OK, you’re going to need roughly an hour, so bookmark this post and come back later if you don’t have the time right now. But I promise that sixty minutes of invested time will be of huge benefit to you, whatever sort of creative work you do. SRSLY.

First of all, you should read this New York Times article about Jan Chipchase (and consider subscribing to his Future Perfect blog while you’re at it). Here in what we used to call the First World we often talk about “revolutionary technologies”, but from our position of privilege we misunderstand the term completely; Chipchase is out there in the dust and monsoons of developing nations discovering how mobile phones really are revolutionising people’s lives in small but tangible ways, and trying to discover how to make them do so more effectively.

“This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on.”

It’s a fascinating piece, and I seriously suggest you read it - especially if you’re a fiction writer. It’s about a lot more than just market research, and there are the seeds of a thousand stories in there.

But that’s just your appetiser. The main course is the following video of Bruce Sterling giving the closing talk at an interface design conference in Germany last year. [via BoingBoing]

Even allowing for my fanboy filter amplifying the impact, I think this forty minutes of thinking will blow the top of your head clean off. If you can watch it as a writer of science fiction (or an artist, web developer, or pretty much anything else) and then email me afterwards and tell me honestly that there was nothing there you needed to know, I will give away all my worldly possessions and take up an itinerant lifestyle as your devoted disciple, spending my days sat in the dust by your feet hanging on your every word.

Basically, bad science fiction makes the same mistake made by bad design - it fails to take into account what people actually want. And people want to not have to think.

Watch … and take notes. You’re going to need them.

“MacBook Air first to fall in hacking contest vs Vista and Linux“

Ah-hhhahhahahahhahhaha hhahaaahha ahahahahah!

[breathes]

Ahhahhahha!

That’s made my afternoon, that has.

[ Yeah, I know, it's a browser exploit, no big deal. But it'll rankle smug Macvangelists the world over. Glee! ]

This is a minority interest post, I’m guessing.

If you aren’t kind of fascinated (or or utterly and irredeemably geeked out) by huge racks of the most powerful computer hardware on the planet, you’ll have no interest in the picture below, or the others like it in this gallery of supercomputer images at Guardian Unlimited.

[Image: hardware from the supercomputer MDGRAPE-3 at RIKEN in Japan; image credit - RIKEN.]

Obviously, I have no idea - Amazon must have forgotten to post me my free review device, but I’m sure it’s on the way*.

It looks … well, it doesn’t look astonishing, really. But that’s irrelevant compared to how good it is for actually, you know, reading books on.

Initial reports seem to be positive, but until I’ve heard feedback from people I know to be serious lovers of traditional book reading, I’ll be holding back my cash. This might be the Model T of a new reading paradigm … if anyone has the clout to pull it off, it’s Bezos and Amazon.

I wonder how long it’ll take for someone to hack the Kindle for increased functionality? I doubt it’ll have the same kudos as the iPhone in that respect, but even so … [Image lifted from those jammy well-connected buggers at Engadget]

[* Little bit of wishful thinking never hurt anyone, right? ]

I don’t like to think of myself as the boastful gloating type. But today, I shall wilfully be exactly that.

Because I have an ARC of the new Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ novel, Matter.

Nothing else matters, indeed.

[I was pipped to the post with my boast by the good Mr Bloomer of Big Dumb Object ... but I retain top rank among jammy bastards, because I have the privilege of doing an interview with Banks for an Interzone feature. I believe the appropriate phrase is "get in"!]

Peer-to-peer book sharing

There’s an awful lot of people who’d very much like to be able to read that book rightf*ckingnow. That hunger for fresh material has driven the P2P distribution systems, at least as far as the music industry is concerned, but as yet there’s no easy way to ‘rip’ a book.

Or is there?

Well, obviously there is, or I wouldn’t have laid that obvious bait. Observe! The Atiz BookSnap:

Atiz are calling it the first consumer book-ripper, but that’s a bit of a stretch at over US$1500. But it is the Model-T of things to come; a device that will (with some assistance from you, at least in this instance) convert a book into a digitally scanned PDF file.

