Brainstorming w. Cory Doctorow [re: Digital Collections]

So I had the idea to supplement a display with a digital collection supplemented by novels licensed through Creative Commons, and on a whim–just to be honest: to see if it’d get through–I emailed Cory Doctorow (Little Brother / Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom [my thoughts] / I, Robot [etc ...]) to pick his brain for digitally likeminded authors, because I’d come out of the gooters (that’s google + gutters) with only the vast gutenburg.org-bible of lit in the public domain and fanfic.

He wrote that none sprang to mind – said authors are still pretty rare, and YA publishers will probably bottleneck creative commons.

“That said, I think it’d be pretty easy to find at least a back-catalog in ebook form donated by writers for use on library terminals only…,” — hmm, as through programs like Adobe Digital Editions, which requires the owner [say, the library] to manually authenticate the computers the files can be read on and printed from. The latter is the biggie – would authors let their ebooks be *printed*? Maybe – if for library programs only. Then Cory: “Hey, Michael! I wouldn’t want to use Adobe DRM (or any DRM!). I wasthinking more like, “Here’s a password-protected site that we ask you not to share access to …,” which made a lot of duhhh sense to me.

The other day, I accessed my Greenstone Digital Library for the first time through SSH via PuTTY, which required a headache and a beer and an entirely new prompt vocabulary as a crash course. The biggest obstacle among poorly budgeted and highly politicized smalltowners [re: libraries] against a digital collection beyond the scare around a whole new system of cataloguing is its cost.

I figure that if you could supplement a collection with works licensed in creative commons and those already in the public domain [the classics], then a library could build a pretty substantial (if modest) collection available through its website, racking-up the hit counter while sparing their savvy patrons the pain-in-the-neck of DRM.

Please point any bookmarks or RSS feeds to the new blog: http://S-is-For-Somewhere.com

Cory Doctorow is the best-selling author of Little Brother & loads more.

So I had the idea to complement a display with a digital collection supplemented by novels licensed through Creative Commons, and on a whim–just to be honest: to see if it’d get through–I emailed Cory Doctorow (Little Brother / Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom [my thoughts] / I, Robot [etc ...]) to pick his brain for digitally likeminded authors, because I’d come out of the gooters (that’s google + gutters) with only the vast gutenberg.org-bible of lit-in-the-public-domain and fanfic.

He wrote that none sprang to mind – said authors are still pretty rare, and YA publishers will probably bottleneck creative commons. “That said, I think it’d be pretty easy to find at least a back-catalog in ebook form donated by writers for use on library terminals only…,” — huh, as through programs like Adobe Digital Editions, which requires the owner [say, the library] to manually authenticate the computers the files can be read on and printed from. The latter is the biggie – would authors let their ebooks be printed? Maybe – if for library programs only. Then, Cory: “Hey, Michael! I wouldn’t want to use Adobe DRM (or any DRM!). I wasthinking more like, “Here’s a password-protected site that we ask you not to share access to …,” which made a lot of duhhh sense to me….

The other day, I accessed my Greenstone Digital Library for the first time through SSH via PuTTY, which required a headache and a beer and an entirely new prompt vocabulary as a crash course. The biggest obstacle among poorly budgeted and highly politicized smalltowners [re: libraries] against a digital collection beyond the scare around a whole new system of cataloguing is its cost.

I figure that if you could supplement a collection with works licensed under creative commons and those already in the public domain (the classics), then a library could build a pretty substantial (if modest) collection available through its website, racking-up the hit counter while sparing their savvy patrons the pain-in-the-neck of DRM.

Sometime over the next week I think I’ll start work collecting public-domain and CC YA oriented works to supplement the library programs with online analogues at the BL[ing]–”the Bradford County Public Library Youth & Teen Services 2.0″ that Could Use Some Color!–and at the end of my semester with Dr. P J[orgensen], when [if] I’ve my head around Greenstone, I’ll transfer the “collection” to the digital library I will have built through the University.

In the singularity, the “cure for death” is a series of digital backups …

Ported from S-is-For-Somewhere.

Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom

On Wednesday I [legitimately] finished Cory Doctorow’s Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom (available in loads of downloadable formats [free]) – read as an etext on my ipod touch. I’d argued before my uncertainty that the broadly sermonized smell and weight of a book-proper was all it was cracked-up to be, but now I’ve first-hand experience. Honestly, I am not too voracious a reader; I’m easily distracted by my own projects and bright lights, so reading’s always been a thrill of convenience during the inbetweens in my day. So, it took me a couple weeks to swipe through it, but that’s with the ability to adapt my random-reading to my random-taste, sifting between maybe seventeen novels (most from the public domain) I carry around – in my pocket.

