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microtxts: 238. en plena catarsis noté cuando respingó y salió de personaje. Me dijo: "No puedo venderlo. Mi corazón está eclipsado". Adiós película.

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Merci à Textes d'avoir repéré cette vidéo produite par la BBC. Un changement de paradigme, c'est indéniable!

 

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Immatériel, à l'instar d'ePagine, joue la carte des libraires traditionnels. C'est tout à fait nouveau, il semble que peu à peu les sites se rendent compte que pour convaincre les éditeurs d'embarquer leurs catalogues, on ne pourra pas se passer de la bonne chaîne du livre, un retour à la vraie vie du livre en quelque sorte!
"L'édition numérique ne se développera pas à partir de quelques sites imposant aux éditeurs et aux lecteurs tel ou tel standard de lecture. Chez immatériel?fr, notre vision de l’édition numérique, ce n’est pas un marché régenté par trois ou quatre points de ventes comme iTunes, Amazon ni même libraire.immateriel.fr ! Ce sont plutôt les 10000 points de ventes en France qui savent ce qu’est un livre (y compris ces trois-là)." (BlogImmatériel).
Ils viennent de mettre en ligne plus de détails sur le fonctionnement pour les "revendeurs de produits numériques de l'édition", vous traduirez bien entendu pour les éditeurs et les libraires.
Comme ils l'expliquent, assez peu de différences avec ce qui fait le quotidien d'un distributeur d'ouvrages papier avec un pourcentage de 10 à 15%. Le problème est justement qu'ils en ont tous un, de distributeur d'ouvrage papier...
Alors Immatériel, le prochain Sodis ou Interforum du livre numérique? Nul doute que l'on doit s'activer en coulisses...

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Un libro que no se presente en la Feria del libro tiene poca chance de sentirse miembro pleno de la gran comunidad lectora. Esta es el tercero de mis 7 u 8 libros que merecen ese honor (o desatino).

La primera vez fue en el precaótico 2001, cuando presenté La Generación Nasdaq. Apogeo ¿y derrumbe? de la eocnomia digital (Granica, 2001) de la mano de Pablo Aristizábal y Gonzalo Arzuaga.

Volví al ruedo en el 2005 con Internet, Imprenta del siglo XXI, (Gedisa, 2005) esta vez acompañado por Alejandro Prince & Edith Liwin y apostillas de Herve Fisher, afortunadamente presente en la Argentina y ese día en la sala.

Esta vez, en ocasión de la presentación de Nativos Digitales, (Santillana, 2009) mis partenaires serán Daniel Filmus y Ernesto van Peborgh y con suerte algún tapado del sub-20.

Comparar y evaluar los propios libros de uno no resiste mayor análisis. Y sin embargo creo que Nativos Digitales no tiene nada que envidiarle a Ciberculturas 1.0 (Paidós, 1995) (presentado a su vez en 1996 en el ICI de la calle Florida en las voces de Horacio González y Heriberto Muraro), con una de las primeras presentaciones multimediáticas que haya hecho jamás), a mi gusto el mas logrado de los libros anteriores, hasta éste, pero infinitamente distinto. En tipo de escritura, público buscado, cuidado por la susceptibilidad ajenas, propuestas subyacentes y sobretodo en experiencia de vida textualizada -algo que llegó a su culminaciòn en Nativos Digitales.

Ustedes lectores decidirán, pero me provoca mucha alegría ver que el arco que se inició en 1995 (igual hubo un par de libros publicados antes), que vió aparecer varios en el camino, y que por unos meses se detendrá aquí (porque ya está en curso de redacción La saga de la computadora de los cien dólares, y seguramente seguirá algo vinculado a Facebook y las redes sociales, mantiene criterios de calidad, actualidad y ecuanimidad epistemológica, no muy comunes en estas épocas de desasosiego y botines colgados.

Gracias a todos los que me ayudaron a llegar hasta acá. Y muchas mas gracias aun a los que seguramente me seguirán apoyando para los escalones que sigan, una vez que -wittgenstenianamente- tiremos esta escalera por la borda. Comme il faut.

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On April 30th, Brittany Shoot of Religion Dispatches, interviewed Eileen Luhr, author of Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture (UC Press, January 2009). Below, are a couple of questions Luhr answered. Please read the rest of the interview entitled, "Christian Punk Meets American Pop; Evangelicals in the ’Burbs."

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In Witnessing Suburbia, you briefly explain the roots of your academic interest in the convergence of popular culture, music, and evangelism. Can you say more about how you came to write the book?

