Fan Fiction: What Writes Better, Simple or Complex? (From PsycArticles)

I am reading a short book on "Simplicity" and the relationship between simplicity and complexity and thought I would also do some research on PsycNet to see what recent research existed. As it happened I found the following article on Fan Fiction (topically of interest). Turns out the more complex the fan fiction story the better it is reviewed and read!

 

APA's PsycArticles contains more than 250,000 full text research articles in psychology but many of these articles have real world business implications relevant to researchers and students in academic disciplines outside psychology and social sciences.  

 

The Diamonds and the Dross: A Quantitative Exploration of Integrative Complexity in Fan fiction by Hayley McCullough investigates the psychological and linguistic characteristics of fan fiction by analyzing its integrative complexity, measuring how well a text recognizes and integrates multiple perspectives. McCullough's research compared 45 popular and 45 unpopular fan fictions from the Archive of Our Own (AO3) platform, using "Hits" (views) and "Kudos" (community approval) as metrics for popularity.

 

Contrary to expectation, that popular fan fiction would show lower complexity—a trend observed in other pop culture domains like film—the study revealed that popular fan fiction consistently scored higher in all forms of complexity across various categories. The finding suggests fan fiction readers prefer more thought provoking and nuanced narratives, which was found regardless whether popularity was measured by views or community approval. The researchers concluded that there is a robust preference for complexity in fan fiction.

 

The article proposes several explanations for this unexpected trend:

• The text-based nature of fan fiction may encourage more complex storytelling (in the absence of visual cues).
• Fan fiction's role as a form of cultural critique. This resonates with the idea that content, including (fan) fiction, often provides insight into complex real-world issues.
• A desire among fans to explore underrepresented identities and perspectives. This can be seen in popular characters like Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander, who was potentially inspired by a "grown-up Pippi Longstocking" and represents a "dysfunctional girl" who nonetheless directs her own destiny, hinting at the appeal of complex and non-traditional identities.

I have explored the fan fiction 'marketplace' a few times on PND and the researchers also reference well known examples including Harry Potter fan websites such as MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron where fans move the Harry Potter story in new directions and different directions (sometimes, not always supported by Rowling). Many of these popular fan sites provide vigorous and unedited feedback to authors which, while potentially intimidating, creates an environment which encourages quality. 

 

The Implications for Publishers: Publishers are encouraged to "engage deeply where it matters" within fan fiction communities rather than just marketing to them as readers rather than content creators. CompletelyNovel.com uses reviews, ratings, and sales data from the social web to help authors prove market viability, demonstrate how community feedback can influence success, and model of "post-publication peer review," where readers assess content quality, aligns with the community-driven nature of fan fiction communities. The research conducted suggests that platforms and content communities that filter for complex or nuanced narratives would be highly valued by readers and creators. 

 

In summary, successful fan fiction is likely to be more complex suggesting a strong appetite for intellectually stimulating content, in turn suggesting commercialization should emphasize deeper more thought provoking story lines, character development and cultural complexity. As the authors note in their closing that there may be more to do to understand fan fiction and the implications of their research: 

As previously discussed, fan fiction as a research topic has been a largely ignored by researchers and scholars outside the qualitative humanities’ scholarship, and only a few studies focus specifically on examining and understanding the underlining psychology of fan fiction, most notably Vinney and Dill-Shackleford (2018). Alongside that article, these studies begin filling this particularly research gap and provides a strong foundation going forward. It is the responsibility of future researcher to continue filling the research gap and build up these studies.

More from APA PsycNet on "Fan Fiction":

Strange new worlds: Social content in popular Star Trek fan fiction versus commercial novels

Fan fiction as a vehicle for meaning making: Eudaimonic appreciation, hedonic enjoyment, and other perspectives on fan engagement with television.

Amazon's Fan Fiction Play

From the Hardy Boys to Mad Men, fan fiction may have been the growth market within the publishing industry that no one knows about.  Fans are by nature the most ardent supporters of character narratives whether they be text or image based and some fairly large online communities have developed around specific shows, characters and franchises.  Over the years, traditional print publishers have dabbled in the market and video and television have accommodated fan fiction into some of their offerings but today's announcement from Amazon is a new twist (I think).

Amazon has now launch their fan fiction site in the Kindle store.  Amazon doesn't own any content but they've circumvented this issue by establishing licensing agreements with content owners so that fans can publish their fiction within an established "world".  It is a really interesting model and given the extent of the Amazon reach one could assume revenue from these fan "worlds" may generate impressive 'found cash'.

More from the Amazon press release:

Kindle Worlds is a new publishing model that allows any writer to publish authorized stories inspired by popular Worlds and make them available for readers to purchase in the Kindle Store, and earn up to a 35% royalty while doing so. Kindle Worlds stories will typically be priced between $0.99 and $3.99 and will be exclusive to Kindle. To learn more and get started writing, visit kindleworlds.amazon.com.
Here’s what authors and licensors are saying about Kindle Worlds:

• “It’s actually a gift to be able to take someone else’s creation and see whether you can take it in a new direction. Watch every show; read every comic book. Honor the canon and honor the fans. There is a reason these stories have become so popular. And don’t feel restricted by the universe that has already been created. It reminds me a bit of writing a haiku or a sonnet. There are rules that must be followed, but within those rules, you can go anywhere. Your imagination is the only limit.” —Carolyn Nash, writer in Archer & Armstrong
• “I believe Kindle Worlds has the potential to increase writership in much the same way the introduction of the Kindle expanded readership. I am thrilled for the Silo Saga to be a part of this program. It’s a natural fit because for the past year, talented authors have been exploring Silos of their own creation, and I look forward to reading more and to crafting some Worlds stories of my own.” —Hugh Howey, World Licensor for the Silo Saga
• “I was intrigued by the opportunity to create something that absolutely had to fall inside a canon that someone else came up with. In one way, it was very freeing to do so. Because the universe itself exists, with all the richness of an already established background and history, I could get right into the meat of the story without having to explain everything to the readers. I did try to make it understandable and enjoyable to a newcomer to the world, however. But there’s a lot I worked to add that will hopefully tickle the fancy of the fans.” —L.J. McDonald, writer in The Vampire Diaries
• “It was great fun to play ‘What if?’ and come up with scenarios that had ties to things that have happened on Vampire Diaries but which took things in a different direction or introduced new characters that could fit into the world of Mystic Falls. There’s probably not a writer fangirl alive who hasn’t fantasized about being able to write at least one episode of her favorite show, and I’m no different. While these stories aren’t show episodes, it’s still pretty darn cool to be able to write them with the idea of fellow fans reading them.” —Trish Milburn, writer in The Vampire Diaries

The Kindle Worlds Store is now open with over 50 commissioned stories including:

• “Pretty Little Liars: Stained” by Barbra Annino
• “The Vampire Diaries: The Arrival” by Lauren Barnholdt & Aaron Gorvine
• “Shadowman: Salvation Sally” by Tom King
• “The Foreworld Saga: The Qian” by Aric Davis
• “X-O Manowar: Noughts and Crosses” by Stuart Moore

I expect publishers and other content producers will pay close attention to this experiment.  Licensing has always been a part of many new title, tv or movie marketing and promotion campaigns and I could see this opportunity becoming very important within product development at many content companies.

Just Like Magic: The Harry Potter Economy

I've such a backlog that I am still on The Economist Christmas Special. Here is a selection from an article on the The Harry Potter economy (Economist):

In fact the Harry Potter books were the iceberg. As each book appeared it drew new readers to the series and expanded sales of earlier books in a snowball effect. Thanks largely to the boy wizard, Bloomsbury’s turnover, which had gradually increased from £11m in 1995 to £14m in 1997, took off. In 1999 it stood at £21m. Two years later it was £61m. By the middle of this decade, with Bloomsbury’s revenues above £100m, rival publishers were griping that there was no point bidding against the firm for a children’s title. So far the books, which are published in America by Scholastic, have sold more than 400m copies worldwide. Not all were read by the young. Central to the books’ success was a repackaging, with a darker cover, for adults embarrassed about being seen reading a children’s book.

Mr Newton says he became “fearful and respectful” of the windfall. A sudden hit can destabilise any company, but the danger is acute in the swaggering media industry. Bloomsbury banked a lot of the money, and has taken advantage of the slump in asset prices to pick up specialist and scholarly publishers. It now owns Arden, most famous for its series of Shakespeare texts, the legal publisher, Tottel, and the cricketer’s bible, Wisden. Having learned to handle magic, Bloomsbury is thus returning to its Muggle (non-wizard) roots. The ideal, Mr Newton says, is to balance the risks—and large potential profits—of the trade fiction business with the dependability and high margins of specialist publishing.
.....
Fans get up to much more. As the books and films took off, the hunger for Harry Potter news and content quickly became so much greater than Warner Bros or the increasingly press-shy Ms Rowling were able to supply that alternative sources began to spring up. The emerging internet fuelled their growth. The most obvious of them are fan websites like MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron, which mix official announcements with rumours. But the most intriguing is the strange world of fan fiction. Ms Rowling’s “worst nightmare” was that her hero would end up on fast-food containers Re-telling the Harry Potter story is a popular pastime. One website dedicated to it, Fiction Alley, added 14 book chapters in November 2009 alone, together with many shorter works. Would-be Rowlings push the Harry Potter story in new directions by focusing on different characters or writing about years not covered in the books. Many plunge into the characters’ romantic lives—perhaps the weakest point of “the canon”, as the original series of books is reverentially known. These amateur stories, which are often subjected to rigorous criticism from other fans, are for the most part competent. The students in them often talk the way teenagers actually talk. “I can’t just be an arse to him for no reason,” splutters Harry at one point in the third book in the “Lily’s Charm” series, by a writer called ObsidianEmbrace. That carries a convincing whiff of the playground.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 23): Romance or Not, Grief in The Killing, The Value of College, Nordic Crimewave + More

From Salon reacting to a report on Utah's KSL.com that romance novels can he highly addictive and threaten marriages (Salon):

Now, a disclaimer first: These generalities are always problematic, because far more men and women represent unique variations on these stereotypes than perfectly adhere to the sexual mold. It's also true that romance novels do not all include sex, whereas porn does by definition. As Sarah Wendell wrote on her website, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, "Anyone who picks up [romance novelist] Georgette Heyer looking for Jenna Jameson is going to be woefully and comically disappointed." A much more direct comparison can be made between smut and the hot-and-heavy action of X-rated fan fiction, but romance novels represent a larger, more mainstream audience. That's why researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam used the two genres -- as well as billions of Internet search terms -- as a way to plumb the depths of the male and female sexual psyches in their book "A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire," and it's a gold mine for a discussion like this one.

Slate looks at how grief is a center piece of the AMC serial The Killing (Slate):

And so The Killing, AMC's moody police procedural about the murder of teenager Rosie Larsen, had its work cut out for it when it decided to tie its murder-investigation plot to a closely observed portrait of the grief of Larsen's parents, Stan and Mitch. Grief is not an easy sell to the American public in the best of circumstances. To portray it authentically is to risk alienating viewers. In addition to being an internal experience that's hard to dramatize, grief can make the bereaved seem prickly and standoffish, difficult to sympathize with. After a warm critical reception, The Killing has indeed stumbled lately, with The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin and Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz pointing out the show's many flaws—the way our relationship to main characters like the mayoral candidate and the detectives fails to deepen and the sketchy politics of the recent terrorist bait-and-switch subplot. To judge by the increasingly impatient responses from fellow viewers I've talked with, the Larsens' plight has started to grate as well. Ironically, though, it is probably the show's most original feature. If frustration with the detective story is due to The Killing's all-too-risible plot twists, frustration with the Larsens is tied up with the show's more-nuanced-than-usual portrait of grief.

In The Atlantic, Debating the Value of College in America by Louis Menand (The Atlantic)

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this. College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. It’s important, therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.

New York magazine takes an almost retrospective look at Scandinavian crime fiction (New York):

Stieg Larsson didn’t just write three blockbuster novels and create an iconic feminist sleuth named Lisbeth Salander. The author, who died at age 50 in 2004, introduced the world to Scandinavian crime fiction, a massive iceberg of a genre, decades old, of which Americans have seen only the tip. That’s already changing. In the next year or so, we may well see Zac Efron in a movie based on Jens Lapidus’s Easy Money, an adaptation of a best seller by Danish newcomer Jussi Adler-Olsen produced by Lars von Trier’s company, and Norwegian star author Jo Nesbø approaching Larsson-level fame (if Knopf head Sonny Mehta has anything to say about it). Over the past year, Mehta has been “busy turning Scandinavians down,” feeling that “I was inhabiting some kind of dark Nordic night.” But he plans to market Nesbø’s The Snowman to the heavens; 150,000 copies hit stores beginning May 10. Even academics are catching the fever: On May 20, a symposium on “Stieg Larsson and Scandinavian Crime Fiction” will convene deep in the heart of Chandler country, at UCLA. For those in search of a summer project, a guide to navigating this publishing phenomenon.

Finally, there's a lot of material from the Hay Festival on sponsors The Telegraph's web site but here is a list of best quotes (Telegraph):

Event 141 Eric Hobsbawm with Tristram Hunt “Eric’s books are on sale in the bookshop, because, as any Marxist will tell you, materialism matters.” Event 150 David Sedaris “One in three Americans weigh as much as the other two.”

From the Twitter this week: Learning to Read on Zero Dollars a Day - NYTimes Girls, pick your bedtime reading with care Guardian Amazon May Soon Need to Collect Sales Tax - Businessweek EBSCO Publishing and The H.W. Wilson Company Make Joint Announcement of Merger Agreement PND WorldCat Local adds access to more databases, collections and publishers OCLC Google and publishers weigh their options after lawyers are given more time by Judge Denny Chin GoogleNews And in sports, Lance Armstrong's lawyers have requested an on air apology from 60mins for the segment last week with Tyler Hamilton in which he accuses Armstrong of doping. As The Atlantic puts is: Do they think we're stupid? (The Atlantic)

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 17): Morrissey, King James, Big Content, Sneering at Genres, Hitch, + More

Morrissey sees his autobiography as an instant "classic" so does Penguin have an advantage (Independent):

"I'd like it to go to Penguin, but only if they published it as a Classic," Morrissey told Radio 4's Front Row. "I can't see why not – a contemporary Penguin Classic. When you consider what really hits print these days and when you look at the autobiographies and how they are sold, most of it is appalling. It's a publishing event, not a literary event." Penguin, whose Classic imprint was launched in 1946 to provide the best books for the affordable price of sixpence, said Morrissey's wishes could be accommodated. A spokeswoman told The Independent: "There is a natural fit between Morrissey's sensibility, his artistic achievements and Penguin Classics. A book could be published as a Penguin Classic because it is a classic in the making. It's something we would like to discuss with Morrissey." There is no minimum time limit before a book can be considered a Penguin Classic, but the list embraces people or works that have "caused scandal and political change, broken down barriers, social and sexual". A provocative figure who challenged rock stereotypes through his celibacy, Morrissey would fit the Penguin Classics lineage, which includes memoirs by Quentin Crisp, Andy Warhol and William Burroughs.

So that settles it then.

The King James Bible is now 400 years old and David Starkey in The Mail on Sunday suggests England can trace her empire back to its publication (Mail):

Called into being by a king, it has carried ideas of truth and freedom and justice and human dignity to the furthest corners of the globe. Its cadences can be heard in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and President Obama. It is the spice in the new English of the Indian Subcontinent. And yet, extraordinarily, this supreme achievement was the work of a committee – or so we have always been told. Closer examination reveals a very different story, which overturns our notions of the chronology of this great book and reintroduces an unjustly neglected name to our pantheon of great writers, William Tyndale. James VI of Scotland succeeded the childless Queen Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603. There were high hopes for him, and none higher than James’s for himself. He had been king of Scots since he was in his cradle. He was learned; a polished, published author and a patient, canny politician. Above all – and in sharp contrast to the ageing Elizabeth, who had frozen into a sort of querulous immobility – he had vision and ambition. James I had set himself three main tasks. He wanted to end the long, debilitating war between England and Spain. He was determined to bring about a political union between his two separate kingdoms of Scotland and England. And he even dreamt of reuniting the Christian church, which had been riven by the Reformation into warring factions, as Catholics fought Protestants and Protestants fought each other. All three conflicts, James resolved, would be settled by his deft mediation as the universal Rex Pacificus – ‘the peacemaker king’.

And on the other hand, a journal issue dedicated to discussing evolution, creation and intelligent design generates some controversy (Inside HigherEd):

But the anger wasn’t provoked by any of the articles in the guest-edited issue, which wrestled with questions including “Are creationists rational?” (answer: yes, in one sense) and “Can’t philosophers tell the difference between science and religion?” The outrage sprang from two paragraphs published in the front of the print edition: a note from the journal’s three regular editors-in-chief, apologizing for the content that followed.

In the Harvard Business Review, Big Content is Strangling American Innovation (HBR):

Many in the high technology industry have known this for a long time. Despite making their living relying on it, the Big Content players do not understand technology, and never have. Rather than see it as an opportunity to reach new audiences, technology has always been a threat to them. Example after example abounds of this attitude; whether it was the VCR which was "to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" as famed movie industry lobbyist Jack Valenti put it at a congressional hearing, or MP3 technology, which they tried to sue out of existence. In fact, it's possible to go back as far as the gramophone and see the content industries rail against new technology. The reason why? Every shift in technology is difficult for them. Just as they work out how to make money using one technology, it changes. The sensible thing for them to do would be to learn how to deal with the change. Instead, their approach to every generation of technology is either to attempt to stymie it so badly that nobody wants it, or to stop it altogether through their influence with lawmakers in Washington DC.

BBC denies sneering at genre fiction (Guardian):

The programming, which included The Books We Really Read: a Culture Show Special and New Novelists: 12 of the Best, used a "sneering derogatory tone" to address commercial fiction, focusing instead on literary fiction, the letter read." The vast majority of novels that are read in this country fall far outside of the contemporary fiction genre – they very much include the three genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, which has produced everything from classics by HG Wells, Bram Stoker, Roald Dahl, Mary Shelley, George Orwell and JRR Tolkien, to modern bestsellers by such authors as Iain M Banks, Sir Terry Pratchett and JK Rowling – these three genres being totally excluded from the BBC's World Book Night coverage," the authors complained. " The BBC World Book Nights self-indulgent coverage gave the general public the misleading impression that novels are only for an elite, and that unless you're reading Dostoevsky, preferably in the original Russian, you're wasting your time on trash." But the BBC said today that it was "absolutely committed to celebrating books in all their forms", including science fiction, pointing to Mark Gatiss's adaptation of HG Wells's Man on the Moon, which ran last October on BBC4, and to three-time Arthur C Clarke award winner China Miéville's appearance on The Review Show.

Martin Amis on Christopher Hitchens (Observer):

As a result, Christopher is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the "destruction" of his interlocutor. This isn't Christopher's policy – but it is his practice. Towards the very end of the last century, all the greatest chessplayers, including Garry Kasparov, began to succumb to a computer (named Deep Blue); I had the opportunity to ask two grandmasters to describe the Deep Blue experience, and they both said: "It's like a wall coming at you." In argument, Christopher is that wall. The prototype of Deep Blue was known as Deep Thought. And there's a case for calling Christopher Deep Speech. With his vast array of geohistorical references and precedents, he is almost Google-like; but Google (with, say, its 10 million "results" in 0.7 seconds) is something of an idiot savant, and Christopher's search engine is much more finely tuned. In debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes. Whereas mere Earthlings get by with a mess of expletives, subordinate clauses, and finely turned tautologies, Christopher talks not only in complete sentences but also in complete paragraphs. Similarly, he is an utter stranger to what Diderot called l'esprit de l'escalier: the spirit of the staircase. This phrase is sometimes translated as "staircase wit" – far too limitingly, in my view, because l'esprit de l'escalier describes an entire stratum of one's intellectual and emotional being. The door to the debating hall, or to the contentious drinks party, or indeed to the little flat containing the focus of amatory desire, has just been firmly closed; and now the belated eureka shapes itself on your lips. These lost chances, these unexercised potencies of persuasion, can haunt you for a lifetime – particularly, of course, when the staircase was the one that might have led to the bedroom.

Ingrate Paul Brodeur wants his stuff back from the NY Public Library (NYTimes):

In a series of letters and phone calls to Mr. Brodeur over the summer, they explained that, as they did with every donation, they had carefully weeded out what would be useful to generations of researchers (original letters and rare primary documents) and excluded less-meaningful artifacts (photocopied news stories and multiple drafts of New Yorker writings). In the process, an original donation of about 320 boxes had been whittled to 53. On a recent afternoon, Ms. Thornton, who oversees collections and exhibits, showed off the results of that winnowing, displaying a detailed catalog and a sampling of documents on a long table outside the library’s Rose Main Reading Room. The Brodeur collection appeared carefully labeled by subject and date. There were folders containing fan mail from readers (one called an article he had written for The New Yorker “extremely provocative and well-researched”). There were copies of letters from Mr. Brodeur to his colleagues at the magazine (including an angry missive to Seymour Hersh, who had backtracked on an endorsement of a much-debated Brodeur book about the dangers of electrical power lines in 1997. Mr. Brodeur called him “craven” and “lame.”). And there was an unfinished draft of a novel, titled “Coral Sea,” about an investigative journalist who stumbles on an important secret. Ms. Thornton said that before last year, Mr. Brodeur’s papers had been largely undigested. The documents, she said, “had no catalog record, no archival finding aid, no collection guide.” She added: “The collection was not usable.”

From the twitter: Reclaiming LS Lowry | Richard Cork Guardian PND: Blackboard in Play PND Who will buy this $Billion education business? PND: 60mins Expose of Mortenson - And He Responds. PND Peter Osnos: Good Book Reviews Are No Longer Enough - The Atlantic Chris Whittle's plan to make a world-class private school - Fortune

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 10): Dave Eggers, WorldBook Day, James Joyce

Long review and interview with Dave Eggers about his recent book and about McSweeneys (Observer):

Well, you need to read Zeitoun. All I can tell you is that it is like something out of Kafka. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) should have been there only to help. But its absorption by the Department of Homeland Security, itself a creation of George Bush following 9/11, seemed somehow to have muddled priorities. As hundreds of Americans drowned, the people at the Department of Homeland Security were still worrying obsessively about the many and various ways in which a terrorist might seek to "exploit" a hurricane. Eggers found Zeitoun via his Voice of Witness project, a non-profit venture which produces books in which ordinary people tell their stories (the first book in the series told the stories of victims of miscarriages of justice in America; Zeitoun first appeared in a volume devoted to Katrina; the next will be about Zimbabwe). "A few weeks after the storm, we started working with local interviewers, sending them into Atlanta and Houston, and all the places people had fled. I was struck by Zeitoun's story, so the next time I was in New Orleans I met the family. I was angry about the war on terror and the suspension of all sense of decency. This seemed like the absolute nadir of all the Bush policies and here was this family squeezed between all these distorted priorities. We talked, and in the first hour it was clear that there was so much to say." Eggers the novelist found a pleasing watery symmetry in Zeitoun's story; his brother, Mohammed, had been a world-class swimmer, a famous man back home in Syria. The family came from originally from Arwad, an island. An island, off Syria? Eggers had never heard of such a place. He was hooked. .... What's more, when it comes to memoir, the line between truth and fiction is, for him, an agonising one and perhaps best avoided. When the James Frey row blew up – it was discovered that Frey's "memoir" about his drugs hell, A Million Little Pieces, was largely fiction – Eggers received at least 100 emails asking him to comment. "I am obsessed with explaining my processes, in my first book, and elsewhere. I didn't weigh in because I hadn't read the book. But I felt for everybody. For him, for his readers, for Oprah – I'm a fan of hers and what she does for books. He stretched things, but you can read the book how you want, and that's how it's read now. With a grain of salt." Sometimes, fiction takes you closer to truth. "Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction." He sighs. "Oh, I'm always sad at book controversies!"

Victoria Barnsley on World Book Day (Observer):

But arguably these gadgets will be serving an audience of existing readers. What interests me in particular is the ability to reach new readers through new devices or clever ways of getting content to existing devices. On Boxing Day 2008, Nintendo launched their 100 Classic Books collection for those who had just received a DS for Christmas. And they were overwhelmed by the take-up. It was one of their top-selling products of the season. Now – who would have thought that teenagers would be huddled together round their screens reading Oliver Twist? Not me for one. So there is huge potential if we provide the right content to get young audiences enthused about great stories.

No doubt those same younger audiences will devise many clever new ways to consume content, to read books, to view movies. But there is one thing that remains constant for me and connects us back to our forebears sitting around fires at the beginning of time – the fascination with storytelling, the desire to learn about ourselves and the world through the power of the imagination. The plethora of new ways to express those thoughts can only enrich this age-old culture.

It's true that World Book Day in the UK has always had a huge emphasis, rightly so, on children. We know that if they catch the bug young, children will become lifelong readers. But for those who have missed out on the opportunity, the Quick Reads series launched in 2006 has been a great success. Aimed at reaching out to the millions of adults in the UK with reading difficulties and the one-third of the British population that never picks up a book, they are written by bestselling authors for both emergent readers and for readers wanting a short, pacy read. And research shows that once they have acquired the habit of reading, they never lose it.

