Neil Gaiman's got some good further ruminations on the nature and reason for free ebooks in a post he called "The nature of free." Bottom line: low-risk/low-cost books are how readers discover new authors, and the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading books, not people reading for free. The more barriers there are to reading, the worse the former gets.

During one of the interviews recently, a reporter said something like, "Of course, a real publisher wouldn't give away paper books," and I pointed out that 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy were given away by Douglas Adams' publisher, with a 'write in and get your free book' ad in Rolling Stone. They wanted copies of HHGTTG on campuses in the US, and they wanted people to read it and tell other people. Word of mouth is still the best tool for selling books.

Link

See also: Free download of Neil Gaiman's American Gods

Neil Gaiman's publisher Harper Collins has put his magnificent novel American Gods online for free reading as an experiment to see free digital copies sell print books.

This is a great idea -- it's really exciting to see publishers trying to get actual data about the market, rather than simply condemning all copying as piracy and hoping that the Internet just goes away.

However, I think that Harper Collins got this one wrong. They've put the text of American Gods up in a wrapper that loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book -- but that's only because practically no one is going to read this version, period.

The fact is that the full text of American Gods has been online for years, and can be located with a single Google query. I managed to download the entire text of the book in less time than it took me to get the Harper Collins edition to load the first page of Chapter One (literally!). The "security" that Harper Collins has bought with its clunky, kudgey experiment is nonexistent: pirates will just go get the pirate edition.

Unfortunately, the "security" has also undermined the experiment's value as a tool for getting better intelligence about the market. This isn't going to cost Neil any sales, but it's also not going to buy him any. We take our books home and read them in a thousand ways, in whatever posture, room, and conditions we care to. No one chains our books to our desks and shows us a single page at a time. This experiment simulates a situation that's completely divorced from the reality of reading for pleasure. As an experiment, this will prove nothing about ebooks either way.

It's a terrible pity. Link (Thanks, Spider!)

See also: Which book should Neil Gaiman put online for free?

I'll be reading and speaking at the Lit.Cologne festival in Cologne, Germany tonight. It's in honor of the German release of Upload (AKA Eastern Standard Tribe) -- hope to see you there!

Science Fiction 2.0
Cory Doctorow – upload
Freitag, 29.02., 19.30 Uhr

Theaterhaus
Stammstraße 38–40, Ehrenfeld

Link

Back in September, I had the extreme good fortune to read an early galley of Clay Shirky's long-awaited masterpiece, "Here Comes Everybody: How Digital Networks Transform Our Ability to Gather and Cooperate," and now that it's on shelves, I am doubly fortunate to tell you about it. Clay has long been one of my favorite thinkers on all things Internet -- not only is he smart and articulate (and it doesn't hurt that he introduced me to my fiancee), but he's one of those people who is able to crystallize the half-formed ideas that I've been trying to piece together into glittering, brilliant insights that make me think, yes, of course, that's how it all works.

Clay's book makes sense of the way that groups are using the Internet. Really good sense. In a treatise that spans all manner of social activity from vigilantism to terrorism, from Flickr to Howard Dean, from blogs to newspapers, Clay unpicks what has made some "social" Internet media into something utterly transformative, while other attempts have fizzled or fallen to griefers and vandals. Clay picks perfect anecdotes to vividly illustrate his points, then shows the larger truth behind them.

Clay's gift here is in explaining why the trivial minutae of Internet communications -- Twittery nothings and LiveJournalish angst -- matter, and why the weighty gravitas of the Internet -- dissidents risking arrest, victims finding succour -- aren't the only thing online that's worthy. In so doing, he manages to illuminate the way that every institution is prone to being recast by the net, and how to manage that change for the best possible outcome.

Unlike a regular business book -- something with a one-sentence punchline that could be explained in a longish New Yorker article -- Here Comes Everybody is dense and rich, with new insight on every page. It's the kind of a book that you can open to any page and be delighted by -- especially if you love the Internet -- and the kind of a book that you'll want to read aloud from to your friends.

