booktwo.org

I haven’t talked about Creative Commons in a while. Last night I went to the London CC Salon, which turned out to be a sort of pep rally for free culture - not a bad thing.

One of the films shown is embedded below (or watch it on YouTube) and makes for a pretty funky introduction to the concepts behind CC. The video is one of the many pieces of CC-licensed work included on Free Me, a DVD created to show off and promulgate the CC ethos. Eventually, it is intended to be sent to journalists and MPs to try to get them to think differently about copyright law.

There hasn’t been much CC-licensed activity in publishing yet, with the notable exceptions of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and novels from experimentalists like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow. The latter two tell some interesting stories about the possibilities of CC.

Stross’ novel Accelerando was released simultaneously in bookstores and as a free, CC-licensed download from the web. According to him and his publisher, this didn’t harm sales one iota - in fact, they’re pretty sure it increased them, not only because of the attendant publicity but because people who downloaded the book and liked it went out and bought the book from shops. Score one to CC.

Doctorow’s Overclocked, downloadable from his site, goes even further. Whereas Accelerando’s Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license allows sharing in the original form but nothing more, Overclocked’s Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license means fans can do what the hell they like with the text - including turning it into a song, creating new methods of distribution, or translating it into their local language.

I think the last one is particularly significant, for authors and publishers. Translation of all but the most mainstream books into all but the most widely-spoken languages is often prohibitively expensive - and in many parts of the world, the author never sees any money for it anyway. CC even provides a developing nations license (now merged with the general licenses) to give different rights according to geographical location. As Tim O’Reilly put it: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”

One really interesting use of these licenses - and I don’t know how this would be done, but I’m sure it’s possible - would be for authors to assign CC licenses to their work when they die, so that the rights to the work would pass directly into the public domain, instead of to the current, bad and corrupt system of author estates** which are allowed to leech off this work for 75 years. Such a move would instantly free up huge chunks of our literary heritage for redistribution and rediscovery.

In fact, there might be a case here for campaigning for existing estates to use CC licenses now. The Society of Authors - who use the income from a number of literary estates, including those of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, to finance their work - might be a good place to start…

There’s something here too about historical parallels with (or reversals of) physical enclosure and the tragedy of the commons. However, that will have to wait: today is the first day of London Lit Plus, and I expect to see you all there.

** No, they’re not all like that. But plenty are…

• O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference: The presentations - God bless O’Reilly: slides, descriptions and more from many of the speakers.
• DRM for Books: Will Publishers Learn Anything from the Music Industry’s Mistakes? - Medialoper reports from TOC
• First Proprietary and Exclusive Novel Published By Borders - Is it just me, or have I been saying for a while that this would happen? Booksellers don’t actually need publishers, and they’re starting to notice. (Overstatement: but it reveals ramifications.)
• Connecting Books With Readers: A Failure | Booksquare - On the necessity of upgrading the technology: why Gutenberg doesn’t work any more, and why POD, or something similar, has to be the next step.
• Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog: Adobe Digital Editions - It sounds a lot better than the Beta I reviewed a while back. And rumours of a iPhone version are very interesting indeed…
• networked_performance: Amazon Noir - The net artists/activists behind Google Will Eat Itself prepare to free the books. Technically, this does appear feasible - Amazon Search Inside actually does reveal the whole book, whereas Google always withhold something… (via Times Emit)
• Businessweek: A Dogged Web Mag Pioneer - Apparently, someone thinks that, maybe, someone can make money publishing exclusively on teh Internets. Yes, it’s magazines; no, that makes no difference in the long run.

Booktwo.org, always up-to-date with the latest online literary microtrends, is proud to bring you a new subgenre: Google fan fic (or should that be fear fic?). Enjoy.

Google Interiors by Sandra Niehaus:

I realized with a shock that George’s hat was a dense cluster of tiny cameras, forming a rounded beehive of angled, glittering eyes. “We’re from Google Interiors, a new venture sponsored by Google to make every home interior in the world searchable on the internet.”

Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford:

“Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google by Bruce Sterling (!):

This is Macbeth’s world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those “Three Weird Sisters”, who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great - only, in real life, it totally sucks?

The Nine Billion Names of God by Kathy Kachelries:

“Here’s the thing. Google has memorized who you are. It’s memorized all of us, through those little forgotten bits that we leave behind like breadcrumbs. And what’s more important, it’s memorized it’s own idea of you. Google is omniscient. It’s omniscient and omnipotent. When it cached its cache for the first time, back in 1994, that’s when Google realized what it was.”

