The Novel Viewed As Moldy Bread

Way back at the dawn of time, I used to do research on hypertext. This was the early Eighties and the Web hadn't been invented yet. It was a time of wonderful freedom - like the days before the IBM PC and its Microsoft operating system were invented, when there were dozens of different personal computer architectures and dozens of different operating systems. Once the IBM PC appeared, all that diversity was quashed. Well, the Web did the same for the many budding hypertext systems - all those brilliant ideas were trampled in the rush to the lowest common denominator.

Which is all very dreary, but what's it got to do with writing? Not much, really. It's just that I've started writing a novel as a hypertext and I've been pondering the many ways such an object could be structured. I have a strong urge to write it as a linear structure - beginning-middle-end and everything lined up neatly in between. Something in me says this is how a book should be. But I'm fighting it. I'm trying to force myself out of this groove and to play around with some ideas.

The first, obvious, thing to do would be to have the main plot be linear with a few loops out along the way into sub-plots. The main line and the sub-plot loops could then have little spikes off them for discursion, or minor character backgrounds. This isn't so bad, it may even be something like the real 2-D structure of a book if it didn't have to be 'flattened' into a 1-D line. But there is more that could be done.

The main plot could be a number of threads - different character perspectives, different emphases on the themes of the book, or different interpretations of the action. These threads could be bundled into particular outcomes, based on decisions made one way or another throughout the book. With this approach, the book is now, effectively, many books, depending on the paths you take.

But a book isn't necessarily a sealed entity. As a hypertext, it can grow tendrils out into the wider world of knowledge and opinion. Obscure references can be linked to their exegesis in Wikipedia, the social and political context of the story can be expanded indefinitely, technical terms can be explained, maps can be referenced, animated models and video can reveal what even the best writing might leave unclear. Like a mold growing on the loaf of the Web, the book can thread its ever-branching hyphae throughout its host's body.

It's all fascinating, and the possibilities reminded me of those far-away days, scribbling diagrams on whiteboards, struggling with graph theory, and trying to hammer SGML into something computable.

But what about the reader? How much complexity can a reader take? How many divergent plotlines will a reader tolerate? How many different points of view does a reader actually want to take on a story? Where does a hypertex stop being a novel and start being intellectual masturbation? I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.

In the end, to be kind to my readers, I will probably go with a simple structure - the one I called 2-D a couple of paragraphs ago. But, oh, the possibilities!

Cons

If you want to be a writer, you need to network. There's no two ways about it. You need to see and be seen. You've gotta press the flesh and schmooze. And that means going to cons and other writerly events.

Cons, as the name suggests, are a great way of spending lots and lots of money. They are gatherings of the great and good where, forthree or four days at a stretch, you get the chance to pester publishers and editors, agents and fellow writers, with the small but tantalising possibility that you will meet someone who can do your 'career' some good. Yeah, you get to listen to people standing at podiums and going on about stuff - how they got their big break, how they organise their time, how to market in the digital age, and so on - but the real reason everyone is there is to get their face known.

Or so I'm told.

Other people tell me its all about meeting fellow writers and discussing one's art with people who will understand, or who will at least be clever, interesting people who like to drink and have a laugh.

Whatever it's all about, it's expensive. I've just done the sums for the two cons I'd like to go to this year. Travelling by coach and the very cheapest flights, staying in the cheapest possible hotels, and not eating much, each con comes to a little over a twelve hundred dollars. Even the book launch I want to go to, travelling by pack mule and eating only tree bark, will set me back about six hundred dollars. So, a total of three thousand dollars for three marketing events.

If I got an agent out of it, and she got me a book deal, it would cover the cost (although I'd have to wait maybe two years to get it all back.) If I didn't, I'd have to sell a barrow-load of short stories this year to pay for it - my quick calculation puts it at about a tenth of all those printed in the paying mags this year.

As a marketing proposition then, going to a couple of cons and a book launch is probably a non-starter. In fact, if I self-published my book and spent the money on online advertising, I'd stand a much better chance of breaking even (I'd only need to sell about 600 copies).

Of course, if I did that, I'd miss all the fun of sitting in bars with half-drunken writers for seven evenings - which is not to be sniffed at - but I'd also miss the six days of travelling by JetStar and Crisps Coaches, and the ten nights of staying in cheap hotels miles from the convention centre.

