reeling and writhing

news to me (that it is June tomorrow? aaargh)

So many books, only one life...I thought at first Mr Deaver was a serial killer, which is why I clicked on this when it came up in my reader. Got him confused with someone else....It is, after all, a fine name for a crime thriller writer .

From last week, there are five book reviews up on the blog at Overland. What a great platform for blog reviews - good to see this.

Included is a review of Lisa Dempster's Neon Pilgrim, Alec Patric's poetry collection which has been released as an e-book, and Emmett Stinson's short fiction collection, Known Unknowns, from Affirm Press.

Academic librarian Constance evaluates the Kobo reader, recently sold out at Borders stores across Australia.

Maud noticed this, and I thank her for it.

Not in a book group? try this one on for size. If you're not in the States, you might like to use it as a reading list later on. With notes.

The Duck has found us all something really good and silly to finish on.

Facebook public status updates searchable, says TechCrunch

Your public Facebook status updates? Now publicly searchable outside Facebook

Via the helpful chaps at TPUTH.

While the debate rages on about Facebook’s attitude to privacy, and in particular the views of Mark Zuckerberg, the current situation is that an awful lot of people make their status updates public, whether they realise the full implications or not. A stark reminder of this comes today in the form of a new search engine thrown together by two developers.

FacebookSearch simply takes those public status updates and makes them searchable, outside of Facebook. The guys behind it, Peter Burns and Will Moffat, have posted a simple explanation: “This is a simple example of just how open facebook has made your information. This data is wide open, and this is one of the least scary uses that anyone will make. If nothing changes, it’s only to get worse.” There’s an interesting discussion over at Hacker News on the morality of what they are doing.

 I am going to keep my eye on what happens there and suggest any Facebookin' readers do same. TechCrunch is a very reliable source for this kind of thing.

who listens to paper radio

A radio of paper. A fine new thing of audio podcasts on a monthly basis, of new writing.

After mountainous hours of pixel shifting and finger tapping – and countless more wrestling sound waves – we are extremely relieved and excited to announce that Paper Radio has now arrived. For those of you visiting for the first time we should explain that Paper Radio is a sonic interpretation of the unique culture of Australasia – in the shape of a podcast.

The first episode from the FM (fiction) channel, Chris Somerville’s The Drowning Man, is the story of an aloof teacher whose life is defined and dominated by the irascible temperament of water. In our next edition, a documentary for the AM (non-fiction) channel, Georgia Moodie rewinds to the 1920s and tails the experiences of the first African American jazz musicians to tour Australia.

The near future holds audio productions from Rachel O’Neill, Benjamin Law and Thomasin Sleigh.

Paper Radio has been created by a team headed by Jessie Borrelle and Jon Tjhia, working out of Melbourne.

I'm subscribed.

a new book to borrow at EWF - Chris Meade

News has come from the Emerging Writers' Festival  of a surprise addition to the Living Library program - Chris Meade:

Digital publishing: Chris Meade
Chris is Co-Director for the Institute for the Future of the Book in London. 

His particular interest is publishing and writing in the digital age.  Previously he was Director of the Poetry Society where he set up the Poetry Café in Covent Garden and the lottery funded Poetry Places project.

In the 1980s he was a pioneer of reader development, promoting public libraries as 'imagination services'.

Chris is the author of The Thoughts of Betty Spital (Penguin 1989) and a past winner of the George Orwell award for his play ‘We Two Boys’.

He is a member of Friendly Literature Organisations (FLO), a consortium supported by Arts Council England with whom he has been exploring the creative potential of new media for readers and writers.

Chris Meade will only be available for eight mentoring sessions so get in quick!

Booking details here. UPDATE: Meade will also be involved in another event at EWF. Details to follow. (I have been told I will like it.It doesn't get more enticing than that.)

teach reporters well

How journalism is being taught, right here, right now.

At the  Online Journalism blog, Paul Bradshaw and a team of UK journalism lecturers report on the vital question of teaching the journalists of tomorrow, and the answer to same. He has his undergraduate students running an online website, Birmingham Recycled, and in this post discusses how to keep them motivated during the term. The range of skills they are acquiring is what caught my eye, rather than the teaching strategies.

