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HarperCollins have just launched their online slushpile site, authonomy.com, in private beta. Authonomy allows budding authors to upload chapters of their work for the rest of the community to read and comment on.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how this would be implemented, and at first sight it looks pretty good - HC haven’t overreached themselves, they’ve simply created a site for people to join, upload their work, and read that of others’. Sounds simple, but many similar projects have failed thanks to scope creep.

Every user gets a profile where they can create a virtual bookshelf showing which other writers’ works they’re supporting - authors get the chance to create their own “cover” for a work too, a pointless but satisfying little feature which is sure to go down very well indeed.

The real challenge, of course, is to persuade wannabe writers to post their work at all - in my own personal experience, unpublished writers are terrified of their work being ’stolen’, enough to be suspicious of publishers themselves, let alone your average web surfer. The Front List, a previous attempt at a “YouTube for books”/”crowdsourcing the slushfile”-type site, solved this by hiding everything from non-members; one approach certainly, but not one likely to bring in the crowds.

Authonomy’s FAQs wisely address many of these concerns, and they haven’t done too much to break the site in the implementation, short of disabling right-clicking on book text. As they put it, “if someone really wants to pass off your efforts as their own they’ll probably find a way” (Hint: turn off javascript). Their real attitude to the problem is more sensible: “here at authonomy, we believe that your talent is better displayed than kept hidden – and that the chances of good things happening are more likely the more hands your manuscript passes through, and the more people you enlist in your support.”

On the technical side, users upload books by chapter (as few or as many as they like) in Word or RTF formats, which are then displayed as is - imagine hitting ‘Output as web page’ in Word, if you’ve ever done such a thing. It doesn’t result in the prettiest pages, but it does mean the book appears on the site as the author made it, which is, quietly, quite a thing.

Authonomy has been a long time in the making, and in the wake of the disastrous relaunch of HarperCollins.co.uk, we feared the worst. But Authonomy (still very much in Beta, which HC.co.uk can’t claim to be) looks like a very good little set-up which is bound to get plenty of attention and users. Nice one, HC.

So, I’ve been meaning to write about Swotter for a while. A couple of weeks ago, it finished reading the whole of James Joyce’s Ulysses to Twitter. I think there’s something kind of amazing about that, but I’m not sure what. Final stats:

• Followers: 198 (meh)
• Updates: 23,467 (phew!)

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:

• Booktwo (obviously)
• ArtsHub - Australian creative news
• ReadersRead - book news
• Book_Blog
• Zombie Attack - an ongoing story, told by Twitter
• TwitterLit - twittering the first lines of books
• Jenny Holzer - more art than lit, but still wonderful (and I’m told it really is her?)
• 3:AM Magazine - the best lit mag on the web (slight bias alert)
• ReadySteadyBook - one of the finest litblogs
• BAFAB - buy a friend a book
• The Book Depository - your Amazon alternative
• OUP Blog - nice that it’s actually twittering, rather than twitterfeeding
• Hesperus Press - a lovely little publisher
• Brit Lit Blogs - several of the best, rounded up
• Blogographos - group classics blog
• TwitterProse - lines from creative nonfiction
• Canongate - another small (but not very) publisher
• Snowbooks - my old employer
• TwitterFiction - Great works of fiction in 140 characters or less
• Speechification - Because. And occasionally lit-related
• Technical Writing - what it says on the tin
• Screenwriting - from writerswrite
• Quotesblog - quotes for quotation junkies
• TwitterQuote - more of the same

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.

I was quite interested when I heard about StoryCode.co.uk (via Zero Influence - there’s a .com version too). At first sight, I thought it might be a newer, better version of WhichBook.net: a way of classifying books to create a more accurate “If you liked this, you’ll love…” recommendations system. The advantage it has on WhichBook is to encourage visitors to “code” books they’ve read, which are then added to the system along with the data - a great advance on using professionals behind the scenes to classify books, which has only managed a couple of hundred titles in several years for WhichBook, and is all very good and user-generated and modern.

