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Why do a text
version of the radio show? How is the text version
an enhanced story form? How often are the stories
emailed and in what format? How much does a subscription
cost and what forms of payment are accepted? As a subscriber,
what copyright restrictions are there in my reproducing the text version? Are the stories ever
repeated? Is my
subscription transferable to another email address? If I find a mistake,
have additional detail on a story, or have a fresh story idea, will you
listen? |
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Why do a text version
of the radio show? As
large as a radio audience can be, the show still misses a large part of its
potential audience. We have long-time fans who bemoaned the loss of the show
when they moved beyond the range of the broadcast or they had a change in
their schedule that kept them being able to hear the show. Being able to
download a text version has the luxury of never missing a story and being
able to read it at your convenience. And of course the differences
between a verbal story and a written story provide a variety of ways to
enhance a story. [click here to return to the top] How is
the text version an enhanced story form? Perhaps
the best, answer will come from looking at the samples provided on this site.
As the writer of the series, when we did the book The
Man Who Stole First Base, it was a delight to be able to add visual elements that cannot
be part of a verbal story. Pictures can make a story feel more alive, and
they can sometimes even play an active role in telling the story. It is also
inevitable with baseball stories that there will often be statistical
content, and you can only do so much of that in a verbal story without
confusing or losing the listener. But if your listener could see it in
a simple chart it would be easily digested as part of the story. If you
have had the opportunity to hear the show, a common experience for many
stories is “Did I hear that right? That’s amazing,” and you wish you could
hear it again because you want to share that story with someone and you would
like to get it right. It is always easier to re-tell a story if you can
review it, and a text version allows you to do exactly that. It is like
having a recording of the show. The
biggest difficulty in writing the radio show was the extreme time constraint
that the show requires. More than once I set out to write a story for the
radio show and finally had to discard the whole story because it simply could
not be told in an entertaining fashion in the time frame allowed. And a large
number of the radio shows are missing fun details that should be part of the story for the maximum
entertainment value, but they have to be cut because of time constraints.
Both Eric and I can tell you that the bulk of final editing of the radio
shows were as much about making it fit as about making the story better. The
text version allows slightly longer versions and a way to mention details
that may not be of interest to the general reader but which can be tucked
away in the endnote for those who might be interested. Rest
assured that one of the most enjoyable aspects of the radio version will be
preserved in the text version. The beauty of a verbal story is that it pushes
you toward brevity; the [click here to return to the top] How
often are the stories emailed and in what format? There
are two stories a week (Monday and Friday) with three holidays off in the
winter (Monday or Friday closest to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Day) for a total of 101 stores. The
stories are in PDF format, which is a common fixed format that is read easily
across the various operating systems. Most computer users already have a PDF
reader installed on their system, and if not, there are many free PDF readers
available online. A PDF document avoids any of the formatting mistranslations
between email programs when writing “inline” emails, and it makes it easier
to add a variety of pictures to the stories. The PDF format also makes it
easy to save a copy and read off-line or to print out a story if you want a
hard copy. PDF
stands for Portable Document Format. Adobe’s free PDF readers are the most popular and can be
downloaded at the following site for all the main operating systems (Windows,
Mac, Linux).
[click here to return to the top] How much
does a subscription cost and what forms of payment are accepted? Thanks
to the economy of electronic mail (email) the cost of a one-year subscription
is just $21 for one year, and $40 for two years. We accept online payments
through both Google Checkout™ and PayPal.
And
even if you don’t have a PayPal account, PayPal will still handle a credit
card payment for you. We also have a mail-in form for payment by check or
money order. We recommend both Google Checkout™ and PayPal
accounts as excellent ways to pay safely and conveniently for your online
purchases. At this time we cannot recommend Amazon Payments for third party transactions and do not offer
that option. Hopefully they will clean up their act and we will be able to
work with them as well. [click here to return to the top] As a
subscriber, what copyright restrictions are there in my reproducing the text
version? The attached document you
receive by email has copyright protection, but like you I’ve never gotten
around to reading U.S. Copyright Law {Title 17 U.S.C. Section 101 et seq.,
Title 18 U.S.C. Section 2319}. My business philosophy is: I’m more interested
in making things easier for the honest than to make things difficult for the
dishonest. I have chosen to go with a very trusting
form of distribution that provides the greatest convenience to the
subscriber. I’m not going to ask you to learn yet another username and
password and work out a schedule for visiting the website to read the latest
“Page,” and I want it to be easy rather than difficult to print out a hard
copy if that is the way you prefer to read the story. I want to make it as
positive an experience as I can for the subscriber. I assume copyright law frowns
on unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted PDF linked through subscribed
email. I will tell you as the author what my hope is, that subscribers will
limit forwarding their link or sharing their subscribed copy to the
following: 1) For
their own personal convenience, that is, that they are the intended recipient 2) To
share a story that is of singular interest to the recipient 3) To
serve as a sample that will inspire the recipient to subscribe I’m not naive. I know there are going to
be situations where readers are tempted into playing a little loose with
their subscription. For example, someone will have a neighbor that they know
would love these stories and like to subscribe but they are not computer
literate, and, so, the subscriber will decide to print out copies from their
subscription and give them to that fan. That’s why the subscription page has
a “bonus” option where a subscriber can slip us a bonus of $10 to $25 as
their conscience might dictate. And if you think the stories are great, the
service impeccable, and you want to send us a tip, more power to you. [click here to return to the top] Are
the stories ever repeated? If it’s a good story, you
bet! Let me put it this way, have you ever heard a good story and then been
delighted to hear it again several years later? Isn’t that the hallmark of a
good story? That being said, right now we are on a cycle where some stories
are not repeated for ten years! And that extreme cycle grows longer every
year as the number of new stories is always greater than the number of
stories retired. Some of the best or most meaningful
stories do come around more frequently, sometimes as recent as a four-year
cycle. In the past 25 years there have been a handful of stories that have
run six times. Hundreds have been shared just once. But if a story is
repeated, every single time it is gone over anew and
99% of the time it is updated or changed — hopefully improved — and sometimes
completely rewritten to bring out another angle of the story. Those
improvements will be even more significant with the enhanced text version
where we have the option to easily fit in new details and add rarely seen
pictures. [click here to return to the top] Is my
subscription transferable to another email address? Yes,
that option is part of the Contact Us page.
We ask that you do it only when truly necessary. It requires the same amount
of hands-on involvement as a new order, and you don’t want to overwhelm our small
operation with a lot of short-term changes in email addresses. If you are
going to be on the move a lot, we encourage you to use a web-based email
address for your subscription. [click here to return to the top] Very
simple. We do not provide your email address or any other contact information
to anyone at any time. [click here to return to the top] If I find a mistake or have additional
detail on a story, or even have a fresh story idea, will you listen? Absolutely. We have ample
proof over the years that we can swing and miss, or boot a ball. We want to
get it right the next time the story is told. And we welcome details that you
might have that could be an interesting addition to a story. As far as new
story ideas, we didn’t get a lot of them from listeners of the radio show,
but sharing story ideas is more common now we are using an email delivery
system. Use the Contact
Us page to send your corrections, extra details, and story ideas,
or simply put it into a reply to any email sent from us. At this point we do
not send any “do-not-repy” emails. [click here to return to the top]
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