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By Sean Clark, on June 30th, 2009 Many of the recent entries in the SEPW discuss Open Access, so I’ve decided to share just one here, as well some nice pieces on DRM and author rights. Pieces in academic journals can be a bit dry, but the information they contain is often both fresh and interesting, so I use this post to sieve through some of the more accessible (and reader-pertinent) articles each month. You can read my previous installment of SEPW highlights, which focused on Open Access and digital archiving, here.
First we have “Fair to Whom?”, by Heather Joseph. This article discusses a bill in Congress that could prove very important to public access, at least on the academic side of things. It is also sad evidence of lobbyist effect in Washington.
H.R. 801 actually packs quite a potential wallop and has widespread implications. It is designed to amend current U.S. copyright law, and carves out a subclass of copyrighted works—specifically, those works that are the result of taxpayer funding—and makes it illegal for the government to require that these works be made freely available to taxpayers as a condition of the federal support researchers receive.
Seems like they want the taxpayers to foot the bill but concede rights to access, which doesn’t sound all that fair to me. Looks like another case of the lawyer and the CEO walking on the reader and scholar. …
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By Michael Hastings, on June 29th, 2009 Here’s the 7th and final part of our Literary Beach Books series. Find the other parts here.
I’m in the process of moving, and many of my books remain packed. So I was going to do these recommendations sans-text. But, after giving it more thought, I felt that would be quite lazy and irresponsible of me. Using the Internetz, I took the middle path: for each book, I went to the Amazon.com “Surprise Me!” feature and chose a line from the randomly selected page to give you a sense of what the novel’s about.
Lunar Park, by Brett Easton Ellis
 What happens when Brett Easton Ellis moves to the suburbs? Very, very, bad things. Think Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road meets Stephen King’s The Shining.
The plot is pretty simple: our narrator, Brett Easton Ellis, recovering addict and literary celebrity, lives in a haunted house with a semi-famous wife and a twelve year old kid whose friends keep disappearing. The ghosts are many: his career, his fictional characters, a stuffed animal called a Terby, his own father. As Brett’s mid-life crisis intensifies, so do the night terrors. We turn the pages to see how he survives.
For my money, this is Ellis’s greatest novel to date. It’s also my favorite “literary novel” of the past few years. I wish I’d never read it so I could read it again this summer. Like all of Ellis’s books, really, it’s a modern day horror story, characters tormented by emptiness, confusion, nihilism, Prada, ambition, family, expectations and, this time around, actual ghosts.
Surprise Me!: “It was an indictment of not only the way of life I was familiar with but also—I thought rather grandly—of the Reagan ‘80’s, and, more indirectly, of Western Civilization at the present moment.” …
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By Sean Clark, on June 26th, 2009
 Copyright law is dastardly business, with more nickel-and-diming and squabbling over percentages than most people probably gather. The music and film industries have gone batshit with copyright law since the rise of the internet, as evidenced by all the tricky take down notices and bogus fair use violation actions taken against YouTubers and bloggers every day.
Imagine if everyone who contributed to the ingredients of a can of soup had a different stake in the overall profit of the can, then on top of that, the percentages paid out to the pea farmers and noodle makers changed depending on what side of the ocean the soup was purchased on. Same farmer; same soup. Once the soup gets old, and the farmers are dead no one can really claim the money anymore (unless they stick a new label on it and add a dash of salt). Books, more so than canned goods, have a tremendous shelf life. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 25th, 2009  Seattle Public Library Rachel Martin is a librarian in Technical and Collection Services at the Seattle Public Library; she coordinates the OverDrive digital catalog for the library. She was kind enough to answer a few questions about ebooks, libraries, and the OverDrive catalog, which allows libraries to lend ebooks, audiobook mp3s, and other digital media. You can check out the OverDrive collection at the Seattle Public Library here.
Chamber Four: Not all libraries are offering ebooks. How did SPL hear about OverDrive and decide to use it?