I've been waiting for this book for years -- something I can hand to people who dismiss the Internet and amateurism and social activity as distractions or trivia. Now I have it. Link

See also:
Clay Shirky defends the Internet
Shirky explains why Keen is a Luddite
Shirky: stupid (c) laws block me from publishing own work online
Clay Shirky: An "expert Wikipedia" won't work
Shirky: Pro metadata will lose to folksonomy
Shirky: Wikipedia is better than Brittanica on net-centric axes
Clay Shirky's ETECH presentation on the politics of social software
Shirky: Wikipedia's "anti-elitism" is a feature, not a bug
Shirky explains: destroying limitations is good for culture
Shirky: Net is a kayak, driven by its environment

Issue Four of Steampunk Magazine is out -- free to download and print at home, or buy a handsomely printed object from the publishers for a mere $3. In this ish, steampunky stories and biographies, an interview with New Weird shakers Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and makers Donna Lynch and Steve Archer, DIY millinery, making a Jacob's Ladder, learning to plate stuff with brass, and the straight dope on Victorian hallucinogens. 82 pages!

Trance Devices were popular in Victorian times for their ability to unlock the imagination. Poets, artists, and thinkers of all fields dabbled in the varieties of trance. Trances were commonly induced by hypnotism, among other methods. One of the more inventive trance-inducing devices was called the “witch’s cradle”. It was a swing-like device in which a person hung from a series of ropes balanced in such a way that it was impossible for the person to reach equilibrium. The individual was put in the harness in a darkened room and left to sway, turn and spin about in complete darkness, never coming to rest. Soon the person was “freed of various psychological ailments. What is less known is that they orientation” and started to hallucinate like in a dream. Link (Thanks, Jake!)

A famed Chinese meat-bun seller calls his product "Goubuli" -- "Dog would ignore it." As Con points out, this guy's a real-world version of Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler, the notorious sausage-inna-bun seller from Terry Pratchett's wonderful Discworld novels.

The steamed "Goubuli" buns filled with a mince of meat and vegetables are the pride of Tianjin, a gritty port city near Beijing. Their Chinese name literally means "Dog would ignore it" and is said to come from the nickname of the man who began selling them some 150 years ago.

Now the buns are sold nationwide and have attracted makers of fake "Dog-would-ignore-it" buns.

But hungry for more success and apparently worried that foreign tourists may fear their name reflects the buns' quality or contents, the Tianjin Goubuli Group Corporation has opted for a tamer English name that may bring its own confusion -- "Go Believe".

Link (Thanks, Con!)

See also:
Pratchett's Discworld: a reading-order guide
Discworld interrelations map
Wedding cake inspired by Discworld's Great A'Tuin
Terry Pratchett's "Making Money" -- economic comedy
Terry Pratchett has rare, early-onset Alzheimer's

Stefan Bucher's new book 100 Daily Monsters is the end-product of a 100-day-long experiment in which Bucher posted a daily video of himself squirting a random blob of ink onto paper and then coloring in and around it to make it into a hairy, scary (and animated) monster. The videos are utterly charming and not a little hypnotic, and Bucher's blog has tons of monsters and their stories from fans all over the world.

The book looks like it'll be a be a treat -- and it comes with a DVD of the videos from the site. Link to Bucher's monster blog, Order the book on Amazon (Thanks, Bruce!)

This week's story on the science fiction podcast Escape Pod is "Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk," a haunting Ken Scholes tale about an animatronic AI Winnie the Pooh toy aboard a doomed, pandemic-wracked survival ship, tasked with saving the human race.

“Do you know what’s happened to the children?”

Edward swallowed. Suddenly, he wanted to cry. “Yes. They’re…sleeping?”

He hoped and hoped and hoped and hoped, grimacing as he did. He looked around.

Makeshift beds lined the room. Small hands gripped blankets, small eyes stared at the ceiling.

“No.” The boy frowned. “They’ve died.”

“Because of Something Very Bad?”

“Yes. And I need you to be a Very Brave Bear. Can you do that?”

Link, Subscribe to podcast feed

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have announced this year's Nebula finalists. There's some really superb work on the ballot this year -- the new Nalo Hopkinson novel, "The New Moon's Arms"; Ted Chiang's novelette "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate"; Geoff Ryman's novelette "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter"; Delia Sherman's "The Fiddler of Bayou Teche"; Bruce Sterling's novella "Kiosk" and many more.

