The Gamburtsevs are a set of peaks equal in size to the European Alps, but they are hidden deep under the ice in the middle of the Antarctic continent.
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Tag: books
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In the New York Times, Author’s Guild president Roy Blount Jr. castigates the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature, claiming that it infringes copyright as it effectively is creating an audiobook without the right to do so. [via]
I think Blount’s argument contains a kernel of truth but he’s chosen the wrong target, the problem is not the technology but the agreements that authors might have with publishers.
It may be a long way off but eventually TTS is going to be good enough that a significant number of people will choose to buy ebooks to be read aloud on their device instead of buying an audiobook narrated by a human being.
This should be of no concern to authors as long as they get the same amount of compensation whichever form their work is sold in. I’m not privy to the rights agreements that authors might have with their publishers but if their is a difference then authors should take the advice of Neil Gaiman’s agent.
We’ve sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this.
I think that the only people who should be concerned by the future in which ‘audiobooks’ are all computer generated on the fly (if indeed that ever does come to pass) are the actors who work as narrators and the recording studios where audiobooks are recorded.
Neil Gaiman interviewed by Henry Jenkins for the Julius Schwartz Memorial Lecture series at MIT. He talks about his happiness in being placed in the gutter of genre fiction by the literati and about the dark qualities of his children’s fiction.
The world’s most super-designed data center is described as being fit for a James Bond villain. [via]
Located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick, it can withstand a hydrogen bomb and has German submarine engines for backup power.
It reminds me however of the data haven that Epiphyte gets involved in building on the island of Kinakuta in Neal Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon.
Neal Stephenson’s new novel, ANATHEM, germinated in 01999 when Danny Hillis asked him and several other contributors to sketch out their ideas of what the Millennium Clock might look like. Stephenson tossed off a quick sketch and promptly forgot about it. Five years later however, when he was between projects, the idea came back to him, and he began to explore the possibility of building a novel around it. ANATHEM is the result, and will be released on September 9th, 02008.
I’m a huge fan of Neal Stephenson and just cannot wait for Anathem.
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The 21 Steps
The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming is a short story which owes something to John Buchan told via an interface using Google Maps which allows you to follow the protagonist through his adventure.
| Me not discover new genre of fiction called Bizarro.
It’s nothing to do with the character from the Superman universe of the same name though. Although if we were still using the bizarre backward logic and manner of speaking as exhibited by the character Bizarro then it would mean that the two were linked – confusing! Anyway Bizarro sounds right up my alley so I think I’ll be checking out The Bizarro Starter Kit as recommended by Bizarro Central. |
Bruce Schneier reports that the New Harry Potter Book Leaked on BitTorrent and that he’s been fielding press calls all day about it.
It’s online: digital photographs of every page are available on BitTorrent.
I’ve been fielding press calls on this, mostly from reporters asking me what the publisher could have done differently. Honestly, I don’t think it was possible to keep the book under wraps. There are millions of copies of the book headed to all four corners of the globe. There are simply too many people who must be trusted in order for the security to hold. And all it takes is one untrustworthy person — one truck driver, one bookstore owner, one warehouse worker — to leak the book.
But conversely, I don’t think the publishers should care. Anyone fan-crazed enough to read digital photographs of the pages a few days before the real copy comes out is also someone who is going to buy a real copy. And anyone who will read the digital photographs instead of the real book would have borrowed a copy from a friend. My guess is that the publishers will lose zero sales, and that the pre-release will simply increase the press frenzy.
I’m kind of amazed the book hadn’t leaked sooner.
And, of course, it is inevitable that we’ll get ASCII copies of the book post-publication, for all of you who want to read it on your PDA.
Harry Potter Fans Transcribe Book from Photos
Scholastic Loses It Over Harry Potter/BitTorent Story
The Harry Potter leaker left the EXIF data still in the jpgs they created.
Have just finished Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and I have to say that once you get past the science bit (and Brown has clearly researched the science but has utterly failed to understand it) there is a half-decent plot albeit with a rather obvious twist in the end.
It’s better plotted than The Da Vinci Code as it does actually build to a climax rather than a series of anti-climatic cliffhangers.
The characters are as poorly sketched as they were in The Da Vinci Code though and are little more than stereotypes.
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CAPTCHA book digitizing
You have almost certainly come across a CAPTCHA before if you’ve tried to sign up for a webmail account or a forum.
A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process usually involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human.
This has developed into a kind of arms race with spammers come up with better CAPTCHA solving software and organisations trying to improve their CAPTCHA generating algorithms.
Throwing themselves into the ring is reCAPTCHA with a brilliant new twist on the idea because reCAPTCHA has two words. Why? reCAPTCHA is more than a CAPTCHA, it also helps to digitize old books. One of the words in reCAPTCHA is a word that the computer knows what it is, much like a normal CAPTCHA. However, the other word is a word that the computer can’t read. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, we not only check that you are a human, but use the result on the other word to help read the book!