Author Jo Walton has declared April 23 to be International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, to be celebrated by authors giving away free, professional-quality work online.

This is a reference to author Howard Hendrix’s controversial “webscabs rant“, in which he accuses authors who give their works away for free on the internet of undercutting other authors, “rotting [the SFWA] organization from within” and of “converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch”. (Yeah, strong stuff.)

In honour of Dr Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if it hasn’t, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.

Whatever you’re posting should go on your own site. I’ll make a post here on the day and people can post links in comments to whatever they’re putting up on. If you are a member of SFWA, or SFWA qualified but not a member (like me) you get extra pixel-spattered points for doing this. If other people want to collect the links too, that would be really cool. Please disseminate this information widely.

Link (via BoingBoing)

Scribd is a new site that lets you upload, read and share documents in a variety of formats (.doc, .txt, .pdf and much more) and perform high-quality conversions between them - to html, jpeg, even to robot-read mp3. In addition, you can also embed the content on your own website. A great way to read and share files like pdfs without having to mess around with multiple programs.

Link (via The Best Media in Life is Free)

Interesting article from Bloggasm, discussing whether releasing a book under a Creative Commons license really does increase sales. Their advice: get BoingBoinged.

“The thing is, there’s a confound here,” Watts explained. “It wasn’t the CC release per se that gave me the boost; it was all the people talking about it. Boingboing doesn’t pimp every novel that comes down the pike. It has to be newsworthy in some way, and an author giving his work away is, for the time being, newsworthy. It attracts attention.”

“So what happens when this catches on?” Watts said. “What happens when everybody releases their work through a Creative Commons licence? Then it’s no longer newsworthy, and while it will certainly continue to make my work more accessible to people who already know of my existence, it certainly won’t lure in any new readers the way the Blindsight campaign has done. It’s a niche strategy, in other words. It only works as long as most artists aren’t doing it– and as long as that’s the case, I’d certainly consider releasing my future books under a CC license.”

Link (via Futurismic)

Previously:
Peter Watts releases SF novel under Creative Commons license

Interesting article on the failure of the e-book market:

Right now, many of the largest publishers charge a cover price for ebooks that is 80% to 100% of the hardcover price. Virtually nobody except Baen (and now a couple of other publishers who’ve dipped a toe in the Webscription market, and some self-publishers) is even thinking about trying to establish what an ebook is really worth in the market.

We know roughly what it costs to produce a book, and we can point to the areas where ebooks are cheaper than paper editions (no dead trees and ink, for one thing; no warehousing or distribution for another) and more expensive (downloads, website maintenance). But we don’t really know what an ebook is worth to the readers, because the market that could give us meaningful feedback on pricing has been strangled in the crib.

My take on ebooks is that they are — and should be seen as — the cheapest form of disposable literature. They’re not cultural artefacts (pace Cory Doctorow); you don’t buy them in signed, slipcased, limited editions. They’re like stripped mass market paperbacks without even the value-added of doubling as wood pulp wall insulation once you’ve read them.

Now, there exists within writing and publishing circles a neurotic fear that sooner or later (probably In Five Years’ Time — that seems to be the normal window) a cheap digital paper based ebook reader will come along, that makes the experience of reading text on a screen no different from the experience of reading a lump of dead tree stitched inside a piece of pigskin. And, as the horror story has it, we will be In Big Trouble, because the pre-existing availability of pirate ebooks will lead to enormous proliferation and a total crash in the value of books. Some pretty smart people believe this story, and the result has been to give it more credibility than it actually deserves. And it leads them to draw what I believe to be faulty conclusions. […]

It’s the received, prevalent wisdom — and it’s a load of rubbish.

Link to full article (via BoingBoing)

Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.
Even if we had to make it all up.

SteamPunk Magazine is a publication that is dedicated to promoting steampunk as a culture, as more than a sub-category of fiction. It is a journal of fashion, music, misapplied technology and chaos. And fiction.

The magazine is available in print for only $3, and as a free pdf download. Since it’s published under a Creative Commons license, it’s free to copy, share and distribute.

The first issue is already available, and the magazine is accepting submissions content (fiction, illustrations and more) for future issues.

Link (via BoingBoing)

The Library of Congress has received a $2-million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to digitize public domain works. The grant emphasizes digitizing “at-risk” titles—or books that are falling apart—and volumes about American history. Dubbed “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress,” the project will also allow the LoC to invest in such technology as, according to a statement from the organization, “suitable page-turner display” along with a program dedicated to quickly indexing and capturing chapters and other sections of a work.

Article from Publisher’s Weekly.

The shortlist for the annual British science fiction award had been released.  Awards will be given in three categories: novel, short fiction and artwork.  The awards will be presented at Eastercon on April 7.

There’s also a recommended reading list of non-fiction works.
Link to the shortlist (via BoingBoing)

Wired News reports on the growing popularity of reading - and writing - books on mobile phones.

A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each. The first mobile phone novel was written six years ago by fiction writer Yoshi, but the trend picked up in the last couple years when high-school girls with no previous publishing experience started posting stories they wrote on community portals for others to download and read on their cell phones.

“A mobile phone novel boom is definitely in place,” said Magic iLand spokesman Toshiaki Itou. “And these are people who hardly ever read novels before, never mind written one.”

Link to the Wired News article