Things like this are why I purchased some ISBNs and self-publish/distribute.
The books (e.g.:Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks[1] and Practical Evolutionary Algorithms[2]) are doing well, and whilst I'm likely "leaving money on the table", I'm happy with how it's going.
I'm not familiar but curious: If you entirely self-publish, is there a benefit to having an ISBN number over... Just publishing w/o one? Or is there a legal requirement to do so?
It was often brought up in conversations with universities and their libraries - having them made things more convenient. The books were selling for a year or so without ISBNs, no problems either way!
ISBN is intended for the marketing of new books and publishers are allowed to reuse the ISBN if a book goes out of print.
I used to work at the library at my Uni and did some analysis of what we had in our catalog and found quite a few books that shared the same ISBN from South End Press which I thought was funny because I had a friend who grew up next door to Noam Chomsky and was friends with the people who ran South End Press. We were talking with them about web publishing in the the early 1990s and found the people there were really excited about something called Futuresplash which eventually became Macromedia Flash.
I think they didn't want to pay for new batches of ISBN numbers and maybe it was colored with a desire to "stick it to the man".
Also at home in my collection I have a lot of books that are from the 1950s and 1960s which have an LCCN but don't have an ISBN so the ISBN would not be a good primary key for a personal book database though I think the LCCN would be better.
Books not published in the US often don't have a LCCN, so not great as a unique ID.
Also if you're actually building a database, never use a meaningful data element like ISBN or LCCN as the primary key. What happens if you have multiple copies, for example?
That's a good point. I should probably print a QR code that is equivalent to a type 4 UUID or a snowflake id and stick it on each individual book. Now that I think of it, I have two copies of Nixon Agonistes which I mentioned in a comment here yesterday.
ISBN's provide a way for people - including bookstores and libraries to index your book data. Which means if you use Ingram Spark, or Amazon's extended distribution, or any other major distributor, your book will pop up on huge amounts of other bookstores inventory systems pretty much automatically.
It won't mean a lot for sales unless you also encourage places (stores, libraries) to stock them, but it does have a small effect (caveat: self-published authors are seen as less than dirt by a lot of bookstores, as a subset of self-published authors takes the "encourage places" as "relentlessly badger places" to try to get them to stock unsellable books)
I've had a handful of sales that way, and financially it's been irrelevant, but it is a little boost to see my books pop up more places.
My daughter wanted an app like this that would help her with sheet music, so that was enough motivation!
I was tinkering with Unity at the time, so I thought I’d use it to make future releases on other platforms a little easier.
I’ve tested it on a few iPhones, iPads, and a MacBook Air (running the iPad app). It’s worked nicely on those. I don’t recommend using the AirPod microphone as I noticed some poor recognition on the lower notes!
I used to write long and technical blog posts. I think it's unlikely someone will go out there way to give you negative feedback, i.e. not constructive.
My motivation came from my younger days where everyone (including myself) had their own little corner of the Internet, made with things like AngelFire and GeoCities. I missed that.
Nowadays, I prefer to make short posts, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. Of course, before I started, I had to write my own static-site generator... It's been years since I've ran my Patreon and I don't post on YouTube like I used to, so there's little to no engagement - which is OK with me.
Yeah WebGPU is very new and still not finished.
It's apparently not supported by Safari.
https://caniuse.com/webgpu
I don't know if it's working on chrome on MacOS ?
The books (e.g.:Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks[1] and Practical Evolutionary Algorithms[2]) are doing well, and whilst I'm likely "leaving money on the table", I'm happy with how it's going.
[1] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/data-analysis-with-rust-...
[2] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/practical-evolutionary-a...