That’s as far as it goes, however, because instead of allowing users any flexibility in how they describe the book, all literary opinion is forced onto a selection of 50 or so sliders, which veer from the confusing, to the pointless, to the incompetent. Confusing example: “Is the story mostly aimed at a mainstream audience or a literary audience?” (Mainstream → Literary) excludes half of the fiction I read. Pointless example: “How much did the atmosphere of the story feel like one you could experience in everyday life or is it more exotic or surreal?” (Everyday → Exotic) might work for actually surreal books, but for most novels, the answer depends on the reader, not the story—but the program won’t know this. Incompetent example: the ‘Plot Type’ category. To what extent is the book a “Rags to Riches” story (None → Plenty), a “Pact with the Devil” story (None → Plenty), a “Brain Vs Brawn” story (None → Plenty)—these aren’t sliding scales, they’re either/or. The results are meaningless. Try it yourself, and see if the results aren’t suspiciously vague (short version: if you put in a thriller, you get a broad selection of thrillers out).

This annoys me because something so long planned - ten years in the making - with a variety of book and web industry heavyweights behind it (see the About page) really should be better than this. It annoys me that something with such a strong and correct rallying call—”inspired by the belief that the Book Trade, locally and globally, is failing it’s readers in the search for new stories and that the power of the internet and the passion of book lovers everywhere can combine into a unique service”—should result in something so poorly thought out.

Digital recommendation systems have come a long way in the last few years, and there are a number of really important lessons which have been completely ignored by StoryCode. The one they get right is user-generation, but they’ve failed to see that for user data to be valuable, it has to be ambient: Last.fm and LibraryThing don’t ask you a bunch of equivocal questions that are highly dependent on the individuals situation and whim: they just see what you’re into, and run with it. It’s powerful, and it works (why do you think CBS bought Last.fm for a small fortune, or Abe Books bought a chunk of LT—particularly when Amazon’s recommendation system is so rubbish).

The second and equally important lesson is that individuals describe things in many different ways—so let them. Tagging, while rapidly becoming a web cliché, works because it is the most flexible system possible, generating reams of long tail classification data that is individually specific but universally applicable. Tagging also provides another incredibly important feature that StoryCode has missed: an incentive to participate. Through tags, individuals handcode their own dataset; my delicious tags for example, allow me to find almost any half-remembered link I’ve ever saved with a couple of terms which are meaningful to me. LibraryThing’s Tag Mirror reveals real things about your reading habits. With StoryCode, there’s no long-term incentive to participate, and mass use is what drives these systems.

So, another book industry initiative fails to learn some of the basic lessons of the internet. We shouldn’t be surprised, but how much time and effort is being wasted here?

Oh yeah, and it doesn’t validate. I’m going to start some kind of button system for lit sites that don’t use web standards. We’re all about standards in literature, spelling, punctuation, typography - we have to get the code right too.

The Internet Archive recently released a demo version of its new Open Library project, about which we are very excited.

We’re great fans of the IA, due to the wonderful Bookmobile and the all-encompassing awesomeness of their main site, the largest collection of its kind of publicly-available text, images, audio and video, as well as the world’s largest history of the web. So when we heard they were turning their attention to paper books, we were looking forward to seeing what they came up with.

Their mission statement is worth reading in full:

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply “free to the people,” as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open. [Source]

But what’s it like, beyond the rhetoric? Well, it’s a collection of listings for every edition of every book that’s ever made it into library classification (or at least, that’s what it will be), as well as scans of those editions which have already made it into the Archive’s copyright-free library.

If:Book has some quibbles about the presentation, but I’m far more interested in what this means at the level of data and metadata.

For starters, Library data is not free. The OCLC, the world’s largest supplier of library data (and recent receiver of much Charkin-praise), is a non-profit which charges for it’s data feeds. The Open Library plans to build futurelib, an open, universal book catalogue, which will contain all books, not just those which arrived recently enough for the increasingly outmoded ISBN classification, or which belong to organisations hooked in to the OCLC’s network.

