Saccades: short stories delivered…
A newly compiled and polished edition of my short story collection Saccades is now available in both print and digital editions. It’s the first of two releases from the web site over the next few months leading up to Off the Record‘s launch in October.
Best of all, for the bargain hunters out there, the digital editions of Saccades are free. If you like the stories, feel free to share the love with others.
Enjoy.
Saccades has existed, in one form or another, for close on ten years. Originally a simple collection of short stories I wrote back in 2000 and 2001, the collection was refined and sharpened into a thematic collection grouped around a fictional building in inner-city Brisbane. Two years of frustrations and delays with publishers saw the collection fall apart and individual stories redrafted and tightened back into individual pieces. By 2005, a few of the stories lobbed up on this here web site as digital downloads. It was still early days for digital publishing and more than a few readers didn’t quite make head nor tails of stories offered up like iTunes tracks, though a few stories—Hemmingway and Lucky January for example—found a few fans. In the meantime, I busied myself with writing novels.
By the end of the decade, digital publishing had moved into a new high gear and I renewed my love of short stories with a few new published pieces. So Saccades was dusted off, gutted, and reconstituted as a collection again. Many stories from the original manuscript were dropped altogether, many more new stories were added. Some of those that remained were radically redrafted. Really, apart from the title and a handful of relatively untouched stories, the collections at either end of the decade are different books.
That’s okay. Things change.
Read MoreConfessions of an accidental print fetishist
Things appear to be speeding up in the digital publishing world and finally the eBook is beginning to matter. No sooner does Apple announce their contribution to the continuing argument around what an e-reader should actually do than Amazon and MacMillan dive at each other’s throats in a way that would make even shareholders blanch. MacMillan won the stoush, but only because Amazon (somewhat uncharacteristically) caved. Nevertheless, this is a sign of things to come. Both publishers and technology vendors want control of the market. Which means the product is important. Who would have thought?
For so many years everyone dabbled in digital publishing, whether as an insurance policy or through Quixotic righteousness. Suddenly the big six are in the game and Amazon is attempting to impose its vision on the rest of the world whether through muscle or threats, while Apple attempt to make a product that will hit the market like a neutron bomb.
I have a sense that the current rash of insanity from the big end of town is still premature. No offence to the people who already enjoy their Kindle or Sony, but everything hinges on Apple selling truckloads of iPads. And I’m yet to be convinced they will. I wouldn’t call the device underwhelming—it does a hell of a lot for its price tag—but I still suspect the device—like all e-readers—solves a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s a better overall package than the Kindle, no question, but can it possibly live up to all that promise?
Then again, my partner mentioned something pretty enlightening the other day (she does that sometimes):
‘If they offered, say, ten free eBooks with the iPad, I’d definitely consider buying one. For much the same price you get all the books and the computer.’
I’m yet to see evidence that they will offer this, but it would seem to be an easy enticement to generate sales, even though the iPad’s price—especially in Australia—will be well off the price of ten books.
So where does all this leave tiny, single artist-operated ventures like mine? To be honest I don’t know. The title of this post comes from the sense that, in my championing of the PDF format as the most appropriate digital publishing platform, I have been thinking of the ultimate reading device as a static book-like thing where the publisher controls all aspects of the experience: the text, the formatting, the font, the page breaking. Since reading more and more on my iPhone apps Stanza and the gorgeous Classics, I’ve actually realised that texts need to be far more flexible and publishers (and authors) need to hand over to the reader their control of font, text sizing, and layout. If a reader wants my stories in magenta coloured Comic Sans on a raging red background, who am I to say no?
In offering beautifully formatted and strictly tamper-proof PDFs of my stories from this site, have I missed a fairly important point about the experience of reading on screen? Am I just limiting my potential readership? Am I shooting myself in the foot?
More and more, I suspect so.
Read MoreKindle in Australia
Mattia Dempsey, editor of Bookseller+Publisher writes in Crikey that Amazon’s Kindle is finally being made available to international buyers meaning for the princely sum of around A$313 non-Americans too can read Amazon’s version of books on a screen.
