Joel Rickett writes:

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

The stories - which can be read online at wetellstories.co.uk - will feature clues that point to a seventh story hidden on the internet, culminating in a competition to win a £13,000 Penguin Classics library.

Link to the Guardian article

The official shortlist for the Hugo (one of the top awards for science fiction and fantasy books, stories, movies, TV shows, art and more) has just been released. Here are the candidates in the best novel category:

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
The Last Colony by John Scalzi
Halting State by Charles Stross

Link to the full list of nominations

From the Hugo award site:

You do not need to attend Denvention 3 in order to participate in the Hugo Awards. A “supporting membership” will be sufficient to make you a member of the World Science Fiction Society and get you voting rights for both the nomination stage and the final ballot. A supporting membership costs US$50 and you can buy one here.

The Espresso Book Machine, which allows users to print copies of books on demand, has just been installed in the New York public library.  The library’s offering free copies of any book out of a list of 20 available on the machine (see below) to anyone who goes to try it out.

The Espresso Book Machine will be available to the public at SIBL through August, and will operate Monday- Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library is located at 188 Madison Avenue (at 34th Street).

Library users will have the opportunity to print free copies of such public domain classics as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens and “Songs of Innocence” by William Blake, as well as appropriately themed in-copyright titles as Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and Jason Epstein’s own “Book Business.” The public domain titles were provided by the Open Content Alliance (“OCA”), a non-profit organization with a database of over 200,000 titles. The OCA and ODB are working closely to offer this digital content free of charge to libraries across the country. Both organizations have received partial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The EBM, now available for sale to libraries and retailers, can potentially allow readers anywhere to obtain within minutes, almost any book title in any language, whether or not the book is in print. The EBM’s proprietary software transmits a digital file to the book machine, which automatically prints, binds, and trims the reader’s selection within minutes as a single, library-quality, paperback book, indistinguishable from the factory-made title.

The direct-to-consumer model of the EBM eliminates shipping and warehousing costs for books (thereby also eliminating returns and pulping of unsold books) and allows simultaneous global availability of millions of new and backlist titles in all categories and languages. These savings permit potentially lower prices to consumers and libraries, and greater royalties and profits to authors and publishers. Also, titles will never have to go out of print again.

Link to press release (via BoingBoing).

The Guardian writes:

The American writer Norman Mailer is to use a “remote pen” to do a book-signing from the other side of the Atlantic, after age and ill-health forced him to cancel a rare public appearance in the UK.

…Mailer will use an internet-based technique devised by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood for remotely signing books called LongPen.

Mailer will be at his home in Provincetown on the east coast near New York, while his audience will be in the tented city which is built in a Georgian square in Edinburgh’s New Town each year for the festival.

According to an older Guardian article on the subject of the LongPen’s launch last year (via Neil Gaiman’s blog archives):

LongPen allows an author to see the reader she is signing for, and vice-versa, using a videoconferencing system, and an image of the page to be signed.

She then writes her inscription on a touch-sensitive LCD screen and presses a button. That sends a signal to the remote bookstore, where the robot arm, clutching an ordinary ballpoint pen, copies out the message on to the book.

A signing through the LongPen is certainly better than a complete cancellation, though in my opinion it leaves something to be desired over an in-person encounter with a favorite author. Still, if the alternative is a tired/grouchy/sick author, a signing through the LongPen might actually allow better “quality time” with them.

It’ll be interesting to see whether more authors will begin to take advantage of technology like the LongPen to make appearances at signings they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to attend. Though authors have been slower than members of other employment sectors to take advantage of virtual interaction, there’s been a recent push to take advantage of technology to interact with readers: commonplace videoconferencing at events and George R. R. Martin’s appearance in Second Life are only a couple examples.

Here’s a great project that really makes me wish I lived in London:

The London Book Project is a free book exchange on a massive scale. Using the London Underground as a high speed distribution network, we aim to bring real literature to London’s commuters. Scrap the freesheets - read a free book instead!

Over the next two weeks we’ll be distributing thousands of second hand books across the tube and we want YOU to get involved. If you see one of our books, please pick it up! Then read it and replace with any book of your choice. Let’s make the tube a giant, free library!

Link (via BoingBoing)

Bestselling fantasy author George R. R. Martin (of the amazing series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is right up there on the top of my personal list of favorite books) is making an appearance in the virtual world of Second Life. He’s joining a growing list of politicians, authors and musicians who have been using SL to connect with people in the virtual environment.

Yes, I’m making a virtual appearance in Bantam’s virtual bookstore on Second Life. For those of you who don’t know it, Second Life is… well, sort of like World of Warcraft without the axes, swords, and monsters. Our world, kinda sorta, virtually. Anyway, I’ll be there this Thursday evening, in avatar form, doing a reading from A DANCE WITH DRAGONS and doing a Q&A afterwards. Proceedings will start at 9:00pm eastern [2am GMT] and run about an hour. This will be a first for me, so it will be fun to see how it goes. Ah, ’tis a brave new world, surely.

If you’d like to be part of the festivities, get thee to www.secondlife.com. You can sign up there, download the software, and design your own avatar. (I’ve never done a reading with monsters in the audience before, at least not the sort you could tell my looking at ‘em).

The virtual bookstore can only hold about sixty avatars, but the overflow will be able to see and hear the reading from satellite sites, and send questions via IM.

I’ve never done this before either, so that’s about all I can tell you about how things will work… but if you live out in the bookdocks where I’m never likely to visit on a book tour, this virtual appearance could be the next best thing. See you there!

Link to blog post. For those of you with Second Life (and if you don’t have it, get it - it’s very easy to set up), just search “bantam” in the places search tab and teleport over.

See you there!

Today is International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, celebrated by authors giving away free, professional-quality work online in a reference to author Howard Hendrix’s controversial “webscabs rant”

You can observe it by listening to this special episode of the Time Traveler podcast on the subject of giving away your writing for free, or by downloading and reading Charlie Stross’ novella Missile Gap, released in honor of the occasion (via BoingBoing).

Previously:
April 23: International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

Edit: More great fiction up! Here and here are two free audiobooks (via BoingBoing) and here’s a list of other free fiction released for the occasion (via Futurismic).

Edit: Find more fiction released for IPSTP Day on the official blog or on author Jo Walton’s blog posting.

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)