A bit of a short one today, after all the website updating over the weekend, and the fact some of my friends are on Only Connect (which I’m watching in iPlayer because we still haven’t acquired a drill in order to hook our TV up to the aerial. Not that that’s stopped me eyeing up freesat and PVR boxes in Curry’s today…)

Publishing: The Bookseller’s Association gives a rundown of Amazon’s latest moves, Introducing Apps for the Kindle, giving authors the option to remove DRM from their works, and offering a 70% royalty on eBooks. All come with a lot of conditions, alas. I think ePubs and self-published authors are going to be the most strongly affected by the changes, and I wonder if Amazon is trying to court their favour. Many price their books on Amazon very highly in order to offset the fees incurred and to drive traffic to their own website. The 70% royalty rate only applies if they don’t do this, but conditions such as the price-points already suit the ePublishers whereas print publishers tend to baulk at that. Kindle Apps are fine for people who already have Kindles, but with the limitations Amazon is imposing (such as the file size) I can’t see there being enough innovation to persuade people to buy the Kindle if they weren’t already considering it. As the article points out, those who write apps aren’t going to be tempted over either, since the medium is so limiting, so part from a few obvious apps (folders? easy sorting?) they’ll mostly be amateur anyway.

InsPiration: Icicles of brick – the photos are beautiful and terrifying, all at once. The abandoned buildings were apparently used to test a form of napalm, which melted the bricks and then allowed them to solidify into red brick-cycles. There’s some debate in the comments, though (and a weird amount of wank about eugenics that appears to come from nowhere) with the suggestion that it’s mortar stalectites, or some kind of treatment on the bricks that’s melted. Whatever the explanation, it’s impressively creepy.

Interest-Piquing: James Patterson Inc, New York Times article. A really interesting look at writing from a business perspective. Prolific and Popular, Patterson is a publisher’s darling, even if he doesn’t do things quite by the book. And quite likeable, by the time you finish the article. As he points out, Dickens was prolific and popular too (and jumped genres occasionally), but few people use those criteria to dismiss his work, so why should they Patterson’s?

Procrastination: If you like it so much why don’t you go live there? spEak You’re bRanes* is a blog reocrding the worst and nuttiest of posts in the BBC’s Have Your Say forums, and on occasion other news sites’. People who take every news story personally, people who hate the BBC’s leftist bias so much they just can’t stop reading the site, people who feel their civil liberties are being repressed because they’re not allowed to be racist, sexist, transphoib, homophobic, bigoted miseries any more… The good news is (a) spEak You’re bRanes proves you’re not the only one out there staring in goggle-eyed disbelief and (b) quite often it’s the same person just posting over and over again. But I’d still recommend looking at some kittens or something after reading the blog, just to calm you down again.

*and ten points if you know what that’s actually a reference to!