Fluid Fuel Reactors eBook/Kindle is now available. If you own a Kindle please consider purchasing! If have any thoughts about FFR you'd like to share, please leave a review.
I'll explain 2019 situation and plan below, but first here's highlights of Fluid Fuel Reactors...
Fluid Fuel Reactors (1958)
Since 2015, I've been asking ORNL, DoE and Addison-Wesley about republishing FFR (Fluid Fuel Reactors) as an eBook. The contract had been lost by both DoE (having once been AEC to whom the copyright was assigned) and Addison-Wesley. All 3 of the original authors have passed.
2018-11-16 DoE sent me a license agreement to sign (took me a day!). Licensing document was completed by DoE on 2018-12-04.
It hasn't been entirely clear what happened at the DoE-end-of-things 2015-2017, but I suspect me attending the 2018 ORNL MSR Workshop (2018-10-03), and meeting some ORNL folks face-to-face is why I'm finally able to reprint FFR.
So today I'm announcing that Fluid Fuel Reactors can now be purchased as an Amazon Kindle eBook.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07L5T6C5R/
If you own a Kindle, or run Kindle app on your iPad/tablet/smartphone please consider purchasing Fluid Fuel Reactors. It is $3. That is the lowest price I can set an Amazon Kindle eBook to, and I've turned on all the options possible to allow the price to go lower for some customers. So if you see a price lower than $3 that's fine, that's deliberate if not also a bit out of my control. If you're subscribed to Kindle Unlimited (for example) the book is free.
But the PDF is Free!?!
I know! Not good enough. Good. Great, in fact, but not good enough.
Personally, I was unable to read FFR due to the PDF format... not in a timely manner. I have a large computer screen and could flip through it, but reading it end-to-end required bed-time reading, or couch reading... iPad or Kindle reading. And PDF is not a format which dynamically adjusts to a reading device. PDF format is designed to be printed, not read on a Kindle. (I can read PDFs on a laptop/desktop but not on anything else.)
If you've never owned a Kindle Paperwhite, here's my 10 second hardware review: It is like a smartphone for reading. Can you imagine living without a smartphone? I can't imagine reading without a Kindle. And so it wasn't until had FFR converted to an eBook format that I was able to read it.
The next update, the one I'll trigger support payments on, will include a link to the EPUB so hopefully everyone with any sort of eBook reader can have a more handy copy of FFR.
"Why didn't you do that without the license to reprint Gord? The PDF has been online for years! Just circulate the EBPUB file online! Are you a coward!?! Why make everyone wait years?"
The whole do-it-legal-thing was because I didn't want to antagonize DoE's legal department. The lawyer I'd been speaking to 2015-2017 made it clear doing so would be a mistake (after another DoE employee floated the idea of just-posting-it-online in an email CCed to the lawyer and myself). My thinking was, that if I did it "wrong" then I'd never get the legal agreement. Now that I do have the agreement, yes I can circulate the EPUB! (I'm allowed to.)
Right now I'm just looking to fix some formatting issues, and however much I can fix them in a week, that's the first EPUB file Ill release. I'll issue more in future, and I'm also looking into hosting all of FFR on an HTML website.
( Also, the Kindle release is NOT DRM protected. That was a yes/no question posed by Amazon and I chose "No DRM". )
Is FFR that Important?
Opinions on this vary. Not everyone agrees this is worthwhile, although most people in MSR world have expressed interest and enthusiasm. So here's why I'm doing this, beyond a properly formatted eBook being easier to read than PDF.
Discoverability.
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Just like we don't upload MP4 video data to our own websites and hope people will stumble upon Thorium / MSR / Nuclear advocacy videos, an eBook belongs in an eBook marketplace. That's where the readers are. That's the most frictionless way to get an eBook into a device. (Yes, to me $3 is less friction than shuttling a data file.)
.Updateability.
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The book was written in 1958, however the ORNL and AEC reports are much more recent. I intend to add these to the end of FFR, so FFR becomes a chronology of Government documents on the subject, and as useful a resource as possible.
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While any given EPUB file would be a snapshot in time, having purchased FFR forever entitles the reader to re-download FFR with the latest version. This can be done MUCH easier/faster than manually re-grabbing the latest EPUB from me and copying it to an eBook reader.
.Money.
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Anyone who buys FFR for $3 off Amazon will result in me receiving $1. (The finances could be better for a text-only eBook but all the image data force me into this 1/3 revenue model.) Obviously I could charge more, but that would reduce impulse-buys... the goal is maximum readership.
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But still, that $1-per-sale might be quite useful. Short of "real money", $1-per-sale might be enough to mount an advertising campaign for the Fluid Fuel Reactors eBook... if 75c of advertising leads to a $1 royalty and so 25c net-profit... that would be an advertising dial I could truly crank-up and put the concept of MSR in the minds of a bigger audience. (There'll be diminishing returns the more ads are circulating, but imagine cranking that dial all they way up to equilibrium.)
