed out the art in the post, some jokes were made, and then i got a little extra. Please enjoy my day's work

also an extra (note the date in the bottom left)

[copperbadge]

Earlier this year, when I was getting ready to publish Fete For A King, I thought, I want to level up and buy my own ISBN again, like I did for Six Harvests. 

An ISBN is the identifier that allows bookstores to sell your books and libraries to catalogue them, and while Lulu will issue you one for free, they retain certain rights if you accept, and I like to own as much as possible of the work that I do. In other countries, you can just...ask for an ISBN and it’s given to you, but in the US some shady-ass nonsense company called Bowker owns all the ISBNs. One will cost you $125, but you can also buy in bulk; 10 will “only” run you $295. And I thought, well, I will probably write nine more books in my lifetime and if not, I can give them to friends. 

And then I wrote two more books this year and published a compilation of all three.

Each book needed two ISBNs, one for epub and one for paperback, and the compilation needed three because of the hardback, so this year I went through nine ISBNs. Given that I have more books in the pipeline and could use to assign ISBNs to some of my older work, I went back to Bowker today to look at buying another bulk of 10, and noticed that for $575 you can buy 100 ISBNs. 

I’m worried what kind of output I’ll ramp up to if I know I have 100 ISBNs to fill before I die, but I definitely could fill more than another 10 ISBNs just with my back catalogue, and if I buy two sets of 10 ISBNs that’s $590 anyway. 

I’m gonna need to wait a paycheck or two, but...yeah I think I’m gonna buy 100 ISBNs. And then just...pray for my immortal soul or something. 

I mean, if we subtract twelve-ish for the books that already exist that need them, and another eight for various special editions (hardcovers, compilations, etc) that’s 80 remaining, and if each book requires two, that’s forty books. Which is only one per year if I live to be eighty-three. 

Forty books. And that’s terrible. 

I suppose I could just like. Become a publisher. There's nothing saying I have to WRITE all forty...

[intothestacks]

Did you know..?

The numbers above a book barcode are called International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs for short.

They consist of ten or thirteen numbers (older books have ten, newer books tend to have thirteen, and are a bit like a book’s fingerprint; each published hardcopy edition of a book has its own ISBN.

[dreamytfw]

Question for y'all: is this fic any good? Can't decide if I should I read it or sell it to a 2nd hand book store.

[mary-is-writing]

✨NOW LOOKING FOR BETA READERS FOR THE MONSTERS ONLY WE SEE✨

After many months of waiting for official paperwork to happen and lots and lots of procrastination, TMOWS is finally ready to enter the next stage: Beta reading for the English version!!

So, hi there writeblr community!!! 👋 If you're interested in helping me by beta reading my first novel, please keep reading this!!

If you don't know what TMOWS is, check the intro post here and check the #tmows tag on my blog :D

Now for real, thank you so so much if you're interested in helping me with this!! You have my eternal gratitude 💕 Secondly, I'm opening 5-10 slots for people interested!! I'd like to at least have five beta readers since that's what I had for the Spanish version, but if by some miracle more people appear that want to help I don't want to reject them.

What I'll ask you to do is mainly catch grammar and spelling errors, since English is not my first language, as well as suggest changes to things like the semantics, punctuation or vocabulary used, if you think they are needed.

What I offer you is not money, but to add you to the Thank You section at the end of the book as well as offering to beta read for free any of your works, anything from short stories to a full novel.

When it comes to a schedule, I'll keep the slots open until the end of June or until they are all filled, whatever happens first. Then, I'll send you a PDF copy through your email on July 1st, and you'll have until September 30th to send it back with your notes. You can choose to either make notes in the copy itself or send a different doc with all your notes, whatever it's easier for you!!

Please send me a DM if you're interested in being a beta reader!! I'll be reblogging this post constantly this week as well as updating on any progress owo)b

Slots available: 10

[rivetgoth]

obviously lots of placeholders in the copyright still but heres the frontmatter! it's really happening you guys.............

[knickknackgalore]

Inkheart

[killingsboys]

true pain is not being able to find the exact edition of a book you want to log on goodreads or storygraph....