I have my own set of opinions about this, which regular readers will doubtless be able to predict quite effectively. But I’d be fascinated to hear the opinions of library staff, publishing staff, bibliophiles and writers about what this will mean to them (and everyone else) in the long term.

First one to mention DRM is a rotten apple.

The system-restore data image for Apple’s new iPhone is already loose on the internet.

My money says it’ll be under a month before the first flashable mods for the OS are available. The term ‘closed system’ has a half-life, just like radioactives.

I didn’t notice until I clicked through to it from my RSS reader that this lengthy ‘blog post from the future’ on Wired is by none other than my favourite cyberpunk author and all-round hand-waving Texan genius, Bruce Sterling.

I should have noticed, of course; in hindsight, it’s very much in his style. Although it doesn’t work exceptionally well on literary terms (it’s one big infodump with a framing concept), I doubt it is supposed to - and it’s well worth a read anyway. Here’s a snippet of news from 2017 as an example:

“Meanwhile, gray-haired representatives are wigging out over the hordes of Americans who blithely abandon their passports to travel the world with European mobiles. The Europeans let you do that. They understand that their hopelessly crufty nationware only impedes the flow of ever-stronger euros. Nobody wants to deal with nationware, not even in an emergency. It’s not granular enough, fast enough, close enough to the ground. If you lose everything you own in a flood or hurricane, who are you going to call — the federal bureaucracy?! Amazon.com, Google, Ikea, and Wal-Mart can deliver anything, anywhere, while the Feds are still stenciling their crates of surplus cheese.

It’s not about who salutes, folks. It’s about who delivers. Remember that. I said it first. You can link to me.”

Apparently there’s more to come, which promises to be fun. As well as being an interesting format with which to deliver futurist ideas (or ‘foresight consulting’, as I believe we’re supposed to call it now), I like the meta-ness of blogging a fictional blog from the future. It also highlights the potential for serialised short fiction to make a resurgence, if the authors can find the right hooks. Hmmm …

DefCon 13 2005

Originally uploaded by eliotphillips.

… are way cooler looking than any sf con badges I’ve seen so far.

My sf-nal brethren, this ires me deeply. There were sf cons way before there were hacker cons. Hell, there were sf cons way before there were hackers, full stop.

The next con bid I vote for will be the one that promises badges with the same degree of awesome as the one above, or the others from the same Flickr set. Who’s with me?

[via BoingBoing]

It’s been a lively week in the publishing world - or so it seems to someone who was away from his RSS feeds for a week.

Genre mags are giving it away for free

I’m very pleased to see that Fantasy & Science Fiction are experimenting with publishing full stories from their back-catalogue on their website. It’s a great way to raise the profile of the writers, and to drive traffic to their own site by providing uniquely valuable content with no strings attached.

They’re some way from the mass of content that Subterranean are giving away, but it’s a good start. I think the recent overseas postal rate hike is making a lot of the small press mags look seriously at new options before they discover a hard place to hem them in between the rock at their back.

For example, I will not be renewing my sub to Locus in paper format; not because the magazine is no good, but because the airmail price increase means that I might as well stick to getting the news from their website - meaning that I get it when it’s still relevant. Hard choices, sure, but it’s a changing world. Better to jump before the chasm gets too wide.

Talking of giving away content, Gareth L. Powell’s story “The Last Reef” is available to read in full on the TTA Press website, as is a teaser for his forthcoming “Ack-Ack Macaque” (at the bottom of the same page, as a downloadable image of the mag layout for the start of the story). We’re looking at ways of expanding the amount of content that the TTA Press site carries over the coming months; more news on that when I have it in a definite format.

The Waterstones cash-for-promo leak

Of course, there are other options for promoting writers - but as the recent alleged leaked memo from Waterstones confirms, they’re strictly for publishers who have a lot of cash to splash around. As someone who gets to see some of the machinations of the music industry, those figures aren’t even slightly surprising. The record companies, music press and brick-and-mortar stores work in very similar ways to the bublishing industry, and that’s a large part of why they’re in such a mire of quicksand at present.

As I’ve said before, this is something the genre publishers should learn from sooner rather than later. Being smaller, they have the ability to change more quickly, being less caught up with the train-wrecking momentum of the big boys.

