I DO know that I definitely wouldn't consider the guy that created Babylon 5 to be one.
Fair enough; however, JMS has published short stories and other works in addition to creating Babylon 5. His following encompasses a significant portion of the online community. Being a member of that community, I can't account for his popularity with "offline" folks.
Williams is not the first 'major' author to publish in this fashion. JMS (Babylon 5's creator) published a serial novel to an online site called Bookface.com. Users religiously logged on every Monday as new segments were made available.
Bookface had a reading interface that was likened to 'streaming text'--it downloaded a piece of the book at a time, and as you reached the end of the segment, it pulled another. Sort of like the segments of an escalator.
The user interface surprised a lot of people--many skeptics were converted after they found that they had just read online for an hour without even realizing it. The width of text on the screen was designed to emulate the approximate size of a paperback book. You hit the spacebar to advance to the next page, like a visceral reminder of flipping the leaves of a book. You could search through the text of the work you were reading, or search against all of the books in the database. When you returned to a book after a prior reading session, it would return you to where you left off. You could leave annotations to yourself, anchored on certain text--think of it as highlighting a passage and adding a note reminding you WHY you highlighted it at the same time.
Unfortunately, the downturn of the internet sector clobbered Bookface. The company did have good momentum, partially because printing a trade novel to paper is a costly process (to address the assertion of another poster)--electronic publishing is a less expensive alternative, and it reduces time to market. Perhaps once the economic climate returns to "Sunny and Warm", the founders of Bookface will resurface.
The recently-posted commentary suggesting that the RIAA will lose its only real adversary by shutting down Napster seems to be pretty close to the mark. The poster of that opinion pointed out that Napster might be the only entity that the RIAA will be able to negotiate/bargain with, and that the Recording industry should take the $1B and run.
I think the recent surge in the use of other file sharing networks has lent some credence to the article. I think it's entirely possible that these services will take over and the sharing services will all be 'underground'. Good luck to the RIAA then.
Like the old saying goes...
If you outlaw mp3s, everyone will be an outlaw.
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I DO know that I definitely wouldn't consider the guy that created Babylon 5 to be one.
Fair enough; however, JMS has published short stories and other works in addition to creating Babylon 5. His following encompasses a significant portion of the online community. Being a member of that community, I can't account for his popularity with "offline" folks.
Williams is not the first 'major' author to publish in this fashion. JMS (Babylon 5's creator) published a serial novel to an online site called Bookface.com. Users religiously logged on every Monday as new segments were made available.
Bookface had a reading interface that was likened to 'streaming text'--it downloaded a piece of the book at a time, and as you reached the end of the segment, it pulled another. Sort of like the segments of an escalator.
The user interface surprised a lot of people--many skeptics were converted after they found that they had just read online for an hour without even realizing it. The width of text on the screen was designed to emulate the approximate size of a paperback book. You hit the spacebar to advance to the next page, like a visceral reminder of flipping the leaves of a book. You could search through the text of the work you were reading, or search against all of the books in the database. When you returned to a book after a prior reading session, it would return you to where you left off. You could leave annotations to yourself, anchored on certain text--think of it as highlighting a passage and adding a note reminding you WHY you highlighted it at the same time.
Unfortunately, the downturn of the internet sector clobbered Bookface. The company did have good momentum, partially because printing a trade novel to paper is a costly process (to address the assertion of another poster)--electronic publishing is a less expensive alternative, and it reduces time to market. Perhaps once the economic climate returns to "Sunny and Warm", the founders of Bookface will resurface.
The recently-posted commentary suggesting that the RIAA will lose its only real adversary by shutting down Napster seems to be pretty close to the mark. The poster of that opinion pointed out that Napster might be the only entity that the RIAA will be able to negotiate/bargain with, and that the Recording industry should take the $1B and run. I think the recent surge in the use of other file sharing networks has lent some credence to the article. I think it's entirely possible that these services will take over and the sharing services will all be 'underground'. Good luck to the RIAA then.
Like the old saying goes... If you outlaw mp3s, everyone will be an outlaw.