[knottahooker]

Based on the training video I just watched, I have a question. How do YOU pronounce "ISBN"?

[skyfallscotland]

Respectfully ma'am, I don't know that I can do this again.

Sincerely,

A non-American with Empyrean-induced PTSD.

[textbookdedications]

Microcomputer Interfacing

by Harold S. Stone

[linseymiller]

checked GR yesterday to get some book data and oh ho ho 45 people want to read that devil, ambition do they?

(it's me i'm the sickos)

[duck-newton]

Concept - Amesty & Graduation as novels.

[a-lesson-you-never-asked-for]

Basic Codes

In this 3rd instalment, we shall discuss some basic codes and cyphers that encode information. We won't go too much in depth into this, but some of these will be familiar and some won't. At the end of the day, they're just short examples showing how messages can be simplified into a bunch of symbols that make things easier to communicate.

Enigma Machine and a Morse Code transmitter

Morse Code

Morse Code is a fun example that was originally designed for long distance communication using electromagnetic telegraphy (the process of sending written messages across long distances using changes in electromagnetic fields).

The way this works is somewhat similar to binary, you have dots and dashes that are organised in a way to represent letters, and spaces that represent the pauses between letters.

The dit duration is the length of time taken to represent 1 dot, that is, just press the button. So it would take 1 dit unit (or 1 dit) to represent the letter 'E' as you can see in the above picture. For a dash, you have to hold down the button a little longer, having a length of 3 dits. So if you go to the letter 'A', the length of the word is 4 dits!

There are 3 types of pauses:

Symbol space - Pausing between dots and dashes to represent a character. For the sake of convenience, I'll represent this with an s. This has length 1 dit.

Letter space - Pausing between characters. I'll use p to represent this. This has length 3 dits.

Word space - Pausing between words. For the sake of convenience, I'll represent this with w. This has length 6 dits.

Let's say you want to represent the letter B, given by "_s." and would have length 5 dits.

If you want to represent BE, it would look like "_s.p." and would have length 9 dits.

And finally BE U, which would look like "_s.p.w.s.s.s_" and would have length 25 dits.

The length of times for the dit durations is up to the users, they're the ones operating, but these are typical ways of defining lengths of words in a standardized way. The actual length of a dit can be anything, anywhere from 10 milliseconds to 100 milliseconds, but as long as one is consistent and efficient.

One thing to notice is that the length of the coded characters are different for each letter of the English alphabet. This is due to entropy, where the length of the encrypted character is inversely related to the frequency of the letter itself. 'E' is the most common letter, so it has the shortest representation, and 'Q' is the least frequent, so it is the longest.

ISBN

The ISBN is an international naming standard that identifies books uniquely (for those published before 2007). It is a 10 digit number that comes of the form

The check digit is an important feature in codes. It enables one to check if the code/message is a valid message or not. This is found in error-correcting codes, and we'll go into this later. It's like saying, "Oh how do I trust this tumblr dude?" and then using certain indicators you can use to make sure that they're legit.

The first 3 parts of the ISBN number are usually easily determined, because they are very deterministic. The check digit is determined using a formula that says

Take the above example and let's make a table

The formula asks us to calculate the sum of the n x digit column, and check if that's divisible by 11. In the case of 7, we notice that the sum of that column is 297 (which is divisible by 11). In the case of 8, the sum of the column is 307, which is not divisible by 11. So if you're given the ISBN 0-387-97812-8, you know that it is not a valid ISBN number.

The above code is called ISBN-10, and there are variations, one example is ISBN-13 which relies on a 13 digit code with the exact same principle so that you can accommodate for a lot more books.

There are several examples of error-correcting codes and play important roles in codes employed on satellites where there is a large amount of corruption of machine code going on.

Coming up next...

We won't do much on error-detecting and error-correcting codes because they are not really useful to explain at the moment. But what we can do it show how to actually design an encryption-decryption algorithm going from the alphabet to a set of symbols, like what we saw in Morse code.

[wildoute]