This post is only really relevant to Australian sci-fi fans. The rest of you may pass the time watching TV or cutting your toenails while they read this. I’ll give you a shout when you can come back.

I just saw a tweet from @AustLiterature which reminded me that the 2010 Ditmar awards are seeking nominations. To be considered for a Ditmar, you need to be Australian and to have had something published in the previous calendar year. That makes the Ditmars the first Australian awards that I actually qualify for. The possibility that I could actually be considered for an award (merit notwithstanding) is strangely exciting.

I mark the start of my fiction publishing career as May 2008. However, stories that were accepted back then mostly did not start appearing until 2009. So that is the year in which people reading odd magazines and anthologies around the world will have started seeing my name. I’ve never really considered myself as being someone who might win an award – not because awards are so wonderfully prestigious that little old me doesn’t deserve one, but because I think of the whole awards thing as being about people in in-crowds scratching each others’ backs, and I’m more a sort of sitting on the outside feeling sorry for myself kind of bloke.

Yet I can’t deny that an award or two would not hurt my career. There was a recent discussion on a writers’ group list I belong to about compiling a list of all Australian writers in the spec fic genre. Many people mantioned many names that ought to be on the list, but no-one mentioned mine. (It’s a list I’ve been contributing to for two years now, mind you.) Then the discussion turned to how to maintain such a list and the most popular suggestion seemed to be to look at the Australian award lists and take the names from those each year. Which all got me thinking.

When I was in business (sorry, I mean a different business) I was quite happy to consider awards as part of the general marketing fluff that went on all the time. I once won the prestigious British Computer Society Medal for a software project I ran (and had it handed to me by HRH the Duke of Kent) and thought it was a pretty good thing at the time. So my reticence to engage in a ‘popularity contest’ for my writing seems pretty strange. In fact, it seems downright precious when I come to think of it. So I’ve decided to suck it up, join the affray, toss my cap in the ring, swallow my pride, and write lots of cliches have a go.

In terms of the Ditmar categories, I have a couple of things I could be nominated for:

Category 3.5 Novella or Novelette: A Novella or Novelette is any work of sf/f/h of 7,500 to 40,000 words. Oddly, I published a short story that fits the bill. It is called ‘The Earth Ship’ and is 8,500 words long. It appeared in the SF/F/H anthology, Best Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction of 2009, edited by Rick DeCost and Robert Griffin, published by Absent Willow Publishing. It is one of my favourite stories – probably because it’s one of the few that has actual spaceships and galactic empires.

Category 3.6 Short Story: A Short Story is any work of sf/f/h less than 7,500 words. This is where the bulk of it lies, but I want to mention just two possibilities, ‘All the Way’, which appeared in The Future Fire #18, and ‘The Shouter and the Chanter’, a piece of flash fiction that came out in Alien Skin Magazine, Vol. VIII No. 3. Has a piece of flash fiction ever won before, I wonder.

Anyone who qualifies and would like to make my day, might like to consider bunging in a nomination or two.

Next year I’ll also have my novel and some reviews to put up as well.

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*For those who didn’t spot it, the title is from a quote by the composer Charles Ives. What he said was, “Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.” Oh to be Charles Ives!

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 Party the benefit of the doubt here – once such a mechanism is in place, the possibility of abuse by this government or future governments is unacceptable.

Please do not respond with assurances. You cannot predict what this government may choose to censor in the future. You certainly have no control over what future governments may choose to censor and for what purposes. The mere existence of such a mechanism will provide the temptation as well as the means. The lack of transparency of the blacklist (which can always be manipulated) will mean Australians can no longer trust their government not to be hiding information from them. Australia is one of the finest democracies on the planet, but with this filter in place, we will never be able to speak out against political or ideological censorship again. We will be no better than China and we will be far worse than any other Western democracy.

Whatever your motives for censoring the Internet – and let’s hope and pray they are good – a mandatory filter is the wrong solution. Whatever you intend to use it for, you will have created the potential for serious abuse. Whatever your beliefs about the moral integrity of future Australian governments, while such a filter exists there will always be the suspicion – because there will always be the possibility – that it is being abused for political or ideological ends.

