The Guardian has a story today suggesting as much:
Everyone’s looking at the pattern they’ve seen in music and video - an old medium changed radically by technology - and waiting for it to hit the book world. But the chances of that happening right now are very small indeed. Why? It’s fairly straightforward.
The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn’t because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod (it didn’t launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead.
Reuters has a short video up about the movie Inkheart (based on the book by Cornelia Funke) and its world premiere. Nothing too fascinating, but it’s probably worth a look if you’ve read it and/or plan to see the film:
The Wizard and the Hopping Pot: There was once a kindly old wizard who used his magic generously and wisely for his neighbours. But then he died and he left his lucky cooking pot to his son. His son was a meanie who didn’t like Muggles and refused to help anyone. The pot got very angry about this and grew warts and hopped around the village chasing him, until he changed his mind. The End.
My lack as a young writer was not so much a lack of skill as a lack of knowledge of myself and the world. I thought if I could just write nice sentences, I’d win a Pulitzer by the time I was 20.
I desperately wanted to major in playwrighting as an undergraduate because I thought the workshops would teach me the skills to get my plays on Broadway. I was annoyed to find many of my peers at NYU writing pale imitations of Pulp Fiction (the hot movie among aspiring screenwriters at the time), but it took me a little while to realize I was writing pale imitations of Christopher Durang and Samuel Beckett. We all imitated because we hadn’t figured out how to tap our own experiences and interests, and our interests and experiences weren’t yet broad enough to produce work of much depth. A little bit of this had to do with our age and various levels of talent, but much more of it had to do with our inability yet to tap into the deep currents of our lives. Chris Shinn, who was a couple years ahead of me at NYU, was smarter than the rest of us and figured this out early, writing Four while we were still trying to figure out what we wanted to say. But it isn’t a matter of age so much as of personality — we all discover our subject matter at different times, and bloom at different rates. […]
Actually, I might have been happier if I had been able to give myself permission to study something in college other than writing. But I was convinced the only way to become a good writer was to major in it. Not so. For many people, in fact, the best way to be a good writer is to spend some time doing things other than studying writing. My writing benefited more from my time working in a high school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side than it did from the classes I was taking when not at work.
There’s lots more in the article; read it here. Via Jay Lake.
SF Signal has a page collecting links works from this year’s Hugo nomination list that are online for free. This is a great chance to read some of the year’s best speculative fiction - nearly all the nominated novellas, novelettes and short stories are online, and Harper Collins has even put up a substantial preview (71 pages) of Michael Chabon’s alternate history novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
Always wanted to create comics but can’t draw? Try Bitstrips. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:
BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site — you make “characters” using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date. Once your strip is done, anyone can modify it — it becomes part of the commons. In the first two weeks of the site’s existence, more than 16,000 strips were created by the users of the service.
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.
Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo has a great article up about book-buyers’ rights in the age of ebooks and licensing.
If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the “first sale” doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?
In the fine print that you “agree” to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you’re not paying to own ‘em, in spite of the use of the term “buy.” Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn’t take away your purchases. Still, it’s a license you can’t sell.
Published today in The Guardian: