On the Britannica Blog, Nick Carr looks at how digital is changing our relationship with text, and doesn’t like what he sees. We’re turning into debased computers, he thinks:
We’re rapidly moving away from our old linear form of writing and reading, in which ideas and narratives wended their way across many pages, to a [...]
I can’t recall where I found this, but it’s very very cool:
Every November, hundreds of thousands of writers commit themselves to the maddest of madnesses: writing a 50,000-word novel in one month, for Nanowrimo, the National Novel Writing Month.
It’s a time of creativity, chaos, angst, nerves, procrastination, excitement, and sheer folly, a colossal celebration of passion for the written word.
It’s also a time, let’s face it, [...]
If the object of writing is to deliver to readers a text that is engaging & enlightens, or entertains them in some way or other, then the idea of maintaining a fixed form of a book needs to be reexamined. Writers will probably always want to keep control of their work, but who is to [...]
One of the things we’ve been spending lots of time thinking about is making it easy for writers/publishers/editors/designers etc. to find each other on Book Oven. We think that the less-commercial end of the publish spectrum is going to change significantly in the next five years, that we’re going to see new kinds of publishing [...]
Book Oven pal Mark Bertils writes about Cloud Publishing on indexmb, focusing mostly on the reader-side, with services like Shortcovers and the more forwardlooking expectation of booky-APIs, Kindle’s or big cloud-based catalog initiatives.
The stuff that’s happening and going to happen on the finished product/reader side is exciting, but it pales, I think, in comparison [...]
Roberto Rocha of the Montreal Gazette has a good article about Book Oven and the new publishing landscape, with a nice pic out the window of the office (with me blocking the view, unfortunately):
Before the Internet, when a writer could not find a publisher to print and sell a manuscript, he could take matters into [...]
Henry Baum of Self-Publishing Review interviewed me the other day about Book Oven. With Henry’s permission, I’m reposting the whole thing below.
Self-Publishing Review: So how’s the site work? What do people do once they create a project and how can writers contribute to other writers’ projects?
Hugh McGuire: Firstly, we’ve just launched and we have [...]
The Newspaperman and the Blogger
On July 9, Ian Shapira, Staff Writer for the Washington Post wrote a 1,500 word fluff piece about consultant Anne Loehr, who explains GenY to their cohabitants in the workplace. Then Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan blogged the story, reprinting some of Anne Loehr quotations from the Post piece.
Ian Shapira was initially happy: [...]
From CBC’s Writers & Company:
This week, international crime. From Italy, Gianrico Carofiglio; from Sweden, Asa Larsson; from Scotland, Louise Welsh; and from Canada, Giles Blunt – talk about mystery writing.
> Listen here.
