Props to the hardcore who followed it all the way. I’m not sure what to say about this, but I’m going to have a think, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Check the Swotter page too, for more info.
In the mean time, I thought I’d do a quick round-up of lit-related action on Twitter, in no particular order:
That’s enough for now, but I’d love to hear more. Please add your favourites in the comments and I’ll add them to the list, with a view to moving this to a dedicated page at some point. Note that it’s not really a list for individuals, unless they’re relentlessly lit-focussed.
MuSick Radio - “Musick is an internet radio station which webcasts Copyleft, Public Domain and Creative Commons music only.” We need a *good* library of similarly-licensed lit.
The Dilbert Blog: Going Forward - Scott Adams explains how blogging has dented his readership, and resolves to do less (but perhaps better).
Do Canonical Web Designs Exist? [Bokardo] - “You can’t appreciate a web site in the same way you appreciate a logo or a poster.” Great article. ‘Design’ is a really limited term, in most peoples’ understanding.
Segway to the Kindle - Excellent article on Amazon as a hardware maker vs. iPod, Apple, etc. Why?
Don’t try to reinvent the web | Media | The Guardian - “The web provides you with a way to keep in daily, even hourly contact with the more committed part of your readership, but it’s done using an entirely new language and playing to a different set of habits.” [Via Russell Davies]
BBC - Comedy Soup Asset Licence FAQ - Not sure how long this has been going on, but it’s wonderful: the BBC releasing audio, video and image assets for people to mash up and create new comedy, under a CC-inspired license.
Is The Net Good For Writers? [10 Zen Monkeys] - “Writing as a special talent became obsolete in the 19th century. The bottleneck was publishing.” Ignore Kindle, and read this fascinating survey of writers in the age of electronic communication.
Bookglutton - Really fascinating, real-time book reading and commenting. Would be impressed with this in any document, but it has flaws. Not very web, but the connection is all there…
Lipstick on a pig? ITAOS on Bookglutton - “includes some nifty functionality around contextual commenting and chatting within books. The drawback however is that it mimics the interface of a book and pretending to be a book on a computer screen sucks.” What Alex says, basically. Check his comments for some developer feedback.
A Hole-y Grail at Andrew P. Mayer - Portal and new themes in game narrative. Again, looking for more stuff like this. Play Portal, by the way. I hadn’t played anything for ages and it took eight hours of my Saturday *like that*.
Steam & the Digital Delivery of Computer Games - “Take2 admitted that retailers are doing everything they can to slow down digital distribution … “if you guys drop the price on your digital side, then we’re not going to be taking as many games, or ANY games, on the retail side”. The retailers right now are doing everything they can to keep their share of the pie.” Sound familiar?
So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it.
There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to be near a computer. Online back-up of your books is very smart - one customer losing their whole library after dropping one of these in the bath would pretty much kill it. The big page-turner paddles on the side will be good for peoples’ frequently contorted, curled-up-on-the-sofa reading positions, and the dog-ear bookmark is nice and friendly, although the purists will probably hate it.
But there’s a lot not to like, even beyond the let’s-party-like-it’s-1989 styling. E-ink just still isn’t good enough: there’s the ‘black flash’ as you turn the page, and the snail-like refresh speed means they’ve had to put in that scroll-wheel barometer thing in the side, which is not good. The whole feeds thing is a misnomer: you have to pick ‘your feeds’ from an Amazon-approved list (currently numbering 308), which is great if you just want Boing Boing and the NYT, but pretty rubbish if your tastes are more eclectic - and you don’t want to pay 99 cents for the privilege (is that a one-off or a subscription?). And the killer for me is that you can only read your own documents by emailing them to Amazon, who’ll convert them and add them to the Kindle ‘for a small fee’. Whoa. That’s just stupid. It’s also such a waste of the rather clever connectivity hardware they’ve packed in there.
Still, Amazon aren’t making this for me - they’re making it for regular, heavy readers, who are book- and not computer-focussed, which is an excellent decision - they will certainly please more people - and explains the video endorsements from Toni Morrison, James Patterson and others. It’s not for techies. We’ll see if the $400 price tag is attractive to non-techies.
It is, without doubt, the best ebook reader out there because it has the iTunes-like connection to all the books you can get, built in. That’s the USP. But I still don’t think we’re going to see mass ebook take-up any time soon, not until e-ink improves and we sort out a format that can move seamlessly between different devices, like mp3. If I can read it on this, I should be able to read it on my laptop, phone and even TV too.
And could someone please explain why they used ‘profligate’ (adj. utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute, recklessly prodigal or extravagant.) as their example word from the dictionary? Reminds me of this story.
UPDATE: For more on the Kindle, you could do worse than Buzzfeed’s roundup.
Yevgeny Zamyatin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - “True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics” Just finished ‘We’. Brilliant stuff.
Bookeen Cybook V3 Puts a Soundtrack to Your eBooks [Gizmodo] - “The Bookeen eReader can handle 8,000 page turns in a single charge, an SD slot, RSS reading, and MP3 playback for listening to music while reading.” Looks like a mobile phone, which is where I increasingly feel this is all heading anyway.
Typogrify Plugin | i love typography - Ooh. Yes. Wordpress plugin for type nuts, including Widows and Orphans support, classes for &s and caps, Smartypants, curly quotes, and more.
The Pub Bench (Publisher’s Benchmarking Forum) - “Publishers: compare notes on what’s going on in the market, to help you see how your company is performing, relatively. This is known as benchmarking.” A project of my old employers’, Snowbooks.
eagger Blog - I knocked up a website for a friend’s new business recently, and I just wanted to point to it as an example of how companies should blog. It’s not the design, just the enthusiasm of the boss, who’s taken to blogging like a duck to water. Good food too.
OLPC: Give One, Get One - If you’re in the US, and you can afford it, this is what you should be doing for Xmas. I would, if either of those things were true…
The ebooks are the result of a residency with Proboscis that I’ve been undertaking in recent months, working with and exploring the potential of their new Diffusion ebook generator.
These stories have been created by cutting up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a variety of sources to create completely new works. This process mines a particular seam of Balkanist fantasy in English language literature and media; ranging from E.M.Forster to contemporary free-sheet the London Paper. Alongside each story is full bibliographical information relating to the research process. In addition, these resources are also collected in a separate bibliography which will be refreshed and added-to each time a new work is uploaded.
Diffusion is a project to create an online ebook generator which people can use to produce small editions of their work. The term ebook is somewhat misleading as the final product is in fact a paper book, albeit one that can be quickly and reasonably easily assembled from an electronic file: the ebook engine generates a 4-up pdf that is printed and assembled into a chapbook:
It’s a good idea and a pretty good implementation, although it took me a couple of tries to get to grips with the assembly, largely because my printer chopped off the page numbers (suggestion: put these at the top of the minipages, not the bottom corner), and the instructions are not very clear (there are better ones on the site, but I only found these later). Anyway, it’s the new sharing age, so (largely inspired by Common Craft) I made my own instruction/demo:
The Piracy Paradox - “A recent paper suggests that weak intellectual-property rules, far from hurting the fashion industry, have instead been integral to its success. The professors call this effect ‘the piracy paradox’.”
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