io9 
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San Francisco, 6:54 PM
Sat Dec 5
18 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/24/09
This is what keeps me from reading Doctorow. His books always sound like screeds for his... fanciful... politics.
-Kle.
11/23/09
11/23/09
You wouldn't think there would be much newness that could be done with the topic but I love those type of stories and the twists involved.
I think the last one I read was "Cowl" by Neal Asher.
I recommend it highly.
I also enjoy HARD science fiction.
11/23/09
11/23/09
11/23/09
"The typical ROI for a Kodacell unit in the old days was about four percent. If you put a hundred dollars in, you'd get a hundred and four dollars out, and it would take about a year to realize. Of course, in the old days, they wouldn't have touched a new business unless they could put a hundred million in and get a hundred and four million out. Four million bucks is four million bucks.
"But here, the company put fifty thousand into these dolls and three months later, they took seventy thousand out, after paying our salaries and bonuses. That's a forty percent ROI. Seventy thousand bucks isn't four million bucks, but forty percent is forty percent."
Well more then a line I guess.
11/24/09
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
08/27/09
08/27/09
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
08/27/09
08/27/09