Down & Out made me rehash machine functionalism, which I was briefed-on during an Intro. Philosophy course, and the haunting potential that we could digitally replicate human consciousness. Doctorow’s “cure for death” is a series of digital backups coupled with tissue restoration; in the Singularity, death means having lost a day, a week, a year-at-most – but an hour-long data-dump will bring you up to speed. Flashbake –

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Etc.: I’m still half-diligently working toward a Glimmer Train deadline, and I’ve almost finished drafting an article for the Bradford Telegraph re: the future of book banning. I’ll throw-it up here in a jiffy. I am writing a reflection paper on As We May Think, and — even though I tend to totally rush through those — I think I may start web-publishing my gradwork as it comes around.

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Kristen loved Lisa See’s Peony in Love, so I am going to smother her with Snow Flower & the Secret Fan (which I loved, re: “nu shu” secret phonetic writing developed by women) in an hour or so. — and googling those, I had no idea Lisa See had written so many novels.

Print, beware! — &c — “pure digital”

[ported from S is For Somewhere]

– have been participating in fairly entertaining trolling on PubLib (Public Library Listserv) (entitled: “Missing the Boat (or at least Getting Wet)”) regarding the threat of irrelevance to libraries who resist digitization. Trust me, while it sounds dull (lowercase-d) in hindsight, when at an isolated reference desk, defaming sacred cows at an institution of cattle herders relieves the pure and outright Dull (capital-d).

Caveat: — I was taken aside by the director (my thread above in question) and warned about my usage of “ad nauseum” when paired with customer service.

Anyway, I now read in Ars Technica that

Even if print survives the next subscription renewal process, it’s clear that Nordin doesn’t think it can continue indefinitely. ACS’s experience has been that, given the choice, enough of its readers prefer digital that print becomes hard to maintain.

“Once you start printing less than 1,000 of anything, you really have to question your business model,” Nordin said.

The options for making print work better are also unpalatable; “No one wanted to give up color—nobody wanted to dial the clock back—and nobody wanted to add author charges for color.

“Obviously, we’re somewhere on the road to pure digital,” Nordin concluded. Still, even with an insider’s view, he was hesitant to predict the trajectory of the transition. “We really don’t know where [we are on that road], and we’re waiting to be guided by our customers.”

which, I’m guessing, Nordin’s thinking right.

Zamyatin’s tangible threat that 2+2=4 [yikes]

Originally @ S-is-For-Somewhere

I’m admittedly biased against DRM-locked digitized books and audio, and so when it was announced that Amazon–which, otherwise, I like a ton–axed copies of 1984 from owners’ kindles, I was less at odds with the particular action than what it meant & symbolized regarding threats to ownership and autonomy in the digital culture.

Skim “Why 2024 Will Be like Nineteen Eighty-Four: How Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning’s digital future” published @ Slate.

Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely. Zittrain writes: “Imagine a world in which all copies of once-censored books like Candide, The Call of the Wild, and Ulysseshad been permanently destroyed at the time of the censoring and could not be studied or enjoyed after subsequent decision-makers lifted the ban.” This may sound like an exaggeration; after all, we’ll surely always have file-sharing networks and other online repositories for works that have been decreed illegal. But it seems like small comfort to rely on BitTorrent to save banned art. The anonymous underground movements that have long sustained banned works will be a lot harder to keep up in the world of the Kindle and the iPhone.

A brief on a year-long labor

Sometime in July ‘08 I began work on a short project that is finally seeing a final draft. This morning I drummed out parts 3 through 7 (seven total) from a copy of its first draft in a worn-all-to-hell moleskine and written more-or-less illegibly. Worst yet, it needs work – and plenty of it. What’s taken so long is persistent, every-so-often revisions based on shifting personal taste. It is a story told tangentially, and I am frustrated by narrative conventions and my attempts to thwart them. Argh.

But I hope to be done here soon. In the meantime, I am picking www.s-is-for-somewhere.com back up to try and finish it as a virtual hub for my scattered presence online; I’m not much of a web-designer, but I get a kick out of dabbling a little and so I am excited to see what I can do with it. If I had the wherewithal I’d ask for help – but hell no[t yet].

I’ve decided to release everything I can online for free under the creative commons licensing; I suspect the reality is that I won’t make a dime, but that’s okay – I may be able to overcome obscurity (a feat).

Thief –, or a dosage of a raw Science [non-]fiction

At the New York Times: A TINY glass telescope, the size of a pea, has been successfully implanted in the eyes of people with severely damaged retinas, helping them to read, watch television and better see familiar faces.

You mid-nineties gamers remember the antihero Garrett (Thief: the Dark Project / :the Metal Age / : Deadly Shadows / :Gold), having his eye twisted-out by the tree-thing Viktoria, had a steampunk mechanical [telescopic] eye built by the Hammerite, Father Karras.

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Sunday is equally lazy. Kristen and I slept late [and she still]. It is just about noon and I am at the glasstable looking out at the little patch of woods just off the porch, and finishing-up “the Hangman” draft – which has taken me only a year to get to this point for measely fifteen-odd pages since I’d written it down. I come back to it every few months, and can’t understand why it is taking me so so so long.

