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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real challenge, of course, is to persuade wannabe writers to post their work at all - in my own personal experience, unpublished writers are terrified of their work being ’stolen’, enough to be suspicious of publishers themselves, let alone your average web surfer.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.

Flickr, everyone’s favourite photo site, just added video, and not everyone is happy about it. But Flickr has been very clever - their video offering is not designed to rival YouTube or the rest as a repository for short films, comedy clips and old adverts. Instead, they’ve limited the videos to 90 seconds to create a new niche: the long moment.

The idea has been around for a while - see the ‘long pose’ meme on YouTube for an example - but Flickr’s smarts are in seeing the gradual amalgamation of digital video and still photography in the same devices, and making a useful connection between the two media produced.

Literature is usually, and paradoxically, perceived as both static - fixed and unchanging on the page - and temporal; spooling along a timeline, occupying an extended period from start to finish. If literature has a photo moment, a pinpointable spot, it is the phoneme, or perhaps the word. Joyce’s great ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng‘, my favorite sound in all literature, or Keat’s ‘Forlorn!’, tolling like a bell in Ode to a Nightingale.

Is there such a thing as a long textual moment? If there is, I would suggest that it can perhaps be found - again paradoxically - in silence, whether in the Beckett’s brooding pauses, or the crystalline, breathless moment at the end of a poem, when the last words hang in the air and, soundlessly, resound.

Above, my ‘long photo’ of African Wild Dogs pacing their enclosure at London Zoo, taken this bright, shiny morning on the canal.

Brief outline of ideas for locative storytelling (more thoughts originating from here and here).

Goal: To produce a locative storytelling experience, where strands of the story are triggered by the reader/listener’s location.

Tech requirements: GPS-enabled mobile phone, or Google Maps’ new locator function, headphones, application running on Symbian or Windows Mobile (or preferably both…).

Personnel: Writer or team of writers, developer, interface designer, voice actor.

Issues: Low GPS penetration - few handsets currently but set to change rapidly - GMaps not yet accurate enough, at least outside large towns.

Proposal: Create a downloadable application which runs on a mobile device. Each standalone app contains a story, specially created for the medium and a particular location (although it would be possible to edit stories with strong localities for this, the former offers more possibilities).

Running the app spawns a navigation map - either a GMaps overlay or a specially created one (perfectly possible for small areas), showing the user’s location (X, above, wide and zoomed) and the accessible storypoints - location-specific ’shards’ of the story.

As the user moves across the map, they come into contact with the storypoints - close enough, and they trigger the shards associated with that point: scrollable texts, an audio recording, even images or video.

This format offers a number of interesting possibilities for the narrative form, beyond a simple (and still wholly possible) linear structure, such as:

• Multiple entry and exit points
• Threaded/associative storytelling (storypoints only revealed after certain others have been visited)
• … tending to “Choose your own adventure” style
• Surprise shards (hidden storypoints)
• Story as treasure hunt.

To achieve the full potential, it would require a writer prepared to engage with (at least partially) non-linear storytelling.

So, that’s a start. Thoughts? Would be pretty sweet to set one of these up in time for London Lit Plus in the summer…

Further reading:

• The Missing Voice
• And While London Burns
• Navball
• Mscapers

Tony White, author of one of my favourite books, Foxy-T, and literary editor of The Idler, has just published a series of extracts from Balkanising Bloomsbury, a work in progress, in the Diffusion eBooks format. He writes:

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:

The project is a direct response to the increasing difficulties of getting short and niche works into the bookshops, and the generator will shortly be made publicly available to all. All the titles are free to download.

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:

P.S. Ooh, there’s some Stewart Home too!

In the great future lit debate, there’s one thing we keep coming back to, that we hear over and over again: “I can’t read from a screen.” Never mind that most of us spend far more time reading from a screen (as you’re doing right now) than we do reading from paper (especially if you count text messages, display boards, TV titles and subtitles and many other instances).

Is fiction different? Is the novel or other long work uniquely suited to paper? Novelists like Margaret Atwood certainly believe so, in her vociferous opposition to all things electronic, and who better to judge than writers?