While it’s good to see such devices attracting interest and more than likely a few buyers at home, Amazon are yet to convince me that their device, with its closed system and proprietary file format for books with DRM, is worth pursuing as an alternative format for selling digital fiction (other than PDF).
For what it’s worth, the design doesn’t exactly float my boat either. But I’ve read enough glowing reports from readers to concede that chunky exterior may mask a more elegant internal design. That’s beside the point anyway.
What interest me is how tightly Amazon dictate the terms of use for the device and its preferred proprietary file format. While the Kindle can display PDF files, all indications are that it does so badly. It apparently fares better with Word documents, but that’s an impractical solution for e-book distributors. Independent publishers and writers can transmogrify their files into Kindle-friendly format, but I notice the process requires an Amazon account. Hmm.
I’ll keep investigating and see how easy it is for independents to tap into the Kindle market. I may even report back here.
Read MoreDigital Fiction 2.0: No iPod of books
While digital technology has indeed revolutionised other entertainment industries even at the consumer level—from photography, to music, to film and television—book publishing in 2009 has remained steadfastly analogue.
Authors have described a ‘rhetoric of resistance’ to the idea of electronic books, perhaps fuelled by the slow take up of the technology to read and dsitribute fiction and entertainment texts.
Where authors have waded into the debate around electronic books, the focus has been on dismissals of the technology from established authors, such as E. Annie Proulx’s sneer at the ‘twitchy little screen’. Fifteen years on, her statement retains currency in the popular imagination. Although the screens are nowhere near as ‘twitchy’ today, most people assume that reading text on an e-reader could never live up to the experience of a book.
But, despite the rhetoric of resistance, manusfacturers continue to develop e-readers under the belief that the technology will eventually gain wider, if not universal, acceptance.
Several dedicated e-book readers are still available, with more models to arriving on the market. Other portable handheld devices are also capable of displaying e-book files. Reading applications and books are already available for the iPhone. With its 3.5-inch backlit display, the device itself hardly makes for great reading, but its popularity and flexibility make it a good platform for e-books to gain wider appeal. The iPhone app store in Australia had more than 1,200 books earlier this year (and far more now) in a variety of formats ready to purchase. Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro is available as a package of audio book, e-book, and other multimedia.
But the most significant recent development in e-readers has come not from the features of the device itself, but rather from the identity and intentions of its manufacturer. In November 2007, Amazon.com launched its Kindle e-reader, sparking a deluge of breathless ‘news’ stories: approximately six hundred in a matter of hours and, by July 2008, Kindle e-books accounted for six per cent of Amazon’s electronic sales. The Kindle 2, this year, repeated the success and has established the device as the frontrunner of the e-book market, in visibility if nothing else.
Even in its new incarnation, the Kindle is a rather clunky-looking device that offers little more than any contemporary electronic reader: an easy-on-the-eye ‘e-paper’ screen, a high-resolution black and white display, large portable storage for texts, and wireless connectivity to online content. What really sets the Kindle apart is Amazon’s adoption of a so-called ‘vertical business’: a model where a single company controls the production and means of access; from the acquisition from authors to the delivery of text to readers.
At the moment, the readers can purchase texts for a Kindle via a standard web browser or wirelessly directly onto the device. Content for the Kindle can be purchased only through Amazon itself. Wireless content leans heavily toward regularly-updated news and magazine content rather than fiction or other book-length works. Publishers have made Kindle versions available of both fiction and non-fiction titles, some launched on the Kindle platform print. There were some suspicious reports that the Kindle version of Dan Brown’s new thriller-by-numbers was outselling its paper counterpart. By all accounts, the Kindle has been a quietly successful venture in a difficult marketplace. But Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos has indicated his company’s desire to use the Kindle as a means of changing the way people buy and consume texts.
Their inspiration, in part, is Apple Inc’s iTunes Music Store, which now dominates music sales throughout the world in partnership with the iPod. But Amazon also intends to seek and publish authors directly to the Kindle, bypassing the need to negotiate with publishers at all.
Who needs publishers? Or booksellers for that matter?
