I came across an interesting article today as I was browsing through the news. At first I didn’t think much of it. But the more I thought about it, the more it intrigued me. I’m talking about plans to publish, in print, Wikipedia in Germany (Publisher plans printed version of Wikipedia). Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The media company — whose units include publisher Random House Inc. and music venture Sony BMG — said Wednesday that it plans to publish "The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia" starting in September with the content made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia.

The article goes on to mention that they plan to publish a new volume every year. The article didn’t mention anything about an English version being printed, but I’m sure it’s not far behind.

Here’s my take:

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As many of you know, I’m really interested in the intersection of literature and technology. This is a large subject that includes everything from ebooks, to the way the internet (ie. blogs) is shaping the way we think about literature.

There’s no doubt that previous sources of information of suffered as a result; mainly, print newspapers and the dwindling number of Books sections in news publications around the US. Whether or not this is directly related to the rise of blogs and other electronic media is up for debate. Personally, I think the electronic world of the internet has taken a large bite out of the world of print. People realize that there are more views and opinions than the few "elite" who get their essays published in nationally distributed papers and magazines.

This whole debate between print and digital formats is understandable. Literary critics, theorists and other academics have largely remained  creatures of the print world. Whereas the internet is showing that even your average, everyday, armchair critic can have a powerful voice in the literary community. But why must they fight?  Why can’t we combine that academic prowess of the old-school critics with the far-reaching, more popular online format?

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Amazon.com is making waves in the world of Print-On-Demand (POD) publishing. Essentially, they are requiring POD publishers to use their own BookSurge subsidiary to print all POD books (you can read my original post here).

The large internet retailer finally responded to the outcry, much of which permeated through the blogosphere late last week. Here’s a snippet of what I read on Publishers Weekly:

In the letter from the Amazon.com books team, the company reiterated that by using machines that are located in its own fulfillment centers, Amazon can have a title ready for shipment quicker than if it needs to ait for a book to be shipped to its facility. The extra time will permit Amazon to "marry" a title with another product that will be shipped in the same box, in most cases hitting Amazon Prime shipping times.

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Since the late 1990s, Amazon.com has been a leader in online book sales. Authors who want to get their books out to a wide audience, usually try and get themselves on Amazon. It just makes good business sense for both the author and publisher.

Or does it? New questions are being raised about Amazon subsidiary BookSurge, a small POD publisher and printer, about how they might be forcing other Print On Demand publishers to use BookSurge, or risk their books not being sold by Amazon. Here’s how Publishers Weekly puts it:

BookSurge, Amazon’s print-on-demand subsidiary, is making an offer that most publishers would like to refuse, but don’t feel they can. According to talks with several pod houses, BookSurge has told them that unless their titles are printed by BookSurge, the buy buttons on Amazon for their titles will be disabled.

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Whenever I’m doing research for a blog post, writing project, or just curious about a specific topic, I find myself using Wikipedia more and more. The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit has grown in size and popularity, so it’s no surprise that a Wikipedia entry is among the first in Google’s search results for common (and even not-so-common) search terms.

My growing reliance on Wikipedia actually surprises me, considering that not too long ago I despised the site. I had my reasons. Chief among them were the idea that Wikipedia relies heavily on the honesty and integrity of those who write and edit entries. And as you well know, not everyone who uses the internet has the best of intentions. Stories have popped up in the news about Wikipedia editors having false qualifications, entries being unfairly biased one way or another, and in the worst cases completely fabricated.

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Do you ever spend time online while reading a book (not at the exact time you’re reading, of course) so you can gain a broadened understanding of the text? If so, how do you go about it? Chances are, you start with a simple Google search and go from there.

If you are doing this, then whether you realize it or not, you are helping to shape the future of literary criticism. A recent article in the Guardian Unlimited brings this issue to light with one particular novel called Spook Country by William Gibson. Now, I have not read the novel (but very intrigued and will add it to my reading list), so some of the article confuses me when it goes into various plot points about the book.

But it doesn’t need to be that hard to understand. A quote from the author himself actually makes this idea of literary criticism being shaped by Google very clear:

"One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition [Gibson's previous novel] is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody’s going to google everything in the text … there’s this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now."

So on a real basic level, the idea is simply that because of the power of the internet, and especially the search powers of Google, the text of a novel can be taken to an entirely different level of understanding because of this "hyperlinked" quality that any text has right now.

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Finding new and unique ways of promoting yourself as a writer is always a challenge. However, it appears that more and more writers are starting to take a lesson from indie musicians and other artists by creating a MySpace page.

I began to wonder if this is really an effective tool. There’s been a lot of negative press about the popular social networking site, mainly dealing with child predators. On the other hand, like musicians, writers are artists who need to promote their work in order to get noticed and sell books.

On a personal note, I used to have a MySpace account, but have since deleted it. My main reason for doing so was because I was getting swamped with friend’s requests from people I didn’t even know. It was kinda scary. However, my profile was just a personal one, and I never intended to use it as a way of promoting myself. But I was getting (and denying) requests to be "friends" from teens – and I’m in my twenties.

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I’m very happy to announce that my internet is back online and working great! I don’t know all the technical details of what went wrong, but from what I gathered, it was a complicated problem that involved a lot more than just the local DSL network around where I live. Fortunatley though, a tech that came out today to look at the problem is the one who got it figured out, and managed to get some strings pulled to get us back online today. If it wasn’t for him, we’d be waiting until sometime next week to get our internet back.

But this whole experience of not having any internet service for an entire week got me thinking. It wasn’t too long ago that the internet was in its infancy and people were communicating the "old fashioned way" (ie. telephone, snail mail). In fact, I remember in my younger days dialing into these bulletin boards (called bbs) that people would run from their home. Once logged on, you could exchange messages with others. How exciting! There were no fancy web pages. No fancy email. And no high speed connection. But that was okay, because everything was text-based and I couldn’t stay logged on for very long because I was tying up the phone line.

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Do innovative sales and marketing ideas for dvds translate well for books?

I guess we’ll find out. Most people are familiar with Netflix: you pick your favorite movies on their website and they send you the dvds via snail mail. After you watch the movie, you send it back and get the next dvd on your list. It turned out to be one of those million-dollar ideas (probably a lot more than that) and has been so wildly successfull it almost brought brick-and-mortar Blockbuster to its knees.

Well now two young and idealistic entrepreneurs are going to bring the Netflix concept to books. It’s called Bookswim. The idea is the same in that for a small monthly fee ($15 to $20) you pick out five books you want to read, they send them to you, you read them and then send the books back in the pre-paid package.

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