Joyce's Finnegans Wake has been re-edited (Observer):

Seventy years on, scholars Danis Rose and John O'Hanlon have reached the conclusion of 30 years of textual analysis. Poring over the tens of thousands of pages of notes, drafts, typescripts and proofs that make up, in Joyce's own words, his "litters from aloft, like a waast wizzard all of whirlwords", they have made 9,000 "minor yet crucial" amendments and corrections to the book, from misspellings to misplaced phrases, ruptured syntax and punctuation marks.

"I never thought I'd see this day," said Rose. "The complexity of the texts and the complexity of the social situation meant it was very, very difficult indeed, but we stuck with it and we got there. There were 20,000 pages of manuscript, and beyond that 60 notebooks, and beyond that it extended out into thousands of different volumes. It extends out and out and out – what Joyce was doing was distilling in and in and in. To reach the text we had to follow him back, and it's a lot harder to go backwards than forwards."

Author David Shields making the case for literary "appropriation" (Boston Globe):

“Reality Hunger” has a number of grievances and goals. Shields, the author of nine previous books, is sick of the traditional novel and calls for a “blurring” of genres, championing what he calls the “lyric essay” as the emerging vehicle of “chunks of ‘reality,’ ” emotional immediacy, and meaningful contemplation. In addition, the author praises the self-referential, ironic, and irreverent as seen in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” karaoke, Sarah Silverman’s stand-up routines, “Borat,” and other contemporary cultural productions.

He also makes a passionate case for the literary “appropriation” of the words of others (as in musical “sampling”). Indeed, he praises plagiarism, and more than two-thirds of “Reality Hunger” itself is unoriginal material, a collection of others’ words. The lawyers at Random House insisted that Shields cite the sources at the end of the book. The “author” reluctantly complies but advises the reader to cut these pages out.

From the twitter:

NY Law School Professor James Grimmelmann has self-archived "The Amended Google Books Settlement is Still Exclusive" in SSRN

This brief essay argues that the proposed settlement in the Google Books case, although formally non-exclusive, would have the practical effect of giving Google an exclusive license to a large number of books. The settlement itself does not create mechanisms for Google's competitors to obtain licenses to orphan books and competitors are unlikely to be able to obtain similar settlements of their own. Recent amendments to the settlement do not change this conclusion.

Project to develop "Open Bibliographic Data" (OpenKnowledge)

In the past few weeks there have been a number of developments related to opening up bibliographic metadata. At the end of January we blogged about CERN opening up their library data. Just recently Ghent University Library have published their data under an open licenseugent_biblio and ugent_catalog) - which is excellent news! (see

In the first instance this group will aim to:

1. Act as a central point of reference and support for people interested in open bibliographic data
2. Identify relevant projects and practices. Promote best practices as well as legal and technical standards for making data open (such as the Open Knowledge Definition).
3. Act as a hub for the development and maintenance of low cost, community driven projects related to open bibliographic data.

Visual Books - Love the London Underground world map. (NYTimes)

Heroes of “This Book Is Overdue” are resolutely high-tech, engaged in “activist and visionary forms of library work.” (NYTimes) And Manchester United are top of the table this morning.

MediaWeek Report (Vol 13, No 1): Flipboard Magazine - New Articles on Audio Books, Scholarly Infrastructure, China Trade, Fan Fiction + Others

Here is my most recent selection of media and publishing articles on Flipboard. 
 

https://flipboard.com/@mpcairns/personanondata---the-magazine-t8knolg6y

Book Website Developers - Update

An essay in the NY Times book review on book web site developers who are gaining some notoriety as really good cover designers have in the past. (NYTimes):

The task of the book Web designer can be a tricky one. “Book sites present challenges that fashion and other sorts of sites do not,” Rabb said in a telephone interview. Because of the nature of the book medium in general, and the hope of selling movie rights in particular, “any time I get too specific about the appearance of a character, people start to get very nervous,” he added.

Instead, Rabb aims to represent a book’s “gestalt,” as he puts it. His sites often include original material from the author, as in the one he created for “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet,” Reif Larsen’s much anticipated first novel about a young Montana prodigy obsessed with mapmaking. That site — which will be rolled out incrementally starting later this month until the book’s release in May — represents a failed “Smithsonian exhibition” of the title character’s work, with some 10 different “cabinets” documenting everything from a taxonomy of all the animals on earth to a map of the American West.

It is nice to see Sheila English (friend of the blog) get a mention in the article as well:

The book video business began back in 2002, when Sheila English, an unpublished romance novelist, trademarked the term Book Trailer and started her own company, Circle of Seven Productions. Her first clients were mostly science-fiction and romance novelists, but the invention of video-sharing sites brought interest from mainstream publishers. Three years ago, English’s company had 12 projects. In 2008, it had 140.

Update:
Over at Publishing Trends they remind me that they did this last month:

And any remaining skeptics out there, take note: Website visits translate directly to the number of books bought. Book shoppers who had visited an author website in the past week bought 38% more books, from a wider range of retailers, than those who had not visited an author site. “Is putting up a website going to make a book a bestseller? No,” says Chin. “Is the website going to help the author build an audience? I believe it can. What you don’t want is for someone to hear about your book, search for it with Google, and find nothing. That’s a potential lost sale.”

Web presence is especially essential in today’s economy. “Websites have become even more important as people are not in stores discovering books,” Fitzgerald says. “We need to get them jazzed about a title and their favorite author and give them reason not just to buy the book, but also to have a relationship with the author and his or her work so they become evangelists for them with fellow readers. These next months, author websites and communications with readers are going to be critical for engendering excitement in readers online, since something as crucial as in-store browsing is not happening.”

The point, of course, is not just to get readers to visit an author site once, but to keep them coming back. How do you make a website sticky?“The saying ‘build it and they will come,’ well, they won’t,” says Burke. He and the other designers we spoke with agreed that flashy design is not a key to success, and the Codex Group research bears that out, with Stephenie Meyer’s website as a case in point. It receives more traffic than any other fiction author site, yet its design is extremely basic, “probably a generic template where you plug in your header graphic,” says Hildick-Smith. “She may only be paying $15 a month for this site on some server system. It’s not elaborately designed at all. But she’s got a daily blog, and more than any other site in our study, she has links to fan sites. Fan site links appear to contribute to loyal audience traffic.”

