EU parliamentary elections today. Rösta pirat!

I read a post on a message board asking if anyone had published via Kindle. It coincided with my reading this post by J.A. Konrath, along with the previous one. Konrath's posts, especially, stirred up some thoughts. In no particular order:

1. People will pay for the convenience of the delivery system. All those Kindle users could go to Konrath's site and download the same books for free in PDF and put them on their Kindle. What they're really paying for is the ability to get the book from a central location, the various associated Amazon packaging (customers who bought this also bought..., consumer reviews, publisher blurbs, etc.), and have it delivered right into their eager little paws by Whispernet. (This flies in the face of the **AA position that people would rather steal it than buy it.)
2. It's important to make sure that sane rights reversion is part of any publishing contract. With technology like print-on-demand and ebooks, it makes sense for publishers to hold on to rights for as long as they can, since they don't have to go to extra expense or effort to make backlists available. The same technologies also mean that authors have the ability to re-release old titles on their own, without the support of a publishing company, and keep a larger percentage of the earnings. (See Konrath's excellent breakdown on what a backlist can potentially earn an author.)
3. It's only a matter of time before the Kindle store gets crufted up with fanfic epics and barely coherent manifestos on the evils of Catholicism/Islam/atheism/creationism/vegetarianism/CIA mind control experiments/alien abduction/.
4. What's really needed is a big, platform independent ebook retailer. The Kindle store is going to wind up just like iTunes for me: another store selling stuff I can't buy. I'm not going to spend insane amounts on an inferior hardware product (that isn't even available where I live anyway) just so I can read a book. I have hope for FictionWise; maybe Barnes and Noble will put some serious backing into them. (Hint: shinier site design and more convenient navigation.) I'd much rather buy my ebooks in multiple formats and DRM free. For me, that is convenient delivery.

My review copy of False Relations by Michelene Wandor arrived yesterday. Just started it, but so far it's superb and I'm looking forward to reading more.

I read a lot of books by white men (some dead) when I was growing up (and still do). It's only the past few years that I've also started reading lots of books written by women and writers from other cultures. I wonder why? Maybe it's the selection in the library. Maybe it's just a shift in taste and interests. I don't know. But I'm glad for it; I find that I really enjoy the variety.

Which reminded me of Genderanalyzer (by two Swedes, Roger Karlsson and Jon Kågström) which attempts to tell the gender of the writer by analyzing text. Can it tell with any level of accuracy?

It thought Margaret Atwood's Hay Journal was written by a man (66%), an excerpt from Alias Grace was written by a woman (78%), and an excerpt from Oryx and Crake was written by a woman (66%).

It thought Doris Lessing's Nobel lecture was written by a woman (56%), an excerpt from The Golden Notebook was written by a man (56%), and an excerpt of The Good Terrorist was written by a woman (70%). (GenderAnalyzer tends to hedge its bets and say that whatever it's analyzing is very gender neutral when the result is in the 50s range.)

It thought the excerpt of Joyce Carol Oates' The Gravedigger's Daughter was written by a man (64%), an excerpt from The Female of the Species was written by a woman (70%), and an excerpt of A Garden of Earthly Delights was written by a woman (59%).

It thought my blog was written by a man (65%), Tania Hershman's blog was written by a woman (59%), and that's when I realized how much time I had wasted finding stuff to plug into Genderanalyzer just to see if it could tell me what I already know.

So from my limited sample, it's right about 2/3 of the time, which is corroborated by poll on the site.

Procrastinate much?

In other news, taking scumbag to a new level by streaming live videos of rape over the internet.

The depths to which human depravity can sink still shock me.

And finally, closing some browser tabs:

• From Holt Uncensored, Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See
• Carolyn Jewel's articles on craft and writing advice
• E.M. Rowan's Field Notes (Research for beginning writers)
• Socialism Today, the Socialist Party magazine
• The Gift of Murder anthology submission call