What I can't understand is why I still want to go.

What Is The Future Of Publishing?

As a one-time Authonomy user (see why I left) I have been following the recent controversy about what happens to their top-ranked authors. Rumour is that not one has yet had a book contract and, instead, some have been quietly offered the chance to take part in a print on demand (POD) self-publishing experiment. Well, Harper Collins, which runs the site, has published an apology for the concern they've caused and assurances that POD is merely another service that HC is offering Authonomy users. It's all very odd, I must say.

But that's not why I'm posting. What struck me about the HC post was that they assured authors who felt like self-publishing that this would not bar them from future publication with HC. To quote:

"And as a publisher we certainly don’t have a problem with authors who have self-published: we’ve acquired a number of authors who took this route initially."

Which is nice to know, since I've read several self-published books which are better than most of the stuff currently on the shelves at my local bookshop. (I'll pass over the hideous grammar of this sentence and the horrible notion that HC 'acquires' authors - as if we were commodities to be bought and sold.)

Agents, publishers and bookshops act as filters on what is available to us to read. Agents and publishers in particular use their professional skills to prevent the great bulk of manuscripts which are poorly written from being published. This, I believe, is a valuable service. It means that, what you see in the bookshops, in the high street and online, meets a minimum standard of coherence and literacy. It is a fairly low standard, but it is there.

But what the agents, publishers and bookshops also do, is try to guess what we the readers will want to buy. So they exclude manuscripts - however well written, however thoughtful, intelligent and insightful - which they do not expect will sell in large enough numbers. The reason for this is obvious: publishers and booksellers need to make money from selling books, and agents need to make money from supplying publishers with books. If the books that are printed don't sell, the whole supply chain collapses.

For the writers of books, this can be a frustrating, infuriating situation. Some writers are not writing commercial works - but they would still like to see them in print. Some writers are producing highly commercial works but their themes or presentation, genres or style, or whatever, are not judged to be saleable that year, or that month. Some writers who produce good, saleable work still don't get a look in because the industry knows it will make more money from a da Vinci Code lookalike, or a celebrity memoir, and each publisher can only do so many books in any one year.

So there are a lot of writers out there who will take the risk and publish their book themselves - because they believe in it, or because they can make enough money from it (even though a publisher couldn't), or because they just don't care about the money. There is a world of talent and excellence in self-published books that the ordinary buying public never sees simply because the agent-publisher-bookshop chain excludes them.

I can understand why each of these groups is loathe to accept that there can be high quality self-published books. The agents simply have no role in the self-publishing supply chain. The publishers are also excluded middle-men. The booksellers can't easily take on self-published books because, without a book going through the agent-publisher filter, there is no guarantee that it will meet even the minimal standards of quality I mentioned earlier - the booksellers would have to become their own filter, judging the books they allowed on their shelves. (For booksellers, there are also issues of quantity, reliability of supply, economies from single-sourcing, and the sale-or-return deals they have with publishers, that would make them wary of self-published works.)

Which all means that the self-published author, no matter how good he or she is, or how saleable his or her book is, is almost inevitably doomed to economic failure because they simply cannot get their product under the noses of the book-buying public. Yet, in this digital age, it has become cost-effective to lay out all our wares - good, bad and ugly - and let the market decide which are the quality products. After all, we find the best blogs to read, the best news aggregators to visit, and the best online shops. The Web has made finding what we need and what we like easier than it has ever been, and a lot quicker and better-focused than marching around town, browsing through bookshops.

There is so much talk these days about the future of publishing - which is mostly about ebooks and other delivery mechanisms. Maybe some of that talk should get down to the basics of how the whole industry could be restructured to let more voices be heard and to give the public more choice in who they listen to.

Sci-Fi and What?

How did 'science fiction' and 'fantasy' ever get lumped together in the popular mind? In particular, why did they ever get lumped together on bookshop shelves?

I ask because I've just had a couple of days in Brisbane and was able to visit a few bookshops. The nearest town with a bookshop to where I live is 150 km away, so this should have been a real treat. Instead, it was a frustrating and annoying waste of time. I wanted just two things. One was to buy a decent poetry anthology. The other was to have some fun browsing the sci-fi shelves.

