Alan Giles, blogging for The Bookseller, yesterday wrote an article comparing Radiohead’s album experiment to the book industry. He points out:

But here’s the most surprising conclusion from “In Rainbows”; despite an explicit invitation by the band to legally download the album for free, huge numbers chose to do so illegally. Research by Will Page, chief economist of copyright organisation MCPS-PRS Alliance, and Eric Garland, c.e.o. of online media researcher Big Champagne, reported 400,000 such “torrents” in the first day, and 2.3 million over the first 25 days. Yet by any standards the album has been a huge commercial success. Page and Garland conclude that “torrents and legal downloads are complements, not competitors”.

He comes to an interesting close when he talks about the music industry’s attitude towards piracy in the 1980s:

.. the (then) record industry publicly argued that “home taping is killing music”, while recognising that hard-up students who had developed a love of music through illegally copying might become core buyers in later life.

It is worth pointing out here that piracy doesn’t affect the publishing industry as much as it does the music one. I’d be more worried about the lack of offline readers and the lower margins the publishing industry faces today than the possibility of copyright infringement. Though, on the other hand, I admit to downloading a copy of Breaking Dawn recently (ehheh!) after finding out that the Malaysian release was delayed for a week. The difference here being that I’d buy the book the instant it hit local bookstores - owning a paper copy is priceless and forever, and a lot more meaningful to me than a .lit file. (Special thanks to Sharon of Bibliobibuli for highlighting this article)

Other links worth checking out:

• Some of my predictions regarding Pages Unbound’s close have come true: discussions about a replacement/clone site have sprung up in the PU forums. Interested writers contact Rose here.
• The New York Times on why we capitalize our ‘I’s.
• A long transcript answering the question ‘How Is the Internet Changing Literary Style?‘
• Just found out about Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth Of Networks. Benkler explores the reality of making money through user generated content, though Nicholas Carr has a wager going on that the only reason volunteers still exist is because there isn’t really any way to make money off them. The book is available for free here.
• Daniel Hall writes in The Economist about how technology is fragmenting the music industry, and - like many others - goes on to throw the gauntlet in the book industry’s direction.

If it seems that more and more people are seeing the parallels between both industries, then it is because they are. The Internet has disrupted many things for many people and the general situation we’re seeing on the ground now is mass confusion. Which equals opportunity. Exciting times, this.

PS: Alexandra Erin’s not gotten back to me on the future of Pages Unbound, so I’m in the dark as to what her descicions are. Somebody help, please?

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I admit some of the articles here are old, but I’ve been hoarding links for awhile now with never enough time to post them up. The picture above, for instance, is a graphical representation of all the cross references in the Bible. Click the picture for the source, or read on:

• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, by Chris Anderson (the same guy who came up with the Long Tail concept), looks at how and why anything to do with the web eventually becomes free.
• Copyrighting Creativity is J.K.Rowling vs the blogosphere.
• The Greatest Punctuation Mark You Never Use: Interrobang
• Web Offers A Market For Budding Hemingways is a cynical look at blooking. From Reuters.
• [Blook]: Sonja Nitshke. Brilliantly written, structured and presented.
• [Blook]: No Man Is An Island, by Gavin Williams. I’ve snatched sections during my sparse online time, but I’ve to admit I’m frightfully behind on it. I like what I’ve read so far. Bookmarked.

Three online storytelling efforts (read: webcomics) that deserve mention:

• Garfield Minus Garfield is a good look at the Garfield comic strips without the orange cat. It turns the strip into an ‘even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life’.
• Adam’s Apple. Requires an understanding of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the Macbook Air … and God.
• The Life Of Mann is an online graphic novel that features a different artist every chapter. Both The Museum Of Modern Fiction and The Life Of Mann are the projects of Josef Lee, a Singaporean artist and graphic designer.

PS: I’ve got a break coming up, so I will have enough time to post up some articles I’ve been working on. I apologize for my inactivity: exams really are not letting up.

PPS: Novelr has gone through a server change and a minor redesign, and I hope it’s better, faster, and easier to read. Enjoy.

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I love Sharon Bakar. Just the other day I found two articles via her blog (Bibliobibuli) entitled ‘The Sharp Rise (And Quick Fall) Of The Blogger’s Books.’ It is the ugly sound of publishers waking up to reality: blogger popularity will not translate to book sales. A particularly telling sentence:

… “built-in” audience or not, it all comes down to content. “A good writer is a good writer,” says Leitch. “Dana Vachon’s book (Mergers & Acquisitions), which was based on his blog - the key to that, it wasn’t about a guy that blogged. He’s a real writer. I don’t think anyone picks up the book and is like, ‘Hey, where are the links?’”

Wonderful stuff.

On a partially related front: does writing really matter? Caleb Crain writes in the New Yorker that reading may very well die out: instead, people will communicate through more visual mediums. The image that hit me was Socrates laughing away in his grave - he believed writing to be inferior to conversation.

A paragraph that made me cringe:

… but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

In which case you and I will be very rare people indeed.

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• James from JPS/fact (formerly Progression, which I quoted from in my post about lousy blook quality) is asking a favour from all of us. He’s currently doing a PhD on the influence of the internet on traditional print fiction, and he wants to compile a list of novels (printed & published) that have been influenced by the internets, either being published as fake blogs, emails, web pages and such. Go, on, give him a hand - his blog has amazing insights into the world of online (and blog) fiction.
• While you’re there read his post on online fiction and popularity - there’ll a few points to think about, though it’s written as a rant.
• Duane Poncy from Elohi Gadugi (and The Germaine Truth) has done something truly laudable: setting up a forum, Creative Blogs, for blook writing and online reading. Go join up, and quickly!
• Business Standard - Read a good blook lately?
• After releasing Sophie (which I covered here), The Institute For The Future Of The Book is hard at work again. They’ve outdone themselves with CommentPress, a plugin that helps give context to blog comments in a post. I can already see fascinating applications for it - non-fiction blooks in particular have great use for context sensitive reader and author interaction. TIFTFOTB projects are usually academic in nature - so I’ll not be surprised if the world of academia (and academic blogs in particular) employ this plugin to dissect articles and posts. Peer review, anyone?

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• Just discovered Xlibris: a ’strategic partner of Random House Ventures’. Much like Lulu, only … smaller, and connected to a traditional publishing house at that.
• Anne Wayman tells us how Writers can stop Global Warming.
• [Blook]: Death On The Beach. Blooked on a ‘displaced Blackberry’, and currently on Chapter 4.
• [Blook]: I have read half of the first arc of Omen of Chaos, and … well. Carlos is prolific and enthusiastic, and really dedicated to the story, but OoC is not something you’ll find in a bookstore anytime soon. I’m keen to see what he writes next, though: someone who writes so much can only get better and better at it.

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