I’ve installed and played around with Sophie for a few days now. It’s an Alpha release, so expect bugs and crashes and weird little things to pop up.
The current Sophie user interface is clunky, to say the least - objects dragged about don’t feel snappy, and there are no help files built into the software. There is no right click functionality anywhere. To make things worse, the only documentation I’ve found is a Quicktime movie over at the Sophie project page, and while it may cover all the basics for writing a Sophie eBook it isn’t enough.
The project site is a minor drawback on its own - it is hard to navigate and is a complete pain when you’re trying to find information about the software. A quick peek around tells me the site is running on Drupal, though I may be mistaken.
Perhaps a wiki will help, in due time.
I’m not exactly sure how Sophie will be accepted by the global eBook publishing community, and from what I see it looks like a glorified cross-platform version of Powerpoint. With comments, streaming and web integration.
But apart from all the Alpha hiccups (we must give it time to grow), Sophie has all the basics in place. Videos, music, pictures and good typography support are built in, as well as integration with servers. The inclusion of a Timeline feature is slightly perplexing to me - books are meant to be browsed at your own pace, are they not? - but overall it looks very promising.
I’ll see if I can help out with documentation - Sophie has a lot of potential; let’s hope it starts taking off in a year or two.
Remember Sophie? That project under the Institute for the Future of the Book that was designed to replace PDFs once and for all? I wrote about it in February, and at long last there’s some news about the software.
The Institute’s blog states that an alpha version of Sophie will be released this week, which I can’t wait to get my grubby paws on. It should be very interesting to see how they’ve implemented the features they mentioned in their last press release.
A very rough roadmap for Sophie:
June — a more robust version of the current feature set
August — a special version of Sophie optimized for the OLPC (aka $100 laptop or XO) in time for the launch of the first six million machines
September — a beta version of Sophie 1.0 which will include the first pass at a Sophie (sic) reader
December — release of Sophie 1.0
I can’t wait for December. Find out more about Sophie here and here.
Google organized Unbound sometime ago (the video is dated 8th March), and I thought I should share it over here - some of the snippets of speeches, especially Cory Doctorow’s and Seth Godin’s were particularly interesting. Oh, and watch for this line:
… where we discovered that the more content we put up on our own website; the more content we gave away the more books we sold.
“Rich people may have finally found the way to heaven: a genetically engineered camel that would fit into the eye of a needle.”
To writers still aspiring to be taken up by one of the traditional publishing houses: our eye to writing heaven has just gotten smaller.
Let’s look at the odds working against authors wanting to publish a first novel:
There are hundreds of competent writing courses out there, which in turn raises the quality for submissions to publishers. Your writing, if beautiful, has to compete with hundreds of others who are more or less as good as, if not better than, yours.
So let’s look at the other factor in getting published: content. Or topic. Or what you write about. If you’re a novelist, the story you present in your first novel must be distinctive, fresh, and easily marketable. It is perhaps this last point that provides us with some worry - more and more marketing campaigns in the publishing industry have huge pictures of good looking authors to use while promoting their fiction - authors are sold next to their books.
Let’s talk about reading habits:
In a survey of 2,000 adults, a third had not bought a new book in the previous 12 months. 34% said they did not read books. (Expanding the Market, Book Marketing Ltd, 2004)
Whether they use the internet or not wasn’t asked, though I believe it should - the internet is primarily a text based medium where reading reigns supreme. Back to the topic at hand: less and less people are reading books, buying books, enjoying literature. There are a myriad of reasons, but let’s just step back and conclude that while book nuts are not shrinking dramatically, they’re not growing exponentially either.
But the number of books, content and writing out there are growing exponentially.
A lot of the above points are discussed and presented poignantly in a Guardian Unlimited article I’ve just finished consuming. The future looks bleak.
Before I became a journalist, I worked as a reader for Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus. I learnt that if it is true that everyone has a novel in them, most people would be best advised to keep it there.
Remember FictionPress? The site where authors post up their writing, and other authors get to comment on the various works put up?
I personally don’t like FictionPress. Or FanFiction.net, for that matter. You don’t get to choose the fonts and font sizes your fiction is presented in, nor decide the environment in which a reader interacts with your words. There you just post fiction and pray that others start taking an interest in what you write. No upward climb towards being published, though some may argue it is a good way to improve your writing.
Urbis, which is basically a polished spin on FictionPress’s idea, does seem to do a few things right. It feels like your typical Web 2.0 service - shiny, polished and well presented. And there is a focused approach to writing - a goals section makes sure you work towards something, while making it easy to socialise with those who are working towards the same goal.
The Be Published goal had 1005 items at the time this post was being written.
Urbis also has a credit system, used as a way to encourage reviews of other people’s work. The underlying concept is easy enough to understand: you earn credits by reviewing other people’s works, and you spend them by revealing reviews other people have written about yours. It’s quite a brilliant move, frankly speaking - it makes sure people don’t hog the duvet and selfishly stick to their own writing.
Let’s look at the odds working against authors wanting to publish a first novel:
Remember 
