I found GitHub repos­i­to­ries that were spread­ing mal­ware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me noth­ing use­ful. So I opened a dis­cus­sion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the ex­act same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the com­ment was deleted. Then an­other per­son replied. It was the same AI an­swer again.

I worked as a de­vel­oper at a com­pany. I asked the busi­ness owner a ques­tion about a busi­ness task. He sent me a ChatGPT screen­shot with the an­swer. I replied that it had noth­ing to do with my ques­tion and every­thing there was wrong. A minute later he sent me an­other ChatGPT screen­shot. He did­n’t even read the AI’s an­swer. He just took a screen­shot and for­warded it to me.

Recently some­one mes­saged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few mes­sages I re­al­ized I was talk­ing to an AI agent.

I’m tired of talk­ing to AI.I want to talk to real peo­ple.But even when I talk to peo­ple, they for­ward my ques­tions to AI and send me the AI’s an­swer.

I also pub­lish all new notes on Telegram and Bluesky.

May 26, 2026

The worst job in­ter­view I ever had was­n’t a knowl­edge melt­down, cod­ing as­sess­ment fail­ure, or a com­plete lan­guage mis­un­der­stand­ing with the in­ter­viewer (although I’ve had all of those, too). No, the worst job in­ter­view I had was some­thing I can only de­scribe as an un­so­licited psych eval­u­a­tion.

I’m an en­gi­neer, pri­mar­ily work­ing for small star­tups. At a less-than-10-per­son com­pany, es­pe­cially in the ear­li­est days, cul­tural fit is of sin­gu­lar im­por­tance. Even if you hire a cracked en­gi­neer, it’s prob­a­bly not gonna be a good ex­pe­ri­ence all-around if you can’t make a hu­man con­nec­tion. All this is to say - I get why you’d want to pri­or­i­tize this. But de­spite many quite nor­mal cul­ture fit in­ter­views, there’s one I still re­play in my con­fused head once in a while. And I think it’s worth shar­ing not be­cause I want to shame the com­pany or in­di­vid­u­als (I’ve left them anony­mous), but rather to sug­gest some re­con­sid­er­a­tion for founders and hir­ing man­agers in the same boat.

About 3 years ago, I re­sponded to a mes­sage look­ing for a found­ing en­gi­neer at a men­tal health startup (their no­ble cause was im­prov­ing ther­apy ac­cess for at-risk youth). The first in­ter­view was a quick con­ver­sa­tion with a founder and their head of en­gi­neer­ing — a fairly un­event­ful in­for­ma­tional in­ter­view (“this is why we’re great join us blah blah”). The fol­low-up with the head of en­gi­neer­ing was sched­uled shortly af­ter­wards.

The fol­low-up, they de­scribed over email, would be a bit non tra­di­tional - a ~90 minute cul­ture fit chat. Note there was no tech­ni­cal as­sess­ment yet. Expecting lit­tle, I joined the video call. It was ex­plained we’d just be get­ting to know each other based on some guid­ing ques­tions.

I fail to re­call the ex­act word­ing of the dis­cus­sion top­ics, but they were, in fact, non-tech­ni­cal — cov­er­ing such lovely top­ics as the hard­est day of my life, my biggest life chal­lenges, and other sim­i­lar “trauma-baiting” ques­tions.

Now, to be clear, I can un­der­stand why these dis­cus­sions might give deep in­sight into a can­di­date! It’s just that I think it’s frankly a lit­tle in­va­sive when you’re ba­si­cally meet­ing this per­son for the first time.

I’m a lit­tle ashamed re­mem­ber­ing my­self talk­ing about failed re­la­tion­ships, fam­ily strug­gles, and in­ter­per­sonal chal­lenges in pre­vi­ous work en­vi­ron­ments. This per­son gave the im­pres­sion that it was a safe space to share, di­vulging lit­tle of their own trauma.

By the end of the call I felt com­pletely emo­tion­ally drained - and i had­n’t even opened my ter­mi­nal! By the time I got the cur­sory one line “We won’t be mov­ing for­ward” email 24 hours later that emo­tional ex­haus­tion quickly turned into two new feel­ings: shame and anger.

I felt aw­ful that i had shared such deeply per­sonal things with the in­ter­viewer just to be cast off in a re­jec­tion email. I felt an­gry that I was re­jected. I felt em­bar­rass­ment that my soul was seem­ingly cracked open and judged “unworthy.” It was­n’t my skills they were re­ject­ing. It was… me.. I felt con­fused that a men­tal health startup had con­sciously de­cided to choose an in­ter­view so ca­pa­ble of mak­ing can­di­dates feel so vul­ner­a­ble.

I don’t think this per­son was try­ing to be cruel. Honestly, that al­most made it more con­fus­ing. The for­mat it­self cre­ated the prob­lem.

Culture fit is im­por­tant, make no mis­take. Make sure the peo­ple you hire are good peo­ple with strong morals. But con­sider eval­u­at­ing this in a way that does­n’t make can­di­dates feel like they need to share their deep­est ex­pe­ri­ences just to scrape and claw for em­ploy­ment.

Andrew Gleeson de­signed Analog Mono, “fixing the crimes of VCR OSD Mono.” There used to be this clas­sic pixel font that you’d see every­where in the 1990s on hi-fi equip­ment: VCRs, TVs, cam­corders, etc. One of its chal­lenges was a low base­line which re­sulted in all the let­ters with de­scen­ders pulled up, for ex­am­ple:

Analog Mono fixes that prob­lem:

Elsewhere, Kumiko Yoshida made Coral Pixels (also on Google Fonts), a color font that comes with the 1990s and 2000s col­or­ful fring­ing baked in. The fring­ing was once an ar­ti­fact of sub­pixel ren­der­ing, but now it is meant to evoke nos­tal­gia or just as an in­ter­est­ing vi­sual el­e­ment in and of it­self. (Perhaps ad­ja­cent to chro­matic aber­ra­tion?)

Lastly, here’s Two Slice by Joseph Fatula — a font that’s only 2 pix­els tall, “and some­what read­able.”

