Money for nothing (and books for free?)
Up-and-coming soon-to-be-novelist Bianca Zander is trying to raise $8000 to "enable [her] to write full-time for six months." She's using her blog Sponsor My Novel as a way to communicate with — and hopefully raise funds from — people she's never met. It's attracted a bit of attention already, with novelist Rachael King and poet Anna Jackson commenting on posts. (I'm not at all sure if they are actually posts from these people, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that they might be...)
There's also a Facebook group, and you can download an extract of the book as a PDF — again an innovative use of the Internet to reach a much larger audience than would have be traditionally possible.
The only problem there is that I — along with many of you reading this — hate reading off screens. That seems like a stupid thing to say because you could quite correctly say "But you're reading off a screen right now! You can't hate it that much!"
What I mean, of course, is that I hate reading anything longer than a few paragraphs off a screen. Reading news articles is fine because of the way they're presented on the web: as chunks of information often broken down into several separate pages, with an aesthetic similar to that of a broadsheet newspaper. Anything longer than that, or significantly more "book-like" in appearance, I usually print out. This is for one of several reasons, but mostly so that I can give such long-form writing the attention that it requires in order to be understood and consumed properly.
Cory Doctorow, in his essay "You Do Like Reading Off Screens," examines how people generally prefer to read full-length works of fiction in their native format: on paper. The main reason why people don't like reading off a screen, he says, is because computers weren't designed with that in mind, and especially now with the advent of always-on broadband Internet technology there are simply way too many distractions to provide an environment in which to properly read a book. Think about it: you can't curl up with a computer on a rainy afternoon, can you? As an aside, Doctorow's article on giving away e-books in order to push dead-tree version sales is as equally interesting a read.
Of course you could argue that emerging technology such as the Sony Reader will change the way we think about reading books, but for now such technology is fairly limited in its availability, and still relatively expensive. It's also cold, emotionless bits of electronic boards and metal, not a nice little paperback book. :)
There's also a Facebook group, and you can download an extract of the book as a PDF — again an innovative use of the Internet to reach a much larger audience than would have be traditionally possible.
The only problem there is that I — along with many of you reading this — hate reading off screens. That seems like a stupid thing to say because you could quite correctly say "But you're reading off a screen right now! You can't hate it that much!"
What I mean, of course, is that I hate reading anything longer than a few paragraphs off a screen. Reading news articles is fine because of the way they're presented on the web: as chunks of information often broken down into several separate pages, with an aesthetic similar to that of a broadsheet newspaper. Anything longer than that, or significantly more "book-like" in appearance, I usually print out. This is for one of several reasons, but mostly so that I can give such long-form writing the attention that it requires in order to be understood and consumed properly.
Cory Doctorow, in his essay "You Do Like Reading Off Screens," examines how people generally prefer to read full-length works of fiction in their native format: on paper. The main reason why people don't like reading off a screen, he says, is because computers weren't designed with that in mind, and especially now with the advent of always-on broadband Internet technology there are simply way too many distractions to provide an environment in which to properly read a book. Think about it: you can't curl up with a computer on a rainy afternoon, can you? As an aside, Doctorow's article on giving away e-books in order to push dead-tree version sales is as equally interesting a read.
Of course you could argue that emerging technology such as the Sony Reader will change the way we think about reading books, but for now such technology is fairly limited in its availability, and still relatively expensive. It's also cold, emotionless bits of electronic boards and metal, not a nice little paperback book. :)
posted by Hugh at 11:42 PM
3 Comments:
Good topic! People should check out the Baen Free Library , which is where every single book published by the Baen company is available to read online.
Regularly ignored in discussions about online piracy, Baen can prove that since they made their whole stable available online for free, their sales have increased detectably - arguably, as you pointed out, because people read enough to know if they're interested, and then buy offscreen copies.
- Kevin.
Bianca (somehow) found my blog and posted the following comment on it, which I'll reproduce here because I think it's interesting and relevant:
"I tried to make the downloadable pdf extract of my novel look as much like a ‘book page’ as possible, in the way I formatted it. That’s why I didn’t include any text on the page - because it didn’t look like a book."
Thanks for the interesting links.
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