This Writing Life

I’ve spent most of this morning reading through some documentation sent to me by John Jarrold, my agent, concerning the Google Book Settlement. Google is in the process of digitising books. It began this, and has continued to do so, largely without the permission of rights holders.

The issues are complex. Even the summary I read contained several statements to the effect that we simply won’t how aspects of the agreement will be interpreted until they are tested in a court. Adding to the complexity is a mish-mash of UK and US jurisdictional problems.

Overall, I don’t think Google’s actions are legal; opting in to the settlement will suggest I agree with the legitimisation of an illegal act, which I don’t. It represents a fundamental change to copyright law that puts the onus on rights holders to defend themselves against behemothic entities.

If you’d like to know more, here is the Google Book Settlement Page; and here is a summary by Gillian Spraggs.

Further to my review of the COOL-ER eBook Reader, it’s worth noting that, elsewhere, the Internet is lighting up with comments, speculation and reviews about the coming storm in publishing that is the digitisation of literature. Check out this MacWorld story. It outlines the ten new ebook readers announced or released at CES this week.

I had a brief exchange with @Sifter on Twitter yesterday. He reminded me that the key factor in the digitisation of books is the development of a device that will bring such books to the masses. Remember a few years back when only students, tech journalists and geeks were using email? Then, suddenly, your mum and dad had email accounts. You could bank online. A tipping point had come. For ebooks, the tipping point will come with a device that can finally compete with the printed book as the technology best adapted for reading, short form and long.

Andy Ihnatko recently published a sensible round-up of what the fabled Apple Tablet (or iSlate, or iBook) might feature. Elsewhere, Neven Mrgan hopes that Apple will take the reins of the distribution model for writers so that publishing a book will be as easy as uploading photos to Flickr. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has published two posts of speculating about the Tablet: the Tablet and Tablet Musings. How close will this device come to Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video?

Friday Project author Caroline Smailes – in a post entitled I’m Cheap – announced that her books In Search of Adam and Black Boxes are now available as ebooks for the relatively cheap price of £1.05. This, I think, is more sensible than the sky-high figures I’ve seen elsewhere, and I expect the trend to continue throughout the industry. (Note that some authors, such as Cory Doctorow, have been giving away ebook versions of their commercial fiction for several years.)

Interesting times.

My review of the device, together with some comments on how ebook readers might affect publishing, can be found as a guest post over at Scott Pack’s blog today.

I do hope so. Can’t bloody stand the stuff, particularly the cursive.

Anne Trubek:

Proclaiming the virtuousness of one way of forming a “j” over others is a trope that occurs throughout handwriting’s history. For instance, early Christians jettisoned Roman scripts they deemed decadent and pagan. In their scriptoria, monks developed Uncial to replace Roman scripts. An internecine battle ensued when Irish monks developed a variation on Uncial that traditionalists deemed an upstart, quasi-heretical script.

Via Miller-McCune.

For those of you who don’t know – and there’s no reason, perhaps, that you should – DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and it is a technology by which content distributors (record companies, for the most part) attempt to control how a customer experiences their product.

Now, audiobooks.

The starting pistol for Internet-distributed audiobooks has been fired and Audible.com is at the ‘b’ of the bang. They have a huge selection of titles read by great actors and if you go for one of their monthly plans, like I do, you can enjoy two books per month for very little cash. Top drawer.

The trouble? Audible’s titles are DRM’d. That is, they are locked down tight. Countless are the times I’ve said to a friend of mine, ‘Oh, you’d love this book I’m listening to…’ and then trail off because I know I won’t be able to lend it. The DRM means only a few machines I’ve nominated can playback the audio.

Well, this stinks. That much is obvious. But you’d think that Audible are doing this because of the pressures put upon them by publishers. It turns out that this is not necessarily the case. In an article for Publisher’s Weekly article, Cory Doctorow (whose book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I review here) relates the saga of trying to get (i) his publisher, then (ii) Audible, then (iii) the online Apple iTunes store to offer his new book without DRM. Thus far, he’s only managed to convince the first two.

Audiobooks are fantastic. They are unabridged, high-quality recordings of stories that you can enjoy when you’re out walking, doing the dishes, or working out. If Steve Jobs – and therefore Apple – is serious about his attitude towards DRM, he should make sure the online Apple store supports pure, unfiddled-with MP3s for both music and the spoken word.

I’m pretty sure this is what readers want. It’s what I want.

As a coda, you can download an audiobook of the first edition of Déjà Vu here – for £500.

H’only joking! It is, of course, free as in air.

There is an emerging genre of what might be called the minimalist word processor (cf. Scrivener, Write Room). These applications are designed to cut away visual distraction and leave the screen looking somewhat like a plain sheet of paper in a typewriter (or, if that’s too far back for you, then looking like an old pre-GUI text editor).

Ommwriter – for that is its name of one such – is available as a beta from here. You just need to provide a valid email address to obtain the download link.

Text is entered into a small window that floats above a background. By default, this background is a snowy scene with two black trees off to one side. Otherwise you see nothing but the blinking cursor and the text you type.

That’s about it.

I’m impressed. If there’s anything difficult about writing on a computer – which, let’s face it, makes it easy in a mind-bogglingly large number of ways – it is distraction.

James Burt, in reference to his own post on Literature Network about writing workshops, says:

At the moment I don’t feel comfortable with writing workshops, but I know my writing has improved in the past through many of the talented people I have workshopped with.

That goes for me, too.

The piece makes several good points. At the end of the day, I feel that a workshop full of writers is an unpredictable, chaotic entity that is unusually susceptible to initial conditions.

As I said, I’ve been lucky with writers’ groups. Here’s what I’ve found over the years:

• In any group of people, there will be some whose opinions are plain wrong. It can be difficult to identify those people.
• A fellow writer whom you admire personally can read out something that is absolutely awful. This will make for an uncomfortable moment when you try to give them honest feedback.
• Without honest feedback, a writing group is a pointless talking shop characterised by commiseration.
• There is a bias towards short fiction because this involves less work for those in the workshop than longer pieces. Through a form of cognitive dissonance, this can bolster the idea that short fiction is a higher or purer form of fiction than the longer variety.
• It is not the case, as far as I can tell, that other writers can provide you with useful feedback just because they are trying to write too.
• These people do know what it’s like to try and crash.

Reader, it has been a long day. I spent the early part of this morning prepping for two hours of seminars on multiple regression (if you don’t know what this is, you don’t want to; if you do know what this, you probably still don’t want to), and this afternoon was whittled away prepping for four hours of seminars starting at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning.

In summary, I’m often grumpy on Tuesday afternoons.

And then I received this email:

I just wanted to say thank you for releasing your book as an audio book – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed listening to it!

Hope you release another one soon!

This is, of course, lovely.

Déjà Vu (the first edition) is available as an audiobook here. (Though the improved special edition is here.)

Philip Palmer on Faster-Than-Light travel in science fiction.

For at this very fast speed, one’s mass will be infinite (i.e. even greater, so the equations prove, than my mass and the dimensions of my arse on Boxing Day) and this makes travel of any kind difficult.

► Faster Than the Speed of Light | Orbit Books

An interesting article on the use of mass transit in psychology.

A pregnant woman appears: Who will give up his seat first? A blind man slips and falls. Who helps? Someone appears out of the blue and asks you to mail a letter. Will you?

► Psychologists have been watching us on the subway. Here’s what they’ve learned. – By Tom Vanderbilt – Slate Magazine