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Dehydrated books, or how to make money off of fan fiction and unauthorized sequels

Imagine that this evening I follow a friend’s link to a new Harry Potter book, one that essentially replaces “The Sorcerer’s Stone” in the canon with a Year 1 adventure that’s darker and closer in tone to the final few books, but that wasn’t written or authorized by J. K. Rowling. The link I follow [...]

Writers, readers, publishers, and the desire to know everything at once

I like infoporn. I love to pore over traffic charts for websites, or look at survey numbers from opinion polls, or sit back and marvel at a really good graph, which is infoporn’s centerfold. One area where the data-crunching promise of personal computing has delivered is in capturing, assembling, and displaying this kind of labor-intensive [...]