The anthology was a dead loss. Bookshops in Brisbane have 'self-help' sections as long as a Buddhist mantra, 'cookery' sections that would take a lifetime to eat your way through, 'business' sections the size of a CEO's 'productivity' bonus, but the 'poetry' section, if it even exists, is a couple of Banjo Patterson collections tossed in with a few Shakespeare plays and school crib sheets. Ah well, back to Amazon, I suppose, land of the long tail and minority interest.

I knew I'd do better with the sci-fi because even a Brisbane bookshop always has a 'Science Fiction and Fantasy' section. Sadly, however, these are invariably 'Fantasy' sections with a few sci-fi books hidden among the hundreds of other books. I must confess, I have now and then read a fantasy novel. I've read The Lord of the Rings. I've read one or two Anne McCaffreys. I even ploughed through six books of Steven Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, each one the size of a brick. But it was a long time ago and I'm over it. People with talking swords fighting with or against dragons just doesn't do it for me. If I want black-and-white morality and mystical mumbo-jumbo in a pre-industrial setting, I can read the Bible.

Of course, I'm being rather harsh. Most sci-fi - especially space opera - is just as bad. My excuse is that I'm narked that to find anything good - some actual, honest-to-goodness sci-fi - among all these fat trilogies with Celtic fonts on their spines, is like fossicking for gems in the bush.

To avoid wasting shoppers' precious time like this, I implore bookshops (and publishers, and magazines, and conferences) to do the right thing and separate out the sci-fi from the fantasy. They are like chalk and cheese. What is the point of mixing them up?

Manuscript Brokers Wanted

Agents are brokers. They are the middlepersons who sit between writers and publishers and make the connections between the needs of each group. Trouble is, agents are in short supply.

What we now need is a new kind of broker: one who will sit between agents and writers and make those connections.

I mention this for two reasons. Firstly, I'm looking for an agent. I've just finished my latest novel, TimeSplash! and I'd like to see it published.* Trawling through agents' websites, one by one, trying to understand what genres they like to work in, whether they're accepting new clients, how they like to be queried, and so on, is only part of the work involved. I'm also working my way through authors of similar material, trying to find out who their agents are. None of this is easy. All of it is time-consuming and tedious. The yearbooks for writers that list agents and their preferences are helpful and take a lot of the pain out of the initial stages of the work, but you need one per territory (so, for me, at least Australia, America and the UK) and the printed ones are at least a year out of date already.

Secondly, I just read a blog posting by Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management, telling the world that she wants people to send her queries right now so she can read them over Christmas. Wow! If only I wrote crime fiction! This is the kind of service agents should be providing - both to writers and to publishers. It got me thinking just how much easier and more efficient finding an agent could be if they were all willing to let the world know when they were open to new queries.

Of course, even if they were all as proactive as Janet, one would still have to subscribe to the blogs of every agent in your genre. But it would be a start.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if I could just tell someone what kind of agent I needed and they would then line them up for me? Or if there was a 'clearing house' online where I could tick a few checkboxes to describe my book and up would come a list of a dozen agents around the world, actively seeking for manuscripts of that type? Surely there would be money to be made by someone in starting up an electronic marketplace like this?

On the other hand, even Janet Reid isn't perfect. Consider this post about 'surrogate writers' which basically says she'll dump any query that doesn't come directly from the writer. Makes it kind of hard for the new middlepeople to get into the market if agents don't like hearing from them. But then Janet wasn't talking about my new breed of broker (meta-agents? super-agents?). She was talking about writers who get their mums to send in a query for them! I just hope that, when manuscript brokers start to appear, her email filters won't search for phrases like 'I'm writing on behalf of...' and file their correspondence under 'Junk'.

Meanwhile...

*For any agents reading this, TimeSplash! is a sci-fi thriller, set about forty years in the future and deals with the struggles of two young people trying to prevent a very singular terrorist attack on London. He's doing it because he's a nice guy who just got dragged into it. She's doing it because she has a personal vendetta agianst the terrorist.

Parallel Importation of Books is Bad for Australia

If you are interested in the culture of Australia, in particular, if you are interested in having a thriving, creative literary culture here, you should speak out against the proposed lifting of restrictions on the parallel importation of books. This pointless destruction of Australia's publishing industry and the subsequent silencing of Australia's writers, is currently being considered by the Productivity Commission.