MediaWeek Report (Vol 13, No 7): Publishers sue Internet Archive over Book Scanning (Plus Filing)

Plaintiffs Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House are suing the Internet Archive (IA) for copyright infringement over the "National Emergency Library" which IA launched to great fan fare earlier this year.   The suit alleges that IA has "brazenly reproduced some 1.3 million bootleg scans of print books, including recent works, commercial fiction and non-fiction, thrillers, and children’s books." without permission or financial consideration.

From the press release:

Despite the self-serving library branding of its operations, IA’s conduct bears little resemblance to the trusted role that thousands of American libraries play within their communities and as participants in the lawful copyright marketplace. IA scans books from cover to cover, posts complete digital files to its website, and solicits users to access them for free by signing up for Internet Archive Accounts. The sheer scale of IA’s infringement described in the complaint—and its stated objective to enlarge its illegal trove with abandon—appear to make it one of the largest known book pirate sites in the world. IA publicly reports millions of dollars in revenue each year, including financial schemes that support its infringement design.

In willfully ignoring the Copyright Act, IA conflates the separate markets and business models made possible by the statute’s incentives and protections, robbing authors and publishers of their ability to control the manner and timing of communicating their works to the public. IA not only conflates print books and eBooks, it ignores the well-established channels in which publishers do business with bookstores, e-commerce platforms, and libraries, including for print and eBook lending. As detailed in the complaint, IA makes no investment in creating the literary works it distributes and appears to give no thought to the impact of its efforts on the quality and vitality of the authorship that fuels the marketplace of ideas.

....

“Regrettably, it seems clear that Internet Archive intends to bludgeon the legal framework that governs copyright investments and transactions in the modern world. As the complaint outlines, by illegally copying and distributing online a stunning number of literary works each day, IA displays an abandon shared only by the world’s most egregious pirate sites.”

Add: Here is the filing via InfoDocket.

While the Author Guild isn't a party to this filling (yet?) the have also released an open letter condemning the IA and its actions.

The National Emergency Library is piracy, pure and simple, no matter how the Internet Archive and its founder Brewster Kahle cloak it as a social benefit. Making hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books available for download is theft. It is illegal and it needs to be shut down.

For those interested, here is the summary of the legal resolution to the Google scanning case (via wikipedia):

Authors Guild v. Google is a copyright case litigated in the United States. It centers on the allegations by the Authors Guild, and previously by the Association of American Publishers, that Google infringed their copyrights in developing its Google Book Search database.  In late 2013, U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin (sitting by designation) dismissed the lawsuit, and affirmed that the Google Books program meets all legal requirements for "fair use," ^[1] in what Publishers Weekly called a "ringing endorsement" of Google.^[2] The Authors Guild appealed the ruling to the Second Circuit, in New York, which held oral arguments in late 2014. On October 16, 2015, the Second Circuit "rejected infringement claims from the Authors Guild and several individual writers, and found that the project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law."^[3] The Authors Guild petitioned the US Supreme Court,^[4] which in April 2016 declined to review the case, leaving the lower court's decision standing.^[5]

Today's case is different but may hinge on some of the same arguments and include 'first sale doctrine' arguments.

Selected snips from the filing:

3. Despite the “Open Library” moniker, IA’s actions grossly exceed legitimate library services, do violence to the Copyright Act, and constitute willful digital piracy on an industrial scale. Consistent with the deplorable nature of piracy, IA’s infringement is intentional and systematic: it produces mirror-image copies of millions of unaltered in-copyright works for which it has no rights and distributes them in their entirety for reading purposes to the public for free, including voluminous numbers of books that are currently commercially available.

6. "For the avoidance of doubt, this lawsuit is not about the occasional transmission of a title under appropriately limited circumstances, nor about anything permissioned or in the public domain. On the contrary, it is about IA’s purposeful collection of truckloads of in-copyright books to scan, reproduce, and then distribute digital bootleg versions online.
IA often suggests that the Website is limited to twentieth-century books, but this is neither accurate nor a defense. IA scans, uploads, and distributes huge numbers of in-copyright books published in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including many books published within just the past few years. 

7. Moreover, while Defendant promotes its non-profit status, it is in fact a highly commercial enterprise with millions of dollars of annual revenues, including financial schemes that provide funding for IA’s infringing activities. By branding itself with the name “Open Library,” it thus badly misleads the public and boldly misappropriates the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.

8. IA defends its willful mass infringement by asserting an invented theory called “Controlled Digital Lending” (“CDL”)—the rules of which have been concocted from whole cloth and continue to get worse....
...no provision under copyright law offers a colorable defense to the systematic copying and distribution of digital book files simply because the actor collects corresponding physical copies. 

9. In short, Defendant merely exploits the investments that publishers have made in their books, and it does so through a business model that is designed to free-ride on the work of others.

11. No concept of fair use supports the systematic mass copying or distribution of entire books for the purpose of mass reading, or put another way, for the purpose of providing to readers the very thing that publishers and authors provide in the first place through lawful and established channels. IA does not add something new to the Plaintiffs’ books, with a different purpose or character; thus, it cannot even begin to make the all-important showing that its use of the works is transformative. Separately, Section 109 of the Copyright Act is clear that, pursuant to the doctrine of first sale, the owner of a lawfully acquired print book may dispose only of her/his particular print copy. One who makes and distributes reproductions of that physical copy—such as IA’s low quality scans—is well outside the bounds of the law. 

13. Its goal of creating digital copies of books and providing them to whomever wants to download them reflects a profound misunderstanding of the costs of creating books, a profound lack of respect for the many contributors involved in the publication process, and a profound disregard of the boundaries and balance of core copyright principles. IA does not seek to “free knowledge”; it seeks to destroy the carefully calibrated ecosystem that makes books possible in the first place—and to undermine the copyright law that stands in its way 

Making 2020 Hindsight: Reflections, Recommendations and Running

For the first time in probably 40 years I did not have a seat on an airliner in 2020. Each year, I'd expect to travel to the UK at least once to see family and trips to Europe and other sundry trips in the US would round out my normal travel schedule. In December 2019, I had just returned from a trip to London not realizing it would be a long time before I was back, and I already had firm upcoming travel plans for Florida and Seoul. I've had years where I've overdone my travel, such as the three years I commuted to Oxford (which turned out to be a complete waste of time), but I realize now how much I miss air travel even if to places I have visited frequently. Of course, perspective is important: The planes and the places will be there in the coming months (and years) and it's a small consideration given the plight we are in due to COVID. The PND household's circumstances are hardly catastrophic and I am more than comfortable with the restrictions and it is stunning to me how many people believe they are above even simple sacrifices. Even the people making the rules!