Of course, these are all vec­tor fonts — e.g. ready to be in­stalled on a mod­ern op­er­at­ing sys­tem — pre­tend­ing to be pixel fonts. That’s maybe a sep­a­rate post al­to­gether, but it leads us to the last font, Geist Pixel from Vercel:

The copy in­tro­duc­ing the font is a lit­tle pre­ten­tious/​​spicy, but it touches upon some­thing im­por­tant:

Geist Pixel is­n’t a nov­elty font. It’s a sys­tem ex­ten­sion. [… It] was de­signed with real us­age in mind, not as a vi­sual gim­mick, but as a func­tional tool within a broader ty­po­graphic sys­tem. […] This mat­ters be­cause pixel fonts of­ten break in pro­duc­tion. They don’t scale prop­erly across view­ports, their met­rics con­flict with ex­ist­ing ty­pog­ra­phy, or they’re purely dec­o­ra­tive. Geist Pixel was built to solve these prob­lems, main­tain­ing the vi­sual tex­ture teams want while pre­serv­ing the ty­po­graphic rigor prod­ucts re­quire.

Geist Pixel is­n’t a nov­elty font. It’s a sys­tem ex­ten­sion. [… It] was de­signed with real us­age in mind, not as a vi­sual gim­mick, but as a func­tional tool within a broader ty­po­graphic sys­tem. […] This mat­ters be­cause pixel fonts of­ten break in pro­duc­tion. They don’t scale prop­erly across view­ports, their met­rics con­flict with ex­ist­ing ty­pog­ra­phy, or they’re purely dec­o­ra­tive. Geist Pixel was built to solve these prob­lems, main­tain­ing the vi­sual tex­ture teams want while pre­serv­ing the ty­po­graphic rigor prod­ucts re­quire.

There are def­i­nitely fonts whose Achilles’ heel is not the let­ter­forms, but the in­vis­i­ble hard work put into every­thing that sur­rounds them: the kern­ing, the meta­data, the ex­tra glyphs, the ver­ti­cal met­rics. It seems that the team be­ing Geist Pixel is proud of es­pe­cially that last part.

Dropbox Co-CEOs Ashraf Alkarmi and Drew Houston. Houston will even­tu­ally step down and as­sume the role of ex­ec­u­tive chair­man at the com­pany he helmed for 19 years.

Courtesy: Dropbox

Drew Houston founded Dropbox nearly two decades ago at age 24, even­tu­ally be­com­ing a house­hold name in Silicon Valley and the first tech en­tre­pre­neur to take a com­pany from the Y Combinator in­cu­ba­tor pro­gram all the way to the pub­lic mar­ket.

Now, at 43, Houston is ready to do some­thing else. He’s in­form­ing staffers on Tuesday that he’ll be tran­si­tion­ing into an ex­ec­u­tive chair­man role af­ter an ini­tial pe­riod shar­ing the co-CEO ti­tle with Ashraf Alkarmi, who is be­ing pro­moted from prod­uct chief. Alkarmi will even­tu­ally take over the top job on his own.

By al­most any mea­sure, Houston has had a great run at Dropbox, help­ing pi­o­neer the cloud stor­age mar­ket, com­pet­ing head-to-head with Google and Apple and build­ing a net worth of more than $2 bil­lion, thanks to sub­stan­tial own­er­ship in his com­pany. But in the land of out­sized ex­pec­ta­tions, Houston has over­seen a com­pany that peaked too soon and never be­came a gen­er­a­tion-defin­ing brand.

Dropbox’s cur­rent mar­ket cap of just over $6 bil­lion is down by half from the high price on its first day of trad­ing in 2018, and is be­low the $10 bil­lion val­u­a­tion it was as­cribed by pri­vate mar­ket in­vestors in 2014. Meanwhile, Airbnb, an­other early break­out hit from Y Combinator, has a mar­ket cap of close to $80 bil­lion, and CEO Brian Chesky is cred­ited with up­end­ing the hos­pi­tal­ity in­dus­try.

Houston, who cre­ated Dropbox due to a “personal frus­tra­tion” with con­stantly los­ing USB sticks when he was in col­lege at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, brushed off the Airbnb com­par­i­son.

“I think my 18-year-old self would be high-fiv­ing me,” Houston told CNBC in an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view, not­ing that Dropbox is “something that a per­cent­age of the planet still uses.”

In its lat­est quar­terly earn­ings re­port, Dropbox said it has more than 18 mil­lion pay­ing users, and the ser­vice re­mains pop­u­lar with me­dia pro­fes­sion­als, graphic de­sign­ers, ar­chi­tects, and oth­ers who share files and pho­tos as part of their daily work.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston Dropbox and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi (together at cen­ter) cel­e­brate the launch of Dropbox’s ini­tial pub­lic of­fer­ing as they ring the open­ing bell at Nasdaq MarketSite, March 23, 2018 in New York City.

Drew Angerer | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Dropbox topped $1 bil­lion in an­nual rev­enue in 2017 and sur­passed $2 bil­lion four years later. But rev­enue is roughly flat over the past two years and de­clined slightly in 2025.

The com­pa­ny’s per­pet­ual chal­lenge has been to dis­tin­guish it­self from the swarm of com­pe­ti­tion, which in­cludes Apple and Google as well as Amazon and Microsoft. Then there’s long­time ri­val Box, which is still run by founder Aaron Levie and faces sim­i­lar ob­sta­cles. Box is val­ued at just over $3.5 bil­lion.

The lat­est hur­dle for Dropbox, and the whole cat­e­gory of sub­scrip­tion soft­ware, is ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, which has swept across the tech in­dus­try over the past three-plus years. The soft­ware space has been ham­mered due to con­cerns that foun­da­tion mod­els from OpenAI and Anthropic will en­able sim­pler tools that dis­place ex­ist­ing prod­ucts.

Dropbox shares have held up bet­ter than many in the en­ter­prise space. The stock is down less than 5% in the past year, while com­pa­nies like Monday.com, HubSpot and Asana have lost more than 60% of their value.

“Whenever there’s a new tech­nol­ogy, peo­ple ex­trap­o­late very quickly,” Houston said. They make as­sump­tions that may be “directionally cor­rect” but take years or even decades longer to play out than they pre­dict.

Regarding “this con­cept of SaaS Apocalypse or what­ever,” Houston said he’s “never met a Dropbox cus­tomer who’s like, ‘I’m just us­ing so much ChatGPT I’m go­ing to can­cel my Dropbox sub­scrip­tion.’”

‘Unanswerable ques­tion’

John Lovelock, an an­a­lyst at Gartner, sees par­al­lels be­tween the cur­rent AI era and the early days of cloud com­put­ing, when com­pa­nies like Salesforce bal­looned at the ex­pense of legacy ven­dors like Oracle and SAP. The tra­di­tional play­ers did­n’t col­lapse but saw growth slow as they tried to pivot to the cloud, de­spite busi­nesses spend­ing more on tech­nol­ogy.