Novel: Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell, The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman, The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson, Odyssey by Jack McDevitt

Novella: "Awakening" by Judith Berman, "The Helper and His Hero" by Matthew Hughes, "Fountain of Age" by Nancy Kress, "Stars Seen Through Stone" by Lucius Shepard, "Kiosk" by Bruce Sterling, "Memorare" by Gene Wolfe

Novelette: "The Children's Crusade" by Robin Wayne Bailey; "Child, Maiden, Woman, Crone" by Terry Bramlett; "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang; "The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" by Kij Johnson; "Safeguard" by Nancy Kress; "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter" by Geoff Ryman; "The Fiddler of Bayou Teche" by Delia Sherman

Short Story: "Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse" by Andy Duncan, "Always" by Karen Joy Fowler, "Titanium Mike Saves the Day" by David D. Levine, "The Story of Love" by Vera Nazarian, "Captive Girl" by Jennifer Pelland, "Pride" by Mary Turzillo

Link

Reacting to the news that Andrew Burt has announced that he will stand for president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, John Scalzi has posted a blistering rant explaining why Burt is unfit to serve. Burt was the only person who volunteered for the vice-president's role the last time around -- after having previously volunteered to run the SFWA anti-piracy effort, loaning himself SFWA's money to patent a bizarre ebook-degrading program, creating a snitch-line for readers to fink each other out with, and then issuing a bulk takedown notice on behalf of the Asimov estate and Robert Silverberg listing thousands of files that did not infringe either writer's copyright (the files merely had the word "Asimov" or "Silverberg" in them). Included in that last was one of my own books, which was posted with my permission, under a Creative Commons license (Burt later lied about the scope of his offense, repeatedly characterising his mistake as encompassing "only three" files, then vilified me for publicly complaining about his abuse of copyright law).

Scalzi does an excellent job of summing up Burt's failures as a writer, a SFWA volunteer, and a policy setter, and his rant is world-class, even if you don't care about politics in SFWA.

Which is to say that to a very large extent, SFWA’s entire last year has been spent dealing with the problems that Andrew Burt, during his tenure as SFWA vice president, has personally created. To be sure, he had help for at least part of it (he couldn’t have been elected onto the newly-formed copyright committee on his board vote alone), but at the end of the day, his bad actions were the ones that damaged public perception of SFWA, tore at the unity of the organization, and caused it to invest significant time and resources repairing the wounds Burt inflicted with his initial lack of care, and his subsequent, entirely self-serving drive to install himself into a chairmanship he had no business seeking.

The fact Burt wants to be president of SFWA after jamming the organization into a wall twice in the last year suggests to my mind either an Aspergian lack of cluefulness, or a grim, committed drive to prove that the Peter Principle is wrong, and that, indeed, one can rise beyond one’s level of incompetence, perchance to explore heretofore unknown, virgin realms of incompetence none have ever seen before. Alas toward the latter, SFWA would be chained to him and dragged along as he frisked about these new lands.

Burt’s lack of writing career and penchant for publicly immolating himself and SFWA have not gone unnoticed, which presents a third issue:

3. Andrew Burt’s Reputation in the Professional SF/F Community. Simply put: It’s bad.

Link

Other SFWA members have posted their own horrified reactions: Charles Coleman Finlay's The Secret Life of Walter Burty is an hilarious Thurber pastiche, with Burt as Walter Mitty:

"Quiet, man!" said Burty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-qwerty-pocketa-qwerty. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening keys. "Give me a fountain pen!" he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He scribbled a series of hasty apologies, shifting blame to the villainous enemies intent on ruining his brilliant investments. And then he wadded up the pages and shoved them in the mouths of everyone who spoke against him. "That will hold for about ten minutes," he shouted. "Get on with the loan!"

An accountant hurried over and whispered to the treasurer, who, surprisingly, looked like Burty would look if Burty were the treasurer, and Burty saw the man turn pale. "Due diligence has set in," said the treasurer nervously. "If you would take over, Burty?"

Burty looked at him and at the cowardly figures of the ordinary mortals who doubted his fiduciary genius. "Glad to," he said. "As you know, I'm a doctor."

They slipped him a blank check and . . .

And Stephanie Leary's done fine work translating Burt's campaign platform into plain speech:

I have a track record as a problem solver and in handling unexpected situations calmly.

I am the instigator of flame wars unprecedented even in SFWA’s long and contentious history. If someone disagrees with me, I quickly resort to personal attacks and attempt to bolster my credibility with specious publication credits and irrelevant remarks about my education. If I appear to be losing the argument, I will pick up my ball and go home.

