E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Andrew Crofts has published an e-book, The Fabulous Dreams of Maggie De Beer which Eyewear recommends. Fifteen year-old Maggie arrives in London on the run from her humdrum suburban life, determined to make it big in show business. For more than thirty years she is exploited by both men and the media. She struggles against endless set-backs and disappointments, always remaining optimistic, always believing that this time her big break has come. Then, when most of us would have given up all hope, the celebrity circus rockets her to bizarre and unexpected pinnacles of fame.

Sad news.  The father of the e-book, Michael Hart , has died, at the age of 64.  Hart's Project Gutenberg put tens of thousands of texts freely out there, for readers wherever they might be.  A true visionary, he will be missed.

The Sunday Times give us an interview with Top Ten ebook best-selling author, John Locke , who has sold a million ebooks and made himself almost a cool half-million US bucks in the process.  Locke, no relation to any philosopher, claims to be working on this third fortune, to be married to a woman with great legs, and to write for bored businessmen and 75% women; his ultra-violent, sexually-prehistoric hitman character apparently appeals to all levels of nitwit slash reader.  The key thing is, he has bypassed agents, publishers and all that nonsense from London, like the snobbery and wine in bookshops, to simply sell books he churns out like some people push toothpaste onto their bristles, for 62p a pop.  This is the future of publishing.  I teach creative writing and have seen many brilliant novels get rejected by the old p-system (publishing system). This is going to empower a lot of people.  Sadly, as my Oxfam bookshop manager friend Martin Penny tells me, m...

Read an E-book Week (7-13 March 2010) is upon us. When Val Stevenson of Nthposition and I began thinking of poetry e-books back in March 2003 (seven years ago now!), at the start of the Iraq war, they were basically PDFs you could download, share, swap, email, host and so forth - not the more elaborate platforms in place now, to use with tablet-shaped readers. I had thought e-books would catch on sooner than they in fact did. Their rapidity of circulation on the Internet, potential lack of expense, and democratic editing and publishing options, made them possibly a wildfire phenomenon - but much resisted their ubiquity, or the rise of the e-writer and e-reader as dominant in the marketplace. Why? 1) resistance from the literary establishment, which remains the gatekeeping presence, determining editorial, review and marketing hegemony; 2) lack of grass-roots support for a real bottom-up revolution in the production of literary products; and 3) an uncertain technological interface, co...