The Townhouse [Week 1]

I thought I might chronicle (half-assedly, admittedly) Kristen’s & my venture into [re]indepdence: it is her first side-step into the world outdoors, and–as you know–I’d become a statistic when I [newly graduated and jobless] moved-in with the folks out-of-the-way in Florida. I intend to post some photographs of the place when we have things a little more situated, but, so far, we have a semi-complete Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom, and Office; the townhouse is small, but two stories and cozy. You’ll see.

The Explosionist

I finished reading Jenny Davidson’s The Explosionist – a smart and intuitive read; paced well, a semi-episodic detective trick — I learned a dash of history precisely because it is alternate in The Explosionist’s Edinburgh; and I subsequently tore down the heavens when it ended on a cliffhanger, prepared to loose on JD all the fury of the world until it occurred to me that, if so, I would never learn what happened after.

Lucky her.

invalidating Dead Witnesses –

The Explosionist

– while grooving with Jenny D.’s scientifically-proven paranormality in The Explosionist, I kept wondering just why sleuths in the novel’s world hadn’t simply asked the [presumably good-and-dead] victim directly – or …, vicariously through incense [?] (“–these on the bones of this dead man” etc.). Then p.-268 read

“The basic idea,” Keith said, so earnestly it was almost comical, “is that many serious crimes–murder’s an obvious example–leave no witnesses aside from the perpetrator. So you want to get the dead to testify, but their words are often so vague as to be useless, not to mention that the 1921 decision in Scotland v. Blavatsky affirmed that recordings of the voices of the dead are inadmissible in court. They’re simply too easy to fake.”

and I am subsequently incurably interested in applications of the laws of the living to the dead.

Twi[L]ight Me on Fire, please –

Hold the Vampiric Phone, already --

Just now read Laurel Ann’s writeup on Regina Jeffers’ Darcy’s Hunger: a Vampire Retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and I am inclined to feel a little malicious. Only recently my fandom’s been strained when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies awoke in me an already festering disdain for Jane-in-the-Ass [see what I did there?] knockoffs and sequels [many, anyway; some I like].

I’d gotten an early copy of P&P&Z and enjoyed it–digging zombies–for what it was worth, but I am hardpressed to ever designate beyond “fun” and broach “good” – it isn’t; it’s leeching from established Janeite and horror markets and having good fun in the process, and that’s about it. P&P&Z was in the forefront of a monsterification trend, as genre-author fanboys-and-girls “horrify” [tr. verb def. 3] the regency, as if trying to find common ground between the Romantics and Stephanie Meyer.

 Mr. Darcy might be a little dark, but Byronic? I think the circumstance would be different for Regina Jeffers if she retold P&P in the style of–let’s say–Ann Radcliffe [The Mysteries of Darcypho], but–and I don’t mean to judge her prematurely–the preview at Austenprose leads me–Librarian with dwindling respect for sacred cows–to chalk her paperback as Harlequin and file it among volumes of the exact same thing.

– I know I’m being crass, and–if I think about it–I am not scoffing Jeffers’ writing (I am sure she is completely capable) or choice in book, – that isn’t the issue [although it may seem like it]; rather, I am more and more aggravated that Janeites continuously think this sort of thing Novel.

Godforbid, I am almost of the opinion that–if an author isn’t going to model Jane, rethink her in the manner of another contemporary [Radcliffe], exaggerate regency drama as horror [rather than make it horror just-because (P&P&Z would have been loads of fun and smart if the apocalypse were related to ill-feelings vis-a-vis the reverberations of the Fr. Revolution a generation prior)]–why not rename the characters and pawn his or wares as original.

/The Graphic Classroom/ in /Teacher Librarian/

I read through the grapevine that The Graphic Classroom was plugged in the school-library journal Teacher Librarian, reading: “Web 2.0: The growing popularity of blogs such as The Graphic Classroom, http://graphicclassroom.blogspot.com, has provided a way for people to easily share reviews and favorite web sites about age appropriate materials for young people.” — which makes me want to mention (I am sure I have before) that I am really pretty impressed with what Chris Wilson [editor] is achieving through his reviewsite. And although it is [for some ungodly reason] in the shadow of godawful reviewsites like No Flying, No Tights, I am watching for it to take off.

I think [I think] the issue may be that it is geared toward a niche audience, or maybe because it is a blog it is somehow less-worthy than NFNT’s messy code, which–maybe like Bookslut–earns it status as an eZine. The Graphic Classroom’s multiple talented authors are thorough reviewers (academic in length and structure), and Chris has some well-earned sway among some of the early-reader/ya graphic marketers: it might not be too hard (although it’d certainly be more time consuming) to wrangle authors and illustrators in and interviewed, reports on major industry events (we already do that, but they aren’t gathered in–say–their own corner of the site, but intermingled with the steady stream of reviews).

Using Bookslut as a model and looking through the TGC archives, there are enough reviews, op-eds, features and suchlike, including the obligatory links, Chris’s killer graduate study, archives organized by recommendations, and so on to situate and usurp a NFNT’s position in the YALSA Recommended Websites list. IMHO