The Cargo Community offers a space to publish creative work and opinion on literature. These are the latest blog posts from our user community.
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Posted:
cargopublishing on July 26, 2010
Posted:
cargopublishing on July 1, 2010
Posted:
cargopublishing on May 2, 2010
Thursday April 15th, from 8pm at Mono, King's Court, Glasgow.
This is a free event and, as we noted on the forums last month, one of the best nights on in Glasgow!
Go along, meet Andrew and get the chance to pick up a copy of Cancer Party at a special price of £5!
Posted:
cargopublishing on April 7, 2010
Hello all, Thought I should mention that the forum has been updated with a few bug fixes. There's now a graphical post editor, complete with shiny buttons and a pre-posting preview, so you can check that all your links work before adding the content. We're aware that there is an issue with smileys not appearing properly. I'm sure this is keeping lots of people awake at night, and rest assured we will spare no effort in squishing that particular bug dead :) If you notice any other bugs or odd behaviour, leave a comment or send me a private message.
I thought I should point out the incisive blog post written by my one of my law professors, Andres Guadamuz, on the sketchy reasoning demonstrated by a company called Attributor, which produces anti-piracy products for the publishing industry. Attributor claim that file-sharing of books is costing American publishers $2.8bn per year. Of course, there's an obvious bias in what Attributor are doing, as Andres points out:
I will resist the temptation to comment on the fact that one should not take seriously a report undertaken by a company that has a commercial interest on the result of said study making the case for their products.They seem to be relying on the record industry's discredited "one unauthorised download equals one lost sale" epithet. Attributor also seems to be to be a somewhat ironically-named company (in the Morrissette sense of irony), since what they do is less about attribution - ...
It strikes me that one of the touchstones of conventional publishing, and much of the reason for the powerful relationships readers have with their literature collections is the tactile, familiar nature of physical books. Is it the case though, that this tactile nature extends to the layout and design of the text itself, as opposed to the three dimensional aspects of the book? Re-flowable text, as on the Web, is becoming less frustrating as a reading medium for extended content as software catches up to the needs of readers - bookmarking, annotations and suchlike no longer present the problems they once did. Craig Mod, a book designer, today presented his take on why the iPad may be the first device able to correctly represent what he calls 'definite content', that which is not intended to be dynamically re-flowed across an arbitrary screen/page size. It's well worth a read, though ...
There's an interesting piece by Jason Epstein in this fortnight's New York Review of Books on the history of disruptive innovation in publishing:
"The resistance today by publishers to the onrushing digital future does not arise from fear of disruptive literacy, but from the understandable fear of their own obsolescence and the complexity of the digital transformation that awaits them... The unprecedented ability of this technology to offer a vast new multilingual marketplace a practically limitless choice of titles will displace the Gutenberg system with or without the cooperation of its current executives."I happen to disagree with his characterisation of the relationship between publishers and readers of electronic material:
"If I were a publisher today I would consider a renewable rental model for all e-book downloads—the "lending library" technique of the Depression era—that more accurately reflects the conditional relationship, enforced by digital rights management software, between content provider ...
Over the past year or so, quite a bit of hype has been generated around the nascent 'e-reader/ebook' industry. New e-reader devices are released every week by no-name Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturers, and on the content side, digital book sales recently crept past those of their physical counterparts at Amazon.com this Christmas. Signs of a sea-change in the industry, no doubt. But are people asking the appropriate questions about ownership, licensing and the power relationship between the 'reader' and the publisher? It is said that as technology moves forward in relation to digital media, we are moving from an ownership culture to a licensing culture. Why does this matter? Well, for one thing, it's because of the 'exhaustion of rights', both legal and practical, which is inherent in the purchase of physical goods containing copyrighted content. 'Exhaustion of rights' is the European term: it's called the 'first sale doctrine' ...