Secondly, an Open Library can consolidate and clarify all these data structures, not enslaved to the horribly outdated Dewey Decimal system, the increasingly subjective and unwieldy Library of Congress Classification system, the publishers’ proprietary and unworkable BIC and ONIX systems, or even the tag-based user-generated systems of the new wave, but providing a translation point between them all, as well as serving as a rallying call to create new and better schemas.

They plan to consolidate all the information surrounding the book too - imagine a place to go and search out books that contains not only the book itself, its various classifications and summaries, but also reviews at every level, from Amazon one-stars up to scholarly monographs, references and antecedents, cover art through time, location and author data… the possibilities are almost limitless.

So too are the commercial applications, with print-on-demand of scanned titles planned, with the trade-off of open sourcing the software driving the library. It will be interesting to look back in fifty or a hundred years to see how static this project (or a similar one) has become. If ebooks take over, will a project like the OL become a true archive, indexing only the past? Even if this is the outcome, it only strengthens the case for such a project. We look forward to following its progress.

Whichbook.net is such a good idea it’s surprising it hasn’t been shamelessly copied elsewhere. You move a set of sliders and get recommendations from UK library catalogues. Read the rest of this entry »

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is the website and nom de guerre of artists Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge, based in Seoul, South Korea. Their art takes the form of text, usually parodying the manifesto or thesis form and accompanied by jazz soundtracks, delivered either as film, or, on the web, flash movies. You can watch the films on their website (the above is from Cunnilingus in North Korea, their most recent work is Morning of the Mongoloids, for Lisboa20).

The artists’ state their intentions with these web-based movies thus: “We try to break as many rules as possible. We try to express the essence of the Internet: information. Strip away the interactivity, the graphics, the design, the photos, the illustrations, the banners, the colours, the fonts and the rest, and what’s left? The text.”

Cycling to work today, I saw this advertised on the side of a bus: Bob Books. Bob Books allows you to create and order books using your own text and digital photos - the examples on the website heavily emphasise personal photo albums of the baby/wedding/holiday variety.

It’s a beautiful site and the downloadable software to create your own book looks and feels much the same - really intuitive and easy to use, even for novices.

It’s a fairly basic service actually, and it’s certainly no threat to traditional publishers or printers, or even to new POD services like Lulu, positioning itself firmly in the one-off, gift books category. However, it’s interesting to see another company - and one with plenty of cash if its advertising is anything to go by - taking the Moo route of offering simple, clean tools to do more stuff with all the user-generated content now available to us all through widespread adoption of technologies like digital photography. That it’s book-related just piqued my interest…

Ficlets is a new site for authoring CC-licensed text snippets which others can play with. It’s pretty cool, and what’s more amazing is it’s come out of AOL. It’s not dissimilar to Yarn, which I mentioned earlier:

ficlets are shorter than short stories. Well, no, actually, they are short stories, but they’re really short stories. Really short, as in there’s not a maximum word count … there’s actually a maximum character count (1,024). There is also a minimum character count, and the number of that beast is 64.

If you wish, we’ll provide you with inspiration (photos, themes, suggested beginnings and endings, even other ficlets), but you’re completely free to blaze your own trail. Now, here’s where the real fun comes in: Each and every ficlet is modular in that, though you may have written a stand-alone story with a beginning, middle, and ending, your fellow ficleteers may choose to write a prequel or sequel to your story. In this respect, you can think of ficlets as literary Legos.

All ficlets are covered under Creative Commons, which means that if you wrote it, you own it. Period.

To give you an idea of what you can do with 1,024 characters, that is the exact length of this “About Ficlets” description

They had to leave a period off the end there, but you get the idea. Ficlets is beautifully implemented and easy to use. There’s also a strange, cool imagination at work here - the ‘Inspiration‘ link pulls random photo sets out of Flickr to spark your creativity, as well as an ‘on this day’ snippet from The History Channel, and some random lines. It’s a beautifully simple mash-up that works very well.