The mar­ket is try­ing to pre­dict how things will play out with AI, Lovelock sug­gested.

“AI is go­ing to bring more value, there­fore there’s go­ing to be more money spent,” Lovelock said. “Where every­body seems to get very ex­cited is who’s go­ing to make that money and that, in some ways, is the unan­swer­able ques­tion right now.”

Analysts at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. wrote in a re­port ear­lier this month af­ter earn­ings that Dropbox is “making progress,” high­light­ing its AI-powered Dash fea­ture that cus­tomers can use to more eas­ily search and in­ter­act with doc­u­ments and mes­sages across third-party apps. The an­a­lysts, who have the equiv­a­lent of a hold rat­ing on the stock, said the AI op­por­tu­nity and the com­pa­ny’s val­u­a­tion are two rea­sons that “value in­vestors may be drawn to Dropbox.”

Dash lets users quickly query and ma­nip­u­late con­tent that goes be­yond text and into video and au­dio.   Houston said ad­vance­ments in AI mod­els mean that “suddenly we can build the ver­sion of this that I would have loved to build 10 years ago.”

watch now

Houston now plans on build­ing some­thing in AI, just not at Dropbox.

“I’m not go­ing to be rac­ing sail­boats,” said Houston, who’s also a board mem­ber at Meta, join­ing in 2020.

Houston said he wants to do some­thing en­tre­pre­neur­ial in AI be­cause “there’s never been a more ex­cit­ing pe­riod to be build­ing things.”

“It’s all cliche, right?” Houston said. “AI is re­shap­ing every as­pect of how we live, and I’m sure that I’ll have no short­age of ideas and stuff to work on.”

Along with Houston’s planned move, Dropbox said on Tuesday that Mike Torres is join­ing the com­pany from Google as chief prod­uct of­fi­cer in July. Torres is cur­rently vice pres­i­dent of prod­uct for Google’s Chrome.

As for when and why Houston made the de­ci­sion to leave, he said there was no spe­cific rea­son for the tim­ing.

“Part of me has al­ways thought, oh yeah, I’ll be the CEO of Dropbox un­til my last gasp of my ca­reer,” he said. “There’s never a per­fect time, there was no part of me where I was like, ‘oh, this date is the date where it’s go­ing to hap­pen.’”

Since Alkarmi joined Dropbox from Vimeo in late 2024, the com­pany has “become a lot more re­spon­sive to our cus­tomers and is tak­ing big­ger swings on in­no­va­tion,” Houston said.

“I trust the right leader,” he said. “The com­pa­ny’s in the right place.”

WATCH: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston on sub­scribers and AI-powered tools.

watch now

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Friendly fraud is the laun­dered name for some­thing that the pay­ment sys­tem is not re­ally able to pre­vent. Even though I’m pretty sure they can do way bet­ter. Particularly big and so­phis­ti­cated pay­ment providers like Stripe, with a moun­tain of sig­nals.

I had a cus­tomer buy my prod­uct twice. It’s called Ciglue. It’s cigar glue. Not Rolex or iPhone. The first or­der was shipped with DHL and de­liv­ered, with proof of de­liv­ery. The cus­tomer did­n’t con­tact to re­quest a re­fund or a re-de­liv­ery, but I saw a dis­pute filed, so I reached out to them.

They said it was the bank’s mis­take be­cause the bank bun­dled this pay­ment with some real fraud­u­lent trans­ac­tions from the Philippines. They promised to con­tact their bank and even of­fered to pay me back via Paypal. I was happy that it’s just a mis­un­der­stand­ing. I sub­mit­ted the ev­i­dence of the de­liv­ery, cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ca­tion, web­site poli­cies, every­thing by the book.

It turned out the cus­tomer was do­ing it on pur­pose, and ly­ing to me. They not only did­n’t con­tact the bank to cor­rect the sit­u­a­tion, they ac­tu­ally pre­tended not to have re­ceived the prod­uct. And the bank, nat­u­rally, sided with them. I had no re­course. Dispute granted. Money, prod­uct, ship­ping and dis­pute fees, all gone. This is an­noy­ing, but not ex­actly un­heard of. If you sell on­line, you prob­a­bly know the feel­ing: you send the prod­uct, col­lect the ev­i­dence, sub­mit every­thing prop­erly, and then some­how still lose.

Before the dis­pute came in, the same cus­tomer placed an­other or­der, this time with un­tracked ship­ping, and a few days af­ter the first dis­pute, an­other dis­pute fol­lowed. Once the first dis­pute was granted, things be­came clear. The cus­tomer emailed me to gloat about their clever scheme. Literally giv­ing me the fin­ger.

I sent the screen­shots to Stripe and asked if this could be re­ported prop­erly. To the bank, to some fraud re­port­ing net­work, or even just in­ter­nally in­side Stripe.

I was­n’t ex­pect­ing Stripe to re­cover the money or re­verse a closed dis­pute. I un­der­stand that the cus­tomer’s bank makes the fi­nal de­ci­sion, and that card net­work rules are what they are. But I did ex­pect the re­port it­self to mat­ter. This is a very clear case of “friendly fraud”. The card be­longed to the cus­tomer, the ad­dress was valid etc. The cus­tomer ap­peared to en­joy screw­ing me over. Pretty sad con­sid­er­ing this is a pretty cheap prod­uct in a niche hobby. But still.

I would have ex­pected Stripe to use this ev­i­dence in some way to feed into the so­phis­ti­cated ma­chine-learn­ing anti-fraud sys­tem. But No.

After quite a bit of back and forth, Stripe’s an­swer seems to be that it does­n’t re­ally mat­ter be­yond my own ac­count.

They told me they don’t use ev­i­dence of charge­back abuse from one mer­chant to cre­ate cross-mer­chant fraud sig­nals, or to take ac­tion against the cus­tomer’s card, email, or other de­tails for other mer­chants.

You prob­a­bly don’t want a sys­tem where one an­noyed mer­chant can get some­one blocked across the whole Stripe pay­ment sys­tem. But there’s a pretty big gap be­tween “automatically block this per­son every­where” and “thanks for the screen­shots, please con­sider Radar”, and this is where it gets frus­trat­ing.