Rachel Martin: We were aware of OverDrive early on as they began promoting the service to public libraries. We were excited to offer a service to our users that provided both ebooks and digital audiobooks.
C4: Does the OverDrive service cost money? Does the library pay by ebook copy you make available, or all-inclusively for the service itself?
RM: Libraries pay a one-time upfront fee to get a customized website and to set up the service and then we pay a quarterly hosting and maintenance fee. We purchase each copy of a book that we make available to our patrons.
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By Sara LeHoullier, on June 25th, 2009  Author: Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 2007
Best ebook deal: Diesel eBooks; free audiobook version at the library
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Haruki Murakami has been getting a lot of buzz over his new two-volume book 1Q84, which is selling like hotcakes in Japan even though the plot has remained a secret. After a 5-year wait, it seems his fans are satisfied.
But 1Q84 hasn’t yet been published in English, and while on vacation I came across After Dark, which happens to be his last novel. I didn’t know what to expect, since I haven’t read any of his other work, but I really enjoyed it and found it difficult to put down. In fact, I actually read it in one go.
It’s a surreal, heavily visual novel, drifting through a single night in Tokyo, Japan, and gliding by the things that happen after dark when rational behavior stops and real life blurs with dreams. The narration is an eerie first person plural, traveling through each scene like a movie camera, following each character as they make their way through a series of bizarre and magically interconnected events. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 24th, 2009 Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
- Clearly having been inspired by our Literary Beach Books series, NPR is holding a poll to determine the best beach books of all time. They define “beach books” as: “When you read one, your surroundings recede, time bends and you’re transported, mesmerized, enthralled. These are page turners to be sure, but that doesn’t mean they’re brainless.” The results should be interesting. NPR also has Nancy Pearl, the librarian behind Book Lust, weighing in with her best books of the summer.
By Mike Beeman, on June 23rd, 2009 I recently found myself buzzing around the web trying to find a good short story. Needless to say, I was at work. Although I wouldn’t want to read a full novel on a desktop computer, a short story is the perfect length for a quick break. I bounced around a handful of big-name literary magazine (Paris Review, Antioch, Harvard Review, etc) looking for a good short story to read, and quickly became discouraged. Discouraged with the websites and their offered fiction.
Most of the venerable, old-school literary magazines are still struggling with the idea of online publication. Until recently, publication meant having a story or poem printed in the physical world, so publishing online seems like an oxymoron. As a result, their websites are often only after-thoughts. I found website after website offering only one or two stories from the current issue and maybe a handful from back issues. This isn’t particularly helpful to a reader, and it’s even worse for the authors. However respectable these grand old dames of literature may be, the meager circulations of even giant names like AGNI and New England Review (estimated at 2,500 – 5,000 and 1,000 – 2,500, respectively) are pitiful compared to the monthly, weekly, and even daily hits of new literary websites like Narrative, Glimmer Train, and Zoetrope.
So, in keeping with C4′s mission to stay on the edge of digital reading, I will be using this space to highlight online literary magazines that are reader and writer friendly. This space will also be used to feature a great story currently available for free online that you may have overlooked. Ideally, these works will not be appearing in print. …
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By Sean Clark, on June 23rd, 2009  Author: Jeremy Robinson
Variance Publishing, 2009
Best ebook deal: Kindle only (free audiobook version available from Podiobooks)
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
2 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
I took a rather arduous journey to Virginia earlier in the month (my first and last experience with Greyhound), and decided on a whim to read a couple of cheap mass-markets on the way. Kronos was one of those selections. I chose it because its cover has a big sea monster with huge teeth about to chomp a scuba diver–see for yourself, above right.
