Richard Powers writes about dictation through the ages:

Why all this need for speech? Long after we’ve fully retooled for printed silence, we still feel residual meaning in the wake of how things sound. Speech and writing share some major neural circuitry, much of it auditory. All readers, even the fast ones, subvocalize. That’s why so many writers — like Flaubert, shouting his sentences in his gueuloir — test the rightness of their words out loud.

What could be less conducive to thought’s cadences than stopping every time your short-term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You’d be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow. The 130-year-old qwerty keyboard may even have been designed to slow fingers and prevent key jamming. We compose on keys the way dogs walk on two legs. However good we get, the act will always be a little freakish.

Link to the NYT article

Fantasy author George R. R. Martin posted on his blog that over three thousand emails and a couple hundred bookmarks have suddenly vanished from his computer.

There’s an interesting paragraph about how he works:

Lest anyone have a heart attack, let me hasten to add that this has NOT affected A DANCE WITH DRAGONS or any of my other work-in-progress. I do my writing on a completely different computer than the one I use for email and the internet, in part to guard against viruses, worms, and nightmares like this. My work machine does not even use Windows (which I loathe). I write with WordStar 4.0 on a pure DOS-based machine. Mock if you must… but WordStar and DOS are both stable as rocks, and never give me the sort of headaches I get from Windows. (I won’t even talk about Microsoft Word, about which I have nothing printable to say).

You can read the whole post here.

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

Literary magazines are increasingly converting to online submissions and on-screen editing, increasing efficiency, cutting costs and saving the rainforests.

Those editors reluctant to convert to online submissions have expressed concerns about economics and eyestrain. Printing out thousands of electronic submissions is not feasible for most journals, and the alternative—asking readers to stare at screens—does not appeal to editors like Stephanie G’Schwind, whose staff members at the Colorado Review consistently tell her “they don’t want to read submissions on-screen.” Michael Czyzniejewski, the editor of Mid-American Review, agrees. “Sitting at a computer terminal for so many more hours than I already do seems like a complete nightmare.”

Many editors do recognize the benefits of online submissions, however, and don’t want to miss out on the trend. “I don’t want to lose submissions because good writers are sending their work with a click of a button instead of wasting postage, stationery, and a lot of time,” says Czyzniejewski.

Before Glimmer Train switched to an online system several years ago, shouldering the stack of submissions was more than coeditors Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies could handle. “We’d come back from a three-day weekend and there would be eight mail buckets leaning against our office door,” says Burmeister-Brown. While not all writers and editors agree that the time has come for an exclusively online submission process, most would agree that eight mail buckets can hold an awful lot of paper—and in this time of heightened awareness of limited natural resources and green initiatives, the days of binder clips, SASEs, and slush piles may be numbered.

Link to the full Poets & Writers, Inc. article

Yesterday Microsoft launched a beta version of its Live Search Books that makes thousands of public domain and noncopyrighted texts scanned from its library partners searchable online. Sometime next year Microsoft hopes to expand the searchable service to include copyrighted books from publishers with their permission.

Guren categorized yesterday’s beta launch as a first step in providing searchable non-copyrighted books andeventually copyrighted books with publisher permission. Books available in the beta were scanned from Microsoft’s library partners at the University of California, the British Library and the University of Toronto. Its new partners include Cornell University, the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine. The books are either in the public domain or with copyright belonging to the library.

Link to the Publishers Weekly article, link to Live Search Books

Award-winning sf author and well-known blogger Cory Doctorow writes about how giving away free ebooks of his books through the internet helped increase his sales.

It’s good business for me, too. This “market research” of giving away e-books sells printed books. What’s more, having my books more widely read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans’ tireless evangelism for my work doesn’t just sell books–it sells me.

The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but their royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on day jobs, teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and other varied sources to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells more books for me, it also gives me more opportunities to earn my keep through writing-related activities.

Link to the Forbes article (via BoingBoing)

Engadget reports:

Oh, come now, like you thought the world’s largest book retailer (online) — which just started peddling digital video under the Unbox brand — wasn’t going to go head to head with Sony’s Reader on an e-book device and service? Say hello to the Amazon Kindle, their take on a book reader device that comes equipped with a 6-inch 800 x 600 display (which we can only assume is e-ink), 256MB internal storage, smallish two-thumb keyboard cursor bar, scroll wheel, standard mini USB port, 3.5mm headphone jack, SD slot, and get this: EV-DO data! (Don’t believe us? The spec sheet is after the break. Why do you think it was in the FCC?)

Looks a little big and clunky to me. And surely they could have done better than 256mb of storage? True, ebooks don’t take up as much space as mp3s, but it’s several times as big as any iPod. The real question, though, is will it work with ebooks that weren’t bought from Amazon?

Read the report here (with pics!). (Via futurismic)