Another 100,000 Galleys
lareviewofbooks:
The famous Library at Alexandria, at its largest, housed perhaps as many as 500,000 scrolls, or the equivalent of some 25,000 books. A quaint number: ten years ago, we were publishing, in the U.S., around ten times that a year. Now, we publish that many every two and a half days.
Anyone with access to a networked computer can publish a book, or ten, or a hundred. Anyone with 500 bucks can see their book into print, and the novel that once would have lived its entire live in a drawer is now more likely to be downloadable. A manuscript that might never have found a home in the twentieth century, certainly not at a “legitimate” publisher as they were called, can now, with very little effort, be ordered online, printed in a run of one, and mailed to a buyer in a matter of hours. We used to call them vanity presses, the companies that helped people publish books not wanted by the traditional, commercial publishing world; now such companies are more often touted as the new business model.
We plan to run a series of pieces on the evolving book world, from independent solo ventures to micro publishers to small presses and the new mini-majors to the Big Six and the 600-pound gorilla. Getting us started is Joseph Peschel, a freelance journalist from South Dakota. He interviews a wide variety of people who have self-published, some happily, some less so, some unworried by the stigma, some with their hands bloody, some embarrassed, some victorious.
— Tom Lutz
JOSEPH PESCHEL
Editors, reviewers, and even many authors believe that if you self-publish, you’re branded a sinner of sorts. You wear a scarlet S-P, signifying that you can’t get published because your work is inferior. If you promote your own work on the Internet, you must sheepishly precede the phrase “self-promotion” with “shameless.” It’s difficult to quantify the extent of the stigma, but we all know that publishing your own work has been frowned upon by writers for decades. Recently, genre authors Amanda Hocking (who writes young adult vampire novels) and John Locke (pulp thrillers) have had so much success independently publishing and selling hundreds of thousands of their own books that you’d think the self-publishing wall would’ve been kicked down and lying in a crumbled mess by now. But the stigma attached to publishing, promoting, and selling your own written word persists. Most writers, like Susan Shapiro, who’s written for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and has conventionally published eight books, including comic novels and nonfiction through St. Martin’s Press and Delacorte, remain convinced that it’s better to get a mainstream publisher. Shapiro, who’s helped hundreds of her students get published, recently told me she would consider self-publishing, but only “if everybody else turned me down.”
No one ever faulted Woody Allen, Orson Welles, Quentin Tarantino, or Charlie Chaplin for writing, directing, and producing their own movies. No one disrespects musicians for distributing their music without a major label behind them. And poets — think of Walt Whitman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the authors of contemporary poetry chapbooks — have long been used to publishing their own work. Why then should independent publishing be regarded any differently? Especially when even established writers, in today’s traditional publication market, can have difficulty getting their publishers and agents behind a book? A slumping economy has pushed already-teetering bookstores into bankruptcy, further squeezed publishers’ profits, and reduced and in some cases eliminated book review space.
Read More
thenewinquiry:
“Don’t you see? Capitalism allows us to communicate, it makes the whole process worth something to somebody. Without it we would be bereft. (What would we talk about without consumer products anyway? Pinterest would be so boring!) Thank goodness the advertising industry and its skip tracers in the data-tracking field are finally learning to monetize more of our everyday life and our social being; finally sociality has some real purpose. Knowing I am being followed reassures me that I am actually going somewhere.”
Rob Horning on Alexis Madrigal’s recent Atlantic article.
Pullulating Jungles of Wallpaper
lareviewofbooks:
JACOB MIKANOWSKI
on Bruno Schulz, Jindřich Štyrský,
and other modernist masters of matter.
The fiction of Bruno Schulz is alive with dead things. His stories all take place in the narrow landscape of his childhood: the small, provincial town of Drohobycz in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now western Ukraine, a few years after the start of the twentieth century. At the same time, they seem to occupy a separate cosmos, one whose physics, biology and even meteorology are distinct from our own. Schulz’s Drohobycz is a city of abnormal winds, intercalated seasons and illusory geography, in which time is entirely plastic, stretching out and contracting according to its own desires.
Here, the boundaries between people and things aren’t fixed. Human beings are susceptible to sudden, inexplicable transformations. They turn into animals — cockroaches, flies, crustaceans — and objects — a pile of ash, a primitive telegraph, a heap of rubbish, the rubber tube of an enema. A flock of multicolored birds flies from the family house in winter; in the fall, it returns blind and misshapen, the birds’ anatomy a nonsense of cardboard and carrion. The substance of reality seems paper-thin and prone to tearing. In attics, darkness degenerates and ferments. Unmade beds rise like dough. Colorless poppies sprout out of the weightless fabric of nightmares and hashish.
