Graham Storrs

Dear Mr. Conroy,
I see from your recent announcement that you and the Labor Party are still determined to go ahead with installing national Internet filters. As an Australian writer, I cannot stress how strongly opposed I am to this measure. Whatever your good intentions for filtering child pornography – and I give you and the [...]

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t [...]

I suppose the title sums up my overall reaction to my new Kindle ebook reader but there are all kinds of details of the experience that I should probably add.
I was reluctant to get a Kindle. It’s not the best e-book reader in the world and e-ink is not my favourite screen technology. The ‘international’ [...]

A bit of Australian internal politics, guys. You might want to just retweet this and move on if that’s not especially interesting to you. However, if you ever read an Australian book, read on.
Those who have campainged hard to ensure that parallel importation restrictions on books are not removed or amended, should be congratulated. They [...]

I think this is the first time I’ve ever had my name on a flyer. My publisher, Lyrical Press Inc. is organising an event on one of its Yahoo groups. They’ve invited me to take part as one of about 20 Lyrical authors who will be talking about, well, I’m not quite sure, but I [...]

Like many ‘emerging’ Australian writers, I’ve been concerned that the government is thinking of lifting parallel importation restrictions (PIRs). This is legislation that helps Australian publishers compete by giving them the opportunity to publish works over here and keep out overseas editions of the same work. Virtually all countries, including the US and UK have [...]

It’s frustrating that Asia and Australia (and lots of other places) seem to have been left out of the marketing of e-book readers. The Amazon Kindle – which allegedly has market dominance – is only available to less than 5% of the world’s population (and even in this tiny fraction of the market accounts for [...]

There is a petition up on the GoPetition site, addressed to, “THE HONOURABLE THE SPEAKER AND MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT” which people concerned about the government’s insane plan to lift parallel importation restrictions on books can sign. The text is as follows:
(Preamble):
The Australian Government is considering whether to abolish the Restrictions [...]

What are libraries doing about e-books? It’s a sign of my inherently selfish nature that this question did not occurred to me until I was about to have an e-book published. But now I’m quite concerned. No, it’s not just because I might lose out on some Public Lending Rights payments, but because, as the [...]

Well, you all know I’m home by now. I just want to summarise my experiences at the Byron Bay Writers Festival before I forget.
The BBWF is only the second writers’ festival I’ve been to but it was similar to the other one in many ways. The big differences were in the venues. The Brisbane Writers [...]