See also:
Science Fiction Writers of America abuses the DMCA
Science Fiction Writers of America reinstates E-Piracy Committee -- new name, same chairman

Wired editor Chris "Long Tail" Anderson has written a long rant for Wired, introducing his next book: FREE. When I read The Long Tail (which explores the new markets that get opened by cheaper and cheaper cost of manufacture, distribution and marketing), I thought it was fantastic, right up to the part where Chris started talking about stuff that doesn't cost anything to copy, digital goods like music and ebooks and so on. As I read that chapter, I thought, oh ho, a divide-by-zero error! The market for digital goods isn't a market for goods at all: since the potential customers can choose to get all digital goods for free on the darknet, the digital goods market is actually a digital services market: what iTunes Store and the rest sell is the service of getting the digital files in a way that's easier, smarter, or faster. The end "product" is the same (actually, the end product is often superior when you download it for free than when you pay for it -- the paid-for versions are often crippled with DRM, something that file-sharers thoughtfully remove for you before uploading).

So Free appears to be an exploration of the Divide-By-Zero problem in the Long Tail, and it's the kind of thing we really, really need:

This difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.

The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed. It's why Google doesn't show up on your credit card. It's why modern Web companies don't charge their users anything. And it's why Yahoo gives away disk drive space. The question of infinite storage was not if but when. The winners made their stuff free first.

Traditionalists wring their hands about the "vaporization of value" and "demonetization" of entire industries. The success of craigslist's free listings, for instance, has hurt the newspaper classified ad business. But that lost newspaper revenue is certainly not ending up in the craigslist coffers. In 2006, the site earned an estimated $40 million from the few things it charges for. That's about 12 percent of the $326 million by which classified ad revenue declined that year.

Link

Metropolis, a German/French documentary series from Arte.tv, shot a short documentary with me about online freedom and surveillance, and science fiction. They've put the episode online as a free, remixable, Creative Commons licensed download. Link

Dav sez, "A friend of mine in Tokyo has built an incredible bookcase that completely surrounds his bed. It's like an igloo made of books. You have to see the photos." Link

Here's a smart way to cope with the mountain of books beside the bed: easy-sew pockets that slip between the box-spring and the mattress and hang down on the side of the bed.

I am constantly tidying up my night table that has piled books, phone, clock, tissue box, converter, pictures, some carnations in a vase, where are you suppose to put all this stuff? Well, in this little bedside pocket of course! Oh so basic. Long embroidered cloth, folded over and sewn. Tuck in between the mattresses and there's your pocket. Stick your water bottle, converter, book, whatever.

Link (via Craft)

The folks who created the amazing security camera screen saver (now available for Windows), are working on a real-life version of the "superplonk" reality filtering system that author Charles Stross introduced in his terrific novel, Accelerando.

In Accelerando Charles Stross writes about a lot of interesting concepts we are just starting to work on. It was one of the most important books for me in 2007. it shows how close science fiction and science get in these days.

My favorite feature is "superplonk." It remixes the environment and filters annoying persons, objects and sounds. That’s an augmented reality version of what I practice today with special earplugs. But soon that should be possible with modified hearing devices and slim head mounted displays.

One experiment in my ongoing surveillance series simulates superplonk with images of network cameras. Via motion detection I am reconstructing a place’s image without people and cars. All moving objects are becoming ghosts. Only people and cars who are standing still are becoming visible. Movement makes you invisible. Jan covers this topic in his master thesis, too.

Link

IO9's Annalee Newitz liveblogged the presentation of Stephen M. Kosslyn, author of Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston. Kosslyn presented on his findings from Cognitive Science research into the optimal way to present visual information -- like PowerPoint slides. Kosslyn's boiled it all down to a few simple points, and while I'm sure there's a lot of nuance and detail in the book, Annalee's piece on its own is damned good advice to circulate to the slideslingers in your life.

The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details -- the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not make the data of interest a different color from the list? Or circle it in red? "The human brain is a difference detector," Kosslyn noted. The eye is immediately drawn to any object that looks different in an image, whether that's due to color, size, or separation from a group. He showed us a pizza with one piece pulled out slightly, noting that our eyes would immediately go to the piece that was pulled out (which was true). Even small differences guide your audience to what's important.