Stripe sells Radar on the strength of its net­work: lots of pay­ments, lots of sig­nals, bet­ter fraud de­tec­tion, ma­chine learn­ing, etc. Stripe sees a lot of trans­ac­tions, so in the­ory it can spot things that an in­di­vid­ual mer­chant can’t. But when a mer­chant sends ac­tual ev­i­dence that a cus­tomer is abus­ing charge­backs, sud­denly it means noth­ing. The rec­om­mended so­lu­tion is to use Radar rules to block the cus­tomer from buy­ing from me again. And I prob­a­bly have to up­grade and pay Stripe to use this rule any­way. Gee thanks!

The next mer­chant still starts from zero. This is also not the kind of fraud Radar can eas­ily solve be­fore the pay­ment. The trans­ac­tion looked fine, checks passed, phys­i­cal ad­dress matched. The abuse hap­pened later, through the dis­pute process. There is no clever check­out rule for “customer re­ceives the prod­uct and later lies to their bank”.

Small mer­chants al­ready have very lit­tle lever­age in dis­putes: the bank de­cides, Stripe points at the bank, and I lose the money, the prod­uct, the dis­pute fee, and the time spent deal­ing with it all. If new ev­i­dence ap­pears later, it may be too late to sub­mit. If the cus­tomer does the same thing else­where, and some­thing tells me this is­n’t this per­son’s first rodeo, then the next mer­chant gets to get suck­ered.

Nothing friendly about this. Besides per­haps Stripe ef­fec­tively be­ing friendly with the fraud­sters here by not do­ing any­thing about it.

When a fire truck fails to de­ploy in a burn­ing build­ing and four peo­ple die, the cause is­n’t just me­chan­i­cal fail­ure. It’s a busi­ness model.

On the night of June 26, 2025, fire­fight­ers on Tower Ladder 14 raced to a Chicago apart­ment build­ing where an ar­son­ist had poured gaso­line on both stair­wells. When they ar­rived, the aer­ial lad­der would not go up. The crew had to shut the rig off en­tirely and restart it. The de­lay lasted ap­prox­i­mately one minute. Four peo­ple died that night — in­clud­ing a preg­nant woman, her five-year-old son, and her sis­ter, who threw her own child from a third-floor win­dow be­fore per­ish­ing her­self.

Nobody told the sur­viv­ing fam­ily about the lad­der mal­func­tion. They found out from jour­nal­ists.

That mal­func­tion­ing truck is a thread. Pull it, and what un­rav­els is one of the clear­est il­lus­tra­tions of how pri­vate eq­uity — the $9.4 tril­lion in­dus­try that qui­etly con­trols roughly 11,500 American com­pa­nies and 11 mil­lion jobs — turns es­sen­tial pub­lic in­fra­struc­ture into profit ex­trac­tion ma­chines, of­ten at lethal cost.

The Business Model: Brilliant for Investors, Brutal for Everyone Else

Private eq­uity is not a mys­tery. The me­chan­ics are straight­for­ward, the in­cen­tives are trans­par­ent, and the out­comes are pre­dictable once you un­der­stand how the ma­chine works.

A pri­vate eq­uity firm raises a fund — typ­i­cally from pen­sion funds, sov­er­eign wealth funds, en­dow­ments, and wealthy in­di­vid­u­als. It then ac­quires com­pa­nies, usu­ally through a lever­aged buy­out (LBO): a struc­ture where 50 to 90 per­cent of the pur­chase price is fi­nanced by debt, and that debt is loaded onto the bal­ance sheet of the ac­quired com­pany, not the firm mak­ing the ac­qui­si­tion. The firm then charges the fund a man­age­ment fee — his­tor­i­cally 2 per­cent of as­sets an­nu­ally — plus car­ried in­ter­est: a 20 per­cent cut of any prof­its, taxed at the long-term cap­i­tal gains rate of 20 per­cent rather than the or­di­nary in­come rate of 37 per­cent. Critics have long called this a tax loop­hole. Congress has de­bated clos­ing it for two decades and has not.

US pri­vate eq­uity AUM reached $3.128 tril­lion in 2024 alone, ac­cord­ing to S&P Global. Total pri­vate mar­kets AUM glob­ally sits at ap­prox­i­mately $15 tril­lion.

The model works when ap­plied to un­der­per­form­ing busi­nesses that gen­uinely need re­struc­tur­ing. PE firms can bring op­er­a­tional dis­ci­pline, growth cap­i­tal, and strate­gic fo­cus. That is the af­fir­ma­tive case, and it is real.

The prob­lem emerges when the model is ap­plied to es­sen­tial ser­vices with in­elas­tic de­mand — in­dus­tries where the cus­tomer has no choice but to pay, where qual­ity degra­da­tion is hard to mea­sure un­til cat­a­stro­phe strikes, and where the typ­i­cal PE time­line of 3-to-7 years be­fore exit cre­ates in­cen­tives to strip value rather than build it.

The Senate Joint Economic Committee’s July 2024 re­port de­scribed this as a “buy, strip and flip” busi­ness model: PE firms load ac­quired com­pa­nies with debt, cut costs ag­gres­sively, then re­sell at a profit — of­ten at the di­rect ex­pense of work­ers, com­mu­ni­ties, and the ser­vices those com­pa­nies pro­vide. Public com­pa­nies ac­quired by PE are ap­prox­i­mately ten times more likely to go bank­rupt than a com­pa­ra­ble con­trol group sub­ject to the same mar­ket forces, the re­port found.

The Fire Truck Racket: A Case Study in Manufactured Scarcity

The fire truck in­dus­try is the sharpest and most doc­u­mented ex­am­ple of what PE con­sol­i­da­tion does to es­sen­tial ser­vices.

Two decades ago, more than two dozen in­de­pen­dent man­u­fac­tur­ers com­peted to build America’s fire ap­pa­ra­tus. Today, three com­pa­nies con­trol ap­prox­i­mately 80 per­cent of the mar­ket: REV Group, Pierce Manufacturing (owned by Oshkosh Corporation), and Rosenbauer. This con­cen­tra­tion was not an ac­ci­dent of mar­ket forces. It was en­gi­neered.

REV Group is the cen­tre­piece of the story. The com­pany — owned by pri­vate eq­uity firm American Industrial Partners — sys­tem­at­i­cally ac­quired for­merly in­de­pen­dent man­u­fac­tur­ers in­clud­ing E-One, Ferrara, KME, Ladder Tower, and Spartan. The old name­plates still ex­ist as brand names. But be­hind them sits a sin­gle PE-backed con­glom­er­ate con­trol­ling a mas­sive share of the sup­ply chain for emer­gency ve­hi­cles that every American city de­pends on.

