Aventurina King at Wired is reporting on a publishing phenomenon in China, where free web access to novels has spurred record sales of printed books.
Literary sites like Source of Chinese and Magic Sword invite authors to upload their novels onto the web, where they might get noticed by an avid audience of young readers and eventually by publishers. King tells the history of Zhang Muye's Read Full Story
I've been following the NY Times open forum on the 50th anniversary of On the Road, which has racked up almost 300 comments so far (just before noon, Wednesday).
More praise than criticism, I'm pleased to see. Much of the condemnation of the book amounts to an ad hominem against Kerouac himself for his treatment of women, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. Much of the praise amounts to lyrical Read Full Story
This is the summer of overload. I'm juggling six writing courses (two sections of business communication, two of technical writing, and one each of web and creative writing), in addition to a course in linguistics that wrapped up last week.
In addition, I'm trying to score an agent for my recent novel Entanglement and complete a few early chapters of my new piece.
This blog has suffered as a Read Full Story
Mike Masnick at TechDirt provides some background information on the RIAA push to drive webcasters out of business by raising their royalty rates to absurd highs.
The answer is that webcasters favor eclectic artists and independent labels, over the corporately standardized music represented by the RIAA.
Traditional radio, of course, is dominated by a few similarly formated stations that all Read Full Story
Stefanie Olsen at News Blog has this new finding about environmental concerns in the online teen community:
Teens who are most active online and influential with peers are also the kids most concerned about the environment, according to a study published Monday by research firm JupiterResearch. ... Green teens are more apt to listen to music, post a personal page online, respond to an online Read Full Story
I couldn't help but smile over Andrew Leonard's Weekly World News-inspired headline on Salon yesterday:
INTERNET ALIEN COMMUNISTS THREATEN TO NUKE 1000 YEARS OF ACADEMIC TRADITION!
This posting on his "How the World Works" blog covered the shutting down of the Weekly World News, and an article by economist Glenn Ellison about the future of peer review in academic writing and publishing.
The Read Full Story
Edward Champion's recent LA Times article "Blogging: a crash course on introspection" is probably the most muddled commentary on blogging I've encountered in the past year.
His thesis is that "confessional" writing has been "spurred by cyberspace," with narcissistic bloggers baring their most intimate secrets with shameless abandon, pandering to "our voyeuristic culture." Champion wonders "why Read Full Story
Slashdot yesterday provided this link to "Errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia."
The page lists 62 of them, in fields ranging from history and biography to math, science and linguistics. This one, for example, is on "Pushkin in Bohemia":
It is a basic fact of Russian history that the tsarist administration never allowed the poet Alexander Pushkin to go Read Full Story
At Salon today, Gary Kamiya writes in praise of old-fashioned editing and editors, and naturally touches on the blogosphere:
In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and Read Full Story
