The Puget News

The ever-interesting bloggers/developers over at 37signals have posted about an interesting book created using a technique similar to one of my favorite methods, the cut-up. In an effort to force creativity, the famous beat writer William Burroughs was fond of taking pages out of books, cutting them vertically down the center, taping them together and then scanning the word junctions down the center-line to spur his creative process and encourage the usage of entirely new words.

In the example blogged about over at 37signals, a writer by the name of Tom Phillips picked up an old Victorian novel and then altered the text by painting over large portions of it, exposing an old work in an entirely new light. The effect is both visually-pleasing and interesting, adding mystery as much of the old work becomes lost. It’s an exercise in exceeding limitations and a great way to kickstart your own creativity.

Check out the to view images of the wonderful pages:

You can also purchase the book outright at Amazon.com:

For you writers out there, I wanted to post a brief review of a free new web application called, oddly enough, “Writer.” Writer is a web-based text editor designed to simplify the act of writing by focusing you on the task at hand. It’s pretty much a blank black square that you fill with words. If you’re like me, the day has enough distractions; there shouldn’t be a need to add to them hunting for formatting options within your “mondo-lithic” word processor.

Writer strips away all the cruft and gets you focused on the content. It has two “keyboard shortcuts” for you emacs fans: (ctrl+s) for save and (ctrl+n) for new. Think you can handle that, genius? If you can’t, there are some smallish, subdued links at the bottom of the browser window to help you do the same thing.

My favorite feature of the processor is the subtle way in which it focuses your eye on the text. As you type, the words in the area you are working are slightly more bold than the words you wrote a bit further up the page. As somebody who is a horrible typist, hunting and pecking along the keyboard at all times, every time I snap my head up to the screen, I see exactly where I am at, sharply delineated.

The other thing I just love about this little application is the “blog it” feature. I’ve been experimenting with many free options for writing content and exporting it to my blog (a custom-hosted wordpress blog). Due to its simplicity, this app is now the de facto standard for writing posts. When I am done writing the content of my post, I click “blog it,” enter the admin details for my wordpress account, and the content gets uploaded as a draft post to my dashboard. Nice! I love how even this is not over-complicated. The author of the app, a “developer for hire” by the name of John Watson has realized that his app is not a “fully integrated blog-posting solution” and instead just focused on helping you move the content to a place where you can add those last-minute html flourishes.

Signing up for an account is optional and only necessary if you intend to “save” files and access them from multiple computers. It’s about as easy as it gets, you just supply a unique username and password.

If you’re a blogger, student, or someone who writes fairly short snippets of text, anything other than a novel really, I’d recommend giving writer a try. There’s really no reason not to, considering the insanely low switching cost.

There is an absolutely fascinating article in the New Yorker related to Google’s Book Scanning/Search project and the pending furor over the copyright issues that this project is bringing to light. The results of this debate will have an impact on how you and I, dear readers, can expect to be able to find and access information in the future.

In this debate, we find authors and publishers pitted against search giants such as Google. Authors and publishers are frightened that they may be carved out of a potentially lucrative business and are insisting on a model which will allow them to receive royalties for their works. They’re also really scared that Google is scanning entire books (which makes sense given that they’re creating a searchable index of all the world’s knowledge) as opposed to the excerpts an academic might use in a research paper which are covered by “fair use”.

For their part, Google states that their use of these works is “transformative” and therefore not covered by copyright. Even in a search, Google only shows the pages surrounding the resultant selections. In their eyes, it’s the equivalent of a really detailed card catalog with the ability to search a selection and see if it meets your criteria before wlaking over to the shelf and picking up the book. You certainly cannot read the whole book through. Google also places restrictions on the number of pages that can be viewed/read by any one person out of any one work. Certainly these restrictions make it too much work to try and subvert them.

So where do I come down on this? I happen to think that creating digital copies of these books is incredibly important - books are ultimately temporary after all. History has taught us not to rely solely on one copy. Alexandria anyone? Have you ever lost a work on the computer while working on it? In my opinion, any enterprise taking on the task of scanning media and making it available more broadly is worthy of our admiration and support. It’s the potential monetization that puts everyone into a tizzy.

I am extremely concerned with what happens if Google manages to settle this lawsuit with the other parties. What will that mean for the other entities who are busy trying to make the same thing happen? Where will this leave competitors like Amazon in the discussion? Will smaller efforts be able to succeed or will they be priced out of the market by the precedent that this judgment would set? Must we accede all content to the mighty Google index?

