Some announcements + A first look inside the new edition of the book

 Hi!

 After the release of the second edition of the book I got many requests for doing a paperback print run. However, it takes a lot of money to do a proper print run and I didn't want to immortalize something that I didn't feel satisfied with. Since then I have worked hard on improving the book to what I feel is as good as I can make it. Today, I finished writing it.

The book is now being copy edited, which will be finished on the first week of December. This means that preorders for the physical book will start on December, and they will be shipped on January. 

The price for the softcover isn't set yet. We are talking with various Japanese companies to see which one provides the best quality at a reasonable cost. We will sell it on the collective website as cheap as iColor and I can manage to print and ship it without losing money on the process. The digital version will still be free for everyone.

Although I plan on doing small updates to it on the future, this will be its final version. I want to thank everyone who has supported me on this 8-year journey. It has been a beautiful project

A first look inside the third edition

 I can't release the full text yet, but I will talk a bit about what is new, what my personal opinions are on the process of researching, writing and how it came out. 

Cover

The cover of the past edition was made by myself. For the paperback version we wanted something better, so Diobrando and I worked for a few months on this design. I am impressed with how it came out, he has done a beautiful job with the arrangement and colors. We all love notation-chan so let's move on to the next point

Contents

The book has gone from 124 pages to 322. Although a few of those are due to the new formatting in A5, there is a lot of new content. The improvements are mainly in the community histories, which have been greatly expanded, as well as in the trick dictionary. 

Let us look at the table of contents for each chapter and see what's new:

In the first chapter I explain the origin of everything pen spinning related. Compared to the second edition, I've improved a lot the pen modding history. Early pen spinning history was a very tough but also fun thing to research. I had to read a lot of archived old pages, go through various Japanese newspaper archives and even travel to the national library in Tokyo to search for the oldest pen spinning publication ever.

 

 In the second chapter I explain how pen spinning evolved in eight different language groups. Almost everything here is new, compared to the second edition. It was one of the aspects I wanted to improve the most, so I talked with many old administrators and members so that they could guide me and check that what I wrote is correct. No doubt that this was a headache to write, but I feel like our boards and communities are such a core concept of pen spinning culture, and one that is so hard to learn about, that I couldn't finish this project without giving my best in this section.

In the third chapter I analyze all world competitions, from WT07 to PSO20. The analyses that I had written for the second edition were a bit shallow at times, so I tried to improve them. It is hard to do very in-depth analysis of pen spinning in an objective way, since our way of understanding PS is always heavily biased by the time we live in. The information on WT and WC combos and happenings is pretty well archived so I feel like anyone who wants to learn more about a specific tournament or spinner can do that by themselves.

Wait, wasn't this like, the whole book at the beginning!? Jokes aside, it's a dense chapter to read but I am very happy with how complete, unambiguous and standardized this notation came to be.

Pen spinning artlangs. I was stoked when Tchus told me that he still conserved some images from the tablature notation explanation. V01D's pitch-yaw-roll notation was also a nice late addition to the bunch.

I feel like not a lot of English-speaking spinners are interested in Japanese notation, but I think that concepts like the axis fingers or some of their modifiers are very interesting, and any notation fan should at least take a look at those.

Nowadays, FLow is working a lot to create a good Korean notation, considering that what they had been working with so far (abcd notation) was quite basic. It was a pleasure to talk with him about this.

And we come to the last one, the trick dictionary. I felt like no proper notation guide would be complete without a vocabulary list (aka an explanation of the trick names that are used), but this had proven to be a much, much more difficult task than expected. There are a total of 323 entries, of which 159 have images (you'll see later what kind of images these are). Between all languages (mostly English, Japanese and Korean), a total of ~700 different trick names are explained.

Just to give an idea of how much of an improvement this dictionary is over the past versions, and over anything that had been written up until now, let's look at a trick: the bust.

This is its entry on the first edition. Quite short. Also, that definition of bust is incorrect.

This is its entry on the second edition. The definition of bust is still incorrect. But hey, I fixed the uppercase T on Thai and I got a prettier monospace font, those are improvements!

This is the entry on the third edition. No more comments.

 

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If you've read so far, thank you! Please stay tuned to the pre-sale announcement either on here, on my youtube channel or on my twitter, @rpd_ps.