Scrivener Pirate
Vikki Nagindas
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Perhaps authors need to accept that ebook piracy is nearly impossible to stamp out. People who download pirated copies of your books are unlikely to have purchased them in the first place, and, if the music example transfers to books, these people might be big purchasers of other books. They might find that they like your books, and buy new ones, and even recommend them to friends.
Well, if you've been reading my previous posts about Apple's tardiness in posting the 9a466 (or whatever it is) Leopard beta to developers who paid for ADC Select or Premiere membership, you'll know I'm not a happy bunny. WWDC attendees received that beta nearly three weeks ago now. And you know what? That beta is now available on torrent sites. Meaning that pirates out there are running a version of Leopard for which they have not paid, whilst legitimate law-abiding ADC Select members such as myself still have no access to that version of Leopard despite having paid Apple for the "latest" Leopard releases - in other words, we have paid for exactly that copy.
Do Apple care?
No, they do not.
I have written to them several times, with no reply. All developers received a general "you will receive the WWDC beta soon via ADC download" e-mail a few days ago. And when I e-mailed them to remind them that they had not replied to my earlier e-mails, they repeated the "soon" message to me.
Well, you know what? I've lost interest. I won't pay for a Select ADC membership again, and I strongly advise other indie developers to think seriously before wasting money on it. Yes, you get hardware discounts, but the main impetus for coughing up for a paid ADC account is pre-release OS X versions. Given that Apple don't honour what you pay for, I strongly recommend not buying into this scam. Sadly, it will mean that users of my software lose out a little in future, in that if I do not pay for pre-release versions of the OS, then I can't guarantee that my software will run on the first release of any new OS upgrade. But if Apple don't make available the new releases of their OS to those of us who have paid for exactly that, then what is the point? The really sad thing in all of this is that I have got so p***ed off at Apple that I have not touched Scrivener development for three weeks now. When I finally get access to the new beta I will hopefully get my enthusiasm back, but as an indie developer, with Apple treating me as though I am worthless, it makes it really hard for me to get enthusiastic about updating a help file or adding a small tweak here or there.
There really are times when I wish I had chosen to develop for Windows. Surely Microsoft cannot treat developers as poorly as Apple do? Apple is not your friend. They make lovely machines and a great OS, but they care very little for users or developers, it seems.
In fact, it seems that the Apple developer model works something like this: 1) Pay hundreds of dollars for ADC membership and an "Early Start Kit" that gives access to latest OS versions; 2) Once you've paid, the latest versions will actually be withheld unless you pay thousands of dollars for a WWDC ticket and travel across the world to attend.
Oh, and if you can't attend, it's not just the beta that is held back, but also any knowledge shared by engineers.
I don't why I'm so surprised - I guess it's just years of Macheads telling me that Microsoft were evil and Apple were Good. When you finally switch to a Mac and develop for the platform for a few years, you soon realise that Apple are just as bad as MS - they just happen to be much smaller and less popular.
So: really, really poor. Please do think twice before paying for ADC membership.
Steven... I have just found this product and have used it for the last 3-4 days and find it really useful. I have a notebook with 4 long pdf documents related to Biblical prophecy and it is really surprising to see a concise summary of each document just by clicking on that document. Two great features I have already found; each question shows the number of citations and you can clickeach and review the actual citation, and the second is the suggested questions from the documents. A really beneficial way to study the material.
I'm not totally sure this is correct but it appears that when asking questions the results only come from the sources in the notebook which limits a bit continual investigation outside the notebook sources. For my needs it would be beneficial to have a ChatGPT like interface to the broader band of knowledge of the large lanugage models of the recent AI vintage.
It's a great question. Right now I think it's kind of a two window experience, because Scrivener has so many tools for actually creating a long-form document, as you say. (For instance, NotebookLM doesn't have the ability to create footnotes/endnotes in things that you write.) So what I would do is compile your existing Scrivener file as a PDF and bring that into NotebookLK and use that to ask questions, get overviews, quotes, etc. And then paste into Scrivener to actually do your writing. Not ideal but I think would be an improvement on just using Scrivener. Over time, it may be possible to write a whole book in NotebookLM or NotebookLM and Docs in a way that would be equivalent to Scrivener. We'll see. (And I think you can use NotebookLM in the UK with a VPN.)