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Imagine all the AEC/ORNL reports being converted to eBook and HTML, and the process entirely paid for by sales of FFR eBooks! That'd be nice.
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I've got some loose-end clarification about the eBooks... for boring technical details skip ahead.
Dr. Raluca Scarlat
Similar to Raluca's TEAC8 presentation on "Thermochemistry of Molten Salts", at TEC2018 Raluca detailed some case studies at TEC2018 on Molten Salt Thermodynamics.
I'm always happy to capture overlapping material, and I did interview Raluca at ORNL's MSR Workshop 2018... so there's now enough Raluca coverage to put to much more effective use in the next narrative. People always ask what the challenges of MSR are, and I think Raluca offers great complexities to consider.
Video Plans and "The Situation"
I have a pretty good idea what I'd like to say and how I'd like to say it for the next narrative. Certainly have way-more-than-enough new coverage to pursue it. That's the most important video-thing I can do, and frankly I do think it is more important than FFR.
But me-editing-video means me sitting in front of a desktop, in my house, in my basement.
To tackle a new narrative will require time off from my current "real job" as my 2-year-old isn't letting me escape at night regularly. That'll happen in early 2019.
My having pursued FFR since 2015 is because I have lots of teeny-tiny fragments of time and a laptop. (Now quite a nice 2012 MacBook Pro laptop.)
Attending to FFR is something I can do in those tiny fragments of time, and editing narrative is something I can do with larger at-home blocks of time. I've love to have a good not-video and a good video project to flip between, depending on where I'm situated with free time at any given moment.
Much of my video-editing-time is sort of invisible. You guys see lecture videos, but just getting any event's footage organized is a huge time-sink.
I've just gotten past the hidden-time-cost of organizing all TEC2018 footage. Andreas's current plan is to allow someone else to edit it into lectures, with me picking off a few key lectures (such as Raluca Scarlat) containing people I'd feature in narrative.
Billy Gogesch chimed in with his captures, and Billy's captures saved Day3 and vastly improved Day2 of TEC2018! Raluca's lecture video is comprised of audio/video from (including myself) 3 volunteer videographer cameras! (The venue having provided zero video capture services.) If any 1 of those 3 audio/video data streams were missing, Raluca's final video would look/sound nothing like it does now!
But anyway TEC2018 is organized, ORNL MSR 2018 is NOT yet fully organized. Editing narrative is hard. So my thinking is, I should invest some time into FFR up-front and see how many processes I can automate... eBook sales to fund HTML/EPUB conversion of government reports to further increase the reader's value in FFR... and then return to narrative more focused with dedicated "time off" from real work once those balls are rolling. (Or once I determine definitively that those are balls that will-not be rolling.)
Boring eBook Details
2018-12-04 closed the loop on securing DoE's permission to reprint. (And YES it was required by Amazon! Amazon DID ask to see the agreement.)
Most of the eBook conversion was completed before 2018. And my editing efforts since have been minimal... the Fluid Fuel Reactors book for sale today is imperfect, but I have confirmed my ability to update it and pass those updates along to customers for free. These sort of experiments take time to percolate, and it is why weeks passed before I could report the success.
While I am (as always) time constrained, right now I am deliberately not cleaning-up FFR to perfection because I have one technical issue looming over my head... Apple!
There are 3 eBook markets I intend to offer Fluid Fuel Reactors on:
Kindle / Amazon.
Done.
.Google Play / Android.
Independent publishers in beta. Might take months to become one.
.Apple / iPad.
There is a weird bug impacting many people currently attempting to become Apple iBook ("/ Apple Books") independent publishers... we can't enroll because the website claims we're "not signed in". The stupidest craziest bug, but apparently it isn't impacting enough people that Apple is willing to fix-it-in-a-day. The engineers at Apple know. The engineers at Apple are working on it...
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...so because I ultimately know that Fluid Fuel Reactors will be available very-soon on iPads and Kindles... (Install the Kindle app on your iPad of course but I want it in Apple's MARKETPLACE and not be directing people to technical work-arounds.) ...I want a revision workflow that is optimized for both.
Because I can't yet confirm a workflow with Apple's ecosystem, I don't want to spend time tinkering with the document. My process needs to ultimately involve me looking at FFR on an iPad (as an Apple Book) and a Kindle, and making sure it is flawless on both. (And I'll rejigger it all once am on Google Play Books but that could take months.)
I can say that Google Docs won't cut it. That is the only thing I know for certain at this point. Too many formatting issues to make it my primary FFR document.
But once I get a workflow established I'll share as much of that process (and access to assets) as I can.
And does anyone want me to go into further detail about publishing the eBook? I suspect I've bored 99% of you to death <veiled_threat>but I could go on</veiled_threat>.