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Google the Publisher not quite there yet: "the larger issue is what Knol is about. it's less about "authorship" and "credentials," to my mind, than self-advertising, self-promotion, and single-minded and narrow-minded points of view".
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The blog is dead; long live the lifestream.
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"Text messaging remains the most widely used data application in the UK".
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For the past few weeks I have been experimenting with different search engines (partly inspired by the publicity surrounding the launch of Cuil). This one combines relevant results with a seriously cool interface.
Short Fiction in the Age of the Ebook
Posted by
19 August, 2008
Posted in Blogging, General, Publishing, eBooks
A guest blog today from Tor UK author Gary Gibson (check out his latest book Stealing Light). Having acquired a Sony Reader Gary muses on a possible renaissance in short form fiction. This post was originally posted on Gary’s blog, White Screen of Despair. So without further ado…
To my surprise, I’m reading more short fiction since I got the Sony Reader than I have in years, mainly because of two factors; short pieces make for a nice occasional break from a full-length work, and I’ve found quite a lot of sf anthologies for sale online at quite a bit less than they’d cost me if I bought physical copies of them from a bookshop. The same goes for some novels as well. This is a bit ironic, since I recently commented on a Tor.com article that I didn’t read short fiction any more because I couldn’t find anything to read.
I recently bought Year’s Best SF 13 for just under £3.50 from a US store - it was either BooksonBoard.com or Fictionwise.com. The current exchange rate between the US and the UK, obviously, helps a lot. But you get a lot of fiction for your buck. Next in line will likely be a new collection called Seeds of Change, available for about the same price. That’s not to say they’re all bargains - I bought the ebook of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, ostensibly for research, and that cost me well over a tenner, which hurt. But I’ve got it now, and the site I bought it from had a rebate that allowed me to pick up a copy of Asimov’s (short fiction again) virtually for free. Interzone and Black Static can similarly be had as virtual editions.
A new collection of short fiction by Chris Beckett, whose The Holy Machine I rated very highly here some time ago, is also out, in both paperback and virtual edition, from Elastic Press. I’ll be getting the virtual edition sometime in the next couple of weeks, and I note with pleasure that the ebook of The Holy Machine can be had for the equivalent of about three and a half quid again. Considerably cheaper than the edition I bought at a convention, which cost me about a tenner. If you own an ebook reader and you’re looking for something to read, you could do an awful lot worse. It would be nice, of course, if some of the other books I’d really like to buy - Jay Lake’s Mainspring, for example - were available in electronic format. But hopefully it and others will be someday.
There’s a potentially very positive aspect to ebooks in relation to short fiction I hadn’t previously considered. Publishers rarely produce collections of short fiction in meaningful numbers any more because they long ago ceased to be cost-effective; much of my early reading was done through the medium of collections by well-known sf authors that would be deemed financially unworthy in the modern age.
Yet without the requirement for printing, binding and shipping, it would be nice to think that short fiction collections could achieve some kind of rebirth in the age of the ebook. Although there are certainly authors such as Beckett and quite a few others with collections out, these tend to come from smaller, specialist presses and thereby both cost more, have smaller print-runs and are harder to find. Ebook publication, I think, places such collections in a better position to be found by the right audience. It certainly means an extra potential revenue source for any author who’s had, say, a dozen or so stories professionally published and would like to be able to bundle them in an e-format.
10 Reasons Not To Write Off Reading From A Screen
Posted by
18 August, 2008
Posted in Publishing, Reading devices, eBooks
Below is a post I recently wrote for the new Writer’s Handbook blog- well worth looking it for aspiring and established authors alike. Much of the material comes from an earlier post for the Digitalist condensed into a more digestible format.
Continue reading "10 Reasons Not To Write Off Reading From A Screen" »
Red Peter and me
Posted by
6 August, 2008
Posted in General
Do you ever get the feeling that finding a way through all the challenges of digital publishing - past, present and future - is a bit like running a marathon? And that keeping up with the latest developments - identifying them, reacting to them, possibly doing something with them, and then moving on - is kinda like sprinting between posts setup along the marathon route?
Trawling through my RSS reader, I sometimes feel an echo of my high school hockey training, when our coach made us put sticks down at three markers, each further than the last, and then sprint back and forth between them: to the first and back, to the second and back, to the third and back, to the second and back, to the first and back… and repeat. There are so many competing versions of the same product or service idea out there. For example, products for tracking your library and reading: add books to your library/shelf, mark them as read or to read, rate them, review them, share them with your friends (find your friends, add them, rate them etc.) and so on.
Continue reading "Red Peter and me" »
2nd special edition ebook out now
Posted by
29 July, 2008
Posted in General
We have released the second in our special edition ebooks programme: Sid Smith’s China Dreams. More about it on the Picador blog.
“Ebooks suck etc”. Yawn.
Posted by
28 July, 2008
Posted in General, eBooks
On the back of the announcement that Waterstone’s and Sony are jointly entering the ebooks marketplace there has been quite a bit of coverage in the media, to the extent that I now regularly discuss ebooks with pretty much everybody. On this blog I have spoken before about the issue of both over hyping or hating ebooks but again, it seems the reaction warrants some kind of comment.