Go and look at the Productivity Commission's web page and the submissions already made. Then check out one or two of the publishing industry insiders who have been commenting. I encourage you to add your own submission. But be quick, the Productivity Commission will accept them only until 20th January 2009. After that you'll be too late to stop our book market being given away to the US and UK, with all it entails in terms of the devastation of Australia's own literature.

Dead America - News of the Dead

Check this out! Writer Luke Keioskie has started up a new website based around the 'world' of his unpublished zombie novel Dead America. The site features news items from Dead America's alternate reality, along with fake adverts offering services, like cosmetic surgery, to zombies.

Apart from being way cool in and of itself, as a marketing vehicle to get a buzz going around his novel, this a fantastic idea. Everyone who has come across Dead America agrees this is a great premise for a novel, and I know for a fact that Luke is a skilled and original writer. Surely it can't be long before a publisher catches on too.

Why I'm Leaving Authonomy

If you've somehow been missed by all the advertising - viral or otherwise - Authonomy is a website run by HarperCollins. Authors can post part or all of their books on the site and other participants (mostly other authors) get to read them, comment on them and vote for them. There is a ranking scheme so that you can see how popular your book is with the other members. Another website quite like this has also just started, called Writing Raw, it is basically the same deal except for one crucial difference. On Authonomy, HarperCollins promises that their editors will take a look at the top five ranked books each month.

The chance of having a major publisher actually look at your work has proven irresistable to many authors (myself included). When I joined, about a week ago, my book was allocated the number 3,403 and I estimate that about 200 books a week are being added to the site (I don't know how many are being removed). I know many people reading this blog might also be tempted to join, so I thought I'd write a few notes about my experience with Authonomy and why I'm leaving it.

1. The first and foremost reason is that the cost-benefit equation is not working out for me. I am spending too much time on the site and yet it doesn't look as if I'll make the top five - which is the main point of doing it. My book 'Time and Tyde' has been well received and I've had some very flattering comments about it. It also climbed steadily in the rankings - from the bottom to about half-way up in five days - but now it has stalled in this mid-league position and the only way to get it moving again would be to spend more time on the Authonomy site. This is because
2. Everyone on Authonomy is hustling. If I say Authonomy is a popularity contest, you probably won't get the full flavour of it. The way to get your book read on Authonomy is to plug it. You join the forums, you start threads, you comment on other people's books, you make 'I'll read yours if you read mine' deals, you invite 'friends' (yes, like MySpace!), and on and on and on. You plug and you plug and you plug. Putting up your book is the least of it. Being successful on Authonomy is a matter of constant, intensive marketing. And it works. The people whose names come up in all the forums, whose comments are all over the site, are the same people who are highest in the rankings. I'm not saying their books are no good. They're mostly quite readable. What I'm saying is that if you're a good writer but you're not a good, persistent, single-minded marketer, with loads of spare time, Authonomy is not for you.
3. Even as a popularity contest, Authonomy is not ideal. Some genres (particularly sience fiction) and sub-genres (comedy) are grossly over-represented, compared with book markets in the real world. I suspect this is partly because Authonomy is a more accurate cross-section of writers than it is of readers, and partly because those writers in genres for which it is most difficult to find a publisher, are the ones frustrated enough, or desperate enough, to try Authonomy. So if your book hits the top five, my guess is that it will still struggle to get past the HarperCollins editors who will have a much more market-oriented view of what is publishable.
4. There is an awful lot of rubbish on the site. I've tried to read widely and not just to follow the herd's recommendations and, while I'm sure the overall standard must be miles higher than a site like Writing Raw (just because Authonomy is attracting some serious writers) I still find I am handing out detailed advice to writers who don't seem to know even the most basic things about the craft. Meanwhile I'm getting lots of 'Wow that's great!' comments and no real help or guidance. It has begun already to grate on me that I am providing my time and effort for free to HarperCollins to help them winnow their slush pile and all they're giving me in return is the chance - the very small chance - that one of their editors might one day look at my book.

So there you are. Maybe it's all rationalisation because 'Time and Tyde' didn't shoot to the top of the rankings and I've got a bad case of sour grapes. It's possible, but I feel more like it's resentment at having been 'used' by HarperCollins. I entered into Authonomy enthusiastically and was a good citizen of this social network but I found that to get anything out of the site, the site demands more and more of my time and effort. In the end, far more than I was prepared to give away.

