Monthly Archives: October 2010

•    Michael Stackpole argues that literary authors shouldn’t let themselves get pinched by the shift to ebooks. There’s also a salient bit about trying to make money:

  No author is owed a living. We’re not entitled to do what we’re doing and get supported because of it. It’s a business. If I can’t turn a profit at writing, the IRS will label my business a hobby and I won’t be able to deduct expenses.

  He works as a waiter – with a ‘diffident, upper crust accent’ – during his down periods. #
•    Tom Armitage spends some time talking about Open Data for the arts over at the BERG blog. He posits that data, taken and modified, can very well be a form of storytelling. On making a Twitter stream of what the curtain at the Royal Opera House is doing:

  And, as that burbles its way into my chat stream, it tells me a story: you may only think there’s a production a day in the theatre, but really, the curtain never stops moving; the organisation never stop working, even when you’re not there. I didn’t learn that by reading it in a book; I learned it by feeling it, and not even by feeling all of it ”“ just a tiny little bit. That talking robot told me a story. This isn’t about instrumenting things for the sake of it; it’s about instrumenting things to make them, in one particular way, more real.

  Via the Brantley mailing list. #
•    Barnes & Noble have released PubIt! – an ebook distribution service. Smart move, though it’s unclear how it’ll stack up against Apple and Amazon. #
•    Jane Austen Fiction Manuscripts is a joint project of the University of Oxford and King’s College London. From the About page:

  Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts are the first significant body of holograph evidence surviving for any British novelist. They represent every stage of her writing career and a variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and handwritten publications for private circulation. (…) Digitization enables their virtual reunification and will provides scholars with the first opportunity to make simultaneous ocular comparison of their different physical and conceptual states.

  The project’s set to last three years. #