Well, it struck me that writers would be a good group to examine in this debate, so I figured I’d start with The Guardian’s Writers’ rooms series, a weekly feature on writers and their places and methods of work, and see how many of these writers compose the works on a computer in the first place, the work never reaching paper until the final proof is printed and makes it to the bookshelf, completing the illusion that this is how it is meant to be.

Here are the results (I’ve left out John Banville because the photo is the same as that for Beryl Bainbridge and he doesn’t say anything specific; all the rest are included):

The haters:

• John Richardson: “I am computer illiterate and write everything by hand.”
• Colm Tóibín: “all in longhand”.
• John Mortimer: “I write with a pen on long sheets of paper. I’ve never learnt how to type.”
• Edna O’Brien: “I write by hand. I do not understand how people can arrive at even a flicker of creativity by means of a computer.”
• Geoff Dyer - surprised by this one, but there’s no computer in sight, and he doesn’t mention one.
• Michael Holroyd: “Early this year I bought a new black laptop which lies somewhere under a pile of papers. It is, I’m told, capable of miracles. I haven’t used it yet.”
• Will Self: “I loathe computers more and more.” (If you’ve never seen Self’s study, do check out his awesome post-it system).
• Antonia Fraser: “My typewriter is electric and so ancient that other typewriters have to be cannibalised when it needs mending.”
• JG Ballard: “I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.”
• AS Byatt - a very papery desk.

The in-betweens:

• Jacqueline Wilson: “I write all my first drafts in gorgeous Italian leather notebooks” - then she types them up on an iBook.
• Hanif Kureishi: “Computers are a mercy for writers, but they do encourage books that are too long. I write by hand first and then type it up.”
• David Hare: “I write things out in longhand, then later put everything on the computer.”
• Beryl Bainbridge: “I got the typewriter in 1958 from a Chinaman… I type it up onto a computer so I can correct it.”

The lovers:

• Carmen Callil: “I write every day, typing straight on to that small computer.”
• Graham Swift - computer taking up most of the desk space.
• Margaret Drabble (Ditto).
• Mark Haddon: “Few schools have cartoons of men with rectal bleeding above the computer workstation” (Yes, he does).
• AL Kennedy: “If I’m doing serious writing I prefer to be in here at night with the low energy bulb and the music, typing on a lap top.”
• Rose Tremain: “The computer desk is an ugly, ancient thing - but I don’t suppose I’ll ever replace it. I’ve written 13 books on it.”
• Ian Rankin: “Under the desk you will see an unused Mac tower (never got the hang of it)” - but he seems OK with the laptop on the desk.
• Esther Freud: “I don’t need any of these things, just my green chair and my laptop.”
• Claire Tomalin - not much room for anything but that computer.
• Andrew O’Hagan: “The laptop is there for work.”
• Diana Athill: “I’m a hopeless dummy about computers, using mine only as a typewriter and for emails, but I do love writing on it.”
• David Lodge: “I found myself doing more and more writing straight onto the computer.”
• Hilary Mantel - a very smart computer.
• Sarah Waters: “All I need in a study is a flat surface, a computer, and a closable door.”
• Michael Frayn: “Word-processor” - confirmed by the statement that “I sit sideways on [to the window] most of the time.”

I make that 10 haters, 15 lovers, and 4 inbetweens. (Please don’t take the terminology too seriously, and yes, it’s deeply unscientific. Still…)

More than half those questioned exclusively use computers - and that’s from a severely weighted sample, tending towards older, literary authors, the kind of people you’d imagine would run a mile from the computer. Yet for many of them, the work comes together, is revised and edited on a screen, where it passes in all likelihood via email to their agents and publishers, who may print it out (as may the authors) to read, but still: the work itself is undeniably of the electronic screen, rather than the page.

Food for thought?

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”.)

3:AM Magazine, of which I am a co-editor as well as designer and site developer, today launched a new, Portuguese-language edition dedicated to writing, music and culture from Brazil: 3:AM Brasil.

I meant to write about 3:AM when we launched the redesigned site back in January, but didn’t get round to it. It’s a great example of a new kind of literary magazine, fully distributed (editors are based in the UK, France, the Czech Republic, the US, Canada and elsewhere), constantly updated and updatable, a Myspace sensation (with 3:AM Brasil hot on its heels), publishing new and established writers with equal commitment and holding offline events in a host of cities worldwide.