As a by product of the above I took perhaps a quarter as many photos (400) in 2020 than in a normal year. Notably many fewer photos of New York (and none of London). I spend decent amount of time in arm chair travel looking at my past photo collections.

When gyms closed in March I was still of the mind that COVID wasn't a big deal and I was at the gym the day before they all closed. Within days, my attitude radically changed as the NY news reported on the body bags being carried out to mobile refrigerator trucks. So the gym was off limits which meant outside exercise was the only viable option and I upped my running game. I track my running activity and in a normal year I usually run between 1000 and 1100 miles. In the past 24 years of diligently tracking my running, I've run as much as 1,200 miles and as few as 500. 

In 2020 I ran 1,400 miles - which is a lot! My goal next year will be a little less but if I do it I will have run 25,000 miles in 25 years. But don't be intimidated because I get slower and slower as the years go by and each year more and more other runners pass me. Occasionally, I'll get a friendly wave from a cute girl who I know is thinking that "it's nice to see the old guys out here." Cold bothers me less than when I was younger but as you get older it is harder to deal with the heat. Bodies can't cool down as quickly as you get older. I am not entirely sure if I will ever go back to New York Sports Club.

As a consultant, working from home is often the norm but had it not been for COVID I would have been spending some time each week in a client office. I miss this more than I would have anticipated and the casual conversation, connections and serendipity that are always part of the work environment is very difficult to create in Zoom. I do think workers will continue to adapt and evolve to this new model but I don't see businesses continuing to be fully online once the restrictions are lifted. COVID will have a lasting influence on work conditions and experiences leading to more flexible arrangements and benefits for both employers and employees. I think it will be more incremental than revolutionary. Dry cleaners will struggle though.

Despite the lack of commuting, there wasn't a lot of extra free time. Placing a m/in/law in care and fixing up her house for rental in the middle of a pandemic didn't help. Mrs PND also spent a lot of time saving democracy with phone banking and writing postcards. I think it helped.

In most years I will read 20+ books a year and this year was similar; however, I read more non-fiction in 2020 than in other years. In December 2019, I was wandering around Politics and Prose and resolved myself to read more political history during 2020. I achieved this and read about Henry VIII, FDR, Grant, Carter, Churchill and others. I interspersed these books will my more normal roster of espionage and crime books. My five favorite books this year were:

About the first year of Churchill's prime ministership, the book interested me because it added in a lot personal history about the personalities and relationships of the people surrounding WSC at this time. I've read some of Martin Gilbert's biography of WSC but this book - by no means as detailed - filled in some gaps. I have many mixed feelings about Churchill and see the American infatuation with him as distinctly odd. Later in the year, I read FDR (below) and it was interesting to read about the same time period from FDR's perspective.

Alter's book is engaging and really well written. He clearly likes Carter but he is also critical about the President which leads to a balanced and interesting narative. My family came to the US in 1977 and we had watched news reports and election news during 1976 from an external perspective. Carter to me was the peanut farmer and little more. As the late seventies progressed my impressions of Carter as a failed leader were cemented and like many others I saw the comparison with Reagan a stark. As it turns out, Carter by many criteria, was one of our most effective Presidents with many initiatives which were either (or both) ahead of his time or long in impact. By chance, one of my last 2020 books was a fictionalized espionage story of the Shah's downfall which also played large in Alter's book.

I read a review of this book in The Economist and as a fan of Conrad, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Jasanoff places Conrad in context which adds scope and perspective to many of the titles he wrote.  Later in the year, I also read King Leopold's' Ghost about how the King of Belgium carved an empire out of central Africa. In the latter book, there are many references to Conrad and Heart of Darkness which aided my understanding of both stories.

This book is long and while comprehensive and well written I thought it was a light read. JE Smith is well known for this book and while I enjoyed it, I thought it was more an appetizer than a full blooded investigation of one of the most successful US presidents. As a side note, as outrage grew over trump's supreme court appointment and calls to pack the court accelerated, one of the more interesting sections of this book concerned FDR's court packing scheme and how it torpedoed his mandate. What a powerful personality. It was a tragedy how his doctors ignored is health issues. With better care he would have lived far longer.

The last in the Cromwell trilogy, I hope Mark Rylance comes back to film this book as well. I enjoyed this book but found it labored at times. Mantel is such a master of language that it is difficult to criticize but I thought the first two titles seemed to flow easier than this one. Perhaps it was because of the inevitable outcome. It is still a compelling story.
 

 

If interested, here are my books on Librarything.

The ability to binge video and tv shows has been one of civilization's greatest inventions. To be untethered to the network schedule and eliminate advertising in the process is real progress! Some highlights this year included:

Call My Agent - Based around on the offices of a french film star agenting business. (Netflix) 

Better Call Saul - Possibly the best written show on tv at the moment (AMC)

Marvelous Mrs Maisel - Housewife turned comedienne (Amazon)

Rake - Australia show which follows the antics of an unconventional attorney (Netflix)

The Queen's Gambit - About chess (Netflix)

After Life - From Ricky Gervais about a widower. (Netflix)

 

 

 

 

For more see my year end newsletter.

Looking forward to a better 2021.

*******

Michael Cairns is a publishing and media executive with over 25 years experience in business strategy, operations and technology implementation.  He has served on several boards and advisory groups including the Association of American Publishers, Book Industry Study Group and the International ISBN organization.   Additionally, he has public and private company board experience.   He can be reached at michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 7): Amis, Plagiarism, Demand Media, "Botulism"

Martin Amis muses about the fourth estate (Guardian):

About 90% of the coverage has passed me by, but some new tendencies are clear enough. What's different, this time round, is that the writer, or this writer, gets blamed for all the slanders he incites in the press. Some quite serious commentators (DJ Taylor, for one) have said that I'm controversial-on-purpose whenever I have a book coming out. Haven't they noticed that the papers pick up on my remarks whether I have a book coming out or not? And how can you be ­controversial- on-purpose without ceasing to care what you say? The Telegraph, on its front page, offers the following: "Martin Amis: 'Women have too much power for their own good'." This is the equivalent of "Rowan Williams: 'Christianity is a vulgar fraud'." I suppose the Telegraph was trying to make me sound "provocative". Well, they messed that up too. I don't sound ­provocative. I sound like a much-feared pub bore in Hove. And yet experienced journalists will look me in the eye and solemnly ask, "Why do you do it?" They are not asking me why I say things in public (which is an increasingly pertinent question). They are asking me why I deliberately stir up the newspapers. How can they have such a slender understanding of their own trade? Getting taken up (and recklessly distorted) in the newspapers is not something I do. It's something the news- ­ papers do. The only person in England who can manipulate the fourth estate is, appropriately, Katie Price. But there I go again. No, the vow of silence looks more and more attractive. That would be a story too, but it would only be a story once. Wouldn't it?