There's a great list of popular posts on this site which would be good to read sometime. I've already  bookmarked the one on Yahoo Pipes for future reference, having lost some other information on that handy tool a while back. I am ashamed to admit that I have been following this blog for a while, and simply cannot remember where I first heard of it. However it's worth keeping an eye on if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of web journalism.

it's news to me 12.04.10

The good folk at Mobylives have covered this report from Wired magazine that book artists are claiming their rights in the Google Books Settlement fracas too. At the time of the Mobylives post, Google was denying the charges. We'll see how that pans out.

Thanks to US bloggers Matthew Tiffany and Bud Parr for this link to audio of Faulkner reading from As I Lay Dying. 

Not only am I delighted for the good folk at Three Percent that they are on this list, but I am looking forward to studying it closely.

This article from the Vancouver Sun about Yann Martel's efforts to get his Prime Minister to read more books was spotted by Mark Sarvas, who also has some news for families on the future of the iPad, I believe.

As recommended in the latest Boldtype, where you can read an interview with the blog authors, here is a link to the blog on 'recommended inappropriate books for kids', Curious Pages.

Finally, Darcy Moore has spotted the first trailer for the film version of John Marsden's very popular YA (and well beyond) novel, Tomorrow When The War Began.

the iPad container for a new kind of book, says Stein

As readers of if:book know, i've often referred to books as the principal vehicle humans have used to move ideas around time and space. Thanks in large part to the internet, over the past fifteen years that function is increasingly being supplanted by the internet/computer/screen combo. I know many people are disappointed in the iPad because they see it as a crippled computer (e.g. Cory Doctorow's recent rant in Boing Boing). Perhaps, if Cory and other critics would stop thinking of the iPad as a computer, but rather think of it as the container for a new kind of book, they might see its potential in a different light. Although a book (in technology terms) is a closed system and certainly not a platform for creativity in the sense that a computer (or a typewriter is), that hasn't stopped books from being invaluable to humanity. For me, the iPad is a an exciting baby step on the way to realizing Neal Stephenson's astonishing conception of the future of the book as described in Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Well worth the read.

[NOTE: Having said all this, I am still very disappointed in all the ways that Apple limits that potential by insisting that the iPad live within the tightly controlled garden walls it has constructed.]

via www.futureofthebook.org

Bob Stein being his usual idiosyncratic self, or is he on the money here?

On the other hand, Cory D certainly is very cross about a lot of things, not many of them to do directly with the transformation of content by instruments and more to do with distribution, creativity and shared culture. The comments on his (sometimes theatrical) post are instructive too.

papering over the cracks in the energy crisis

Megan Halpern at Mobylives shares some reading about the potential environmental repercussions of e-publishing:

Don Carli at PBS Mediashift argues that this choice between digital or print is a “false dilemma” — one that makes us feel guilty about using paper products and eliminates any sort of concern for the environmental impact of the digital sphere and the internet. But really, we should at this point be more concerned about the latter. All of our use of digital media, the internet, cell phones, iPads, etc. is the cause of record-breaking global energy use. And that record-breaking energy use is becoming worse for the environment than paper use. We’ve just yet to realize the consequences.

(Pic via Mobylives.)

new template, new posts, new internet scrapbook too

Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: post-digital media design, an introduction

Here's Chris Heathcote's part of the panel that got considerable Twitter time last week during SXSWI, particularly from Richard Nash, who quoted Ben Terrett of Newspaper Club saying 'we have broken your business, now we want your machines' (or words to that effect). Though no one has written a complete post on the presentation yet, it appears Nerds and gold coins were involved. Molly Wright Steenson's gnomic remarks are included in her post here, and probably deserve a post of their own. Newspaper Club, likewise. Looks like a lot of fun.

Update - as noted by Meanland folk (that's the Meanjin-Overland digital project), on  Twitter , James Bridle has now posted on his part of the panel at booktwo.org.

(crossposted at mulberry road )

Book Reviews: How The Web Reads 'Em, via ReadWriteWeb

Why Google and Other Humans Don't Read Your Book Reviews

The book and media industries are going through interesting times, to put it mildly. As physical books prepare for their demise, the confusion around pricing of digital ones grows. Yet, whether physical or digital, to sell books you need marketing. People need to hear about a book before they buy it.

Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb haz most of teh bomb on online book reviews.

In short, most reviews published online as part of large media outlets' contribution to book reviewing ARE NOT TAGGED SO THAT GOOGLE CAN FIND THEM (and I want to shout this from the rooftops, I do). Which partly explains, as you'll see if you read further into that post, why all the reviews I ran here last year carrying 'review' in the title did quite well in search results, thanks.

A Simple Way to Please Google

So how should the book reviews be tagged?

To start with, the title needs to make it clear, that this is a book review. Of course humans may find a more subtle title more enticing, but for the sake of machine: Book Review: Manhood by Mels has to be present. It would be even better to mark up that this is a book review, and here is the book title and here is the author.

Next, the post needs to be adorned with the right tags and keywords. L.A. Times' reviews are certainly very clever, but again, Google does not get humor. A better tag would the title of the book, the name of the author and the non-conspicuous phrase "book review".

Iskold obligingly runs through how this important task might be done better through the use of structured formats or markup, of which there are now quite a few breeds around. This is of course so damn important I had to stop my self-imposed Internet weaning exercises to tell you all.

I'm assuming you've looked at Iskold's example of tagging, but I will go further and tell you why Zadie Smith's review of E.M. Forster's radio show scripts in the New York Review of Books, the link to which I fluffed a while back, can be easily found online, even without review in the title: because the NYRB in their wisdom used a structured markup known to all good cataloguers and digital archivists as Dublin Core, a subset of RDF (see the comments in Iskold's post for further technical discussion on these matters.) This is an EVEN BETTER WAY, particularly if your subbies don't want to see a page full of titles screaming REVIEW. It works well, however my little reviews also work with none of this fancy metadata (to play with that I have to pay Typepad more dollars), only with review in the title.

(If you want to see the tags, go to View in the browser toolbar, and click on Page Source for a similar view to that shown in Iskold's post. Typepad doesn't like the long lines of markup text, so I won't waste time producing it here.)

What, then, are newspaper owners thinking while they skinny up our Saturday papers and threaten to lock up their book reviews behind paywalls, all for the lack of a little measly markup? "Hooray, no more book reviews, nobody has complained so they obviously weren't reading them anyway"??? Don't know why = don't want to know....!!

Do they care? One has to wonder, seriously. The small amount of research I have done into this across several sites, including Book Forum (where not all metadata in reviews is equal) and Flavorwire (which often has 'review' in titles, though they do lose some findability in a 'Daily Dose' reviews segment) suggest that the very simple act of including book review or review in the title can make all the difference, and structured markup is teh bomb.

The first of these two practices is very common web knowledge, and surely known to most sub-editors by now - or are we finding out the hard way, watching book reviews in papers die online so that media bosses can pretend they could never afford them anyway?

Bear in mind that the search online for a review does not take into account the browsing aspect of review reading which is such an inviting aspect of  the 'paper' newspaper (although a featured reviews webpage could assist with that).

The Age has it right, for the reviews that are put online anyway, following Iskold's suggestion that Book Review be in the title tag:

<title>A Woman of Seville - Book Reviews - Books - Entertainment - theage.com.au</title>

returns Carmel Bird's recent review of Sallie Muirden's A Woman Of Seville at the top of world and Oz searches.

The Australian failed this test on one example I tested - consequently the review of Lenny Bartulin's The Black Russian which was put online on the weekend is practically invisible. Here's its metadata:

<title>The art of being a bad luck magnet | The Australian</title>

<meta name="description" content="The Black Russian By Lenny Bartulin Scribe, 261pp, $27.95" />

<meta name="keywords" content=" crime thriller, Phillip Marlowe" />

Venero Armanno's November 2008 review of The Slap, which did have 'Book Review' in the keywords tag, though not the crucial title tag, has disappeared without trace, while my review still rides the Google waves and continues to draw traffic. This is a great pity, and I have linked to it from my review today.

If you're a reviewer or an editor, get thee to the IT department, go, go, and get it sorted. While you're there, tell them to put all the weekend reviews online very early on Saturday morning, too (this, the Australian does, and the Age dawdles unconscionably over). So bloggers can link to those fine examples of reviewing in the print pubs and go on doing what we prefer to do, engaging in conversation and chatty recommendation, hopefully a la Forster, instead of being blamed unfairly for the nonfindability of newspaper reviews. You have librarians, guys - clearly The Age is using theirs.