Angry Robot

'Angry Robot' sounds sort of cute doesn't it? You can just see the little fella with its glass eyes popping and its jointed metal arms waving agitatedly. It makes me wonder whether this is really the image Harper Collins UK had in mind when they named their new sci-fi imprint.

I read in SF Scope today that Harper Collins' newly-appointed Publishing Director, Marc Gascoigne, will run the imprint as a stand-alone unit and that he's all fired up with enthusiasm and exciting ideas and intends to "build a new wave of authors in the genre". (Which made me smile, I have to say, imagining a production line where Angry Robot Authors are rolling off the conveyor belt, eyes popping and arms waving.)

More seriously, though, going on the few words of quoted comment from Mr. Gascoigne, his plan seems to be to ride on the back of "other areas of mass-media such as movies, television and computer games [which] have enjoyed massive popular success across a variety of SF and Fantasy subjects." Not surprisingly, then, he seems to want to target "hard-to-reach audiences like teenage boys." So, movies, games, TV and teenage boys, all mentioned in the same paragraph by Mr. Gascoigne. Looks like authors with shoot-em-up space operas, preferably with some yeuky horror sequences and a hot babe or two, should mail them off to Angry Robot asap.

When I was a teenage boy, I wasn't hard to reach at all. In fact, I went out hunting for sci-fi and I couldn't get enough. It was all grown-up stuff too - Ballard, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Huxley, Vonnegut, and so on. Not a YA writer in sight in those days. Have teenage boys changed so much in a few decades? Or have marketers simply found a different kind of teenage boy to sell books to - the kind that used to kick footballs (and other teenage boys) rather than read but who now shoot simulated aliens (and simulated people) in simulated worlds?

Oh look, I'm getting all bitter and cynical again. I'm sure Angry Robot will be a fine imprint, publishing imaginative, high-quality writing by a new wave of intelligent and thoughtful writers. And, if it is, I wish it all the best.

Cory Doctorow: Creating Value Through Celebrity

Once again, I find myself feeling uneasy about Cory Doctorow. I just read his article Macropayments in Locus Magazine online. In it he argues that using 'micropayments' for buying creative works online doesn't really work because (a) the transaction processing costs can't be brought down low enough, (b) there is a step-function in the buyer's mind between 'free' and 'not-free', and (c) if it is the artist themselves charging the micropayment, it changes the relationship between artist and audience in undesirable ways. Instead, he appears to be advocating a system of commercial intermediaries – such as already exist today (e.g. a publisher who sits between artist and buyer and does all the selling.) On the other hand, 'in an ideal world' as he says, there might be a graded commercial relationship between artist and customer which starts with giving the artist's work away for free as downloads but which begins to incur costs as the work is embodied (in print, or on disc, or whatever) and then grows more expensive as various value-added features are added ('deluxe' packaging, additional content, the artist's signature, and so on). Presumably all of this is done through a commercial intermediary too.

The problem with Doctorow is that, while I tend to agree with just about everything he says (and while I think he is a good and entertaining writer of non-fiction and fiction) I always feel he has pulled off some kind of sleight of hand in getting my agreement. I'm not certain I've discovered quite what it is yet but it is something like this: what Cory Doctorow says is true for Cory Doctorow and for people like him, but not for the great mass of artists.

In the kind of economy Doctorow promotes for artists, the works of art themselves are effectively valueless. It is only the packaging and the additional content that make them worth shelling out money for. I've struggled with why this seems so wrong to me, despite how convincing his arguments are, and I think I may have found the heart of it. This kind of economy only works when the artist is also a celebrity. This is why the artist's signature adds value. This is why you give away your work for nothing but charge high fees for public speaking engagements. Specifically, it means that in the world he envisages writers must become like rock stars and film stars. Their persons must become a cult, they must have fans, their lives must become the real product so that they can add value to the intrinsically worthless writing they produce.

Is this really the direction we want writing to take? Do we any longer have a choice?

Chrome: Giving Your Rights Away to Google

As a writer, I will not be using the new browser - Chrome - from Google. The problem has nothing to do with its capabilities, its security, or its provenance. The problem is the end-user license agreement you must agree to when you install it. Clause 11.1 of the Chrome EULA says:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Effectively, this means that for any material you "submit, post or display" via the browser (this post, for example) Google gets the right, for free and forever, to use it in any way they want.