The implication for writers seeking publication would probably be minimal. Should Amazon forge headlong into publishing, it would likely adopt the same guarded curiosity towards new writers familiar to anyone who has submitted a manuscript. But how a writer, once accepted by Amazon-the-publisher, could confidently negotiate with a single publisher/marketer/seller would depend entirely on how open and transparent Amazon decides to implement its ‘vertical business’.
So far, Amazon has been about as transparent as a freak Australian dust storm.
But, while the impact of such a business model on writers is unclear at this stage, the implication for readers is potentially profound.
Aside from locking readers into a single point of purchase, Amazon has also adopted a proprietary format for Kindle texts using digital rights management (DRM) to lock the files to a single authorised device. Many worry that, by adopting DRM, Amazon wishes to reduce reading to an atomised, private activity, without the messiness and unprofitability of readers sharing with friends, borrowing from a library, or selling their books to the second-hand market.
Is that a legitimate concern or just a guess at what might be Amazon’s fantasy world?
The real danger of DRM is that, by attempting to address a real or perceived threat of piracy, publishers will place needlessly punitive and restrictive measures on the very readers they need to remain in business. This is the lesson of the disastrous impact of DRM on the music industry.
In waging a war against piracy, record companies entered into a debate over the ownership of recorded music. With ownership comes implied control over when, where, how, and even with whom the product will be ‘consumed’. At its lowest point, the Recording Industry Association of America found itself in a blizzard of crushing lawsuits against individuals throughout the United States while every attempt at DRM succeeded only in annoying legitimate listeners. And all the while sales continued to fall in every territory: 14.3 per cent in 2006 and 10.8 per cent in 2007.
In the music industry today, the long discussion over DRM seems to have reached its end with the recent announcement that the RIAA has agreed to drop DRM from all digital music sales through iTunes.
Perhaps there will be no ‘iPod of books’. Perhaps the future of digital publishing resides not so much in any single device, but in the format used to download, share, borrow, or otherwise use texts. Entirely open and universal formats for reading texts and illustrations already exist such as the PDF or portable document format (don’t let Adobe fool you into thinking they own PDF—they don’t) and HTML or hypertext markup language. Both formats are created and almost universally accessible on any device. PDF has the edge on consistent layout and maintains the look of text on paper, while HTML, the language of the World Wide Web, has both ubiquity and the extensibility to incorporate multimedia, potentially opening new avenues for storytelling.
Digital Fiction 3.0: Everybody panic! NOW! to come…
Digital Fiction 1.0: Hardly prophetic is back here.
My own shop for digital fiction is over here. Artist owned and operated since 2006.
Read MoreDigital Fiction 1.0: Hardly prophetic
I’ve had a long piece knocking around in my computer for a while now and I thought I should probably get it out there before everything in it becomes outdated. Most of this was written earlier this year after a ton of research into the publishing industry and its approach to the digital form. Most of the alarmist malarky referenced comes from traditional media, which I suspect has a vested interest in fanning the flames of discontent. You’ll see more of said malarkey later. Anyway, here’s part one-point-oh.
Once upon a time, I wrote something called e-fiction. At least I think it was called that. Somewhere in the year 2000, the year that once served as shorthand for ‘the future’, a short story of mine won a minor award for something called ‘cyber-writing’. The name recalls a simpler time, before the turn of the millennium, when ‘cyber’ served as shorthand for ‘electronic’. At least that’s my recollection. The story, titled Hemmingway, offered a quirky twist on the old adage that robots will eventually become our masters:
From DataBug Technologies comes the latest in virtual author software. HEMMINGWAY VA is the perfect software solution for any publisher from desktop to multinational. HEMMINGWAY combines the latest in real time, natural language, learning artificial intelligence technology with a user-friendly web-style interface to provide professional quality writing at a moment’s notice. Whether writing a catalogue or crafting literary fiction, HEMMINGWAY will satisfy your authoring needs in minutes. All you need to do is ask!