My interest in Christian conservatism began when I was home from college and watching the 1992 Republican National Convention. The convention took place at a bad time for Republicans—the Cold War had ended and George H.W. Bush had raised taxes despite a pledge not to. As a result, he didn’t have much to run on other than the concept of “family values,” which the Republicans invoked following the riots in Los Angeles (this was when Dan Quayle condemned the TV character “Murphy Brown” for having a child out of wedlock in a speech to the Commonwealth Club).

In Houston, Pat Buchanan gave a primetime speech in which he declared a “cultural war” for the “soul of America.” I was appalled by the speech, but I had siblings who thought it was great. So my initial interest in the topic was that “family values” could provoke vastly different reactions—I found it exclusive, but others found it inclusive. A few years later, I went to graduate school to write about the culture of “family values,” and I found that not much had been written about the music and popular culture of Christians.

What was your favorite part of your research?

My favorite research was for the chapter about Christian metal bands. I was never a fan of “mainstream” metal music, so I felt that I could treat both Christian and “secular” bands fairly. Still, I found the claims and the stunts to be pretty outrageous.

Christian bands had some really strange ideas and some interesting justifications for wearing makeup and having long hair. I had a database of hundreds of Christian metal bands, and I poured through all kinds of fan magazines to follow them. My favorite anecdote is the one about an obscure band from Texas called Stryken. They attended a Motley Crue concert wearing futuristic suits of armor. They somehow managed to get a 14’ x 8’ wooden cross into the arena (who knows what people bring to these shows?) and took it to the area in front of the stage. They were eventually kicked out of the concert for proselytizing.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered?

In researching chapter two, which looks at Christian youth subcultures, I found a really interesting punk zine called “Thieves and Prostitutes” that had intricate artwork (I believe one of the editors is now a tattoo artist) and articles that tried to claim Jesus as the original punk. A student in Florida was suspended from school for distributing the zine, in part because the principal misunderstood what the art signified—he was afraid it was blasphemous. The 700 Club featured the suspended student because they felt his religious rights were violated by the school. This was one of the moments where political and cultural activism intersected.

* To read the rest of the interview, please visit the Religion Dispatches website.

* Special thanks to Religion Dispatches for letting us post an excerpt of the article.

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George Santayana said “Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” Certainly e-book history has been repeating—the iPod Touch and the Kindle are standing in for the Palm PDA and the RocketBook as another generation discovers e-books just as the early adopters did ten years ago.

But the history that people have been forgetting (or perhaps not knowing to begin with) is that there was a thriving electronic fiction community years before even the earliest commercial e-books were around to be adopted.

Over the last four columns, I have looked at a number of the Internet fiction writing circles that made up this community. To wit:

• The Superguy Mailing List
• The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative
• alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, alt.pub.havens-rest
• Animé fanfic and Undocumented Features

These are the forums, filled mostly with college students, that were producing, distributing, and reading electronic literature in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Years before anyone caviled at the idea of reading from a handheld LCD, hundreds of people were thrilling to these tales on their amber and green CRTs, or those gigantic line printers that printed on green and white paper.

Today I’m going end this series with a look at a number of miscellaneous fiction archives and zines from that same era or even earlier. As the title suggests, I will be starting with some archives of collected fiction and nonfiction material, and closing out with zines.

“Zine” can be an abbreviation of “magazine”—but in the Internet sense, it is usually an abbreviation of “electronic magazine” or “e-zine” instead. E-zines were produced like the amateur “fanzines” that came about when Star Trek galvanized fandom in the 1960s—but using electronic distribution instead of the traditional fanzine mimeographs or photocopies. They could cover a variety of topics, but the ones I will be spotlighting here are mostly for original fiction.

But first, there are a few archives to go through.

Transformation Stories Archive

When the World Wide Web came about, people saw it as a great way to aggregate stories based on common themes into theme-based archives. (Gopher and WAIS had been used for this in the past, but neither was as widespread or user-friendly as the web was becoming.)

According to the Wikipedia writeup, the Transformation Stories Archive was founded in 1995 to collect stories relating to physical and mental transformation of all kinds. These stories were taken from a Transformation Stories Archive mailing list, or collected from other areas of the web such as alt.sex.stories (see below).

The site divides the stories up into several categories, such as “Animals,” “Mythical Beasts,” or “The Other Sex,” and there is also a section for some transformation-themed shared worlds. The stories are reformatted into HTML, so can easily be converted for device reading.

Stories that the archivist felt were particularly good are marked with three stars, while stories with prurient content are marked with three Xs. The quality of writing varies, as one would expect from amateur fiction—and some of the stories (especially the X-marked stories) veer into strange territory (such as transformation-as-fetish, or even vorarephilia).