The re­sult is a back­log that reads like a fi­nan­cial op­por­tu­nity in earn­ings calls and a cri­sis in every fire sta­tion in the coun­try. As of 2025, REV Group’s back­log stands at $4.5 bil­lion. Wait times for a cus­tom fire truck run to four years. Prices have dou­bled in a decade: a pumper truck now costs around $1 mil­lion; a lad­der truck runs over $2 mil­lion. Profit mar­gins in the in­dus­try have tripled — from the his­toric 4-to-5 per­cent range to over 13 per­cent.

“Our $4.5 bil­lion back­log is at­trac­tive among in­dus­trial man­u­fac­tur­ers, is largely backed by mu­nic­i­pal tax re­ceipts, and of­fers sig­nif­i­cant value ac­cre­tion op­por­tu­nity, pro­vid­ing a path­way for growth and mar­gin ex­pan­sion over the next sev­eral years.”

— Mark Skonieczny, CEO, REV Group, 2025 in­vestor earn­ings call

Note what Skonieczny is telling in­vestors: the back­log is not a prob­lem to be solved. It is an as­set. The cus­tomers — fire de­part­ments serv­ing American cities — are locked in be­cause they have no al­ter­na­tive. Their or­ders, backed by tax re­ceipts, are guar­an­teed rev­enue. The com­pa­ny’s in­cen­tive is to main­tain the back­log, not elim­i­nate it.

The Senate heard this clearly. At a September 10, 2025 hear­ing, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) put it bluntly to the man­u­fac­tur­ers:

“This did­n’t just hap­pen to you ac­ci­den­tally. This is a busi­ness de­ci­sion, is­n’t it? You keep these back­logs like this. […] Another word for this would be a heist. This sounds to me like pri­vate eq­uity came in; bought up all of these small com­pa­nies; com­bined them; shut down their pro­duc­tion; rolled up a huge back­log; mas­sive prof­its; stiffed these guys; and now you’re mak­ing out like ban­dits.”

— Sen. Josh Hawley, US Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Management, September 10, 2025

The pro­duc­tion data sup­ports Hawley’s char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. REV Group closed mul­ti­ple pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ties in Pennsylvania and Virginia even as its back­log grew. The com­pany si­mul­ta­ne­ously spent $530 mil­lion on stock buy­backs and div­i­dend pay­ments, in­clud­ing a $180 mil­lion spe­cial div­i­dend paid di­rectly to pri­vate eq­uity own­ers just be­fore the com­pany went pub­lic. The CEO earns $6 mil­lion an­nu­ally.

The com­pet­i­tive mar­ket is gone. The Fire Apparatus Manufacturers Association — the in­dus­try trade group — holds an­nual meet­ings where mem­bers share “economic data, fire mar­ket trends, and ap­pa­ra­tus sales and or­der sta­tis­tics.” Antitrust at­tor­ney Basel Musharbash tes­ti­fied to Congress that the con­glom­er­ates “appear to have trans­formed a once vi­brant in­dus­try into a racket.” Four cities — Los Angeles County, Green Bay, Allentown, and oth­ers — have filed fed­eral an­titrust law­suits. The Texas Attorney General opened a price-fix­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion. The de­fen­dants deny all wrong­do­ing.

Meanwhile, Ed Kelly, pres­i­dent of the International Association of Fire Fighters, told the Senate: “Sometimes we have fire­fight­ers re­spond­ing in pickup trucks, like a paint­ing crew with ground lad­ders on it.”

This Is a Pattern, Not an Anomaly

The fire truck in­dus­try is the most pub­licly doc­u­mented case, but the un­der­ly­ing play­book — ac­quire, con­sol­i­date, re­duce sup­ply, ex­tract mar­gin — ap­pears across es­sen­tial sec­tors with alarm­ing con­sis­tency.

Ambulances

Private eq­ui­ty’s grip on emer­gency med­ical ser­vices fol­lows the same arc. KKR con­trols sig­nif­i­cant am­bu­lance mar­ket share through Envision Healthcare and Global Medical Response (parent of Rural/Metro). As PE’s mar­ket share in air am­bu­lance grew, the me­dian charge for a trans­port in­creased over 60 per­cent be­tween 2012 and 2017, ac­cord­ing to re­search cited in Senate tes­ti­mony. The pre­dictable end­point: Envision Healthcare filed for Chapter 11 bank­ruptcy in 2023 un­der the weight of debt it was sad­dled with af­ter its PE ac­qui­si­tion — leav­ing con­tracts can­celled, re­sponse times de­graded, and in at least one doc­u­mented case, a de­layed am­bu­lance ar­rival that may have con­tributed to a death.

Nursing Homes

PE in­vest­ment in nurs­ing homes grew from $5 bil­lion in 2000 to $104 bil­lion in 2024. More than 1,500 fa­cil­i­ties now op­er­ate un­der PE con­trol. The doc­u­mented out­comes are not am­bigu­ous: PE-owned nurs­ing homes show more care de­fi­cien­cies, sig­nif­i­cantly re­duced staffing hours, higher hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tion rates, and in­creased mor­tal­ity. People un­der­go­ing surgery at PE-acquired hos­pi­tals faced a 17 per­cent higher prob­a­bil­ity of dy­ing within 90 days than pa­tients at non-ac­quired cen­tres, ac­cord­ing to peer-re­viewed re­search. At least two PE-owned nurs­ing home chains filed for bank­ruptcy in 2024 alone — LaVie Care Centers (backed by Formation Capital) and Goldner Capital Management — leav­ing res­i­dents dis­placed and staff un­paid.

Housing

Institutional in­vestors — many PE-backed — own more than 500,000 sin­gle-fam­ily rental homes and are pro­jected to con­trol 40 per­cent of the US sin­gle-fam­ily rental mar­ket by 2030. The DOJ opened a crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion in 2024 into RealPage, a prop­erty-man­age­ment soft­ware firm used by ma­jor land­lords, over al­le­ga­tions that its al­go­rith­mic pric­ing sys­tem en­abled co­or­di­nated rent in­creases across com­pet­ing land­lords — ef­fec­tively au­tomat­ing what an­titrust law would oth­er­wise pro­hibit. The Senate passed a bi­par­ti­san hous­ing bill in March 2026 tar­get­ing large in­vestors, though its scope re­mains lim­ited.