I am a lifelong supporter of the labour movement and come from a poor, working class background. There are few things a Labor government could do to change the way I vote. Censoring the Internet with mandatory filtering would be one of them. I would swap my vote immediately to any party that would promise to scrap it and that might stand a chance of achieving power. That is because such a filter strikes at the very heart of democracy and puts everything I believe in at risk.

Regards,

Graham Storrs.

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 played with Wordle yet, it’s definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

Revealing, isn't it? (click for larger version)

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’ version (why don’t they just say ‘the one for foreigners’?) doesn’t have a proper charger (just USB – which is SLOW) has no SD card slot, and, even at the current exchange rate, I still think it’s overpriced.  However, it is the best – certainly the best value – that is currently available in Australia, I really, really wanted an ereader, and it’s wireless connectivity trumps most other technical features.

When I took it out of the box, I have to say I was a little disappointed. The screen was smaller than I had expected and the device weighed more. The e-ink page is not as high contrast as I remembered (much less than the LCD screen I’m typing into at the moment) and the slow refresh rate makes the user interface feel slow and clunky. When I uploaded a few MobiPocket files from my PC (a piece of cake, by the way) and started to read, I found the slow page turning and the flickering through black as the page turns a bit of a worry. (Please note that most of these drawbacks would be common to all e-ink ebook readers.)

Then I started to read. Within a couple of minutes the page turning and the rest didn’t bother me at all. I got used to it and the whole device just melted into the background. In fact, now that I’ve spent a few hours using the Kindle, I found going back to a real book quite a surprise. Have they always been so big and heavy and cumbersome as that? How did I cope with such a ridiculously cumbersome technology for all those years?

Someone put a lot of thought into the Kindle hardware. The ergonomics of the physical device are excellent. The controls are just where they need to be. Most things do just what you’d expect them to without having to check the manual. It’s easy to hold, well balanced and feels natural to operate. The only part of the machine I don’t like is the on/off switch at the top. It’s hard to find (when you’re holding the machine in a reading position) and fiddly to use. But then, you don’t use it all that often.

The software user interface design isn’t quite so good, but it’s acceptable. The menus are OK, screen layouts for books and so on are adequate. The book cover images are too small to make much sense of and being black and white and fairly low resolution doesn’t help. But the designers made some good choices about menu contents and about defaults. The first time I went back to a magazine I had been reading and found that it opened just where I had left off, I wanted to shake the designer’s hand. My (long-sighted) wife particularly likes the fact you can easily switch to a larger font size.

Registration was easy (essentially there is none – unless you received the Kindle as a gift) and the shopping experience really shows the years of bookselling expertise that Amazon brings to bear.

So far I have a handful of sci-fi magazines on the device, and a bundle of 50-odd books by Wilkie Collins that I bought from Amazon for about $7. (Yes, I know they’d have been free from Project Gutenberg but, for a few dollars, the convenience of having 50-odd books delivered direct to the reader is irresistable.) I’ve yet to see how the Kindle handles collections of hundreds of books and other documents. The way it seems at the moment (books easy and cheap to acquire, reading simple and pleasurable) I can only see one reason I would ever buy another print book: availability.

The Kindle Booksstore has about 300,000 titles but it is nowhere near enough. The first three books I looked for using the device (‘Anathem’ by Neal Stephenson, ‘Dead America’ by Luke Keioskie, and ‘Old Man’s War’ by John Scalzi) were not there. Stephenson and Scazi would definitely have made sales if they had been. (I’ve already got ‘Dead America’.) Fortunately, there are plenty pf other ebook shops and ebook editions of everything will be the norm soon enough.

I’m pretty sure my Kindle (for foreigners) will be thoroughly outdated in a couple of years’ time (hell, it’s starting to slide even now) but between now and then, I expect it to be my constant companion. People who don’t think electronic publishing is the future, probably haven’t tried using an ebook reader yet. I’ve only had mine 24 hours and the advantages of presenting books electronically over presenting them on paper seem overwhelming. Yes, the technology is not yet perfect, but it is already good enough that I don’t want to go back to the old days (yesterday morning) before my ereader arrived.

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 have done us all a great service. Today, a press release from Craig Emerson’s office announced: ‘The Government has decided not to change the Australian regulatory regime for books introduced by the previous Labor government.’

