Tenebris

Missing the point: the ALA on digitizing libraries

I missed this the other day when it came out, but David Rothman at Teleread provides a first class summary of the fuss and response over the LA Times editorial against the Google Print program.

Le Spirale Fantastique, a blognovel

Rohit Gupta, a writer who lives in Bombay, is engaged in an interesting experiment in the blognovel: Le Spirale Fantastique. He's also concocted a scheme for promoting his book through link exchanges. You can choose a sentence from his book and link to it from your own page, and he in turn will link that sentence to your blog.

The sentence I chose was this:

As he sat sipping the gin he’d bought on the way up, she wandered the innards of her cavernous apartment, like a ghost, casting no shadow on the tiled floor.

Given the importance of external links in order for organic search engine marketing, this strikes me as a pretty good scheme. I ran across this, by the way, on eBook culture, a blog that appears to be defunct.

Public Domain Resources for Homeschoolers

Not that there is any shortage of online resources for public domain texts and the like, but I ran across this site today by chance, The Baldwin Project, described as a a comprehensive collection of resources for parents and teachers of children. It offers a couple of good indexes of public domain materials, including a page of stories.

The Hyperliterature Exchange

PODs, Micropayments & Adverts: Lulu.com, BitPass and AdSense discussed by Edward Picot (from The Hyperliterature Exchange, Picot's e-book site). This article came out a while back and I don't recall ever linking to it on Tenebris, although I think it's quite good. I ran across it again today while surfing and, in retrospect, it is one of the rare articles that, whatever its other shortcomings may be, really gets it with regard to Lulu (before digressing into a discussion of BitPass):

With production and delivery costs eliminated, it becomes theoretically possible for creators to offer their work at a much lower cost; and consumers who would balk at paying a couple of dollars to see someone's self-published animated poems might be prepared to risk it for a few cents. The problem is how to get the few cents from the consumers.

The other standout article from the last year or so that showed an understanding of Lulu in the context of the bigger picture remains Stephanee Killen's essay (on her site Integrative Ink): Digital Rights: The Revolution of the Arts.

Epublishing gone wild: Romantica

I love this: a story about novelist Tina Engler, who founded an e-publishing company called Ellora's Cave for sexually explicit romance novels. See Romance novels go hard core: Writer/e-publisher steers a sexual revolution .

Sales for "The Empress' New Clothes" were slow at first. Readers were downloading the book once every other day for $3.95. One of Engler's first and most enthusiastic readers was a woman named Crissy Brashear from Cincinnati, who was not only a romance reader but a reviewer as well. Brashear loved "The Empress' New Clothes" and touted it on her many romance-reader Internet lists.

The key to the success of the titles, you'll notice, was cross-linking by an active reviewer. Advice to authors: use Amazon's listmania to your advantage!