As you were. Transmission will probably resume in June. May not talk much more about this in the comments as there is a lot of stuff going on here. But I did want to share these words of vindication.

god bless publishers, each and every one

I have seen something on ReadWriteWeb about FastPencil before. This will strike fear into the hearts of some publishers, though not all.

FastPencil certainly has a catchy name - the writer covering this also mentions a company called SmashWords, which he reports is mainly making its mark in the area of distribution of DRM-free e-books. Note, too, that ReadWriteWeb content has been syndicated by the New York Times' technology section since September this year - it is a very good news feed to follow if you are interested in web trends in publishing, along with other tech news.

from my email...

For it is true, some of us live in an Internet world. And isn't "Internet Tendency" just the best name ever for a service delivering an i-Phone app from indie publishers? How 'hubbly jubbly'.

Mc Sweeney's email newsletter promises great things for its new iPhone app, The Small Chair:

No longer will T-Pain be your only salvation on trains, during lunch, and through all the other empty gaps in a day. Allow McSweeney's to fill your moments of solitude, moments of togetherness, moments of intolerable boredom.'

Und so weiter. There's a review making extravagant claims about sales of The Small Chair, here at Boldtype.

the book has a collaborative future, says Stein

While Bob Stein's address on the future of the book at the Capitol on Thursday night was riveting stuff, its delivery was not without some issues - it never ceases to amaze me how MWF administrators manage to program digital publishing events in venues with no Internet access. While two years ago anyone appearing with Net-dependent stuff should have come armed to the teeth with backup plans (including the ability to use a screen set up in a tent!) it's a tad surprising in 2009 that we still need to spell this kind of thing out to festival organisers.

Is it really that hard to let a presenter on digital issues know that there are digital issues with the venue well in advance? Not only that, but as with Germaine Greer's address in this venue a year ago (not part of MWF), it was apparently not possible to have stage lights dimmed, making it hard for Stein to see his own laptop screen while presenting. I doubt the magnificence of the venue made up to him for that, if indeed he could see the damn place at all (Greer could not, and complained she could not see us several times).

Rant over. In a rather large nutshell, early work with text and video at the Voyager Company showed Stein that 'a book is a medium where the user is in control of their experience', in other words, 'user-driven media'. In the early '80s, a book was also what he described as a 'random access device' - and in that sense, without the availability to the general public of recording and rewinding tools, television was not.

In his work on the Criterion series of films recorded on laser disc for Voyager, Stein watched films and 'read' movies the way he read books, turning back and forward, stopping, repeating bits he needed to see again, developing multimedia features now common on DVD, such as director commentary.

He left Voyager in the mid-90s but was coaxed back into publishing sometime in the 'noughties, eventuating in the development of the annotating tools and projects for which he is best known. 

the pick of the feeds (stars down on the right as well)

There has been a lot of wild speculation afoot regarding the potential release of an Apple product which might (gasp!) combine e-reading with other things. Mitch Ratcliffe of Booksahead is trying to put out some of the flames before there's a fire. Bookseller.com has more information here.

The Guardian has a great interview with Shaun Tan, as well as news of the discovery of some previously unseen letters of Flaubert's in a British stash.

I have been following this guy so I can find out things like this quickly. Richard Nash speaks to Publishers' Weekly about his past at Soft Skull and his newest venture, Cursor.

I have enjoyed reading Kris Hemensley's correspondence with his brother in Dorset this week. And I am very fond of the Australian Ballet's excellent blog, Behind Ballet. Here is their tribute to the late Merce Cunningham, by Martyn Pedler, complete with video.

a true desktop has landed

Kathryn Greenhill, Emergent Technologies Specialist at Murdoch University (and indeed for most of Australia's libraries) reviews Microsoft's Surface Computer on her remarkable blog, Librarians Matter.