So right away (after an odd almost-rape scene that had nothing to do with the rest of the book and took place, supposedly, in a parking garage I know well in Portsmouth, NH) when protagonist and Navy SEAL turned oceanographer Dr. Atticus Young and his distant teenaged daughter decide to bond through scuba diving, I was pretty psyched for some carnage. Instead, this big vicious spear-toothed sea monster gulps her whole. Atticus obviously assumes her dead, but Robinson does a pretty poor job of playing his hand close to his chest. …
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By David Duhr, on June 22nd, 2009 Here’s part 6 of our Literary Beach Books series. Find the other parts here.
Having just moved from Boston to the Atlantic coast of Florida, my ideas of beach reading will have to be redefined. Until now, the term has been synonymous with “vacation reading”—books I want to bring with me to places that are warmer and happier than all the cloudy northern cities I’ve called home. It’s not the beach itself that matters, it’s the atmosphere. Las Vegas, situated squarely in the middle of Hell, is where I’ve done the lion’s share of my beach reading. Now, with actual beaches just down the block from where I lay my head at night, every book on my shelves has the potential to be a true beach book.
Here are five that made the trip with me:
The Fool’s Progress, by Edward Abbey
 The great Ed Abbey called this book his “fat masterpiece.” Fat it is, checking in at just under 500 pages. Read them all. In order. And then read them all again, because this is my all-time favorite novel, and it very well may become yours, too.
Published in 1988, this is Abbey’s swan song, a book he poured himself into for years. It begins in “the dim inane of Tucson, Arizona,” where Henry Holyoak Lightcap, whose wife has just split on him for the last time, raises a .357 Magnum and blasts away at his loud-running Frigidaire.
Henry, with nothing left to lose and hiding a dark secret inside himself, decides to embark on one final trip back home to Virginia, an odyssey that takes him from his beloved Southwest through the middle of the country and into the Appalachia of his youth. In his dying truck with his dying dog, Henry stops to say last goodbyes to friends along the way as he reflects on a life full of love found and lost, authority scorned at every turn, and an abiding love for and awe of nature.
This book will make you laugh and cry at the same time. This is as close as Abbey got to autobiography, so if you’re fascinated with the real-life character, then you’ll feel the same about Henry Lightcap. I cannot recommend this book enough. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 19th, 2009 It’s easy, as an aspiring writer, to pick up a bad book and take heart that your writing is better than its. The problem with that thinking is that authors these days aren’t competing just against other books, they’re competing for the leisure time of their audience against every other form of entertainment available.
Books have a sizable handicap in this fight. An avid reader might read 50 books a year (or about .025% of the nearly 200,000 titles published every year in the U.S. alone), whereas a casual movie watcher might see 100 movies without really trying, and an avid movie watcher can see almost every movie that comes out.
Most people would rather give up sex than music; the same can be said, I would wager, of few readers with books. With TV, you can get a decent feel for a show in half an hour, without much risk if you don’t like it. If you don’t like a book, you feel tricked and trapped into reading the whole thing.
So the odds of finding a book you’ll like are lower than with other media (and with more risk if you don’t like a book), plus reading lacks the universal appeal of music and the ease of use of TV and movies.
Here are a few examples of excellent writing in non-book media. For aspiring writers, consider this your competition.
 Writing a video game must be especially difficult. A game doesn’t need a story to be good, but can easily be ruined by an attempt to wedge in a boring, slow-paced drama. The challenge is to write a story that entertains and doesn’t drag, for an audience interested more in submachine guns than subplot.
Bioshock is quite simply the best-written game there’s ever been. 90% of its fun is in premise (it’s relatively short on character, by contrast), but it has such a well-realized world and such an intricate, captivating plotline, that I found myself actually looking forward to the story bits, rather than dreading them like usual.
The game creates not only an interesting world, but a world that’s intrinsic to the playing of the game. The plot isn’t especially non-linear, but it’s immersive and entertaining, and the story has layers of meaning (from the ethics of genetics to the philosophy of choice and identity) that a lot of contemporary novels can’t touch.
It’s simple, dramatic game writing at its best.
Honorable mentions: Grim Fandango (the funniest PC game ever made); the Half-Life series …
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