Link, Link to Clear and to the Point

Tomorrow, I'll be a guest of honour at PicoCon, a small, one-day science fiction convention put on by the Imperial College Science Fiction society in South Kensington, London. The other guests are Liz Williams and Paul Cornell -- admission ranges from £4-8. Hope to see you there!

It is a small (hence the name), affordable and convenient convention for students in or near London, and London fandom. Registration usually opens at 10am, first event ~11, finishing up in the evening around 7-8pm. At a Picocon you will encounter:

* Guests of Honour doing talks and panels
* Destruction of Dodgy Merchandise (you're welcome to bring along donations)
* All-day LAN gaming (usually some form of Unreal Tournament)
* Stalls selling books and other stuff
* General socialising room, also with games organised throughout the day by the Wargames society (e.g. Fluxx)
* Quiz and silly games
* Student Union bar

Link

Random House Audio -- a division of Bertelsmann, one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world -- has announced that it will now allow its audiobooks to be sold without DRM by all of its online retailers. In the announcement, Random House notes that they've been running a DRM-free audiobook program with eMusic for months, and that none of the pirate editions of their audiobooks online came from those DRM-free editions; rather, they've come from DRM'ed editions that were cracked, and from ripped CDs. I know, I know -- duh. But how freaking cool is it to have a publisher come out and say that in public?

I'm especially pleased about this because I've been doing a couple of little publishing deals with various Random House divisions. The German division publishes translations of my novels in Germany and Austria, while Random House Audio is doing the audiobook version of my forthcoming novel, Little Brother. My agent had negotiated a one-off no-DRM deal with them for that edition, but now it seems like everyone's going to have the same option: authors who don't want DRM won't be forced by Random House to include it.

The big question-mark is hovering over Audible, recently acquired by Amazon. I love the range and selection and pricing of Audible's titles, but I got majorly hosed when I switched to Linux and had to spend a month converting my giant, expensive Audible collection to DRM-free MP3s. When my agent started shopping the audio rights for Little Brother, I was shocked to discover that Audible refused to release any books without DRM -- even if the author didn't want it -- and that they had the exclusive contract to supply audiobooks to the iTunes Store.

Amazon's gone on record saying that they'll kill Audible's DRM if the public makes a big enough stink. With Random House going DRM-free, you gotta wonder if Amazon will do the right thing and follow.

Since our decision has been based in part on our experience with eMusic, I would like to share those results with you. EMusic started selling audiobooks mid-September, and their program has been a success, with strong sales every month since launch. Since they sell content only in the MP3 format (in other words, without DRM), our goal was to find out if allowing them to sell our content would lead to any increase in illegal filesharing. For tracking purposes, we watermarked all of the eMusic files and then hired a piracy watchdog service to monitor and report back to us if any of our titles appeared on the major filesharing networks. We tracked a mix of popular titles, including some that were not available through eMusic. Because piracy is already a fact of life in the digital world, what we were interested in finding out was not whether piracy exists, but rather whether there is any correlation between DRM-free distribution and an increased incidence of piracy.

The results: we have not yet found a single instance of the eMusic watermarked titles being distributed illegally. We did find many copies of audiobook files available for free, but they did not originate from the eMusic test, but rather from copied CDs or from files whose DRM was hacked. It is worth noting that these results are entirely consistent with what the music industry has found in the last six months. After conducting their own tests with Amazon, Walmart.com and others, the major labels have reached the conclusion that MP3 distribution does not in itself lead to increased piracy, they are now moving their entire catalogs to this approach.

PDF Link

The sceince, tech and science fiction blog Futurismic is once again set to publish original fiction, beginning in March:

Monday 3rd March, to be precise - and on the first weekday of each month after that, as well. Between now and then there will be a few other changes taking place, and after the fiction you’ll see the return of our non-fiction columns as well.

Link

The Nebraska Library Commission has begun to include Creative Commons licensed editions of books in its catalog -- so you can check out my novels in the Tor editions, or just nab a copy from the library's site.

About a month ago I was asked the following question: Why don't libraries start cataloging and offering CC-licensed works? Why not, I asked myself. Why doesn't the Commission try this. So, I spoke with others and everyone loved the idea. (At first anyway. We'll come back to that in a moment.) The basic idea was to take electronic versions of these titles, post them on our Web server, catalog them in the OPAC, then offer them up to those that wanted them. Additionally, for some titles the license allowed for physical printing of the works so we sent those files off to the print shop to turn them into spiral-bound books to be added to the physical collection. (A few days later the print shop called back to question our right to print these works. A few pointers back to the CC Web site and the relevant licenses straightened it all out.)