Kathryn went on a tour of the United States and the Netherlands earlier this year as Australia's main library representative in all things 2.0. Not only is she a highly regarded global ambassador in these matters, but this table is EXACTLY what one of my son's former doctors should have had to manage his paperwork.
(His weapon of choice? a terrific secretary and an extraordinarily messy little backpack. I hope no one reading this knows who I mean, as he is a fantastic specialist.)

When I can find the article where the original research was quoted in which practitioners from the Mayo Clinic were surveyed some years ago to ascertain what kind of screen would best match the way they used documents, I will link to it. And I will send this picture to the specialist if I can find his email address, I think he will appreciate it.

But this is not just good for kids (though the low cost table and applications her husband is developing for use in disability sound wonderful). Oh Nooooo. Click through and have a look, it's a thing of beauty all right.

to review the reviewer

The title of James' recent post at City of Tongues (also listed here at The Group) is taken in vain by Ramona Koval's programmers to introduce a session at Radio National's Book Show on literary criticism, with Delia Falconer and Geordie Williamson.
This session acted also as publicity for the ASAL conference on Common Readers and Critics, held last week in Canberra. (we should be able to read some of those thought provoking presentations in JASAL early next year.)

This BookShow session is notable chiefly for Williamson's remarks on protecting Australian writing from comparisons with work from overseas, and, rather incredibly, his handpass to Falconer in the final five minutes of play, on Koval's nimbly explosive suggestion that it shouldn't be necessary to publish negative reviews if there are lots of good books around. (Not quite why I prefer not to publish negative reviews here, but a surprising suggestion nonetheless.)

And all GW says is, "well, I think that's one for you, Delia." !!!

The answer to that question might be, 'yes, it's something lone bloggers can get away with, I think, Ramona, but editors and writers working together can afford to cover a broader canvas.' It's not even a really useful excuse for a blogger. Where would any media program (RN Book Show included) be if it was friendly all the time because everything it cast its eye over was 'pretty noice, thanks'?

Falconer rises to the occasion like a right sport - do check out her wonderful article on James Wood here if you haven't already (among many other things). It is a shame that Koval chooses to cut her off at the end as she does, and I thank a friend who's an attentive listener for alerting me to Williamson's clumsy pass.

read some Granta for free

That venerable UK literary organ, Granta, did a site rebuild recently and has announced via the monthly email newsletter that the online content on Granta.com has been refreshed.

New on Granta.com in May 2009:

'Rhyme and Reason' by Adam Gopnik: In conversation with the award-winning poet and essayist Katha Pollitt.

'Letter from Gaza' by Hisham Matar: The tragic life of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani.

'Dragon Island' by Laura Fellowes: The most recent in our New Voices series.

'The Last Modernist' by Chris Petit: A consideration of the life and work of J.G. Ballard.

'A Vacation from Myself' by John Beckman: ‘What I gained, and lost, from antidepressants.’

'The Public Poet' by Lavinia Greenlaw: An appreciation of Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s first female poet laureate.

'Getting Lost' by Heidi Julavits: One wintry weekend in the Berkshires.

It will be noted by the observant that online content is available via RSS in seven categories. I  may have seen this when I first visited this sexy looking new site about a month ago: for some reason it looked overwhelming and I plumped for the email newsletter.

So I guess if I really don't want to know about events I can't possibly attend, I could just subscribe to the half dozen other feeds on the online content page.

Or the email newsletter, which gave me the list above in a neat little bloggable text package. Hey, it's my choice.
Do note that it is also possible to subscribe to New Voices, which is definitely an exciting choice. Enjoy.

it's all print

It appears that a bigger Kindle is in the offing, and that some are bruiting the possibility that this will assist in the online shift for newspapers.
It appears more likely to me that it will also assist in increasing the digital divide, but it would be good to hear what these guys think about it too.

Meanwhile at Newspaper Death Watch (horrible, horrible name for a blog, isn't it), it is reported that there is an upsurge in enrolments in journalism studies in the States. So there will continue to be writers and critics who prophesy with their pens...but they must keep their eyes wide for that chance.

Update: Details on the Kindle launch here, at Mobylives.

digital Montaigne will arrive very soon

At if:book, there is a thoughtful article by Sebastian Mary on reading and paper, and why the iPod for reading high quality Web content really should be only a moment away.