No. I don't think so, Google. You want my stuff, you pay me for it.

Presumably, if Google ever exercised this right, you could challenge it in court if you felt you had grounds that it wasn't being used "for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote" its browser. But why would you take the risk when you can be absolutely sure of keeping all your intellectual property rights by not using Chrome at all?

I know Google isn't the sweet little bunch of struggling upstarts it once was but this is real Evil Empire stuff. Maybe the PR department should take a stand and rein in the company's lawyers before Google loses all its friends.

Ebook Readers And Ebooks Aren't There Yet

I would love an ebook reader that really worked. Sadly they don't exist yet. These are the reasons I probably won't be getting an ebook reader for some considerable time.

First and foremost, I worry about access to my books. With paper books, they're always available. You just have to pick one up and it's ready to read, even if you haven't touched it for twenty years or more. With ebooks, this is not the case and might never be the case. Digital Rights Management (DRM) and file formats are two technical issues with ebooks that could render a book I buy now unusable in twenty years.

First, think about file formats. How many of the file formats available today will still be usable in twenty years? Which of the technologies that exist to read them will still be around in twenty years? If I'd had a library of ebooks on Atari or Commodore, BBC Micro or Sinclair QL machines and formats, what could I buy today to read those books? If I had my library safely backed up on cassette tapes of five-and-a-quarter inch floppy discs, what could I use now to retrieve them?

When you consider that the life of a paper book may be at least your own lifetime and maybe very much longer, just think how much technologies have changed in that time. Just think how much faster they are changing now.

DRM is a completely different issue but has similar problems. My main gripe with DRM is the notion that when I buy a book, I don't actually own anything except a license to read it (on a certain technology). Each time I want to read an ebook under some DRM regimes, I need to ask permission by logging in to the owner's service to verify my identity and my ownership of the license. I can't lend my ebook to other people. I can't pass my library on to my children. It isn't clear for most of these schemes, how I could resell my ebook. The business models around DRM are not customer friendly.

But that is only part of the problem with DRM and ebooks. What happens when the company that owns the book and licences my copy goes bust? Hopefully, a similar company will pick up the rights and carry on providing access. But what if it doesn't? Where is my book then? Does this mean that, if I buy an ebook, I have to trust that the company that supplies it will last my whole life, or that I'll be fortunate enough that an unbroken chain of companies will own the book and keep my access going?

And that isn't all. What if I change my ebook reader technology? Can I guarantee that the DRM that used to work to provide access on my old technology will now work on my new technology? What if I change readers every two years for the next two decades? What are the chances that I'll end up with a reader that has backward compatibility for the rights management scheme that was enforced by my first ebook reader? It is the same technical problem as for file formats. They change. Technology changes. There is no guarantee of backward compatibility forever. Sooner or later, one's library will become obsolete and inaccessible.

Frankly, I don't want that to happen to my books. I have many books in my shelves at home that were published fifty or more years ago. Will people in fifty years time be able to say that about their e-libraries? Or will books have to be constantly re-published – and re-purchased - so that they can be read on the new technologies yet to come?

So access is an issue that bothers me. The other main problem I have with ebook readers is less important (because I think it is a problem that will be solved one day) but is one which currently prevents me buying an ebook reader. They are just not as good as books. They are not as easy to use. You can read a book comfortably in a very wide range of lighting conditions, from bright sunlight to a gentle night-light. You can easily navigate within a book. You can add any number of bookmarks. You can annotate it. You can take it with you on holiday without needing to take a charger or worry about whether there will be telecoms access on the appropriate network when you get there. You can set it aside for a month and pick it up without finding its battery is flat. You can change your broadband supplier without losing access to your library, or your favourite bookshop. You can have one or a dozen books on the go at the same time, without needing extra readers. You can lend a book to someone else, without having to give them your reader too and making all your other books inaccessible. You can scan or photocopy or OCR a book and do things with the image or text-block you have created which, as long as they are within the 'fair use' provisions of copyright law, won't land you with a lawsuit from your book licenser for DRM infringement. The simplicity and practicality of a paper book make it easy to operate. You don't need to learn a new interface each time the technology changes because the technology doesn't change.