It goes on:

‘Australian book printing and publishing is under strong competitive pressure from international online booksellers such as Amazon and The Book Depository and the Government has formed the view that that this pressure is likely to intensify.

‘In addition, the technology of electronic books (e-books) like Kindle Books will continue to improve with further innovations and price reductions expected.

‘The Government has not accepted the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to remove the parallel importation restrictions on books.

‘The Productivity Commission report acknowledged that removing these restrictions would adversely affect Australian authors, publishers and culture. The Commission recommended extra budgetary funding of authors and publishers to compensate them for this loss.

‘The Government has decided not to commit to a new spending program for Australian authors and publishers.

‘Compromise proposals were considered, involving reductions in the length of the 30-day publication rule and the 90-day resupply rule.

‘In the circumstances of intense competition from online books and e-books, the Government judged that changing the regulations governing book imports is unlikely to have any material effect on the availability of books in Australia.

‘If books cannot be made available in a timely fashion and at a competitive price, customers will opt for online sales and e-books.

‘Introducing a price cap along the lines of the Canadian system would increase regulation with questionable effects on book prices.

‘The Australian book printing and publishing industries will need to respond to the increasing competition from imports without relying on additional government assistance.’

Please note that 3rd-from-last sentence, “If books cannot be made available, etc..” It was the book sellers of Australia (supermarkets and department stores included) who wanted to trash Australian publishing for the sake of larger profits by changing the PIR legislation. I think that sentence puts them firmly back in their box. However, it also points those of us who are concerned about Australian writing to where the next big battle will be fought.

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 should imagine books, ebooks, romance, sci fi, and writing will all get a mention. Everyone is welcome. Ever wanted to meet 20 authors?

I’ve never been involved in one of these things before – being a newbie at Lyrical – but “chat, fun and prizes” sounds like it’s worth dropping in for.

Antipodeans, Europeans and Asians please note that dates and times are in American. (At this time of year, times shown in the flyer are GMT minus 5 hours.)  I’ll probably be dropping in throughout the event but I’ll definitely be around between 10pm and 11pm US EST (which is 1pm to 2pm Aus EST on 19th November, 3am to 4am GMT on 19th November – why don’t we all just use UTC?). I certainly hope to see some of you there – maybe not the Europeans!

One in 20 again!

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 similar legislation. It is almost certain that without PIRs, imported editions of popular books at lower prices (possibly remaindered books, and most of them, if they came from Australian authors, edited and censored to suit their primary, overseas markets) would make life very hard for Australian poublishers and thereby reduce the number of new Australian authors who could sell their work. For lots more on this subject see the Saving Aussie Books website.

Today, however, I read a blog post by Joanna Penn that made me think that PIRs were not the only, nor the major threat facing Australian publishers. Joanna makes no bones about the fact that she finds books published in Australia too expensive. She has often said she buys books from Amazon.com and pays the shipping and still gets them cheaper. With the huge mark-ups that Australian booksellers put on books, she has a valid point. However, Joanna recently bought a Kindle. In fact, she was probably one of the first people in Australia to have one. And, if you’ve read her blog post, you’ll see one of the main reasons why. A book she saw in a local book shop was available for instant download to the Kindle at about a quarter of the book shop price.

The important message for Australian publishers and Australian book sellers in this is that Joanna states flatly she would not have bought the book from the shop. It was too expensive, but, on the Kindle, the price was right.

Joanna is at the leading edge of a wave of change that is going to sweep through this country in the next couple of years. As an early adopter of e-reader technology she is among the first of probably millions of Australians who will buy these devices and use the wireless connectivity built into them to buy books – from anywhere in the world.

Australia has a book-selling infrastructure that is almost guaranteed to encourage rapid adoption of e-readers now that the first have arrived. Even when I lived in a Brisbane suburb, my nearest decent bookshop was 30km away (in the city, where parking costs a fortune). Now I live in the country, my nearest good bookshop is 150km away! (I don’t count the K-Mart that is a mere 60km away.) I rarely get to a book shop to buy books. I buy books from Fishpond.com.au (when they have them) and Amazon.com (when they don’t) or I go to the library. When I buy e-books, I tend to get them direct from the publisher where possible. It won’t be long before I get my own wireless e-reader and stop using Australian bookshops altogether.

