It seems that the best thing that ever happened to Harper Lee as a writer was also the worst thing that ever happened to Harper Lee as a writer.
In 1956, Lee received a gift of a year’s wages from friends who told her to “write whatever you please.” Let’s take a moment now for intense jealousy. All done? OK, let’s see what happened next.
Here’s a heads-up for fellow webzine editors and publishers, fiction writers publishing their own work online, and other interested (or indeed interesting) parties: the Anthologize plugin for WordPress generates EPUB, PDF and “other mobile formats” from content stored on the blog in which it is installed. Dan Cohen, head of the team that produced it (in just a week, no less, using a funding grant from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University) explains in a bit more detail:
[This plugin] converts the popular open-source WordPress system into a full-fledged book-production platform. Using Anthologize, you can take online content such as blogs, feeds, and images (and soon multimedia), and organize it, edit it, and export it into a variety of modern formats that will work on multiple devices. Have a poetry blog? Anthologize it into a nice-looking ePub ebook and distribute it to iPads the world over. A museum with an RSS feed of the best items from your collection? Anthologize it into a coffee table book. Have a group blog on a historical subject? Anthologize the best pieces quarterly into a print or e-journal, or archive it in TEI.
[…]
I suspect there will be many users and uses for Anthologize, and developers can extend the software to work in different environments and for different purposes. I see the tool as part of a wave of “reading 2.0″ software that I’ve come to rely on for packaging online content for long-form consumption and distribution, including the Readability browser plugin and Instapaper. This class of software is particularly important for the humanities, which remains very bookish, but it is broadly applicable. Anthologize is flexible enough to handle different genres of writing and content, opening up new possibilities for scholarly communication.
So, obviously intended for a userbase of humanities academics, but this could be a real kick-start for us fiction webzine types to start reaching out to the ereader audiences on a webzine budget*. All I need now is a few extra hours in every day of the week to investigate it further… *sigh*
Hopefully some smart people will retool it for some of the other open-source CMS platforms as well. I could very easily and quickly find a use for a ModX version….
[ Hat-tip to Alex “Xander” Ingram, Third Row Fandom’s in-house ebooks boffin. Big up yerself, Xander, and thanks for the notification. 🙂 ]
[ * Webzine budget (compound noun, colloquial) – (1): small change and used paperclips. ]
There’s a book called Zero History coming out soon, written by some guy called William Gibson…
Kinda surprised that the first place I saw this was at Wired… but then the Bigend trilogy (of which this is the third instalment) has rather conspicuously not been marketed as (or should that be to?) science fiction. Maybe the publishers figure all us geeks are gonna buy it anyway?
They may have a point. 🙂
Psychology boffins at Northwest University reckon they can detect “guilty knowledge” with 100% accuracy using scans of P300 brainwaves. Haven’t we reached a point where we should just abolish all modes of collective transportation, close down all buildings and spaces to which the general public have access, and oblige everyone to walk around naked with their ID tattooed onto their foreheads? After all, we’ve handed terrorists most of the victory they wanted by means of our descent into technology-mitigated paranoia, so why not just disassemble civilisation totally and treat everyone as a potential enemy? Better we destroy the freedom “the terrorists” hate so much than let them do it for us, AMIRITE?
Paranoia bonus: for those Statesiders feeling smug about not living in camera-infested Orwellian Britain, GizMag rounds up a few loophole-exploiting surveillance schemes that your own government is using to keep an eye on you. Don’t you feel safer now?
… or at least it does in uber-hip New York, where the magazine that bears the city’s name reports on a new batch of shops for hardcore bookgeeks in the Big Apple [via MetaFilter]:
Contributing to the resurgence is the local-is-better ethos, which has bled over from the culinary and fashion worlds, causing readers to crave a more human-scale shopping experience. And the specter of a world without indie bookshops has inspired a new, perhaps quixotic generation of entrepreneurs to jump in. The new booksellers bring a modern approach to the business: In place of the dusty riots of yore are more curated, well-lit shops that emphasize personal service and community—book clubs, readings, charity projects, and even the occasional lit-geek basketball league.
I’ve always been a dusty riot kinda guy myself (yeah, I know, surprising much?, but hey, whatever works – if people are selling books (and making a living selling books) in brick’n’mortar non-chain outlets, I don’t care how they’re doing it.
What about you lot – what’s the state of the indie bookstore in your town or city?