One day, an ebook reader will emerge which is as easy to use as a real book but we are still a long way away from it and, as long as there are dozens of different ebook readers on the market, each slightly different from the next, the problem of there being no perfect reader will always be with us. We are still waiting for the ebook equivalent of the Apple Mac to be invented. When it is, no doubt the equivalent of IBM or Microsoft (Google? Amazon?) will come along and clobber it and then take twenty years to take us to where we could have been all along.

Of course, the world has to go through the excruciating process of switching from paper books to ebooks – with all the mistakes and losses this will entail. I dread to think what will happen to books that are published today in exclusive deals with a single technology platform supplier. In ten or twenty years they may not exist in any form that anyone can actually read anymore. What becomes of ebooks for which there never was a physical copy? Do we just lose them forever?

The 8^th Edition of the Hutchinson Encylopedia (1988), for which I wrote the computer entries, became one of the very first books in the world also to be published on CD ROM. I'm very glad I have a paper copy of this book, though, since the proprietary format of the CD ROM version required the installation of its own, platform-dependent reader. My first Sci-Fi novel was written on a BBC Micro and saved on discs that really were floppy. That the whole of this technology died off and disappeared many years ago seemed fine until the day I lost the paper printout. Which is to say, if you live long enough (and I'm not that old!) you will have seen examples of the way that modern ebooks and ebook readers are headed.

Science Looks At Fiction

I love science. I love writing fiction. I even enjoy programming. So an article in last week's New Scientist was especially interesting to me. Keith Oatley, a cognitive scientist from the University of Toronto, has been studying the effects of fiction on personality and emotion. His conclusion is that there is a strong effect. He and his collaborators found that people who read fiction (as opposed to non-fiction) actually become more like the characters in the stories. He likens fiction to a simulation of a social world, created by the author, which then runs in the minds of the readers. Reading involves exercising empathy to identify with the characters and, through a kind of social learning, the absorption of some of their traits.

Oatley's finding is that reading fiction improves social skills and gives fiction readers 'substantially greater empathy.' He therefore believes it is generally beneficial to a society. Of course, he might be slightly biased. Oakley, as well as being a scientist, is also a writer of fiction.

But I like the idea that when I write fiction I am also writing a simulation of a world that will run in people's minds. It is an idea that squares pretty well with how I have always thought of writing fiction – although for me, the greatest pleasure in doing it is to create a simulation that will run in my own mind.

Yet I can't help feeling a little anxious about all this. If people are learning social skills, learning to understand people and their interactions, from fiction, doesn't this mean fiction writers have a strong moral obligation to represent the world truthfully and accurately? Doesn't it at least mean they should be intelligent and wise enough that what they write isn't stupid or plain wrong?

Many years ago, I used to study 'argumentation' – the modern incarnation of rhetoric. Ancient rhetoricians such as Aristotle (pictured), Plato and Cicero, understood that effective argument could be a force for good as well as ill. Aristotle in particular believed that only moral men should be taught these potentially dangerous skills. It is pretty obvious that persuasive arguers who might use the craft of rhetoric for their own ends and without regard for morality or truth, can do immense damage to society. Look at the way the USA and the UK were persuaded to invade and conquer Iraq.

If fiction – apparently harmless entertainments like novels and short stories – can have such a strong influence on the reader's mental construction of social reality, maybe we should be more careful about what we read – and what we write. Should only moral people be allowed to write fiction? Should publishers and editors take their share of the blame for what damage an inaccurate or untruthful depiction might do?

Oatley has not directly investigated the other kinds of fiction in our world – films and games, for example – but he suspects they will be found to have a similarly powerful effect on personality and social understanding as literature does. Now that really does make me worried.

The Future of Publishing: Techie Perspective

Writers interested in the future of publishing might have been following the articles and discussion by Sara Lloyd over at The Digitalist. For those not also following the techie nerd literature on this subject, there have been a number of relevant articles at the TechDirt blog. The latest of these has the great benefit of being a bit of a crossover, critiqueing Steven Poole's critique of his failed experiment in giving away a book for free. The article, "'Give It Away And Pray' Isn't A Business Model... But It Doesn't Mean That 'Free' Doesn't Work" is well worth a read, as are some of its referenced articles.