Filippo Bernardini impersonated figures from the publishing industry to trick people into handing over their works. He used his inside industry knowledge, having been employed by the publishing giant Simon & Schuster in London. Bernardini, 30, pleaded guilty in New York to wire fraud, but his motive has never been clear.
Bernardini’s targets included Irish novelist Sally Rooney, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, and British author and screenwriter Ian McEwan.
The number of active users on the Mastodon social network has dropped more than 30% since the peak and is continuing a slow decline, according to the latest data posted on its website. There were about 1.8 million active users in the first week of January, down from over 2.5 million in early December.
Aside from grumbles about Mastodon being difficult to use, I think a lot of people are wary of having to start over again somewhere else. If Twitter had ceased to exist, gone off-line, members who wished to remain active on a micro-blogging service would have no choice but to find a new platform, but that hasn’t (yet) been the case.
I joined Twitter in 2007, as did many of the people who follow me. Today some of those people have tens of thousands of followers, something that would’ve entailed considerable time and effort to achieve. The prospect of leaving that behind, and rebuilding their following on another service, would be daunting.
Anyone then looking to start again would have found barely any of their Twitter followers on Mastodon, rendering a move questionable. So much for the Twitter members who threatened to depart, to “move to Canada” so to speak, after Elon Musk assumed ownership. In the same way some Americans, unhappy with the prospect of Donald Trump becoming U.S. President, declared they would migrate to Canada, in the event he won office. Ultimately few, if any, made the move.
While some Twitter users might have gone to Mastodon, or another micro-blogging service, or left social media behind all together, their numbers were limited by the looks of it. Staying on, rather than starting from scratch, turned out to be more appealing. Twitter had a way of retaining members, sitting — out of sight — up its sleeve, all along.
Text-to-speech AIs have begun narrating select romance and fiction audiobooks available from Apple Books. Audiobook listeners electing an AI… entity (is that how I should refer to them?) to recite their title can choose between two digital voices, named Madison and Jackson. An additional two AI narrators, Helena and Mitchell, will soon be reading out non-fiction titles. Apple says the move will reduce costs, making it easier for independent authors and publishers to produce audiobooks:
The feature represents a big shift from the current audiobook model, which often involves authors narrating their own books in a process that can take weeks and cost thousands for a publisher. Digital narration has the potential to allow smaller publishers and authors to put out an audiobook at a much lower cost.
I don’t know what professional book narrators will think — though I can guess — but the move also makes sense for those authors who currently chose to narrate their own work. They can save several weeks of recording time, leaving them to focus on what they do best: write. While it could be said AI narrators were inevitable, that will be cold comfort for their human counterparts.
Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2018 novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, would like to see American actor Jessica Chastain cast in the role of Celia St. James, in the upcoming Netflix screen adaptation of the book. I couldn’t agree more with such a choice. Chastain often came to mind as I read Seven Husbands, and not solely because both Chastain and St. James are redheads. In fact, I can’t help wondering whether Reid drew a certain degree of inspiration for St. James from Chastain.
While I believe the role of St. James officially remains to be cast, Chastain has expressed interest. “Send me a script”, she said, when asked recently about the possibility, by American TV show host Andy Cohen.
American journalist, author, and blogger, Clive Thompson, writing about the benefits of blogging. The audience effect is one of the positives, and will go a long way to sharpening your writing:
But blogging has another benefit, which is that it triggers the “audience effect”. The audience effect is precisely what it sounds like: When we’re working on something that will soon go before an audience, we work far harder than if we’re doing work that’s for our eyes only. For decades, psychologists have documented the audience effect in studies: If you have experimental subjects write out an explanation for other people, for example, it’ll be far longer and clearer and more comprehensive than if you ask them to write it merely for themselves.
Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you.
I’m all for this, obviously. But as I wrote last month, social media apps have made it so easy to create a web presence (should I even use that term in 2023?), that buying a domain name, and installing a blogging application, seems like a lot of work.
Still to those willing to put in the hard yards, more power to you. And, for a more… succinct call to action, read Start a Fucking Blog, by Kev Quirk.
I’m not sure how often books with parts of their text blacked-out — rendering paragraphs, possibly entire pages, unreadable — are ever published, but README.txt, a memoir by former American solider, turned whistle blower and activist, Chelsea Manning, published by Penguin Books Australia in October 2022, is an example.
In 2010, Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents to WikiLeaks, and a number of media outlets. She was later incarcerated for her actions, but only served several years of a thirty-five year sentence the court imposed on her.
In her book, Manning wrote about releasing the classified documents, and her pre-trial jail time, among other things, but a number of pages have been redacted by the publisher, at least in Australia:
Manning feared being sent to Guantanamo as a terrorist. Her publishers simply feared lawyers: three sections of the book, which would appear to describe documents she uploaded, are blacked out.
It seems only a small portion of the book cannot be read as a result, but I wonder if blacking out pages in books in this way, has any effect on their long term value. In the same way, for instance, mint made errors can sometimes make a coin featuring some sort production flaw, more valuable.
Blacked out text would make Manning’s memoir unique in a certain way, possibly making it collectible for that reason. Time will tell.
The Social Network, the 2010 dramatization of the creation of Facebook, directed by American filmmaker David Fincher, was one of my favourite films of that year, even though I may not be the biggest fan of the Facebook itself. But the audacity, the arrogance, the energy, the self-belief, and the growing realisation Mark Zuckerberg (as portrayed in deadpan fashion by Jesse Eisenberg) was onto something, was infectious.
The Playlist, trailer, a Netflix produced docu-drama dramatization about the founding of music streaming service Spotify, released in October 2022, is another start-up show I’m looking forward to seeing, as the Spotify story has some similarities to Facebook.
In 2006, Spotify co-founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, set about building the “best music player in the world”. One that was both free to use, and legal. To succeed they said, “we just need to get hold of the music rights.” What could be simpler? But, the rest — as they say — is history.
Led by Daniel Ek, a group of passionate young entrepreneurs come together in what seems to be the impossible task to change the music industry — and the world. They set out to create a legal streaming service for music.
The minister promised to treat “artists as workers”, criticising the [previous] Coalition government for exclusions on jobkeeper wage subsidies and for the comments by the former prime minister Scott Morrison praising “tradies … building the stage” but not artists.
In addition, streaming services such as Netflix and Stan will be subject to quotas, ensuring they air more Australian made content. Also the Lending Right Schemes, which pays a royalty to authors when a library loans one of their books out, will be expanded to include ebooks.