Due to disruptions caused by a server change, the TSA has not been updated with new material since 2003. However, members of the Transformation Stories Archive mailing list have created a successor site to host new stories at shifti.org.

alt.sex.stories and the a.s.s. Text Repository

When college students—young men and women at the peak of their hormonal activity—encounter a textual medium for communicating with other people, some of the results are predictable. According to Wikipedia, the newsgroup alt.sex.stories was created in 1992. A few years later, it spawned a moderated newsgroup so that those seeking higher-quality erotic stories would have a better source of material.

The kinds of stories that appeared on the a.s.s. groups are exactly what you would expect—but given that “erotica-related titles […] are among the hottest sellers at some major e-bookstores” it should not be surprising that “e-rotica” was popular even before e-books came around. A number of notable erotica writers such as Elf Sternberg (whose Pendorwright series is a noteworthy erotica archive in and of itself) and Mary Anne Mohanraj got their start there.

Over 250,000 tales from alt.sex.stories are collected on the alt.sex.stories Text Repository. (Given that even the entry page is not remotely worksafe, I have elected to leave the link out to prevent unhappy accidents. It may be found through the Wikipedia link above.) The stories are presented in the same hard-wrapped ASCII text form in which they were posted to the group.

Textfiles.com

Even though this series has been concentrating mostly on the Internet in the early ‘90s, screen reading and writing did not start there. If anything, it started at the same time as the PC revolution in the early ‘80s, when there was a thriving Internet bulletin board culture that was used by computer hobbyists. Instead of BITNET and the Internet, they had FidoNet, a relay system of computers connected by periodical modem dialing. Instead of newsgroups or forums, they had FidoNet relays and file servers.

Back in those days, a lot of text files were written and circulated from relay to relay, file server to file server. People transcribed old humor sources, documents, or books and passed them on, or wrote stories of their own, in order to increase their upload-to-download ratio on file servers so they would be allowed to download more of the other files there.

Textfiles.com is a comprehensive repository for as many of those files and stories and electronic zines as the archivist could find—which is quite a lot of them. Both files from the golden age of FidoNet, and files from the early days of the Internet are represented.

For people like me, who got in on the tail end of BBS culture and the beginning of Internet culture, this is a major trip down memory lane. There is a lot of original historical material here, things that people back in the day thought was important to get down. Instructions on how to use the Internet, humor files about 50 ways to confuse your roommate, lists of “warez” FTP sites (long defunct by now)—it’s all here.

There is also a fairly lengthy list of electronic magazines, or e-zines, that were being circulated at the time. There are dozens of them, devoted to all different subjects—humor, fiction, hacking. (Lots of them about hacking.) Of special interest to me was the archive of M00se Droppings, a humor zine founded by some of the same people who launched the Superguy mailing list I covered in my first column.

All the text files are presented in their original hard-wrapped ASCII text format. The design of the site itself, green text on black background, is meant to evoke the green screens of the old ASCII text terminal days. It can be a little wearing on the eyes after a while, but fortunately the designer has made a black on white color scheme available as well for the file lists. Nonetheless, Readability may be a good bet for the rest of the site.

Another archive of history and miscellaneous material from the early days of the Internet can be found on nethistory.dumbentia.com.

DargonZine

Apart from all the zines listed at textfiles.com, there are a number of e-zines worth mentioning on their own. The first of these is Dargon, which is about the only still-active shared-universe project with a legitimate claim to being older than the SFStory/Superguy list that started in 1987—Dargon started in 1984 as a more general fantasy and science-fiction related zine called FSFnet (for Fantasy and Science Fiction on the Internet—no relation to the Free Software Foundation).

In 1985, some of the FSF writers decided they wanted to get together to create a shared fantasy setting, called Dargon, Over the next few years, the setting gradually took over the magazine until it was renamed to DargonZine in 1988. It has continued, publishing several issues a year, to this day.

Dargon has an archive of back-issues available in both HTML and text formats. The HTML versions should not be hard at all to convert to device e-readable format. Recent DargonZine issues are also available for the Kindle for 99 cents each.

Intertext, Quanta

Another pair of notable fiction zines are Intertext and Quanta. Intertext ran for 57 issues from 1991 through 2004—a remarkable run for an Internet publication. The archives are available, formatted in HTML.

Quanta was slightly earlier, and ran from 1989 to 1995. HTML formatted stories from it can be found in an archive.org archive of the defunct etext.org site. It contained fiction, but also some nonfiction articles such as this rant from Peter A. David about the studio inconsistencies that plagued his work on Star Trek tie-in properties.

Other Zines

There are many more e-zines than I could cover in this column. Apart from the zine archives at textfile.com, John Labovitz’s E-Zine List also offers links that can lead to many hours of interesting browsing through the history of the net.

In Conclusion

Thus ends my look back at the fiction and other writings from the golden era of the Internet, BITNET, and FidoNet. Of course, no column could cover all of the writing lists and forums and zines that were around back in the day, but I think I at least hit the high points.