Notice that nowhere in this debate have we yet spoken about what users/readers actually want and deserve. According to the New Yorker article, about 20% of all the books in existence are in the public domain. Let’s dismiss how ludicrously small this is for a moment and focus on what these constitute. These are generally older titles where the rights have lapsed or twhere there was never a copyright in the first place. Nobody fights over these and there are numerous efforts to bring this group of books into ready availability online. Another 10% of books are covered by copyright and currently in print. Nobody debates these much either since they typically constitute newer titles and represent precisely what copyright is intended to protect - the right of artists to make money off their works. It’s the other 70% that are the real buggers. The large majority of books are covered by copyright and not currently in-print. This leaves booklovers like myself in a position of having to track down a physical copy of an asset which is no longer produced. Thankfully, this has become easier in the age of the internet, but it has also built unassailable marketplaces around the truly rare and hard to find items. Why should we all not be able to benefit from knowledge which is failing to produce commercial value any further for the artists and publishers?

And so, the solution seems to me to be quite simple. We should enforce a “use it or lose it” policy on copyright holders. If, for instance, a book is no longer in-print and new copies fail to be circulated or made available to the market for some period of time at a reasonable cost, the copyright would be removed and the item would pass into the public domain, made freely available to the world - everyone with equal opportunity to profit off the work if they so desire. Why not? How many people still sell copies of “Moby Dick”, even though it is freely available in digital form in the public domain

The appeal of a “universal library” of all the world’s information is almost too much for me to bear. I want, I want, I want. It hurts me to think the reason we won’t such a thing is a relatively small cadre of people who wish to reserve the right to profit off their copyrighted material at some point in the future. Either you accept the business risk of making knowledge available or someone will do it for you, that should be our motto. It’s what the world deserves.

Go see what all the hubbub is about, check out

Other takes on this story:

• Techdirt: If Google Gives In On Library Scanning — Will It Hurt Everyone?
• The Last Podcast: Google’s Book Search

November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the month where thousands of aspiring novelists take advantage of the seasonally poor weather (especially here in the Puget Sound), trade in their self-censoring generally overly-judgmental attitudes, and focus purely on the production of writing a novel - no matter how bad it is. Hellbent on the production of 2,000 words a day, these folks labor towards the completion of a 175-page (50,000 word) novel while their progress is shared, encouraged, and tracked at the NaNoWriMo website.

It’s a worthy endeavor, a task to which I aspire - perhaps next year - and the folks I know who have participated have lauded the benefits of it freeing their creative processes.

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve been following Matthew Baldwin’s attempt over at the ever-hilarious Defective Yeti to read “Moby Dick” this month. I don’t know if the clever creation of the “NoNoReMo” moniker is his, but since he’s the first person I’ve seen use it, and I could find no central “NoNoReMo” website using a cursory Google search, I’m giving him credit. His “Moby Dick” reading excursions are frequently blogged and always contain hilarious observations about the experience. So far, I’m harboring doubts as to whether Matthew will be successful - he hasn’t updated the attempt since November 6th but I love what he’s produced so far - even it means that “Moby Dick” moves further down my priority list of “Books to Read”.

The reason I bring all of this up is that several people, including myself (you know who you are), have decided to collectively read a big novel coming out near the end of this month. While we have no need to tie ourselves to a 1-month goal on this, it would be best not to drag this out. We’ll probably aim to finish by Christmas or New Year. I don’t want to write about it longer than that and even indulgent readers would have their patience tested.

I’ll announce what the book is in the coming days so that anybody who wants to partake can do so (although the above image should be a pretty major hint - nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Getting people to read gigantic books is always a goal of mine though, so if I were you, I’d expect to see this exercise repeated with various works in the future. Feel free to suggest things you’d like to read and discuss online.

Haruki Murakami wrote the short story “Tony Takitani” based on a yellow T-shirt that he discovered and purchased in a Maui thrift shop. Something about that shirt and the Americanized Japanese name on it spoke to him of a story that needed to be written.

How many stories do you pass by every day? Take the time in the coming days to search for something small and incongruous. You’ll know you’ve found the item when an unanswerable question pops into your head - a place where fiction is almost certain to be more rewarding than the truth. Give yourself 10 minutes to commit it to paper (or computer) and I
guarantee that you’ll find the source of something deeper and more valuable to work with.

Resources:

Murakami, Haruki. “On the Adaptation of Toni Takitani.” Zoetrope: All-Story Summer 2006.