I can’t help thinking of a Yahoo Pipes type GUI to stitch them together into persistent, save-able stories - the current implementation is more of a choose-your-ow-adventure deal, and I don’t have an AOL screen name to see exactly what AIMShare does (OpenID AOL?). But I’ll still be wasting plenty of time there…

[UPDATE: Thanks to Jason Garber in the comments for pointing out that Ficlets does take OpenID. Nice one, guys.]

There’s been a bit of media attention in the UK lately around some children’s books which have been appearing as part of a new initiative to increase tolerance and reduce homophobic bullying in schools. Books such as And Tango Makes Three, the story of two male penguins in a committed relationship in Central Park zoo, and King & King, a new twist on the old Prince-and-Princess fairytale, introduce the concepts of same-sex love and relationships to young children.

There has been the predictable response from religious groups who view such books as ‘forcing’ alternative sexualities on children, or somehow tempting them into homosexuality themselves (see this Guardian article). The alternative case is so frequently mis-represented that it bears stating here: homosexuality, not being a choice, is a reality in the lives of many children and young adults, either by being the offspring or ward of same-sex couples, or, later, being their own experience. Homophobic bullying is so widespread that increased tolerance not only helps kids who are actually gay, but those whose lives are made miserable by homophobic taunts even if they themselves are not gay.

As Elizabeth Atkinson, director of the No Outsiders project which is promoting the books, puts it so well: “What books do not say is as important as what they do.” To deliberately leave images of gay relationships out of children’s books is to censor social reality.

This controversy - over the same books - cropped up a while back in the States, and I wrote about it then for STML, my literary blog (link contains images some consider NSFW). Look there to see the historical background to this debate.

What’s the booktwo angle on this post? Well, there’s not much of one, except to say that technology, it is hoped, can help educators and students circumvent the strictures of religious or state-sanctioned intolerance to free up debate around controversial issues. Organisations such as the ALA use the internet to raise awareness with projects such as Banned Book Week, to keep records of most challenged books, and to advise librarians on how to deal with such challenges. Libraries such as that at UPenn create online repositories of censored works, accessible to all (worth noting that that the current Swotter text, James Joyce’s Ulysses, is on that list). Think Tanks such as the Free Expression Policy Project place book censorship alongside restrictive DRM and aggressive internet filtering on their issue list. The debates will continue, but the new can stand alongside the old in our continuing quest for personal and intellectual freedom and tolerance.

Don’t you love it when you think of something really cool, but you don’t have the skills to make it happen - and then you find out someone already has?

Back in October of last year, I suggested a couple of the projects that I’d like to see Booktwo build. One of these was Exquisite Corpus, an updated take on the old parlour game, Exquisite Corpse, where players took it in turn to add to a drawing or story created by the previous player. Sadly, we never managed to implement this.

However, we were very pleased to stumble upon Yarn, a collaborative story-writing tool created by the folks at The Daily Jolt, a US College network (and is somewhat proprietary for that, but hey). Yarn allows people to start their own stories, or add to those created by others, and they can also splice off at any point from existing stories to create choose-your-own-adventure-type tales. Go have a play.

Yarn isn’t presented as a cutting-edge literary tool, but it has the potential to be one. The other project we suggested late last year was Infintie Entries, a distributed wiki-novel. This was fulfilled up to a point by Penguins’ Million Penguins project, but the latter failed - in as much as it became unmanageable and was eventually euthanised - because it tried to synthesise a single voice - one version of the truth - from a wealth of disparate voices. If the wiki- or massively-authored novel is to succeed, it needs to embrace dissonance and non-linearity, it needs to take the path mapped out by avant-garde writers like J. G. Ballard and William Burroughs. Yarn, cutesy though it is, provides one possible framework to make this happen.