The week in books: Why bookshops are killing life writing; St Cyril on trial; and the Orange longlist | Books | The Guardian

A mel­an­choly piece in the Guardian Review this morn­ing caught my eye. Biographer Michael Holroyd, writ­ing about the sale of biography:

What cre­ates demand? If only we knew. Publishers seem to out­siders to be para­lysed by cau­tion in these dif­fi­cult times, ask­ing them­selves what sold last year and hop­ing to repro­duce it. How often I have heard them say: “this book did not sell”. I have never heard them say: “we did not sell this book”.

► The week in books: Why book­shops are killing life writ­ing; St Cyril on trial; and the Orange long­list | Books | The Guardian

Barrington Stoke

No, not a colo­nial detect­ive from 1849, but a pub­lisher on a mis­sion to provide books that are aimed at chil­dren with dys­lexia or other issues related to read­ing. Read more →

The Ethics of Used Books

David Isaak, author of Shock and Awe, has this to say about buy­ing used paper­backs instead of new books for which an author receives a royalty:

I find this too be a gray area, not only eth­ic­ally, but in terms of my own pref­er­ences. To put it simply, more money is good…but more read­ers is even bet­ter, and I’m not sure where the trade-off lies.

In the long run, I think any author wants his or her books to be read. This will be par­tic­u­larly true of authors who sell few books. If you’re selling by the cart load, you’ve prob­ably mak­ing enough money not to worry about that second­hand 10% or so.

► TOMORROWVILLE: The Ethics of Used Books

★ Prepositions and Mind Control

Lonelysandwich makes an inter­est­ing point with regards the use of ‘on the App Store’ (in the con­text of iPhone applic­a­tions) rather than ‘at the App Store’.

If I asked you where you went to buy your iPhone, would you say you bought it on the Apple Store? No, you wouldn’t. You’d say you bought it at the Apple Store. Does this mean that Apple chooses not to think of iTunes as a retail out­let or to think of apps as retail products?

Read more →

Get With the Programme

Wired Science ran an inter­view between Brandon Keim, a journ­al­ist, and Martha Farah, a neur­os­cient­ist. They were dis­cuss­ing free will.

Says Martha:

I don’t think “free will” is a very sens­ible concept, and you don’t need neur­os­cience to reject it — any mech­an­istic view of the world is good enough, and indeed you could even argue on purely con­cep­tual grounds that the oppos­ite of determ­in­ism is ran­dom­ness, not free will! Most thought­ful neur­os­cient­ists I know have replaced the concept of free will with the concept of ration­al­ity — that we select our actions based on a kind of prac­tical reas­on­ing. And there is no con­flict between ration­al­ity and the mind as a phys­ical sys­tem — After all, com­puters are rational phys­ical systems!

Bearing in mind that Farah and I hail from the same island within the aca­demic archipelago, I thought this soun­ded like a use­ful reminder of two things: (i) the logical dif­fi­culties with the exist­ence of some­thing like ‘free will’ stem from a mech­an­istic view of the uni­verse, going back to the Ancient Greeks, and isn’t a recent inven­tion by neur­os­cient­ists; (ii) if you don’t like determ­in­ism, you should real­ise that it’s absence means ran­dom­ness — you’re screwed either way.

No, I don’t like it either.

► Is Free Will an Illusion? | Wired Science from Wired.com

Is This a Good Sentence?

From Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:

The nat­ural fra­grance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pen­cil shavings.

Aliya Whiteley’s brother says that:

pen­cil shav­ings do not smell spicy or angry. And the whole idea of pen­cil shav­ings smelling angry had made him very angry. What kind of a rub­bish writerly phrase is this? Is it style over meaning?

Read more →

Doing Things in Threes

There are, actu­ally, four ways to get pub­lished, but I can under­stand the legal reas­ons behind BubbleCow omit­ting kidnap.

Tier 1: The Big Boys; Tier 2: The Independents; Tier 3: Self Publishing

► BubbleCow: The three tiers of pub­lish­ing or can my book make any money?

The Three-Act Structure

For writers new to the game, Digital fic­tion Show has an over­view of the three-act structure.

The three act plot incor­por­ates wis­dom gleaned from how people tell stor­ies and how people require those stor­ies to be told — in a focused, coher­ent man­ner that runs in a spe­cific sequence — in order to induce curi­os­ity and a desire to find out what hap­pens next.

► Digital Fiction Show » The three act plot in fic­tion (a guide for writers) (heads up from BubbleCow)

Stories That Span Books

In the con­text of some com­plaints about the late­ness of George R. R. Martin’s next book, which is one in a series, nov­el­ist Charles Stross offers some insight into the writ­ing of book-spanning stor­ies. Read more →

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on Safari 4 Public Beta

I agree with Gruber’s com­ments on the lack of a pro­gress bar in the new ver­sion of Safari, which has been replaced by a spin­ning roundel.

It was, I soon decided, a damn clever way to show pro­gress in a way that was prom­in­ent while the page was actu­ally load­ing, and without tak­ing up any addi­tional space on the screen after load­ing was complete.

► Daring Fireball: Observations, Complaints, Quibbles, and Suggestions Regarding the Safari 4 Public Beta Released One Week Ago, Roughly in Order of Importance