Link

Novelist John Scalzi, who has earned a buck or two from writing, has written a damned fine post about money management for writers. I spent a few years figuring this stuff out myself -- the hard way -- and really wish I'd had this around when I started earning my living from writing.

4. Your income is half of what you think it is.
When you work for someone, the employer withholds your income and Social Security taxes for the IRS, pays part of your Social Security, automatically deducts for your 401(k) and health insurance, and (if you’re not an idjit) also kicks in a bit for the 401(k). When you’re a freelance writer, none of this happens. The problem is, lots of writers forget that and spend everything they get when they get it, so when taxes come due (which is quarterly, because per the earlier notation, the government quite sensibly doesn’t trust freelancers to pay their taxes in one lump sum) lots of writers go “oh, crap” and have to suck change out of sofas and the few remaining pay phones to square the debt. This is also why many writers never get around to funding IRAs or other retirement vehicles, and spend their lives hoping they don’t slip or catch cold or get hit by a taxi, because they have no health insurance.

Simple solution: Every time you get a check, divide it in two. One half is yours to pay for bills, rent and groceries, and if there’s anything left over, to play with. The other half, which you deposit into an interest-bearing account of some sort, goes to federal, state and local taxes and your Social Security taxes, and anything that’s left over goes to fund your IRA (do the Roth IRA, it’ll pay off in the end) and, if you’re not lucky enough to have either number two or three above, your health insurance (have a day job or a spouse with bennies? Save it anyway. Be one of the wacky single-digit percent of Americans who actually save something in the bank. Also, and more usefully, that money you’re saving becomes a “buffer” for the times when you have bills but no income on the way. The buffer is your friend. Love the buffer. Fund the buffer).

Link

Logos Bible Software publishes specialist electronic editions of scholarly works -- they use a "community pricing model" that allows their community of customers to work together to establish the demand for the work and set a fair price for it before it is produced:

They also do what they call community pricing, where they don't know how to set the price. Here, they expose the price curve to their users, letting users choose the price they are willing to pay. Once the price crosses the line that allows them to cover their costs, they give that "best price" to their pre-order customers (regardless of which price they actually chose when voting.) They then raise the price to the point on the curve that shows best profit for Logos, for customers who weren't part of the original subscription. In this way, they make money on every product they produce (much like threadless.com, which aggregates demand (but doesn't set pricing) before producing a product.) To me, this is a major trend for the future of manufacturing, but that's another topic....

Link

The stairs going up to the attic room of a Victorian row house in London have been fitted with books that line each riser and wrap around the edges. As someone who lives in small places with lots of books (and no matter what I do, no matter how ruthless I am, I always seem to have lots more books than I have room for) this kind of thing is sheer aspirational porn for me.

The flat occupies part of the shared top floor of an existing Victorian mansion block. Our proposal extended the flat into the unused loft space above, creating a new bedroom level and increasing the floor area of the flat by approximately one third. We created a 'secret' staircase, hidden from the main reception room, to access a new loft bedroom lit by roof lights. Limited by space, we melded the idea of a staircase with our client's desire for a library to form a 'library staircase' in which English oak stair treads and shelves are both completely lined with books. With a skylight above lighting the staircase, it becomes the perfect place to stop and browse a tome. The stair structure was designed as an upside down 'sedan chair' structure (with Rodrigues Associates, Structural Engineers, London) that carries the whole weight of the stair and books back to the main structural walls of the building. It dangles from the upper floor thereby avoiding any complicated neighbour issues with the floors below.

Link (Thanks, David!)

Wikitravel, the collaborative wiki project that compiles guides to cities and countries around the world, has spun out Wikitravel Press, which will publish hardcopy editions of the Wikitravel guides. Each copy will be printed on demand, using a recent (no more than a month old) version of the selected Wikitravel pages (printed and fulfilled by lulu.com). This is a nice bridge over the gap between the currency of a wiki page and the convenience of a bound volume.

Wikitravel, the Webby Award-winning online travel guide, has over 30,000 guides to destinations around the world. At Wikitravel Press, we select the best ones, give them to our carefully selected local editors to polish and fact-check, and then typeset them with our revolutionary one-click Yucca engine. This lets us update the guides from top to bottom every single month. When you order online, a fresh copy is printed just for you and shipped to your doorstop in less than a week*.