I read books, read blogs, I twitter compulsively. I use these different formats for different kinds of experience. I see no contradiction: what I'm getting at here is that the e-reader is being treated as though it is a viable vehicle for long-form writing, in a way that ignores the essential fact that long-form writing and reading is rooted in paper, and book manufacturing...

...I would welcome a device designed for downloading and archiving essays I think are important, a virtual library device for the belles lettres of today.

Armed with such a device, creating playlists, mashups, collages of our favourite short works, we might become a generation of digital Montaignes, annotating and expanding our collective discourse. Blogging is already, in effect, the re-emergence of belles lettres; and while blog posts are typically written for the moment, a device that could earn the blogger a small sum (and the cachet of being considered worthy of archiving) for every essay downloaded might well inspire a renaissance in short work written for a longer lifespan.

While I get a small headache thinking about the business model for that, he has noted that it already exists and is called iTunes.
So, why not have a bookshelf AND an e-reader, hey.

The first commenter on this post is a guy called Aaron Pressman who refers us to an online service called Instapaper - he blogged it here.

Note also that the Australian e-reader, the iLiad, available through Dymocks (no, I'm not being sponsored to say that), allows annotation.

Time for a shower - I'll leave it to you to embrace the rest of the discussion there, but note that Bob Stein, the founder of The Institute for the Future of the Book (where the if:book blog lives), is speaking in Brisbane this week. I am making inquiries and will let you know if he is coming south at all. (News of that event via Angela at LiteraryMinded.)

link circus

Newspapers will cope in the online environment, you know. If they really want to.

If you didn't see this a few weeks back, take a look now. Link via Amanda at Confessions Of An Author.

I will be seeing this coming in my letterbox soon, I hope.

As you can see, much better to check with Jessamyn first about the libraries' special collections than rely on the Smithsonian. Ask a librarian! specially a rarin' one.

And here is a new tool from Arc90 Lab to enhance the readability of anything you find online that's a bit messy. Works like a charm and is very easy to use - I have found you can print from it, too (that is, from the view it provides of stripped back text.) I am impressed.
Link via if:book.

Susan Wyndham thinks this Perth Writers' Festival adventure, borrowed from New York, would go down a treat in Sydney. (Has to be an improvement on the cabaret at Byron, I think.)

And finally, something completely different from Design Sponge. (Link via Catherine Campbell, who has recently provided illustrations to Lisa Dempster's brilliant Death Mook, on sale at Sticky, Readings and MagNation now.) Something there is that doesn't love an artist's blog roll...

blogs all over every day

From Creative Economy Online comes a link to this story from the New York Times about a Chicago news publisher who has decided to hand out blog stories as free newspapers, splitting profits from advertising between himself and the bloggers. Claire Cain Miller suggests that some (though not all) free dailies are still in a good position as print news battles to stay afloat across the globe, thanks to the relatively constant value of local advertising:

'Ads from local businesses are one reason that free dailies have been a rare bright spot in the newspaper industry. Unlike struggling car companies and department stores, which are mainstay advertisers of metropolitan dailies, small businesses have increased their ad spending during the recession, several publishers said.

“All growth in the newspaper industry for the last 20 years has been in free papers, and the fastest-growing segment of that for the last five years has been in free dailies,” said H. Harrison Cochran, publisher of The Aurora Sentinel in Colorado and past president of Suburban Newspapers of America.'

And the name of this new paper? Oddly enough, The Printed Blog.

tomorrow never knows, but probably has a damn good idea

I want to share a long, somewhat rambling but quite interesting post reporting on The Future Of Entertainment 3, an MIT conference held recently: it has literary novels and fan culture as its main topic and is by Joanne at Tomorrow Museum ( a blog pointed to by MobyLives):

I find the more time I spend online, the more I crave the quiet escape of a novel. But to work as a technology respite, a novel first must be exceptionally well-written...The novel won’t ever die. The more I think about it, the more I agree that fan culture/spreadable media is essential to literature, and will succeed in spite of constraints on time and size. The first step is a great book.