Read More
“The Evolution of Warfare” :D
realcleverscience:
npr:
cosascool:
tools
Really, the pointer should be 20C. Input devices in 21C will be/are things like your fingers, your eyes, your brain. —Wright
First thought: Awesome! Yay science and progress!
Second thought: I completely agree with Wright. (Hell, we’re already creating some amazing BCI technologies!)
Third thought: Hmm… perhaps it’s actually a message about the evolution of warfare - in which case Wright’s point may have missed the point.
hitrecordjoe:
Calling all Writers, all Vocalists, all Visual Artists… Well, EVERYONE!
The REGULARITY #60 (02/22/12)
In this weeks Regularity I cover a damn good writing exercise in the collaboration Dialogue Tales.
Dan The Automator and I request some vocals for the incredibly killer beat that Dan made just with HITRECORD audio records.
And I wanna shine a light on a big favorite and popular collaboration, Shadow Caste. We have the concept and a bunch of great visuals and characters - let’s start making some episodes out of it!
Thanks Again.
<3
J
==
Contribute to these collaborations here! =
The church’s decades-old campaign against modern contraception has led to an epidemic of unsafe abortions in the Philippines. The country’s high unmet need for contraception means that almost half of pregnancies are unwanted and about 500,000 per year result in abortion. All too often, these procedures are unsafe. Every year, an estimated 60,000 Filipinas are injured trying to terminate a pregnancy. About 1,000 die from abortion-related complications.
Greeneland
lareviewofbooks:
JUDITH FREEMAN
on Pico Iyer’s The Man Within My Head.
Pico Iyer
The Man Within My Head
Alfred A. Knopf, January 2012. 256 pp.
Raymond Chandler once said that great writing, whatever else it does, nags at the minds of subsequent writers, who find it sometimes difficult to explain just why they are so haunted by a particular work or author. The real mystery is not that an author takes up residence in our head, but why? Why this author and not that one? Why does Henry James haunt Colm Tóibín and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and why did he haunt Graham Greene? Why does Graham Greene haunt Pico Iyer, and Raymond Chandler haunt me? Most often we simply accept these hauntings without attempting to discover why a particular writer has so colonized our mind, because to do so would require an excavation of the unconscious that is not only hard work but often disturbing and, perhaps, impossible — like asking us to fully know ourselves while we are still in the process of becoming.
Is it that we see ourselves in the work of our shadow mentors – the traces of our own lives and sensibilities? Do they somehow supply us with the tools we need to tell stories of our own? Do we choose them, or do they choose us, taking up residence of their own volition? Do they, like love or other compulsions, become, as Pico Iyer suggests, “forces we can’t explain even to ourselves?”
This is exactly the sort of reckoning Iyer sets out to accomplish in The Man Within My Head, a book whose comely title plays off Greene’s first published novel, The Man Within. The book is a journey into Iyer’s own haunting by Greene, the writer who has most influenced his writing as well as his life. Part memoir, part literary excavation, part travelogue and existential inquiry, it’s a story about finding one’s voice as a writer and one’s place in the world (or lack of place). It’s a book about spiritual conundrums and dilemmas, and about fathers — both those we create as shadow allies, and those who create us (those real–life figures who become much more complex presences to deal with). Finally, it’s an exploration of the ways in which the power of affinity lies in its mysteriousness, how fictional and real worlds collide in the consciousness of a writer whose ghostly guide becomes more real in some ways than living people. The Man Within My Head is an investigation into not only what haunts us and why, but how what haunts us sometimes conceals what we most do not want to turn our attention to.
Read More
smarterplanet:
The hot tech gig of 2022: Data scientist - Fortune Tech
By the end of the decade 50 billion devices will be emitting information nonstop. Data scientists will help manage it all.
A decade from now the smart techies who decided to become app developers may wish they had taken an applied-mathematics class or two. The coming deluge of data (more on that in a moment) will create demand for a new kind of computer scientist — a gig that’s one part mathematician, one part product-development guru, and one part detective.
D.J. Patil is a pioneer in the field of data science, a new discipline that aims to organize and make sense of all the data generated by machines. It’s a challenge that will grow exponentially over the next decade.
Tech in 2012: Face-offs, failures and fairly big changes at the office
Today there are some 400 million devices connected to the Internet, mostly phones and computers. By 2020 some 50 billion devices, from cars to appliances, will be talking to one another. And companies will need teams of data scientists like Patil to sort through everything from internal inventory metrics to customer tweets. The role is so important that Greylock Partners has hired Patil to serve as a “data scientist in residence” to help its portfolio companies mine their data for patterns or stats that will make them more efficient or smarter than their competitors.