Local Newspapers

Alden Global Capital — a hedge fund with tac­tics in­dis­tin­guish­able from PE — sys­tem­at­i­cally ac­quired lo­cal news­pa­pers and gut­ted them, cut­ting news­rooms faster than any other owner in the coun­try. The 2019 Gannett-GateHouse merger, backed by New Media Investment Group (a hedge fund), put one in five US daily news­pa­pers un­der fi­nan­cial-en­gi­neer con­trol. Academic re­search found that when a PE firm ac­quires a news­pa­per, the news­room shrinks by an av­er­age of nine re­porters and ed­i­tors — around 14 per­cent of staff — not be­cause the pa­pers aren’t prof­itable, but be­cause the model de­mands mar­gin ex­trac­tion. The ef­fect is the de­struc­tion of lo­cal de­mo­c­ra­tic ac­count­abil­ity in­fra­struc­ture.

The Structural Problem Nobody Is Naming

The main­stream cov­er­age of PE tends to fo­cus on in­di­vid­ual cases: a hos­pi­tal that went bank­rupt, a nurs­ing home with code vi­o­la­tions, a city that can’t get a fire truck for four years. The sto­ries are com­pelling. What they of­ten miss is the sys­temic ar­chi­tec­ture that makes these out­comes not bugs but fea­tures.

PE’s struc­tural in­cen­tive is to max­imise re­turns over a 3-to-7 year in­vest­ment hori­zon. When ap­plied to gen­uinely com­pet­i­tive in­dus­tries with mul­ti­ple play­ers, this can drive ef­fi­ciency. When ap­plied to es­sen­tial ser­vices — par­tic­u­larly af­ter roll-up ac­qui­si­tions that elim­i­nate com­pe­ti­tion — it cre­ates some­thing more trou­bling: a model that prof­its from degra­da­tion of the very ser­vices the pub­lic can­not opt out of.

The debt load­ing mech­a­nism is key and un­der­re­ported. When a PE firm ac­quires a nurs­ing home chain or an am­bu­lance com­pany via LBO, the debt does­n’t sit on the PE fir­m’s bal­ance sheet. It sits on the ac­quired com­pa­ny’s bal­ance sheet. The firm has al­ready ex­tracted its man­age­ment fees. If the com­pany even­tu­ally files for bank­ruptcy, the PE firm has typ­i­cally al­ready re­ceived div­i­dends and fees that ex­ceed its eq­uity con­tri­bu­tion. The losses fall on cred­i­tors, work­ers, pen­sion funds, and — in the case of es­sen­tial ser­vices — the com­mu­ni­ties that de­pended on those ser­vices.

REV Group’s $180 mil­lion spe­cial div­i­dend to PE own­ers be­fore IPO is a text­book ex­am­ple. The money was ex­tracted be­fore the mar­ket ever had a chance to price in the risk. The fire de­part­ments who need the trucks have no equiv­a­lent exit op­tion.

What Comes Next

Four cities have now sued the ma­jor fire truck man­u­fac­tur­ers. The IAFF has for­mally asked the FTC to in­ves­ti­gate an­titrust vi­o­la­tions. The Senate held a bi­par­ti­san hear­ing — no­table for its rar­ity — in which sen­a­tors from both par­ties used words like “heist” and “racket” with­out the man­u­fac­tur­ers of­fer­ing a cred­i­ble re­but­tal.

The broader PE re­form de­bate has gained ground. The Stop Wall Street Looting Act, in­tro­duced in Congress, would make PE firms li­able for the debts of their port­fo­lio com­pa­nies, close the car­ried in­ter­est tax loop­hole, re­strict div­i­dend re­cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion (the prac­tice of load­ing debt to pay PE own­ers be­fore exit), and give work­ers a pri­or­ity claim in bank­ruptcy. It has not passed.

The harder ques­tion — one that the an­titrust suits and Senate hear­ings won’t fully re­solve — is whether es­sen­tial in­fra­struc­ture should be sub­ject to the same fi­nan­cial-en­gi­neer­ing logic as any other in­vestable as­set class. The mar­ket an­swer is: what­ever gen­er­ates re­turn is fair game. The pub­lic ser­vice an­swer is: some in­dus­tries ex­ist to serve com­mu­ni­ties, and the cost of mak­ing them pure profit ve­hi­cles is paid in de­layed am­bu­lances, un­main­tained fire trucks, and bod­ies in burned apart­ments.

The fire in Chicago is not a metaphor. It is a con­se­quence. And it will keep hap­pen­ing un­til the struc­tural in­cen­tives that pro­duced it are ad­dressed — not case by case, but at the level of the model it­self.

The most im­por­tant piece of fic­tion writ­ing is the story. Are the char­ac­ters com­pelling? Is the plot ex­cit­ing and co­her­ent? Is the story be­liev­able? Paired with that is writ­ing qual­ity, which in­cludes gram­mar, syn­tax, spelling, and punc­tu­a­tion. Without an im­mense amount of work on these points, au­thors lack a book worth pub­lish­ing.

Formatting and type­set­ting a novel can be­come an af­ter­thought. It’s prob­a­bly the most tech­nol­ogy-dri­ven part of the self-pub­lish­ing process, which can be scary to au­thors who just want to get a pol­ished book into read­ers’ hands. I don’t mean to im­ply my for­mat­ting process is the best or the eas­i­est. It works for me and sat­is­fies my in­cli­na­tions as both an in­de­pen­dent nov­el­ist and soft­ware de­vel­oper.

Word + InDesign + Calibre + Kindle Create

I started safe. All three of my Christian his­tor­i­cal nov­els—Heretics of Piedmont, The Lord of Luserna, and Prince of Savoy, plus my novella The Outcast of Chivasso—started as Microsoft Word files (DOCX). The vast ma­jor­ity of ed­i­tors and proof­read­ers rely on Word for tracked changes, and prac­ti­cally every fi­nal for­mat­ting pro­gram (Adobe InDesign, Kindle Create, Calibre, Atticus, etc.) can im­port DOCX files. Like a good boy, I used para­graph styles rather than man­ual for­mat­ting. My Word doc­u­ment—named some­thing like “Heretics-of-Piedmont_revised-final-3.docx”—became my source of truth, the com­mon an­ces­tor for all fi­nal for­mats.

