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San Francisco, 3:50 AM
Wed Nov 11
27 posts in the last 24 hours
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08/27/09
As for fanfiction, I've read some truely amazing works over the years. Sure, most of them are crap, but you run into some gems. You really do. As for getting them published, well... that's a legal clusterfuck, and I don't think it will ever happen.
08/27/09
What I'm doing now is different, something that could be published without copyright problems. The setting, a PD shared world, was around in a fanzine, but it's now all web, all the time. And I think the quality os writing is lower. Nobody seems to be editing.
I do hear of things happening with fanfics, with systems of critical readers, but right now we need the filtering and editing supplied by publishers. And somehow that has to be paid for.
As for ebooks, they make sense for the fanatical reader. But a lot of people read very few books in a year. How does an ebook reader make sense for them? A quick scribble on the back of an envelope suggests that I could cover the capital outlay on the reader before it became obsolete, but it's sensitive to the difference between print and ebook prices. Some publishers charge the same price, which isn't good for ebooks.
08/27/09
Nice to "meet" someone who remembers the old days. I still have piles of zines I edited, wrote for, or bought. I miss those days, though I don't miss the smell of rubber cement and white-out.
08/27/09
[archive.salon.com]
'An editor of science-fiction books that I know fell in love with the Pilot when he realized that he could put an entire manuscript into a box that weighs 4.7 ounces and fits into his jacket pocket. "You really have to have spent a decade of your life schlepping 600-page manuscripts around to understand how attractive this is," he says. He admits that he wouldn't use the Pilot's tiny screen -- it's smaller than an index card -- for major editing. But, he says, "An enormous amount of what an editor has to do day in and day out is just reading. These days, if I can get an e-text version of a big document I have to read, the first thing I do is hot-sync it onto my Pilot."'
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
Yes, the access to vast libraries of works and the potentially low cost of individual e-books does seem impressive, but I'm increasingly finding that many of these files are poorly formatted, mis-spelt, and generally make my eyeballs ache after around fifteen minutes.
Plus, I'm concerned about durability. I know with a book that I can drop it down the stairs, in a puddle or leave it with a two year old for an hour and it will still be readable; how would a digital book hold up?
I still think the up-take will increase, if not as explosively as the digital music formats have then at least with the same inevitability
08/27/09
08/27/09
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08/27/09
Well, a lot of you are doing _exactly_ this at the moment with Amazon only books, etc. So you have a serious disconnect between your heads and your actions somewhere.
08/27/09
08/27/09
Your rant about the problems digital creates for you reveals an inability to understand and move forward with the changing times. Things WILL change, and its really up to you to keep up with it. I don't oiwn a digital reader yet, but I will as soon as they make one I like enough. (Hoping the apple tablet will fit the bill.) The nonsense about "hard drives failing" is just that, solid state drives are incredibly durable, and while they have a limited number of write cycles they can be read almost to infinity. Beyond that, good digital stores keep records of what you own so that in the event of a theft, loss or accident you can easily re-download your collection.
This is io9, not "Luddite hour."
08/27/09
That changed when I realized that e-books don't mean the Death of Print, that's just nonsense. They may mark the end of mass-market trade paperbacks, but that's not a bad thing. Instead, they could mark the time where if you WANT a physical book, you get something that's really fancy and nice.
Books may become more expensive, but they'll become more fascinating and even more of an artifact than they are now, possibly going back to gold leaf inlays and gorgeous binding. I'm definitely not opposed to such a thing.
I imagine that books could become what records are now, something for collectors that is fascinating to have and show off.
08/27/09
08/27/09
I personally will never ever buy a digital book or a book reader.How can I resell one ? What about a company deleting your books like the Amazon 1984 thing.What are we never gong to sit down and hold a book again ?
I HATE DIGITAL NOW !!!
With all this stuff and more going digital I am sick of thinking of this.
1.my 2 bands never sells any CD's anymore
2.my job is getting to be a drag as work is so down i could do it all in 10 hours i bet.