Specifically the more spittle flecked, hate ridden reaction of (some of) ebook’s detractors. The language, the sentiment, is almost bizzarely visceral in its pathological intensity.
Take these three in the Observer. Lynne Truss manages to be reasonably civil, but the language of Will Self and Amanda Ross is markedly less so: the operative words are “loathe” and “horrified”. Peter Conrad, in an admittedly interesting and more thoughtful piece, accuses ebooks of wanting “to bring about the end of a culture”. Similarly in the many conversations I have about ebooks I am always struck by the sheer force, to the point of rudeness, in people’s adverse reactions to the mention of a book that is, gasp, not on paper.
For the record then it is worth re-iterating: calm down, books are not going to go away, ebooks are channel that will exist side by side with them, there is nothing to get so worked up about, no one is trying to kill books or end a culture, rather the reverse, to rejuvenate and contribute to that culture.
Strangely ebook’s biggest haters are often those who will crow most loudly about their imminent and monumental failure. Why bother hating them so much then?
As a bibliophile I can quite understand people’s passion for the printed, crafted artifact, but surely its time to get over the sheer level of knee jerk, violent invective ebooks attract. Surely?
notice: change to commenting settings
Posted by
22 July, 2008
Posted in General
We’ve been having a bit of trouble with spam comments making their way through the Akismet spam filter recently, so I just wanted to let you know that for a little while the discussion settings will have to be a bit stricter than we’d like.
Once you’ve had a comment approved, you should be able to comment without moderation thereafter (provided you supply the same identifying details).
Please do keep commenting on our blog - we’ll approve genuine comments as soon as possible.
Tethered Reading
Posted by
17 July, 2008
Posted in Copyright, Reading devices, eBooks
The recent noise about the iPhone highlights a trend recently discussed by Jonathan Zittrain in his book The Future of the Internet; namely how “generative” IT platforms are giving way to closed “tethered” appliances. The iPhone is such a device, in that it is ultimately policed by Apple and is capable of being controlled by them.
Zittrain acknowledges the benefits of tethered appliances in an age when the internet is becoming increasingly dangerous but he raises a few spectres of what might result from a world dominated by tethered appliances, where the openness and flexibility engendered by neutral networks and development platforms, an openness that has lead to an unprecedented flowering of productivity and creativity, gives way to greater manufacturer control.
While the threats are many and various it occurred to me that there is an implication for publishing. Imagine you are reading a book on a tethered device like an iPhone or an Amazon Kindle. Both of these devices are connected to Apple and Amazon and are capable of being remotely updated. Imagine you have bought a book which is stored on the said device. Imagine the book is labeled libelous or in some way defamatory, inflammatory or otherwise in contravention of the law and is ordered to be removed from sale.
If you own the print copy then whilst the book can be stopped from selling anymore, you can still possess your own copy. The object still exists and stands as its own testimony and historical record.
On a tethered device that is not necessarily so; as Larry Lessig has noted “Code is law” and the book could be erased as the system operators, having that capacity, are legally coerced into doing so. This has implications not just in terms of ownership of digital materials but has a wider import in terms of how tethered appliances could shift the nature of discourse and alter our understanding of history.
While this is clearly an extreme and hypothetical situation, it’s nonetheless something to think about.
Work in progress
Posted by
15 July, 2008
Posted in General, Reading devices, eBooks
The blogosphere has been buzzing since the App Store launched over last weekend with comments about ‘dozy publishers’ who have missed a great opportunity to make their books available on the iPhone. But apart from a few digital PR points scored against competing publishers, there doesn’t seem to me to be any huge value in first mover advantage here for publishers, unless we want to make the decision to become software developers.
Continue reading "Work in progress" »
Bloglishing? Part 2
Posted by
9 July, 2008
Posted in Blogging, Publishing
Blogging is the signature written form of our age, indeed is arguably the most widespread and popular form of published words that has ever existed. Bracketing the arguments about noise to signal ratios, self indulgence and wild proliferation blogging is now a fact of the written word as much as letters, novels, newspapers and emails. In Part 1 I argued that blogging was a publishable activity and that by recognizing this publishers can become more responsive to a range of opportunities therein.
Like what?
Bloglishing? Part 1
Posted by
7 July, 2008
Posted in Blogging, Publishing
Apologies for another dubious neologism (ok, one usage already indexed by Google). We’ve had so many, why stop now? Aside from being a slightly, er, clunky name “bloglishing” captures a concept that I’ve recently been interested in; namely the different ways a blog is actually published.
Blogs are popularly thought of as quintessential self publishing, the implication being that there is no, or very little, intermediary between the content creation and consumption. Of course even within traditional self publishing there is a huge amount of intermediation of one kind or another, ranging from a simple model like Lulu to more complex schemes of vanity publishing that come with certain services.
However this very obviously fails to describe the intricacy and diversity within blogging, fails to account for differing platforms and differing scales of audience, as well as different models of collaboration on or syndicating the content itself. I would suggest that all blogs are to some extent published, with differing layers of “publication” that apply to different blogs. These layers are by no means mutually exclusive and many blogs could be included in more than one layer.
What might these layers of blog publishing look like?