And finally, the grandaddy of Google Fan Fic, EPIC 2014 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson (an oldie but still a goodie):

In 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, which pays users to contribute any information they know into a central grid, allowing the system to automatically create news tailored to individuals, entirely without journalists. … At its best, EPIC is “a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before … but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue.”

(See also: Armando Ianucci’s Tesco vs. Denmark: from “Every Little Helps” to “We Control Every Aspect Of Your Lives”.)

• It’s a new online chapter for books | Guardian Technology - The always readable Vic Keegan rounds up the bookish social networks. Sound on the consequences of shrinking newspaper review sections, and the possible consequences for internet-based distribution. (Via Times Emit)
• Ingram announces partnership with Microsoft - To provide scanning and other services (including, let’s make this quite clear, printing and/or selling at some future point) for Google-baiting Live Book Search. Which is fine, if anyone is using Live Search.
• LibraryThing: Fifteen million books! - It’s great and all, but I still haven’t found a compelling reason to use LT. When I start using connected ebooks, and it becomes like last.fm, perhaps, but still not sure.
• Nature Precedings - Major science journal goes user-generated. ‘Pre-publication research and preliminary findings’, without peer review. Hmm. Hope to do some more on this soon… (via if:book)
• YouTube: apple ebook reader for iPod - Sensible device proposal: ebook reader as iPod accessory. Works for ebooks, and taps an already huge market. I particularly like the travel book application. (Via if:book)
• if:book on Adobe Digital Editions 1.0 - Doesn’t sound like much has changed from the beta I reviewed pretty poorly last year.
• Skoob Books - Back at the Brunswick. Fantastic news.

Despite my repeated entreaties, no one bought me a ticket for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference, on this week. It looks like a lot of interesting people, talking about important stuff.

Pleased to see that Manolis Kelaidis’ bluebook project, which I wrote about last year, has made an impactful appearance, and I suspect there’s a lot of similarly cool stuff being discussed.

Places to find out more: there’s the Conference blog, Andrea Laue’s jusTaText seems to be on the ball, as does Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead, and there’s always Jeremy’s excited Twitter. If you know others, do let me know.

In the meantime, I’ll be over at London Lit Plus…

Saturday was definitely Interesting. A 300-person conference which noone really knew the content of beforehand, but which lived up to its name. And there were even some booktwo-related thoughts in there. Read the rest of this entry »

• Norman Mailer to use LongPen - Still really, really not getting this.
• In a Flickr, self-publishing service Blurb expands to Europe | CNET - Self-publishing + POD comes to Europe, with a web2.0 approach to marketing…

• Covers: dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design. - Beautifully designed and executed site, as it should be. Will book covers become the next gatefold record sleeve?
• Chark Blog: The heist - A bit late on this one, but you may be amused by Macmillan CEO Richard Charkin’s prank on Google at the BEA. Interestingly, delicious tags are equally weighted between ‘funny’ and ’stupid’ on this one…
• “Only the professional critics - Anthony Lane, Alex Ross, James Wood, AS Byatt, Claire Tomalin - know what they are talking about; bloggers are merely expressing an opinion.” - Wonderful Independent publisher and bookseller Persephone broadcasts disappointing opinion. I’d like to see how this is applied to critics who blog, or bloggers who get hired. The distinction is meaningless.
• The end of General Trade Publishing Houses - Excellent Idea Logical speech from the BEA. Read.

• Penguin launch online teen reading community - ‘Spinebreakers’ coming Q3 2007…
• Children’s publishers are testing e-books for young people - National Post on Disney and Scholastic offerings coming soon
• Scholastic.com | Book FLIX - Scholastic’s online reading programme, coming soon. Feel a little bothered that they’ve felt the need to pair it with video to get kids’ attention - a poor solution.

Of interest to very few, I imagine, but I’m attending the BBC/Yahoo Hack Day at Alexandra Palace this weekend. Probably only the Sunday, as I’m also attending Interesting 2007 on the Saturday. Busy, busy, busy.

Very interested in hooking up with booktwo-interested parties at either. Drop me a line if you’re coming… (Also available via the backnetwork as STML). Would love to hack something, but not much of a hacker.

Additional tags: interesting2007, hackdaylondon.