APFOL: October 25-31

Interesting posts and other things that have caught my eye this week. It isn’t actually everything, since I didn’t want to kill myself copy-pasting, so for the entire link collection check out my Delicious page.

And now, I present to you, my readers: Awesome Post Full of Links #9: October 25-31!

Books in General

• Reading Books in Black and White | Poets & Writers
  “Whether it’s because of a lack of media exposure or the absence of word of mouth, I don’t think white readers hear much about black novelists, except for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Colson Whitehead, and a few others, so they don’t know which of our books they may like.” December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give It to Somebody Not Black Month!
• Scuffed slippers and wormy books….: Penny for your thoughts?
  “I sell books, pretty much everyday, and I can tell you what sells to what type of customer and what does not, “business model” bedamned. I’m also tired of consumers who think that the entire driving goal of the capitalist system is to see how much stuff they can acquire on the cheap; my part-Scottish great-grandmother called that “mean”.”
• Is Book Sharing Really a Threat to Publishing? | Medialoper
  “Books are viral by nature, and the loaning of books is one of the main ways that the book virus spreads. We’ve all had friends push a favorite book on us. Sometimes it’s annoying, sometimes it’s a life changing. Frequently we end up buying other books by the same author as a result of the initial loan. In that respect, loaned books are like a gateway drug. It’s in the publishing industry’s best interest to ensure that the loaning of books continues in the digital era.”

Authors & Publishers

• I Am Not Afraid, Dammit « Storytellers Unplugged
  “What really surprises me is when you hear publishing people say that they don’t know what to do, or that they refuse listen to Internet professionals. They seem to believe if they do what has worked in the past, eventually the storm will pass and the anchor of tradition will have kept them steady and safe. They look at the people who are succeeding by merging their digital plans with their traditional print plans and call them anomalies at best, or insane at worst. What they need to be doing is learning from them.”
• Complaints about women writing misogynist crime fiction are a red herring | Val McDermid | Books | guardian.co.uk
  “At the time, nobody was questioning the motives of the men who wrote those books. Nobody was asking them at literary festivals or in interviews, “How does it feel, as a man, to be writing such extreme violence against women?” But as soon as women – who, after all, are overwhelmingly the victims of sexually motivated brutality and homicide – decide they want to explore the same territory, gender becomes an issue. And not just an issue, but a stick to beat all of us women who dare to want to examine a society that has produced so many people who are interested in reading such fictions.”
• What the hell is social publishing? « Billboards and Cave Drawings
  “I’ve been reading a lot of posts over at Soapbox Included lately. The site’s author, a guy by the name of Brandon Mendelson is attempting to carve out a cyber niche for himself as a social publisher. And of course, being the pyschic fellow that I am, I can read your mind right now. You’re thinking: What the hell is social publishing?”

(Book) Blogging

• Punnett Square of Book Reviews: In which I get Geeky and invoke genetics… | Booklorn.com
  What makes a good review? What makes a bad review? And what makes a bad positive review or a good negative review? They ARE different things! And Anysia will explain it to you with SCIENCE!

And

• President Obama ACTS! The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act is LAW!!! | I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell do I read?
• Steampunk Blogging, aka Tit-Tat | Tor.com
  “Where blogs and online posting boards exist in a digital world kept alive by electricity, tit-tat finds an analog equivalent: the printed page. In tit-tat, commentators submit articles on current events and public issues to printing houses, which in turn compile them and print them out on large broadsheets. Practitioners of tit-tat (called “tatters”) read these articles and then submit comments to the printing houses in the same way that modern blog followers leave comments on blog entries.”
• With this Steam-Powered Prosthetic Arm, I Could Be As Strong as… A Normal Person | Tor.com
  “Disability issues are real, even if we use steampunk as a form of escapism — it’s a human rights issue and it stands to reason that at a steampunk convention or gathering, we would want everyone to have as much fun as possible. Steampunks with disabilities are part of that everyone, and while it may seem, at first glance, to be a huge use of resources accommodating their immediate needs, remember that what’s good for one subsection of the community can be extended to all other subsections of the community.”

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