I did­n’t want to for­mat my book for print in Word, though. Can it be done? Yes. Does it meet the qual­ity stan­dards of pro­fes­sion­als? That’s de­bat­able. Its hy­phen­ation and jus­ti­fi­ca­tion leave a lot to be de­sired, among other weak­nesses. The last time I checked (early 2026), Word does­n’t in­clude mi­croty­pog­ra­phy fea­tures like desk­top pub­lish­ing soft­ware does.

Other op­tions ex­ist, but Adobe InDesign is the in­dus­try stan­dard. Professionals use its bat­tle-tested fea­ture set to pro­duce what truly can be art. I wanted that level of qual­ity in my own books. So I held my nose and plunged into the world of Adobe Creative Cloud. I did­n’t know how to use InDesign at first, but I read a lot and watched plenty of YouTube videos on the craft. I learned about DOCX style map­ping, pre­vent­ing em-dash breaks, crisp mar­gins, page bal­anc­ing, at­trac­tive drop-caps, track­ing, op­ti­cal mar­gins, base­line grids, and other minu­tia. Plenty of jar­gon there, but the work is quite sat­is­fy­ing, es­pe­cially when you no­tice the de­tails in the end prod­uct. (Side note: when I browse book­stores, I al­ways in­ves­ti­gate how big pub­lish­ing houses do it.) When I got to the se­quels, I again chose InDesign.

Ebooks are an en­tirely dif­fer­ent mat­ter. There are many de­cent op­tions to pro­duce an EPUB, but none seem to dom­i­nate ebook pub­lish­ing like InDesign does for print. Kovid Goyal is a fa­mil­iar name in the soft­ware world; he’s one of those tal­ented de­vel­op­ers who make work­ing with com­put­ers bet­ter for the rest of us. Perhaps his most well-known con­tri­bu­tion is Calibre, a pow­er­ful ebook man­ager. Not only can you read nearly any ebook with it, but it also in­cludes an amaz­ing ebook au­thor­ing toolset. Importing from a Microsoft Word doc­u­ment is a breeze, and with a lit­tle HTML and CSS knowl­edge, you can cre­ate a very com­pat­i­ble EPUB.

Kindle is a dif­fer­ent story. You can up­load EPUBs to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), where they will con­vert it into their pro­pri­etary KFX file. I never had suc­cess up­load­ing the EPUBs I had cre­ated with Calibre, how­ever. Amazon’s sug­gested so­lu­tion is their Kindle Create pro­gram, which worked okay, but that was yet an­other for­mat to main­tain. The soft­ware de­vel­oper in me was scream­ing for a bet­ter so­lu­tion.

Opportunities

Making the slight­est change be­came a chore.

Update the “master” DOCX

Update InDesign file, ex­port PDF, up­load to dis­trib­u­tors

Update EPUB in Calibre, ex­port EPUB, up­load to dis­trib­u­tors

Update in Kindle Create, ex­port KPF, up­load to KDP

A Linux lap­top is my daily dri­ver, but nei­ther Kindle Create nor InDesign run on it (even with Wine), so I had to switch to my fam­ily Macbook—first-world prob­lems, but I like what I’m used to.

A few years ago on Hacker News, I dis­cov­ered Standard Ebooks. I read the pro­jec­t’s goals and skimmed a few of their pub­lished works. To say I was im­pressed is an un­der­state­ment. Their books were miles ahead of any free ebook. I noted the pro­ject and have since read at least a dozen books from their grow­ing li­brary of pub­lic do­main works (by the way, they’re a wor­thy cause to sup­port). If only my own ebooks could match their qual­ity.

Pivoting

I fin­ished Prince of Savoy, Book 3 of my tril­ogy, in 2025 and was ready to for­mat it. As I had done nu­mer­ous times, I im­ported the Word doc­u­ment into InDesign and for­mat­ted the print ver­sion. But then I had an idea—what if I fol­lowed Standard Ebooks’ (SE) process in­stead? For a few rea­sons, I used Calibre to con­vert the DOCX to a clean EPUB, to which I would later ap­ply SE’s Manual of Style via their de­tailed guide to pro­duc­ing an ebook.

I quickly dis­cov­ered how strict, how pedan­tic, and how ut­terly opin­ion­ated SE is. Their style guide leaves lit­tle room for in­ter­pre­ta­tion or am­bi­gu­ity, which, if fol­lowed prop­erly, re­sults in a pris­tine EPUB that’s com­pat­i­ble on prac­ti­cally all de­vices. The process was a chore, es­pe­cially the first time I worked through it. I told my­self, “Trust the process; it’ll be worth it,” be­cause it of­ten felt more like a chore. Looking back, I feel like SE’s tools (all fun­nelled through the pow­er­ful stan­dard­e­books com­mand line pro­gram) are like hav­ing a copy­ed­i­tor for ebook for­mat­ting or a lin­ter for code. Here are some ex­am­ples from SE’s lin­ter:

Illegal unit used to set font-size. Hint: Use em units.

Word count in meta­data does­n’t match ac­tual word count.

Header el­e­ment with in­com­pat­i­ble se­man­tics. Hint: Headers should be ei­ther ti­tle or or­di­nal, not both.

Possessive ’s within name ital­ics. Hint: If the name in ital­ics is do­ing the pos­sess­ing, ’s goes out­side ital­ics.

…among hun­dreds of other checks. The strict­ness ap­peals to me as a soft­ware de­vel­oper. Getting all lint rules to pass took some time, but it was sat­is­fy­ing to end up with a clean di­rec­tory of XHTML source files, ver­sion con­trolled in Git, eas­ily built as an EPUB with the se build com­mand. I had scratched Kindle Create from my work­flow, be­cause Standard Ebooks EPUBs con­verts well for Kindles. Prince of Savoy was ready to dis­trib­ute, and I was thor­oughly sat­is­fied with its elec­tronic for­mat.

Open Source Tooling

With the tril­ogy com­plete, I wanted to go back and re­vise the first in­stall­ment, Heretics of Piedmont. I spent 3 weeks of free time im­prov­ing mi­nor de­tails (eliminating a few anachro­nisms, slim­ming prose, adding three hand-drawn maps), with the goal of fully match­ing the style of Books 2 and 3. But I was tired of edit­ing the doc­u­ment on a Windows com­puter—or worse, Office 365 Online. Pedantically, I per­formed the con­ver­sion from DOCX to ODT (Open Document Text, the na­tive for­mat for LibreOffice Writer).