There will come a tipping point, in five or ten years, when the number of people using e-readers and the number of books published electronically means that books printed on peper will be printed in smaller runs and will start rising in price – on their way to becoming rare, luxury goods. PIRs seem almost irrelevant in the face of what’s coming.

Eee-book reader

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 less than half of all e-book reader sales.) Even the Sony e-book readers (and the rest of the pack) are available to a mere 10% of the world.

I suppose the fact is that no-one selling e-book readers has a truly global vision of what this will, one day, amount to. Apple, when its ‘tablet’ is released, may well steal the market right out from under the current players. Meanwhile, its iPod Touch and iPhone are perhaps the only global e-book readers available.

But wait! What am I drivelling on about? I’ve been reading e-books for years and I don’t own an iPhone! The fact is that just about everybody in the first world owns a device that can be used as an e-book reader. You are probably using yours right this minute – and what are you doing with it? You’re reading!

Yes, the humble desktop PC, the ubiquitous laptop, that cute little netbook, and that PDA in your pocket, are all perfectly good e-book readers. You can load them all with e-book reader software like Adobe Digital Editions, Microsoft Reader, and Mobipocket Reader – but the chances are excellent that you already have a perfectly fine e-book reader installed: Adobe’s Acrobat Reader.

It’s true, these devices don’t use e-ink and some people really are sensitive to the flicker on computer screens (which can be avoided, at least for desktops, by using a screen with a very high refresh rate, by the way) but I’ve been reading from screens for decades now and the benefits of e-ink seem rather marginal to me. And, let’s face it, dedicated e-book readers are very expensive for what they are – a single-finction device, sometimes tied to a single e-book format. For about the same price as a good Sony or Kindle, you can get a nice netbook that will also allow you to do a million other things when you’re not reading, read all known book formats, and won’t be obsolete quite so quickly. (For the price of an iPhone, you could get two, and God alone knows what the Apple tablet will cost!)

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 on Parallel Imports of Books into Australia. If it goes ahead this action will have drastic effects on Australian-authored fiction and non-fiction books – and causing the loss of many jobs in the publishing, printing and distribution industries. For further information go to http://savingaussiebooks.wordpress.com/

Petition:

We, the undersigned, ask the Parliament to retain the current restrictions on the Parallel Importation of books for the following reasons:1. There is no guarantee books will be cheaper, but removing the Restrictions will cause severe job losses in the publishing, book printing, packaging, and distribution industries.

2. The diversity of local and international book titles will diminish as publishers are forced to make smaller print runs, and take fewer risks with new authors.

3. Australian authors should not be forced to rely on unspecified extra taxpayer funded grants and subsidies, as suggested by the Productivity Commission, to compensate income lost under Parallel Importation.

4. Imported versions of Australian-authored books will be in direct competition with authentic editions. Foreign versions often change drastically to suit overseas markets – removing Australian idioms, references, humour and spelling. This is of particular concern for those Australian children who already struggle with spelling and literacy.

If you want to preserve Australia’s publishing industry, Australian writers, and books written in an Australian ‘voice’, you should seriously consider signing this petition.

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 whole of publishing slowly turns digital and publishers stop printing books on dead trees, there will only be e-books to be had. Whither then the public library?

I can imagine various schemes whereby libraries could buy e-books and then loan them to people – everything from EPUB and PDF files on DVD to sophisticated online libraries, but what are they actually going to do? Does anybody know? Are there any librarians reading who could tell me what current thinking is on this matter? There must be committees working through this even as I speak. My guess is that by the end of next year, the more progressive libraries will want to be in the game. Ten years after that, they will all have to be in the game as they rapidly become out-of-print book archives, not lending libraries with a current catalogue.

And if I’m right, and new, printed books are set to become a rarity as publishing’s inertial resistance to change turns into unstoppable momentum, it isn’t just the libraries that will need a radical makeover, but bookshops too. When we all have book readers in our pockets (in fact, multi-function entertainment and communications gadgets) and can download any book from any library or bookshop anywhere in the world, will the buildings that currently house these book supply services need to find new tennants?