At HPD I usually try to avoid blantant worship of businesses, advertising and products- it weakens our credibility and makes us look like we're spouting off advetorials.

So in lieu of that, I have to say, Amazon's Kindle is amazing.

It is ridiculously easy to use, looks good and for Australians who suffer with extremely overpriced books, it is a very tempting little item.

So watch out Australian publishers and printers, the future is coming and unless you start talking to Apple's ipad and the Kindle, your whole industry will be thrown out like yesterday's (soon to be non existent) newspapers.

In 48 hours, he'd sold as many PDFs as he'd sold print versions in the previous four weeks.

Also of interest:

Print sales in the last 48 hours have been better than print sales in the last 5 days.

People bought it as a PDF, liked it, and decided they wanted a print copy for the house.

The thing that caught my eye about the Unbook was the idea of accepting a book as a version: an evolving beast that spits out periodic iterations of itself before crawling away to mutate some more. And it occurred to me today that that actually ties into the idea of the Battle Weapon - the 12-inch released to test new experiments in music (more commonly known as dubplates these days).

(See also "short fiction as the club scene," short/flash fiction as the dubplate)

Paid-PDF as a Battle Weapon? A v0.9 release of a book or collection of ideas? Not quite the "electronic Advance Reading Copy" that people like Baen release in digital formats, maybe - but it could be. It could also be much more beta than that. Novelettes and bags-of-notes. Who knows? Let it mutate.

Just as I was writing this? A blog entry from Simon Reynolds pops up in the side window. Relevant part:

the blog for Kevin Pearce's new e-zine Your Heart Out, which he will send to you in PDF form if you ask nicely and you can print out if you so choose (a crafty fusion of the possibilities of the internet with the tangibility/cherishablity of the old-style fanzine, eh?)

WARREN ELLIS is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as FELL, MINISTRY OF SPACE, PLANETARY, and TRANSMETROPOLITAN, and the author of "underground classic" CROOKED LITTLE VEIN.

Zombies Invade Classic Fiction

Author BRUCE STIRLING on the newly emerged subculture of Steampunk.

In 2000, a good friend gave me a copy of Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, which was written before either of us was born. It wasn’t shocking to me that a book with a chapter entitled “Arabs and Other Animals” had been published almost three decades before September 11, or even that it had become an American bestseller. It was shocking that a sensitive and dear friend who loved the book and loved me, an Arab-American, would not even remember to warn me about the flagrant-to-the-point-of-comedic racism of that chapter title... I can’t say whether a similar book with a chapter called “Africans and Other Animals” would have achieved the same popular success in 1973 or have had a Columbia University conference dedicated to celebrating it as a “feminist classic” in 2008. But, I know the reaction to that chapter title would be a major aspect of its critical reception...

Jong’s published reaction to being publicly confronted and castigated for her “ugly prejudice” by her sister, who incidentally had married an “animal” and had half-Arab children, also seemed indicative of the ways in which antipathy towards Arabs has and has not evolved in the past three decades. Though Jong ceded that she wouldn’t use “Arabs and Other Animals” as a chapter title today, she told The New Yorker that, “When Moqtada al-Sadr comes to power, and I am facing the firing squad, it will be for that.”

Although it is egregious that she somehow casts herself as a heroine and victim after she is called out for being a bigot, it is even more significant that her words reinforce again the idea that all Arabs are dangerous and out to get Americans for our freedoms to write racy books rather than our policies in the Middle East. Where is al-Sadr likely to come to power? In war-torn Iraq, which has become so sectarian it seems unlikely that any one group can stabilize its leadership? No, it seems to be America itself where al-Sadr is going to be rolling in, taking charge and assembling his firing squad reserved for novelists. [More]