Does LibreOffice have its short­com­ings? Certainly. But from my ex­pe­ri­ence, it does its job: I can type, check spelling and gram­mar, and per­haps most im­por­tantly, ap­ply styles. As I re­vised, I added se­man­tic para­graph styles for songs, let­ters, po­ems, epigraphs, glos­sary en­tries, etc.; char­ac­ter styles are a less used fea­ture of word proces­sors, but they can act as se­man­tics that go be­yond ba­sic for­mat­ting. I cre­ated styles for each for­eign lan­guage (seven of them in Heretics of Piedmont) and ap­plied them to the ap­prox­i­mately one hun­dred non-Eng­lish phrases in the text. There are also char­ac­ter styles for di­rect thoughts, cre­ative work ti­tles, prayers, and em­pha­sis; though all of these trans­late to ital­ics when read­ing in print and elec­tron­i­cally, hav­ing these se­man­tics is a key in pro­duc­ing a Standard Ebooks-compliant EPUB. Not only do the se­man­tic at­trib­utes make the book more ac­ces­si­ble for those who use screen-read­ers, but they also en­able more con­trol that sur­passes sim­ple ital­ics for­mat­ting.

Now I had a clean, se­man­ti­cally rich ODT file: open source, easy to edit, and as I would soon dis­cover, sim­ple to parse. I chose this file as my “source of truth.” “Why did­n’t you just au­thor it in LaTeX? Or Markdown? Or RST?” you might ask. I con­sid­ered each of those, but I pre­fer writ­ing nov­els in a word proces­sor, not a text ed­i­tor.

Now I needed to cre­ate a PDF and an EPUB. Though I had never parsed an ODT file, a lit­tle Python, lxml, and Claude Code helped me quickly draft the con­ver­sion script. The script maps the XML nodes of the ODT file to an in­ter­me­di­ary struc­ture, which then al­lows for eas­ily out­put to XHTML (and even­tu­ally LaTeX; I’ll get to that later). I ran the con­ver­sion script with a TOML con­fig file (which maps ODT styles to XHTML el­e­ments and at­trib­utes), and I had every­thing I needed for the SE EPUB—and only a cou­ple lint er­rors to fix. Ebook goal ac­com­plished!

The more dif­fi­cult path was the print PDF. I des­per­ately wanted LibreOffice Writer to have the fea­tures I needed. Coincidentally, sev­eral mi­croty­pog­ra­phy fea­tures landed in 2025 that sounded much like Adobe InDesign’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties. Would it be that sim­ple?

Unfortunately, no. Though I read through changel­ogs and saw the care vol­un­teer de­vel­op­ers took in bring­ing mi­croty­pog­ra­phy to Writer, it was­n’t up to the task yet. The end edge of the page was ragged, the bot­tom edge was un­bal­anced, and drop caps ap­peared odd. I tried Scribus too, but 200+ page books bring the pro­gram to a crawl. And the re­sults were worse than Writer. I’d have to set­tle for InDesign, I fig­ured.

Then I thought of LaTeX. I had heard of it since I started pro­gram­ming but was never fully ex­posed to it. In col­lege (non-STEM), I sub­mit­ted pa­pers as Word doc­u­ments or PDFs. LaTeX seemed daunt­ing, but it had the fea­tures I des­per­ately wanted: ad­vanced ty­pog­ra­phy, abil­ity to au­to­mate, and ver­sion con­trol. I tested a chap­ter from my book as LaTeX and com­pared the out­put with Adobe InDesign’s. It was nearly in­dis­tin­guish­able.

Now the hard part: How do I con­vert an ODT file to TeX? Pandoc can, but cus­tom Writer styles aren’t car­ried over. So I re­pur­posed the same con­ver­sion script I used for ODT→XHTML and gen­er­al­ized it to sup­port ODT→TeX. Perhaps some day I’ll open source that code, but it’s cur­rently tai­lored for my own unique use cases, and I’m not sure it will help oth­ers yet.

Retrofitting

At last I had a sus­tain­able, au­to­mated, ver­sion-con­trolled path for pro­duc­ing print and elec­tronic ver­sions of my books—with­out pro­pri­etary soft­ware like Word and InDesign. There’s still the down­side of hav­ing to edit the “master” ODT file, then re­gen­er­at­ing the PDF and EPUB, but it’s a triv­ial process I can per­form on any com­puter. I had tran­si­tioned from opaque bi­nary(ish) .docx and .indd files to plain-text .xhtml and .tex. Seeing ex­actly what changed in a proof­read­ing pass via git diff was a mas­sive qual­ity-of-life win.

Even though I had re­vised and “retooled” Heretics of Piedmont, I still had two other nov­els and a novella that used the old tools. I also con­verted those Word doc­u­ments to se­man­tic Writer doc­u­ments, then my con­ver­sion script han­dles the rest.

Is there room for im­prove­ment? For sure. I would love if the XHTML and TeX were ar­ti­facts rather than code. I cur­rently have sep­a­rate Git repos­i­to­ries for the XHTML and TeX for each book, mainly be­cause I want the ODT file to re­main the source of truth. It’s eas­ier for me to write in, and pro­fes­sional copy­ed­i­tors and proof­read­ers want word proces­sor doc­u­ments for their work.

My process cer­tainly is­n’t for every­one. Most in­de­pen­dent au­thors would be fine with ei­ther hir­ing a pro­fes­sional for­mat­ter or set­tling with some­thing sim­i­lar to my ear­lier process. In the end, read­ers don’t care about the for­mat­ting process. They want to read a good story. I want to pro­vide that first, but if I can also en­joy the for­mat­ting, I’ll count that as a win for my read­ers too.

Appendix: The LaTeX Preamble

For any­one in­ter­ested in the un­der­ly­ing me­chan­ics, you can view the full LaTeX pre­am­ble here.

These are the key pack­ages I used:

mem­oir: “batteries in­cluded” class for doc­u­ment cre­ation

fontspec: al­lows ren­der­ing of OpenType fonts (like my fa­vorite body text, Adobe Garamond)

poly­glos­sia: pro­vides hy­phen­ation pat­terns per lan­guage; I oc­ca­sion­ally use non-Eng­lish lan­guages like Old Occitan and Latin for reader im­mer­sion

graph­icx: al­lows ad­vanced em­bed­ding and ad­just­ment of im­ages like maps and my au­thor por­trait

mi­crotype: pro­vides the pre­vi­ously-men­tioned fea­tures that en­hance the ap­pear­ance and read­abil­ity of every page—one of the main rea­sons I chose LaTeX

LaTeX

TeX

EPUB

Standard Ebooks

Novel Formatting