Rock band Wintergreen’s latest video — “Can’t Sit Still,” directed by Keith Schofield — features one of the musicians reading a copy of my latest short story collection, Overclocked. Sweet!
(Thanks, Terry!)
Monthly Archives::
September 2007
Michael Buckbee, proprietor of a “Fabjectory” (Bruce Sterling’s neologism “fabject” + “factory” = Fabjectory) has created a Second Life version of the print-and-fold minicomic of Printcrime, created by talented comics artist Martin Cendreda (the story appears in my collection Overclocked. He sez, “We use rapid prototyping machines to create real life objects from the avatars and sculptures that people make in SecondLife and I’ve been vainly trying to explain to people that this isn’t so much about creating expensive immobile dolls for people as it is breaking ground for a new way to interact with the world, something Print Crime does so well.”
Michael Buckbee, proprietor of a “Fabjectory” (Bruce Sterling’s neologism “fabject” + “factory” = Fabjectory) has created a Second Life version of the print-and-fold minicomic of Printcrime, created by talented comics artist Martin Cendreda (the story appears in my collection Overclocked. He sez, “We use rapid prototyping machines to create real life objects from the avatars and sculptures that people make in SecondLife and I’ve been vainly trying to explain to people that this isn’t so much about creating expensive immobile dolls for people as it is breaking ground for a new way to interact with the world, something Print Crime does so well.”
I’ve started a new gig as an essayist/columnist for Search Engine, a new show on CBC Radio. They’ve got me reading adaptations of my Guardian columns, starting with my piece on Digital Lysenkoism. They’ve done a great job with the editing — it’s nice having other people around to help me sound smart!
Thomas Crampton cornered me in China this week with a video camera and asked me how to blog — here’s a video of my answer. In a nutshell: pretend you’re a wire-service stringer and you’ll end up writing better headlines.
I’m coming to Beijing, China next week and I’ll be stopping in at the Beijing Bookworm to give a talk on China, the Information Economy and copyright — and I’ll be reading a little never-before-seen new fiction while I’m there. Hope to see you!
When: Wednesday 12th September 7.30pm
Where: The Bookworm, Building 4, Nan Sanlitun Road, Chao Yang District, Beijing, 100000, P.R. China, (010) 6586 9507, books@beijingbookworm.com
My latest column in Locus Magazine has just gone live. Called “Free(konomic) E-books,” it’s an attempt to enumerate the evidence that Creative Commons and other scheme for giving away free ebooks works to sell printed books. In my next column, I’l expain how Creative Commons works, and how science fiction writers can use it.
Many of us have assumed, a priori, that electronic books substitute for print books. While I don’t have controlled, quantitative data to refute the proposition, I do have plenty of experience with this stuff, and all that experience leads me to believe that giving away my books is selling the hell out of them.
More importantly, the free e-book skeptics have no evidence to offer in support of their position — just hand-waving and dark muttering about a mythological future when book-lovers give up their printed books for electronic book-readers (as opposed to the much more plausible future where book lovers go on buying their fetish objects and carry books around on their electronic devices).
