You’ve changed, man
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Apple, Inc. in the last few weeks. After spending the holidays reading the Steve Jobs biography, I returned to work to find a major announcement around ebooks in the offing. So I start blog watching around the big A. One post in particular caught my eye. In his upcoming expose-style book on Apple, Adam Lashinsky talks about Apple’s policy of not providing lunch to its employees.
The culture at Apple is described as “the polar opposite of Google’s,” and one small but noteworthy difference between the two rival companies lies in lunch. Unlike at Google, where lunch is free, Apple employees must pay for their “quite good and reasonably priced” lunch at the company cafeteria. There is one exception: new employees are given free lunch during their first-day orientation.
At first, I was astounded that this would be considered in any way remarkable—so unlike Google, apart from your first day, Apple is just like every other employer in the world—but a picture of the company’s mindset emerged from this strange and kind of stalkish anecdote. Any largesse is short-lived at best. You know you’re going to have to pay for those sandwiches, right?
Apparently this was still in the back of my mind when I sat down early Friday morning to watch Apple’s Phil Schiller take the stage. Schiller duly proved the rumour-mongers right when he unveiled the first major revision to iBooks, Apple’s ereader app for the iPad, and iBooks Author, a new authoring tool to create media-rich electronic books.
Read MoreHand Made High Tech
Throughout 2011, if:book Australia commissioned essays from ten Australian writers on the future of writing and reading in a future tilted towards the digital. Each writer drew on his or her experience in fields diverse as publishing, transmedia, gaming, and comics to observe the changes taking place in ‘books’ and discussing where this might lead for authors, readers, and reading culture.
Originally posted at the if:book web site, the articles have now been compiled (some updated) into a single volume under the title Hand Made High Tech with an introduction by me and a brilliant cover design by Daniel Neville.
It’s free to download in any format or to read online. If you have any interest in books and publishing futures, it’s worth a read. Check it out.
Read MoreOff the Record Now Available in Digital
After much technical jiggery-pokery, Off The Record is now available in digital form, including the Kindle store for all you kindlers out there. The book is also coming soon to Apple iBookstore and Google eBooks.
In time it will also be available from all major vendors, including Baker & Taylor, B&N, Borders, Bowker, Ebooks.com, Ebrary, Follett Digital Resources, Kobo, Lightning Source (Ingram), Netlibrary, Overdrive, Sony, and Tecknoquest.
The ebook for Off the Record will be available to customers worldwide, so if you have had any trouble finding yourself a print copy (you obviously haven’t tried here), now is your chance to pick yourself up copy in fully recyclable pixels.
Read MoreReasons for waiting
Okay, I understand that few people will get the Art of Fighting reference in the title, but so what? The important thing is, progress continues on the frightening volume of work underway. And this is more or less a post to remind myself I’m still a writer with a blog.
Fiction does what it does. We write it and we send it out into the world. The rest is up to the world and there’s nothing more to talk about here other than the fact that I am still first and foremost a fiction writer. I can’t help it. It’s what I do. Specifically, novel number four is moving from drawing board to text on a daily basis, except tonight because my computer is in for repair.
Non-fiction? Well, now we are talking something interesting. The big news is a non-fiction project is entering its final phase and with a publisher! A whole lotta detail will follow soon. Promise.
You might have noticed that, despite the lack of a commuter, I am in fact updating the blog. That’s because this update is happening on an iPad. Hmm…intriguing…
See? All kinds of stuff happens when I’m not updating the blog.
Read MoreTwitterFEST Preview
Tomorrow, I will host the second TwitterFEST session for the Emerging Writers Festival. The session today went down remarkably well, despite my turning up right at the end and contributing only by telling everyone that I was late. In fact, it was fast and furious with discussion flying all over the place. I only hope I’ll be able to keep up (I won’t).
So the discussion tomorrow will focus on the iPad, released here in Australia on Friday. Early reports from the United States have focused on just how many people have forked out for one of the slick glass and metal flat screen thingos, despite the generally confused notion of what it actually, you know, does.
While Amazon, Sony, et al have focused on delivering a reader that attempts as much as possible to mimic the experience of a book, Apple has stuck to their vision of a multi-function future. Your devices, they assume, will do everything all the time. Which device you use, depends on context. The iPhone is in your pocket, the computer is on your desk or kitchen table or whatever, the iPad is for the couch and backpack.
How it affects your approach to books and reading will depend on community consensus. Academic publishing seems a doddle. Would you rather an iPad or sixteen doorstop textbooks? How it affects leisurely reading and fiction will likely be more complicated.
How complicated? That’s what I’d be keen to find out tomorrow.
I will try cutting and pasting the discussion (as much as I can) here on the blog tomorrow evening, for anyone like me who turns up late.
Read MoreThe Books