3.what and were are you going to put or do with a whole library of "digital" things..............losers wait till your drive dies and you spend 1,000's to professionally recover data.
remember we may be smart on io9 and know how to work with drives but what ahout the average consumer....those folks won't understand all the digital tech.
my boss and i were just talking about digital yesterday.i told him i will never buy into it and i hope others wont.i said what do you think folks are just going to sit in the house and order things and never go out to a "store"
BOYCOTT DIGITAL BOOKS !!!!
Keep real bookstores and book compainies alive please
08/27/09
Digital books just make more sense to our society. Students that purchase my books will not break their backs carrying them and will save a bundle since we will have next to no production costs for digital editions. Open-source texts will be even more cost effective when they catch on and kids won't spend a fortune on that and tuition combined. And what about a bookstore is so beautiful and precious that you can't get the same feeling from your public library? If anything, you should prefer the latter since no one's trying to pressure you into making a purchase at ridiculously overpriced MSRP. Libraries will persist no matter what and will thrive from things like OverDrive's local library digital distribution initiative.
And authors will be able to directly market to their customers. If they want a little polish, they can hire a freelance professional editor to look at their work and a marketing guru to see how best to engage their readership. If they can't afford that, they can easily purchase podcasting equipment and start spreading the word through iTunes if they feel particularly assertive.
Sure, there will be drawbacks, but the potential here is amazing. It's like the creation of the Gutenberg press all over again.
What's saddest about your comment (besides the atrocious grammar) seems to be your blind love of Middle Men and Gatekeepers, and those folks will only tolerate you for your money.
08/27/09
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08/27/09
The question of what books get made available for what platforms is a complicated one right now -- everybody's engaged in an enormous multiparty negotation over who pays for conversion costs, what the final price points will be, and dozens of other legal and logistical terms. It's an enormous amount of work and I'm glad I'm not involved in it. As a consumer I'm eager for as many of our books to be available in as many formats as possible. Meanwhile, I note that we, too, use Sony Readers; the company bought several hundred of them for its employees, partly just to reduce the amount of paper we go through reproducing manuscripts for in-house reading. (Manuscripts of books we're _publishing_ -- do not, please, send us submission manuscripts in Sony Reader format.)
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/26/09
The Bad: Tor isn't very good with distributing e-books. In fact, they're probably the last of the big publishers to get on the bandwagon. They produce a lot of good sci-fi that I don't read because I've pretty much quit reading p-book fiction.
The Ugly: I've been wanting to read Walter Hunt's "Dark Wing" series for a long time on my e-reader but its just not available...and this is under Mr. Hayden's purview.
08/26/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
Get it now? I can explain further if you need it.
08/27/09
I don't think it's particulary apt either way. Both paper and e-books have real advantages and disadvantages. I won't fault someone who buys digital-only because they have very limited shelf space, or like being able to take notes easily, or even because they find that same tactile experience so many paper-readers prefer to be a turn-off for them.
If someone gets a book simply for the image of it, then yes, it's silly- but it's no sillier with an e-book than with someone leaving Dostoyevsky on the coffee table to try and appear well-read.
08/27/09
08/26/09
Also, back in the olden days, the ratio of good to bad fanfic was probably slightly better b/c you had to convince other people to buy your zine rather than just slapping it up there for free. You had to convince editors to accept it and invest in printing/advertising/mailing it rather than just throwing it out there. Fanfic did occasionally go legit, and the authors did all the time.
Also, also, not only did I read novels on my Palm Pilot in the 90's, but I toted my Worldcon schedule around on it. Hand-formatted from the r.a.sf post. Authors wrote books for that format that people actually paid money for from small presses.
What I'm saying is, for a major SF publisher, dude isn't that futuristic or even that recently technological.
08/27/09
I don't make any claims to be some kind of technological whiz; I don't even have any programming skills. All this stuff was done with help.
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/26/09
Ok, I'll quit blathering. My big problem with e-books involves spending money on something I cannot resell. (The smell and feel of real books enters in there too, but is secondary.)
08/26/09
I was just looking at one of my non-fiction bookshelves before I logged on here and trying to decide what I could sell to get a little money or at least trade in to get some different used books. Not going to happen with e-books, either way.
It's also going to take a while for displays to get up to the resolution of paper. It weighs more, but it lasts longer and doesn't have jaggies.