Comments on: NYT Confuses Authors, Computers, Insults Women

By: Speakeasy » Blog Archive » Books by Computer

Speakeasy » Blog Archive » Books by Computer — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:25:36 +0000

[…] Booksquare (again) raises some interesting points, and doesn’t seem to think much of the NYT coverage of the whole thing. The bit about authorship – how can this guy consider himself an author when he hasn’t written a paragraph? – smacks of modern questions of creativity and authorship. If an artist makes a collage, is he an artist, or just a guy who glues lots of other images together? […]

By: Sherry

Sherry — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:10:50 +0000

Does this remind anyone of the theory that you can get chimps to write music with a computer? Isn’t that just putting notes together? After all, there are only so many notes!!

A few years ago, I was taking a Writing Romance class at our local community college. There were two young men in the class, 20-ish. When the instructor brought up creating characters, getting to know your hero/heroine, one of the young men raised his hand. He didn’t see the point of having to do this. He planned on just writing a romance. (I could see $$$ in his eyes)

When the very tactful teacher asked his experience in reading romances he replied he’d already read one. ??? The rest of us kept quiet but the silent snickering was palpable!
He did not complete the course.
Sherry

By: Kassia Krozser

Kassia Krozser — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:39:48 +0000

Clive, I love you! As you know, I alluded to the copyright issue in my post; thank you for bringing it all home. This is aggregation. Now, I happen to believe that content aggregation on a paid level will become a booming service industry very soon ( we’re already seeing signs of it), but, man, you gotta respect copyright. That the NYT didn’t bring it up just furthers my theories about their coverage of these issues.

I miss Edward Wyatt.

Melissa — these are pure POD. Which leads to an interesting question about how he’s working with Amazon given their recent BookSurge push. There is no gatekeeper, nor, I suspect, serious quality control. As we all know, the Internet is filled with as misinformation as information.

Again, I think there’s going to be a huge market for businesses that do this and do this well.

Sam — ha, ha, no. There is structure then there is complete lack of knowledge about writing books. This dude doesn’t know.

As for your off-topic question, you can annotate in Adobe Acrobate using the comments function (maybe there are other ways, but this is what I use). That’s not really answering your question because the book you’re reading needs to allow for annotation *and* has to be in PDF format. I think Kindle books can also have notes, but, alas, still waiting for my Kindle sample…

By: Clive Warner

Clive Warner — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:16:14 +0000

What about copyright? How can he be certain that Internet crawlers know what is in the public domain and what isn’t?

By: Melissa

Melissa — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:12:35 +0000

I can’t believe they really published that – or that there is actually someone DOING that. It’s one thing for the industry to decide to make the move towards electronic publishing – but this is another matter entirely. Who is publishing his books? Or is he self-published? Is there really a publishing company, a ‘gate keeper,’ letting someone submit massive amounts of knowingly stolen information simply be compiled and re-published? I completely agree with your opinion that this is utterly ridiculous.

By: Sam Wilson

Sam Wilson — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:09:36 +0000

Doesn’t Robert Parker use a similar technique in his hard boiled fiction sited in Boston ? Maybe Tom Clancy too ?

I have a question that is off topic for you. I have always written in my books. How can you do that with ebooks ? What do I need to annotate Adobe PDF ?