The story itself is hardly prophetic. I have never considered myself a science fiction writer, let alone a futurist, and I don’t expect my job to wind up outsourced to software any time soon. But, for me at least, Hemmingway became a signpost to my future in writing and publishing. Hemmingway was a story both presented and delivered electronically to its audience.
Hemmingway mostly centres on a conversation between the titular ‘virtual writer’ and one of the programmers who helped create him. To present on screen, I broke the narrative into smaller chunks, using images and animations to provide suitable atmospherics. I presented the dialogue on screen in real time, as though readers were eavesdropping on a real interaction between man and machine.
Following its success in the ‘cyber-writing’ competition, Hemmingway was adapted and published as an ‘e-novel’ by an online literary journal.
The times were exciting for digital publishing: the dot com boom made anything vaguely web-based seem successful, big name authors were experimenting with electronic texts, and e-book readers seemed to be finally making progress after ten years of hype.
For a short time, it seemed that my little story formed another part of an inexorable digital publishing revolution. It was only a matter of time.
But, for all the excitement it generated at the time, Hemmingway remains little more than a dolled-up short story. With the benefit of hindsight, the e-novel’s images, animations, and audio now seem like desperate attempts to draw attention away from the fact that the story is as linear and passive as any dog-eared paperback.
The promise of the web and the challenge it presents to writers is to consider moving beyond traditional unidirectional storytelling. ‘Surfing’ the web may prove to be one of the more incisive coinages of the last two decades. The picture of the web surfer may also be akin to a bowerbird, Readers skim over information on the web, picking through pieces of information before link hopping to the next chunk. While arguments rage over whether web surfing destroys the ability to read or creates a new kind of reading, the idea of a single, sustained narrative arc—even a relatively short one—takes on a faintly archaic sepia tone in the web’s relentless chunk bombardment.
With this in mind, I set out to take my e-novel and push the character of Hemmingway as far as the web allowed. Both the character and the story interface were based on an artificial intelligence ‘chatter-bot’ platform and it seemed a logical extension of the story to insert the character into a more complex chat-based program. The result that project, Hemmingway 0.5, is today available to chat on just about any topic, responding in character to whatever you say via the text input. The technology is a simple, but sophisticated response mechanism, moving beyond pat answers to analyse the patterns of language and formulate its responses to be consistent, broad-ranging, and most of all intelligible.
The three-year project to create Hemmingway 0.5 was challenging to a fiction writer used to working with character, setting, and plot. Creating a ‘chatter-bot’ involves long hours of laborious data entry: pre-empting all possible variations of potential inputs from users and determining how the character would respond.
While both fun and distracting, Hemmingway 0.5 also led me to deconstruct the language into smaller components, to think about the various ways information in English can be repackaged, depending on who is talking, and the similarities and differences between plain spoken English and off-the-cuff sentences plugged into a web page form field.
It’s as far from a typical narrative as one can get. Some may question if it qualifies as fiction at all.
Hemmingway 0.5 launched in 2005. For months, I watched Hemmingway provoke, engage, and occasionally harass anyone who addressed him. The project attracted attention from other writers, web geeks, and other random individuals and my web site flooded with traffic from people keen to lock horns with the cranky virtual writer. But soon I realised that Hemmingway’s knowledge base was only a start. Other authors of chatter-bots on the web continually update their bots with new knowledge and new strategies for responding to users. I had already written for the project over the previous three years. I was not prepared to make one single character my life’s work.
Around the same time, my first published short stories—and their associated pay cheques—arrived in the post. Hemmingway 0.5, a project that required as much time and energy as a novel, offered little more than a brief, amusing distraction for nothing.
Without a way to live off kudos, pushing the limits of digital publishing was hardly a great career move. I would never make a living as a writer with Hemmingway 0.5.
Subscription and pay-per-view web sites are rarely successful in a world where readers expect web-based writing to be freely available. And yet, web users have shown they are willing to pay for high quality download content to enjoy on a portable device such as an iPod.
Digital Fiction 2.0: No iPod of Books to come…
Hemmingway the short story is available to download with web site subscriptions.
Hemmingway 0.5 is still available to chat 24/7.
Read MoreThe Books
