Comments on: Has science fiction gone future-blind?

By: Frank

Frank — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 21:24:25 +0000

Maybe there’s been no reaction from the online SF community because they’ve heard it all before. Doctorow has been going on about this for years, on BoingBoing and elsewhere. He isn’t saying anything new in his pieces for Locus Online; he’s just recycling his standard material. Whether they agree or disagree with him, everyone already knows where he stands on the issue.

By: DrObviousSo

DrObviousSo — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 05:38:06 +0000

Hello, this is The Hermit from the SF carnival come to check out the other links.

All that I can really add to this is that I think just about every paper book I’ve purchased recently, has also been downloaded and added to my pocket pc. With the exception of some Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft, these have all been new publications that I’d gladly pay for a download of instead of a paper copy of.

As a student at a rather good tech school, Case Western Reserve, I’m surrounded by the bleeding edge of early adopters, and ebooks on computers or pocket pc’s are fairly common. I don’t know if that means they’ll trickle into the mainstream market place soon or not.

One problem with that is that there’s no need to go buy new hardware like an ipod. A computer monitor does the trick just fine for most ebook readers.

By: The Greatest Show In the Galaxy #3 » Solar Flare: Science Fiction News

The Greatest Show In the Galaxy #3 » Solar Flare: Science Fiction News — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 00:46:51 +0000

[...] Paul Raven / Armchair Anarchist presents Has science fiction gone future-blind? posted at Velcro City Tourist Board, saying, “Electronic book readers are popping up like mushrooms in autumn; the music industry is reeling from its failures to stem the tide of filesharing in reaction to restrictive DRM; technology is marching forwards ever faster to a world where all content is digital. So why is it that science fiction, the genre of tech nerds and future freaks, seems to be ignoring these developments completely?” [...]

By: Julian Morrison

Julian Morrison — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 22:22:01 +0000

The possible, cruel answer is that the music industry made no mistakes – that this is a “Kobiyashi Maru Scenario” for all forms of the professional copyright-content biz; there are and were no winning options. Art must become amateur. Artists will have day jobs.

Aside: I’ve heard people praise the paper book, in the belief that aesthetics will guarantee its’ continuance. I couldn’t disagree more. I say this as a man with a small library of my own – the paper book is bulky, heavy, smelly, unsearchable, inconvenient to index and completely unavailable to data mining. It can’t be backed up, it can’t be duplicated, it can’t be emailed or posted to reddit. Its only advantages are durability and a reflective rather than radiative viewing area. Can you be certain electronics won’t match that? I certainly am not.

What it will be replaced with, if anything, is the idea of the printed book as a transient instantiation of a digital datum. “Print it out”, peruse, discard. You have the file and you can re-create it whenever you see the need.

By: Jose

Jose — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:26:00 +0000

I went to the 1992 Worldcon in Orlando and there was an employee of a burgeoning e publisher issuing statements of “traditional publishers are dinosaurs!” at every panel he went to.
Here we are 14 years later and we’ve seen wave after wave of e publishing ventures emerge and then turn to dust. People involved in SF publishing have not been ignoring e publishing, they’ve had their ears talked off about it for over 15 years now.

It’ll come eventually but it’s not sneaking up on anyone. When it does arrive I think SF authors will be at the forefront of adapting to it and probably capitalizing on it.