Is plagiarism the new black? Interview with a young successful author/artist who admits to 'mixing' rather than steeling content from others. She even gets and endorsement from one of the 'victims' (NYTimes):

For the obviously gifted Ms. Hegemann, who already had a play (written and staged) and a movie (written, directed and released in theaters) to her credit, it was an early ascension to the ranks of artistic stardom. That is, until a blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes. As other unattributed sources came to light, outsize praise quickly turned to a torrent of outrage, reminiscent of the uproar in 2006 over a Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, who was caught plagiarizing numerous passages in her much praised debut novel. But Ms. Hegemann’s story took a very different turn. On Thursday, Ms. Hegemann’s book was announced as one of the finalists for the $20,000 prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in the fiction category. And a member of the jury said Thursday that the panel had been aware of the plagiarism charges before they made their final selection.

NY Times reporter Bill Carter, who wrote the book on the 'Late Night Wars' is set to pen an up-t0-date book on the recent Conan-Leno fracas (Gawker):

Carter said he isn't taking a Team Conan or Team Jay stance now—or in the book. "I obviously have to reach out to all sides," he said. "For the longest time, I personally tried to watch as many episodes of all the shows as I could to get sense of each show, and what each guy does. I don't just pick one and stick with that guy." Although the book will touch on many of the TV industry's struggles, Carter said he is focusing on the recent late-night infighting. "It's fun to have something to write about again," he said. Carter's 1992 The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night had exclusive details about one of televisions most infamous power struggles: the original battle between NBC, CBS, Jay Leno and David Letterman for Johnny Carson's seat on the Tonight Show. The Late Shift revealed secret NBC documents; Johnny Carson's role in Letterman's decision to join CBS; and ridiculous scenes like Jay Leno hiding in a closet to spy on a secret NBC staff meeting. It was later turned into an 1996 HBO movie.

Libraries seeking to migrate to eBooks and send print volumes to deep storage find it's not so easy: InsideHigherEd (And, yes that is the worst web site design ever).

But campus resistance to digital creep might not boil down to simple antiquarianism. Notwithstanding Apple’s new iPad, the e-reader market may be as unprepared to be embraced by academe as academe is to embrace e-books. “Although some e-book standards such as ePub are beginning to emerge, there is still significant flux and divergence from those standards,” Henry and Spiro write. “Standards are important in enabling consumers to read content from multiple publishers on their devices, to move content around to multiple devices, and to preserve books for the long-term.” Though e-books are poised to gain a firm foothold in higher education within the decade, the authors predict, academics and e-reader vendors aren't yet on the same page. This is largely due to the fact that e-readers have not managed to replicate certain aspects of the traditional book-reader's user experience: “You can do a lot with a print book: photocopy or scan as many pages as you like, scrawl in the margins, highlight passages, bookmark pages, skip around, read it in the bathtub, give it to someone else, make art out of it, etc.,” the Rice researchers note. “Due to constraints imposed by some [Digital Rights Management] regimes, readers of e-books may find that they only can print a limited number of pages, have to navigate awkwardly through the book, cannot take notes or bookmark pages, and cannot give the book to someone else.” While they enjoy the searchability of electronic documents and databases, academics still prefer holding a book in their hands to read it. These advantages come at a price, though. Print volumes are, after all, voluminous — a property that implies a series of relatively pricey preservation costs. According to Courant and Nielsen, these work out to an average of $4.26 per book, per year when you take into account, maintenance, cleaning, electricity for temperature control, staffing, and circulation, as well as the considerable funds that go into building and renovating centrally located, open-stack facilities to house the volumes

Profile of Demand Media and their 'factory' approach to content creation (Guardian):

And it is changing, indeed. It is not only that 7,000 freelance editors, writers and video producers as well as 650 copy editors work for the company. Demand Media produces more than 4,500 items of content a day, and it uses algorithms to produce that content most effectively. Previously, news organizations published content based on what their editors thought readers were interested in. Now, the internet gives publishers access to hundreds of millions of people's search queries. That is where Demand Media's algorithms come in. "Our search algorithm delivers keywords like 'pruning roses', 'naming babies', or 'hiking'," says Rosenblatt. "We take these keywords and turn them into article titles, and use that to influence what we are going to create." But Demand Media is taking it further. After learning about web users' interests, Demand Media calculates if an article is commercially relevant. The company calculates the advertising demand by using another database, and looks if there isn't too much competition for its content because the topic has been widely reported online. If the outcome is correct, it assigns a freelancer to produce content.

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy extensively cites a fake philosopher in his new book (NYTimes):

For the debut of his latest weighty title, “On War in Philosophy,” the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy made the glossy spreads of French magazines with his trademark panache: crisp, unbuttoned white Charvet shirts, golden tan and a windswept silvery mane of hair. But this glamorous literary campaign was suddenly marred by an absolute philosophical truth: Mr. Lévy backed up the book’s theories by citing the thought of a fake philosopher. In fact, the sham philosopher has never been a secret, and even has his own Wikipedia entry .... In his newest book, Mr. Lévy attacked the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant as a madman, and in support cited the Paraguayan lectures of Jean-Baptiste Botul to his 20th-century followers. In fact Mr. Botul is the longtime creature of Frédéric Pagès, a journalist with the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. “We’ve had a big laugh, obviously,” Mr. Pagès said of Mr. Lévy. “This one was an error that was really simple that the media immediately understood.” Mr. Pagès has never made a secret of his fictional philosopher, who has a fan club that meets monthly in salons throughout Paris. Mr. Botul’s school of thought is called Botulism, his followers are botuliennes and they debate such weighty theories as the metaphysics of flab. As they describe it, Mr. Botul’s astonishing ideas ranged from phenomenology to cheese, sausages, women’s breasts and the transport of valises during the 1930s.

Hamstrung by computer issues over the past week or so that accounts for the tardiness.