Mark – Page 61

More Google Books Hilarity

September 3, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

In all the reading I’ve done about the Google Books class action suit, I completely missed this (from Reuters):

Under the settlement, authors have until the end of this week to opt out of the settlement.

Any time you have to opt out, it means the people opting you in have already won. As to the rest of the Reuters piece, it details an FTC letter urging Google to improve its privacy policy blah blah blah blah blah….

Please. Anyone who ever cracked open the bloody hatch on the political sausage machine knows that nothing matters except enforcement. And so far there’s nothing to enforce. Ergo Google will do whatever it wants and people will enjoy Google Books until SOMETHING BAD happens, at which point everyone will be shocked — shocked! — that there is gambling in Casablanca.

— Mark Barrett

Is Blog Fiction Dead?

September 3, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on the previous post, I followed one of the ‘best blogfic’ search hits back to a 2008 post on BlogFiction.org, titled: Did Blog Fiction Peak In 2005?

An interesting question. If true, however, I would think it had less to do with the potential of the medium than it did with the various attempts during that time. So maybe it’s time to try something new.

— Mark Barrett

Lost in the Desert

September 3, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

Can you point me to the best blog fiction on the internet? Not just the best web fiction — although I guess I wouldn’t mind a few pointers there as well — but specifically blog fiction, however you define it?

The reason I ask is that I’ve been rooting around for a few weeks now, clicking links and following threads, and I’m seeing a lot of fiction on the internet. And I’m really glad that so many people are publishing to the web. It can only make them better writers, and it can only speed the process of networking which is so important to any writer’s ability to develop. (All writers need to find good readers. It’s a nightmare for all involved.)

On some level, however, I’m still not connecting with a lot of what I’m reading, and I keep feeling like I’m wandering in circles. So…if I said to you, “Who’s writing the best blog fiction on the internet?”, what would you say?

(I tried searching for ‘best blog fiction’ but I was not encouraged by the number of hits I got in return. And ‘best blogfic’ turned out even worse.)

— Mark Barrett

Amazon and Irony

September 2, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Speaking of Amazon’s outrage regarding Google’s class-action settlement, isn’t there a wee bit of irony in all this? I mean, Amazon’s core business — before it became the go-to site for spatulas and throw rugs — used to be…wait for it!…books.

Yes kids, that’s really true. Way back at the dawn of time (1995), Amazon’s great idea was to be an online bookstore, making pretty much every in-print book and many out-of-print books available nationwide. And it was a huge, huge success. So much so, that Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, decided to sell every product known to mankind in much the same way. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: BlogFiction.org

September 2, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

When you get around to the type of internet fiction called blog fiction, or blogfic — and it won’t take you long — you should stop in at BlogFiction.org. On that site you’ll find posts that will help you put things in context, as well as get you up to speed on the current state of the genre (if that’s the right word for it).

First up, and a must-read, is a post titled Blog Fiction Defined. It’s exactly the kind of deep analysis I like, but it’s also very accessible, and includes a clickable flow chart to help you grasp the information presented. Even better, there’s an explicit acknowledgment that it’s too soon to nail some of the details down, and from an editorial point of view that’s a very good sign.

After that, poke around on the blog and in the forum. There are some good nuggets of information to be found not just on the subject of blog fiction, but on the much more important question of what blog fiction is and may become. As someone who’s interested not just in reading blogfic, but in writing it, I need to know how blog fiction is put together as a matter of craft, and BlogFiction.org seems interested in that question as well.

— Mark Barrett

Leet

September 1, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

Do you know what leet (or leetspeak) is? I’m betting you do, but like me you may not have known the name for it.

I’ve actually been trying for over a year to figure out what to call this hallucinalingo the K3wL kids are all using, but every search on the subject was thwarted precisely because the language is so plastic. Today, however, while enmeshed in a completely different subject, I stumbled on the keyword that unlocks the code. Leet.

L| <4// |~33[) em0|~3 /-/3|~3.