Thank you - some food for thought and new tools for thought as well! I will be interested to hear anything about how the adoption of a tool like this affects your future output if you have any pieces that happen to be a controlled experiment in your writing and thinking before and after adopting it.
Hey Stephen! I'm a huge fan of the concept of the adjacent possible as you've outlined in (most recently for me, anyway) "Where Good Ideas Come From." I agree completely with this way of thinking about how ideas form. I'm a huge fan of Feynman, and write about him way too much, largely because I think this is just how he saw the world.
Just wanted to throw that out there first! I'm playing with Notebook LM now, but it doesn't seem quite ready for prime time. it loses the conversation thread quickly and isn't keeping up with my conversation (for reference, I use GPT4 and Bard every day). I'm confident this will improve rapidly, and i am excited!
Thanks, Andrew! We're working on the conversation history issues. It should perform reasonably well with some followup questions, but its "memory" is currently only one turn in the conversation. It's tricky with the source grounding because each time you ask a question, we are retrieving a bunch of passages from your sources to put in the context window -- and those passages are based on the current query. It's going to get much better as we fully transition to Gemini over the next week, but in the meantime, I think you will get very solid results if you don't reference the conversation history in your questions. In other words, say: "tell me more about pirates" and not "tell me more about them" etc.
We are definitely going to be rolling out more input types -- integrating with the Web would make particular sense, given that it's Google! Besides the limited source categories, what's holding you back from finding it helpful? What would you be trying to use it for?
I would love to have a powerful AI-based notebook. I would use it for everything. However, like most other potential users I already have a "notebook system" so Notebook LM would have to at least come close to my current system for me to consider switching.
Just curious - is the multiple notebook model gonna stay? Because that is a deal breaker. I think everyone would want to be able to search, find common information, correlate, etc... across multiple "chapters" of their notes.
Thanks, Stephen! I appreciate the product a great deal. I run my own businesses, and being able to analyze some things beyond what I currently can see, and having it live in the Google ecosystem is appealing.
The source materials are stored on Google's servers while you are an active user of NotebookLM. But we do not train the model on any of the information in those sources -- we effectively just put it in the "short term memory" of the AI and then wipe it as soon as your conversation is over. So you can feel confident using private or corporate information, or material under copyright that you have permission to use.
NotebookLM, the AI-powered tool for thought I've been building with Google Labs for the past year or so, officially launched to users in the U.S. on Friday. If you were in our early access program using NotebookLM earlier this summer, I highly recommend that you check it out again. The early access version was mostly our attempt to learn as much as possible about source-grounded AI. In other words, it was more of an experimental feature, not a product. The version that launched on Friday gives you a genuinely new interface for working in collaboration with a language model, creating a single, integrated space for reading, thinking, asking questions, and writing. Some of the most exciting features\u2014what we call \\\"suggested actions\\\"\u2014are going to be rolling out over the next week or two. But the main architecture is in place\u2014and NotebookLM is now using Gemini Pro, Google's new AI model.
In his PlainText column at Wired on Friday, \\\"Google\u2019s NotebookLM Aims to Be the Ultimate Writing Assistant,\\\" Steven Levy tells the story of my long fascination with tools for thought, starting with my early obsession with Hypercard in the late 80s, some of which will be familiar to Adjacent Possible readers. (Amazingly, he quotes his own column from Macworld magazine in 1988 reviewing Hypercard, which I'm pretty sure is how I originally heard about the software when I was a sophomore in college\u2014there basically wasn't any other way back then to keep up with Mac-related news.) He then describes his experience using NotebookLM, which provokes some very interesting thoughts on what a creative partnership with an AI is going to look like as these tools become more common:
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