News & views

Reflections on writing and technology

notebook-smallMany of my articles on this blog are reflections on writing and technology. Although there are some writers who eschew the idea of technology, I believe that if you define “technology” widely enough, it becomes obvious that all writers use technology.

Even those who are fortunate enough to have an assistant to whom they can dictate their thoughts, and who will then type them up, are using technology – albeit at one remove

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Thoughts on Amazon’s new royalties system

Amazon Kindle PDFAmazon very recently introduced a new way of calculating royalties for books borrowed in the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library schemes. Whereas previously royalties were based on the number of times a book has been borrowed, they will now be based on the number of pages read. Amazon will define what a page is according to font size and other parameters, so authors can’t pull a fast one by making the font huge!
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A Self-publishing journey: Is Digital Rights Management effective against piracy?

Caught in the ActAfter quite a long gap, I’ve decided to self-publish a few books. I thought it might be interesting to write up my journey, because perhaps the research I undertake will be beneficial to others.

Today I’m looking at whether or not you should choose Digital Rights Management, or DRM, as a way of preventing your ebooks being illegally copied.

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Victorian Humour

Victorian Joke on pictureVictorian humour? A contradiction in terms, surely? Not according to Bob Nicholson, a lecturer in history who is on a mission to make Victorian jokes funny again (which presupposes they were funny in the first place, of course, but one assumes they were!).

Now, you may think this has nothing to do with writing, but it has. Bob is using a computing technique known as “text mining” to trawl through loads of Victorian publications held by the British Library, and extract jokes.

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