I’m really excited about this new venture, not just because of all the hot lit coming out of Brazil right now, which now has a central place to show itself off to a wider community, but because it shows how technology can be leveraged to readdress the shocking state of literature in translation in the English-speaking world (much back-and-forth between 3:AM’s sister sites is planned), and we can bring yet more new, exciting writing into the light. 3:AM Deputy Editor A. Stevens and new 3:AM Brasil Editor Elisangela Fracaroli deserve much praise for making this happen.

Unsurprisingly, 3:AM France and Japan are now in advanced states of planning - watch this space…

Here’s something that passed me by, but that makes fascinating reading: yesterday was International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day (via Boingboing).

On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if it hasn’t, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.

The root of IP-ST Day lies in a (coherent and self-described) rant written by Howard V. Hendrix, well-published author and current Vice-President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (the SFWA).

Read the rest of this entry »

With little fanfare, if:book released a very early version of Sophie, their rich content creation tool, last Wednesday. You can download it here. Sophie has been described variously as the next step in ebooks, a publishing tool for the rest of us, the first base of the networked book, so I was eager to see what it actually was.

After a short time playing around with it, I pretty much gave up. I’d show you the result, but I can’t figure out how to show it off as there’s no documentation and everything I did manage to do (which wasn’t much) I learnt from this video demo (uploaded to YouTube for ease of viewing, from this source). There’s something in the menus about ‘publish book for Apache server’, but that spewed out a bunch of files with no information on what to do with them.

Here’s some screenshots of the interface, the only useful menu, and the ‘halo’ tool configuration:

I’m not sure what’s being created here. Is this a standalone document creator? There’s very little you can do to your content once it’s in Sophie, so you need external text and image editors for most things (for example, I couldn’t work out how to search-and-replace the incorrectly-encoded apostrophes in my Gutenberg source text). Most of the tools are very simple, but then so are the results - this looks like a CD-ROM creator circa 1993. Because, er, that’s what it is…

Sophie’s either sixteen years in the making or nearly three depending on whether you go back to the beginning or not. The beginning was at The Voyager Company, an early electronic publisher … Back in 1992 Voyager released the Expanded Books Toolkit which enabled people to make simple e-books without any programming… Shortly thereafter, Voyager Japan released T-2 which has gone on to become the leading ebook software in its home country. In 1996 a group of Voyager employees formed Night Kitchen with the intent of creating an authoring/reading environment that would extend the Expanded Books Toolkit concept to include rich media. The result TK3 never officially came to market… The Mellon Foundation approached some of the TK3 team and asked them to build a new multimedia authoring program which would be open-source and would extend TK3 by enabling time-based events… That became Sophie. [Source]

Can you imagine the code? It’s clearly inspired by existing rich media applications such as Flash, but it’s target users - the technologically unskilled - don’t use such applications. How are they supposed to get their heads around concepts such as ‘flows’, ‘timelines’ and different server versions? And if they do get that, why aren’t they using the existing apps?

It’s all very disappointing, and I think if:book know it, which is why they haven’t supported or trumpeted this release in any way. But if they’re looking for feedback, here’s some, and we hope it’s constructive:

• Figure out what it’s really for - “Sophie’s raison d’être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming.” Can we get some examples? Are these just tarted-up ebooks, or something more?
• Figure out who wants it - who are these sophisticated but unskilled users? I regularly use Adobe and ex-Macromedia products including Flash, Photoshop, InDesign etc., but I had a hard time figuring out Sophie.
• Make it stand out - I don’t know what differentiates it from other media creation tools. Where’s the killer feature?
• Really open source it - We found the developer site, but there doesn’t appear to much of a community here. The source forge lists about thirty developers, but only about five seem to have done much. What’s going on?
• Smarten it up and Speed it up - it looks terrible and handles worse.

The potential is all there for… something, but I don’t think anyone, least of all its creators, know what. if:book is an academic, not a technical organisation - sorry guys, but I think you’d agree - and this project seems somewhat directionless. As an example, take the comments on the release notice - while there are some questions about the source, most want a long-winded discussion about the theoretical nature of the book.

Yes, this is an alpha release, but it’s still startlingly naked. We need some good examples of what this can do, and at least some basic documentation, to get any kind of a handle on what’s going on.

[UPDATE: Lots of discussion in the comments. Please read on…]

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.]