Joanne also provided this post on iPhones and novels a while back.I did think it funny that Joanne is asking this question as it is my understanding that novels on phones are huge in Japan. However her post really discusses the absence of social media technology in recent fiction, and she has a point: do we 'novelise' phones and email yet? (Christos Tsiolkas, to his credit, does acknowledge technology has a place in people's lives in The Slap at several points.) She gives it a shot:

'The intensity of the 24-hour news cycle, the impatience of waiting for email replies, these frantic, perpetually-shifting day-to-day Internet journeys … can these be novelized? Let me try…

    None of my friends were at the party so I pulled out my iPhone as I waited. I checked out Mary on Facebook and realized she has a new boyfriend. His profile was set to private so I looked him up on google and found an old Myspace profile he hasn’t updated in 2 years, but it says his favorite band is Wolf Parade and someone left a comment that he left his white Wafarers at her place. What a wanker. I twittered something passive aggressive about how I hate hipsters...'

Her post reminded me that Stephen Fry, who would have found some very good reasons why there should be an Internet if it had not already existed, I am sure, had a very successful Oscar Wilde twitter day recently, which you can read about here.

where is this river going...

Oh NOES.

Amazon gets bigger, and the CEO of the little guy explains why, here.
I have only just found this out, reading elsewhere and am a bit unnerved. Not sure if it's a good thing or not. I rather liked AbeBooks just as it was, thanks. It had a nice musty feel about it, and everyone I ordered from through them was terrific.
If you are a smaller bookseller out there who knows any more about this and whether it's a good thing or not, drop us a line.

The Amazon press release is quoted here:

"As a leader in rare and hard-to-find books, AbeBooks brings added breadth and expanded selection to our customers worldwide," said Russell Grandinetti, vice president of books for Amazon.com. "AbeBooks provides a wide range of services to both sellers and customers, and we look forward to working with them to further grow their business. We're excited to present all of our customers with the widest selection of books available any place on Earth."

"This deal brings together book sellers and book lovers from around the world, and offers both types of customers a great experience," said Hannes Blum, chief executive officer of AbeBooks. "We are very excited to be joining the Amazon family."

The good news is that AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand alone operation, and will maintain all its websites. This user sighs in relief.

Web 2.0 makeovers for Brit publishing

Although launched and hosted by the independent publishing house Canongate, Meet at the Gate is not a typical publisher's website. Yes you can search the Canongate catalogue and find out more about the excellent and diverse array of books and writers we publish, but Meet at the Gate has much broader and bigger ambitions. It's about the creation of a cultural hub, one that is totally independent in its spirit and content, a place with a particular focus on books, film, music and websites that will help guide you to the most interesting stuff around.

Not only does Canongate Publishing's blog invite the public (including the publishing industry) to contribute posts (called gateposts), but it selects blogs of note to feature every once in a while. (This I discovered via Stephen Mitchelmore at UK blog This Space, featured last week. )

Not only that, it's the front page of the whole establishment, the first hit for Canongate on Google and the publisher's public face is integrated quite well into a social network site.* Haven't seen anything else like this yet; I will have to get out a bit more, I think. A search turned up this article by Hannah Davies in The BookSeller (thanks to Book Addicts for the link), which will be my starting point for further forays. Davies notes that Canongate's site was in beta in September and due to be launched, so I would say this is still very new.

The Canongate site could do with some more navigation aids either on top or to the side. It seems to have been designed by someone who thinks most blogs are messy affairs, however most of (er, most of) our mess has some purpose or other. Because of the lean design, presently the search box on the Gateposts page of Meet At The Gate can only help you find things you already know are there, unless they're the latest or greatest posts, of course.

Keep your eyes peeled and you'll be able to browse topics and contributors from the side menu on the front page (though sadly you cannot find the posts on featured blogs easily). See, our categorised archives exist for a reason...and there could be a reason why there's no room for them here, also.

There appear to be dribs of more innovative technology drabbed here and there through the site - a Twitter feed of news and some MySpace and Facebook addresses are mentioned, but only from one page.

Otherwise it's an interesting experiment and I am reasonably impressed by their efforts to bring writers, publishers and the public together in a social network.** A fair bit of thought has gone into this, and given the prestige of bloggers in the UK (most of the prominent bloggers were sent Sony E-readers to trial in September), it would want to be pretty to attract their attention.