And that's only half the story! On your travels, you're sure to discover great new restaurants or hip new bars not listed in the guide. For normal travel guides, you could write some "feedback" and hope they put it into the next edition five years from now. But for Wikitravel, you can add it yourself, and less than one month later your contribution (and your name) will be in print.

Link

IO9 has a set of provocative rules for "fan husbandry" -- nine things creators should do to keep their fans active (if not, you know, happy or satisfied):

Fans love inconsistencies. Fans claim to hate contradictions in long-running stories, but actually that stuff is catnip to them. If Londo Mollari says he has seven penises in one episode and then refers to his twelve penises in another episode, the fans will spend hours coming up with explanations for the discrepancy. Marvel Comics realized this years ago, when it started sending "no prizes" to fans who could come up with the cleverest explanations of continuity goofs. So don't worry about trying to be consistent with old stories. Just ignore them, and let the fans worry about them.

Link

Chip Kidd is one of the world's greatest graphic designers, specializing in book design. Book One is his design retrospective filled with concept sketches and hilarious anecdotes and insights into design.

Kidd's also an excellent novelist. A few years ago he wrote The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel In Two Semesters about 1960s college design students.

The Learners is a sequel to Cheese Monkeys, in which the main character goes to work in an ad agency, which from the reviews I've read, sounds something like the agency in my favorite TV show, Mad Men.

A Boing Boing reader named Meryl alerted me to a video called "5 Experiments in Form and Contrast" Kidd created to promote The Learners. She says, "He basically reads a well-known piece of dialogue by one person while putting on the voice and physical affect of another well-known person." Link

For the past 18 months, the Steal This Wiki project has been industriously updating Abbie Hoffman's 1971 classic, Steal This Book, and now they're ready to ship. Ploney Almoney sez, "We now have our first alpha available for people to download as ODT or PDF, it is a huge bloated draft with minimal images but we have added just about every survival tip we could think of for shelter alternatives living out of a pack, cooking without a kitchen, escaping the United States, and even making a fabber, plus all of the protest and propaganda distribution in a more useful DIY format. Now we need lots of people to read it and help us get the edits done so it can be sent for printing."

This site is intended to support and distribute information that is relevant to this day and age, which can be reasonably defined as one in which Americans are forced to deal with difficult issues (such as a military led by an unwise and unreasonable group of people) as well as with real and dangerous threats.

Hopefully as the content on this site evolves, it will become a new and useful work, holding true to the spirit of the original, and providing useful information to those who value freedom, peace, and justice.

This site contains the how-to information on everything from how to grow a garden to how to teach a college level class. How many revolutions were about putting the existing means of production into the hands of the people. We have seen that these revolutions, given enough time, always ended with a new power caste abusing the under class. We want to give the means of production for basic needs back into the hands of every person so they can choose to ignore the heavy hand of a government which has melded itself with the mega-businesses in a way that leaves ordinary humans with a voice or a choice. [edit]

Link to Steal This Wiki, Link to download PDF of alpha edition

See also: Steal This Book, the wiki

John Scalzi and Tor are making his groundbreaking novel Old Man's War available as a free download as part of the runup to the launch of Tor's killer new sf supersite. There are plenty of other titles available too -- you just need to sign up to get an email notifying you of more cool free stuff from Tor. Link

Neil Shubin's new book, Your Inner Fish, traces the evolutionary history of the human body's many quirks, including the origin of the hiccup:

Or consider hiccups. Spasms in our diaphragms, hiccups are triggered by electric signals generated in the brain stem. Amphibian brain stems emit similar signals, which control the regular motion of their gills. Our brain stems, inherited from amphibian ancestors, still spurt out odd signals producing hiccups that are, according to Shubin, essentially the same phenomenon as gill breathing. Similarly, modern lifestyles leave us vulnerable to predispositions to obesity, heart attacks and haemorrhoids because we have the genes of hunter-gatherers who lived active, not sedentary, lives.

My kid's got persistent hiccups (they started in the womb) and while they don't seem to bother her, they take some getting used to for visitors. Now I can just explain that she's getting in touch with her inner amphibian. Link, Link to Your Inner Fish on Amazon (via Collision Detection)