Harry Haxxor and the Pilfered Plot

The saturation of blather about the forthcoming final installment of [popular children's fantasy series that I can't be bothered to name-check] is reaching ridiculous proportions. I was more than a trifle suspicious when I saw the news that OMGHAX PL0+ SU|\/||\/|4RY G4N|<3d FRUM W3BSIT3ZORZ!!!1!!1, and Bruce Schneier also seems to be less than convinced that this is anything more than a publicity stunt.

The question of which side of the fence the stunt has come from will likely never be made apparent - at least not with the same degree of headline-grabbing fervour as the original story.

OUP just wishes Google would ask first

On the subject of the pilfering (or not) of licenced content, an executive of the Oxford University Press has gone on the record as saying that all publishers really want is the opportunity to give permission for their work to be digitised by Google, rather than the opportunity to refuse the permission already assumed.

I need to research this matter more thoroughly, so I’m not going to call one way or the other on the veracity of the claims until I know the facts of the matter. But there are hints that publishers are starting to wake up to the usefulness of the digitisation projects, even though they don’t want to go back on their earlier statements of outrage.

Espresso Print-on-Demand Machine goes live in New York

If nothing else, digital copies of public domain material could become far more useful and accessible in the next few years, once a few more libraries and bookstores follow the New York Public Library’s lead, and install Espresso Book Machines to print titles on demand for customers. Until we reach a point that the vast majority of readers are prepared for reading in electronic formats at all times, these devices are as close as the publishing industry can get to the just-in-time customer-satisfying power of downloaded music - and as such represent a wise step forwards in trying to adapt to a changing business landscape.

Some folk don’t like the Dewey Decimal system*. It doesn’t work well with the more casual library user, so the argument goes, because the granularity of information it provides isn’t intuitive to people who don’t have that sort of mind-set.

Hence the decision of a public library in Arizona to do away with Dewey and replace it with a broader topic-based cataloguing system, more akin to that of bookshops. And cue debate by bookworms and library types over the rights and wrongs of the decision.**

What this highlights is that we have access to too much information for any single linear cataloguing system to handle sufficiently. Neither Dewey nor  subject sections can handle both topical cross-referencing and precise atomised location of knowledge. for example.

Which, as far as I’m concerned, is another argument in favour of the Google Books project. Once books are detached from their physicality, the inherent problems of finding something on a shelf becomes irrelevant. With a decent search engine, you can locate exactly what you want, or browse more broadly - whichever suits you best.

And despite childish pseudo-protests from publishers who seem to have misunderstood the entire issue, more institutions are opening up to the idea. The Big Ten US universities (which are actually twelve in number, for some reason) will be letting the Google people get their mitts on significant chunks of their library collections, with the intent of creating “a shared digital repository that faculty, students and the public can access quickly.”

As I’ve said before, I don’t think the death of the physical book is incredibly close, but it can be seen on the horizon. The problem isn’t dead-tree technology, it’s the distribution mechanism. We’re now very accustomed to getting the information we want as soon as we need it, and libraries cannot always meet those demands.

Nor can bookstores, for various reasons - many of them profit based, which has led to the pseudo-monoculture of big-chain bookstore shelves. It’s a situation that has encouraged the MD of Edinburgh’s Birlinn Press to buy up a series of indie bookstores in an attempt to revive the industry, a quixotic move that (much as I’d love to see it work) doesn’t seem likely to succeed.

The future of books is in digital catalogues and print-on-demand technology. There’ll still be a need for libraries with good stock, and for shops with full shelves to browse. But until libraries and shops can cater to every possible customer’s every possible request - quickly, cheaply and efficiently - they’re going to lose users to services like Amazon and Abe. Sad, perhaps, but also true.

[* Not me - I love Dewey, being a natural born sucker for taxonomic systems. The proprietary nature of it frustrates me, though, and is a major source of its bugs and inability to move with the times ... but that's a whole different rant.]

[** Much of the debate seems to miss the point that the really important function of Dewey is to allow the library staff to quickly locate a book on the customer's behalf - a task that becomes exponentially harder with loose-category shelving. But that is yet another different rant.]