Now I'm off to read Maria Hyland's post - whoo hoo. Hope I can comment....nope, I am too shy. Never mind how she feels about Helen Garner being nominated for a prize alongside her - I can't even put fingers to keyboard when I have the chance to talk to MJH. I must have some favourite writers after all, and this is the test I will apply in future.

Also she's published by Text, Canongate's partners down under. So I am left wondering if the arrangement's so very different from providing a few choice sentences for a cover blurb. While not as gratingly obvious as the author blogs at Faber, some of which seem to be simply webpages put up on Blogger under industry pressure, this is a funny state of affairs. Do the authors volunteer for this activity? How does this work exactly?

(The blog of the month at Faber for November, that of Richard T. Kelly, author of a bio of Sean Penn and other works, is worthy of a post on its own on author blogging. He's doing quite a nice job with whatever it is that he thinks he's doing there. The labelling is a tad gratuitous, but he seems to like, and 'get,' blogging, which is more than can be said for the blog I found there in October, which has discreetly disappeared from the site.)

There are also snippets from Canongate's 'archives', which I assume doesn't always include sniffy correspondence like this. I am going to follow the Gate site for a bit and see what else turns up, and I will keep you informed of any progress I make.

*see Andrea's comment and ensuing discussion below for a finer distinction between social networks and the use of social media in commercial websites.

** and again.

are we there yet?

Can you read blogs on e-readers yet?
Joe Wikert is happy with the Kindle's service, pending Amazon charging 10c an email.
Following his earlier tip-off, I have been able to chase up an evaluation on Cnet of the most recent modifications to the Sony E-Reader.

In recent weeks, several British bloggers have been sent Readers to review - Stephen Mitchelmore is quietly reflective, finding it easy to use to read long documents, and quite booklike for a novel of Paul Auster's.

However, the most recent model of the Sony e-reader (known simply as 'the Reader') does not allow zooming on PDF pages. Trees are still falling in a good cause after all.

Kim is reviewing the Sony, as is Lynne at dovegreyreader (calling herself 'dovegreye-reader, in a good cause. (Love that cover!)

Scott Pack from the improbably named Me and My Big Mouth blog (didn't stop him getting an interview with Murakami, though), has noted that

the song files take up a lot of space.  So What from Kind of Blue takes up as much space as War & Peace...It certainly isn't an alternative to your iPod but you could easily squeeze in your favourite albums to read along to.

(Apple must surely be twiddling a few things here and there, they could muscle in on this caper pretty quicksmart, couldn't they?)

In the meantime, the iLiad, which is expensive but the main weapon of choice for Australian e-booksellers Dymocks, has some wiring for the web (though what this means in terms of RSS feeds, the holy grail for bloggers, is hard to determine from current information available - the PC review cited below says yes, but some downloading issues are involved.)

This UK review from ZDNet gives the iLiad pretty high marks, with price something of a drawback. PC Authority gave it a fairly tough going over in January:

'...It’s the onboard software that lets it down, though. It isn’t that it’s unusable – you can browse your virtual library and read eBooks on it – but it isn’t as intuitive or polished as a device this innovative deserves. You can’t, for example, copy a book from a USB flash drive to the internal memory without hooking it up to a PC. It’s also fairly slow – not a problem when you’re staring at static pages, but it can take ten seconds to open a file, and a second or so to change pages.

So we’re left with great hardware, let down by poor software. It does the job, but it lacks the polish of a truly consumer-orientated device. If iRex can fix the software issues and, ultimately, bring down the price, it could even have a potential iPod for books on its hands.'

All of which was flitting through my mind as I approached my short chat on bedside reading at the State Library this week - at this stage I'm almost convinced I still like books too much, and am too prone to sudden and irrational bouts of technostress, to be bothered with all the faffing around with batteries and software involved with electronic readers: though as a document reader, of course, an e-reader of any kind (even a laptop) ensures some paper savings amongst the more conservatively minded.

If you're interested in free e-books, this link from the Dymocks iLiad page might be of help - Matthew McClintock has been running manybooks.net since 2005. I will be evaluating this site sometime soon, but at a very quick glance it looks as though Matthew is a reviewer and provides some technical assistance on several formats for e-reading, not just on dedicated 'reading' devices. So if you already have a handheld device that does more things than the above products, check his site out.