So next time you’re looking for something interesting to read, consider visiting some of the sites I’ve mentioned in these columns and checking out some “Paleo E-books”.

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Here’s Robert Lanham’s Internet-Age Writing Syllabus:

Students will analyze the publishing industry and learn how to be more innovative than the bards of yesteryear. They’ll be asked to consider, for instance, Thomas Pynchon. How much more successful would Gravity’s Rainbow have been if it were two paragraphs long and posted on a blog beneath a picture of scantily clad coeds? And why not add a Google search box? Or what if Susan Sontag had friended 10 million people on Facebook and then published a shorter version of The Volcano Lover as a status update: "Susan thinks a volcano is a great metaphor for primal passion. Also, streak of my hair turning white—d’oh!"

(By the way, I visited the McSweeney’s booth at SXSW last year. Apparently I had assumed that McSweeney’s was a net-only publisher. In fact, not only do they produce lots of print books, the books I saw  were some of the most beautiful and exquisitely designed books I had ever come across. I wanted to hold every one of them and buy the whole lot.  Unfortunately you can’t really appreciate the books as objects by looking at an online store).

Here’s a comic video about ebook business models . Produced by Mediocre Films.

More seriously, I just noticed that Blip.tv has the TOC 2009 panel videos.  See for example the video of  Rise of ebook panel, featuring David Rothman, Mark Coker, April Hamilton, Joe Wikert. These should be familiar names to people who follow this blog. Thanks to O’Reilly for posting these vids.

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Dans sa bibliothèque, Philippe Vandel parle formidablement d'Alexandre Vialatte... (DansMaBibliothèque)

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The Open Access Directory is now a year old, and SPARC has issued a press release about this event.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Open Access Directory, hosted by Simmons College, is a wiki where community contributors create and maintain simple, factual lists about Open Access to science and scholarship. Launched just one year ago, and operated entirely by an international corps of volunteers, the OAD quickly blossomed from six to 40 lists and has served more than 250,000 unique users.

Designed by Robin Peek (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College) and Peter Suber (Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Senior Researcher at SPARC), the OAD has quickly become a "go-to” resource in the academic community.

The Directory’s "signature” lists include:

• Timeline of the Open Access movement, based on the work of Peter Suber (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Timeline)
• Bibliography of Open Access, based on the work of Charles W. Bailey Jr. (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Bibliography_of_open_access)
• Events celebrating Open Access Day 2008, which captured participation by 129 campuses worldwide (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Events_celebrating_Open_Access_Day)
• Conferences and workshops related to Open Access, which tracks events from 2002 to 2010 (http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Events)

"The Open Access Directory has become a central and relied-upon resource that is also a gathering place for everyone looking to learn more about the benefits of Open Access," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "In planning last year’s Open Access Day, it became clear that OA champions in every corner of the world have valuable tools, key advancements, and breaking news to share. The OAD is the place they can meet and share these resources. Congratulations to the editors of the Open Access Directory on their first birthday!"

The Open Access Directory will serve as a central component in the program for the upcoming Open Access Week (October 19 to 23, 2009), which will feature educational resources that local hosts can use to customize events to suit local audiences and time zones. Two sample program tracks, highlighting "Author’s rights and author addenda—For researchers," and "Institutional Advantages from Open Access—For administrators," have been released for participants to use to design or inspire their plans for the week.

Sample tracks point first to OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), which delivers resources for multiple constituencies and awareness levels. Both OAD and OASIS resources are community-driven tools that invite registered users to expand and refine available content. The organizers of Open Access Week invite feedback on the sample tracks as well as contributions to OASIS and the OAD. Additional sample tracks will be developed with advice from registered Open Access Week participants.

Here are the editorial staff members of the OAD:

• Editors and Administrators
• • Robin Peek. Editor. Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
  • Jean-Claude Guédon. Associate Editor. Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Montreal
  • David Goodman. Associate Editor, and wiki consultant. Princeton University Library, retired (Administrator at Wikipedia, and Editorial council, Citizendium)
  • Athanasia Pontika. Assistant Editor. Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
  • Terry Plum. Technology Coordinator. Assistant Dean for Technology and Director, Simmons GSLIS at Mount Holyoke College
• Editorial Board
• • Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Member. Publisher, Digital Scholarship
  • Leslie Chan. Member. Program Supervisor for New Media Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough
  • Heather Joseph. Member. Executive Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
  • Melissa Hagemann. Member. Open Society Institute
  • Peter Suber. Member. Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Senior Researcher at SPARC
  • Alma Swan. Member. Key Perspectives Ltd
  • John Wilbanks. Member. Vice President, Creative Commons

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