(And before the leetpolice throw me up against a wall and give me a few kidney punches for desecrating the lingo — yes, I know you can’t just slap things together like that. For demonstration purposes only.)

Google & Sony: Together Again

September 1, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

It looks like the Google/Sony alliance is getting serious. And as I said last week, in a post about the rollout of Sony’s new anti-Kindle e-readers, it’s going to be very hard to bet against this tag-team powerhouse in any market they decide to enter.

The news from last night is that Sony is going to be putting Google’s Chrome browser in all of the PC’s that it ships in North America.

Sony started installing Chrome in PCs bound for North America in May, a Sony representative said. The deal was initially a test run for the two companies, but the test phase is nearly over.

The Sony deal marks an important step for Chrome into PCs. Launched almost exactly a year ago, the browser has had a rough time against rivals such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Once again the Google/Sony alliance is strengthened, and the momentum of their combined flying wedge is aimed straight at Microsoft. [ Read more ]

Flash Fiction Defined

August 31, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I spent some time today trying to bring my growing awareness of internet fiction into some kind of focus, and while doing so the phrase ‘flash fiction’ kept nagging at me like a forgotten errand. Later, in a moment of clarity I realized that I didn’t really have the slightest idea what flash fiction was, beyond being very short.

So I saddled up ol’ Metaphor (that’s the imaginary horse I just invented for this post) and rode over to the Wikipedia Saloon, (apparently this post is going to have a Western theme), and asked around. And here’s what I found:

Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. There is no widely accepted definition of the length of the category.

So there you go: nobody knows what flash fiction is.

Yee hah!

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Authonomy

August 31, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Imagine for a moment that you’re a publishing house. You’ve been putting book deals together for decades the old-fashioned way. You have agents you know and trust doing the heavy sifting for you, plowing through countless query letters from eager new authors. You have in-house editors working with a stable of developing and established authors, packaging titles for developing and established niches, and leveraging copyrighted content across developing and established mediums. You know, down to the last penny, what it costs to print a page, change a typo, or put a book on a shelf in any bookstore in the world.

And then the internet comes to town.

What do you do? Well, after a good bit of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, you would probably come up with something very much like Authonomy. (If you haven’t seen the site before, click over and take a look. You’ll ‘get it’ in about five seconds.) You might not do it as well as HarperCollins has done it, but you’d recognize the obviousness of the solution, and you would seize the opportunity.

By establishing an online community under the auspices of HarperCollins, and by promising members of that community a chance to get their work in front of editors at HarperCollins, Authonomy solves two persistent publishing problems in one fell swoop. First, it offloads part of the arduous and rarely-rewarding process of sifting through submissions — which is currently undertaken by agents around the world — onto an even less-demanding community. Second, it gives HarperCollins the appearance of being forward-looking, tech-savvy and internet-aware, when in fact they are simply replacing one system of mining writers with another system of mining writers. [ Read more ]

Why the Book Biz Should Be Scared

August 28, 2009 By Mark 10 Comments

Next time you’re about to school someone on how the music industry is or is not like the book business, stop what you’re doing and locate a copy of Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, by Steven Knopper.

While you should ideally read the whole thing, at the very least you should flip to Chapter 7 and read it in full before you wax intellectual about all things digitally downloaded. Here’s a key graph:

“These days, [Aimee] Mann uses recording technology that is cheaper than ever and makes licensing deals with major distribution companies simply to put her records in stores and post them on iTunes. She gets to keep control of her master recordings and makes every creative decision about what does and doesn’t go on the record. ‘A lot of artists don’t realize how much money they could make by retaining ownership and licensing directly,’ her manager, Michael Hausman, told ex-Talking Head David Byrne in Wired.”

Why is that a big deal? Because it makes clear that recording artists no longer need partners in order to produce music or deliver it to an audience. Between advances on the recording side, which have made CD-quality audio cheap to produce, and developments on the digital/internet side, which have made CD-quality audio cheap to distribute, there is no longer any obstacle between Aimee Mann and her audience. [ Read more ]