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Readercon 19: Sunday
2008-08-02 22:32"Belated this post is. Post or post not, there is no draft."
Sunday basically involved two panels and a bunch of random con-ness. The latter included nice chats with a bunch of people, including some e-book reader hardware geeking with Robert J. Sawyer. (Oh, and breakfast. To my complete lack of surprise, the hotel's Eggs Benedict was passable; no worse, no better. The best non-home-cooked ones I've had in a while were at Sarabeth's on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It didn't hurt that I was eating those on someone else's dime, either; that place isn't cheap.)
1000: The Aesthetics of Online Magazines
The obligatory introductions/"position statements":
Ellen Datlow: involved with several online magazines over a long time, starting with OMNI Online. She didn't change her buying pattern when moving from print to electronic media. Designing for readability is very important.
Leah Bobet: managing editor of Ideomancer. Very interested in hyperfiction, and ways to use the medium that aren't necessarily practical (or possible) in print.
Ernest Lilley: senior editor of SFRevu and related efforts. Feels that you can treat the web as a piece of paper and "recapture the print experience". Sees experiments (like hyperfiction) as often being "too much work for too little payoff, like eating an artichoke." Aims for the "transparent experience" where the words flow into your brain, with no distractions in between.
Sean Wallace: senior editor at Clarkesworld Magazine. It's a fantasy magazine that "moved from print to Web". When buying, considers the commercial aspects of the story, particularly length; longer stories are harder to turn into podcasts, and take up more of the "best of" print book when that's done.
[ckd: I'm really pleased by the panelist choices here; we have a set of people all of whom have actually done this, and with significantly different viewpoints. Kudos to the Readercon program folks.]
My notes on the discussion don't go into deep detail, but touched on things such as the "5000 word attention span limit" (Bobet attributes this to the Internet being a two-way medium, which changes the reader's expectations), the issue of longer stories needing some way to "mark your place" (segueing into a discussion of PDA reading in an e-book format rather than as a web page), the question of how you do ads in a longer story (break it into multiple web pages?), the idea of serialization (Lilley: "they won't come back for the next chunk"; Bobet: "they will if it's good enough"), and of course a mention of Shadow Unit.
1200: Satire With and Without Freedom of Speech
This was both deep and fast moving; definitely "wear your life jacket" territory. (Appropriately enough, Jim "here are all the ways things can kill you, and what to do about them" Macdonald was on the panel.)
Quick hits: James D. Macdonald saying that magic realism was the Latin American version of the Lem/Zemyatin "sneak it past the authorities" trick. James Morrow: "Rush Limbaugh is the piano player in the whorehouse of the Bush administration." Macdonald: "There's a word for stories with only one level. That word is 'unpublished'." Paul Di Filippo, after a question on whether "satire exhaustion" had set in: "The Onion just did 'Whale Oil Once Again Economical'." Morrow: "Satire should be pointing up to a better world."
After that, I got my membership for next year.
That was the con that was. I didn't see everyone or everything I would have liked to, but I never do.
Sunday basically involved two panels and a bunch of random con-ness. The latter included nice chats with a bunch of people, including some e-book reader hardware geeking with Robert J. Sawyer. (Oh, and breakfast. To my complete lack of surprise, the hotel's Eggs Benedict was passable; no worse, no better. The best non-home-cooked ones I've had in a while were at Sarabeth's on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It didn't hurt that I was eating those on someone else's dime, either; that place isn't cheap.)
1000: The Aesthetics of Online Magazines
The obligatory introductions/"position statements":
Ellen Datlow: involved with several online magazines over a long time, starting with OMNI Online. She didn't change her buying pattern when moving from print to electronic media. Designing for readability is very important.
Leah Bobet: managing editor of Ideomancer. Very interested in hyperfiction, and ways to use the medium that aren't necessarily practical (or possible) in print.
Ernest Lilley: senior editor of SFRevu and related efforts. Feels that you can treat the web as a piece of paper and "recapture the print experience". Sees experiments (like hyperfiction) as often being "too much work for too little payoff, like eating an artichoke." Aims for the "transparent experience" where the words flow into your brain, with no distractions in between.
Sean Wallace: senior editor at Clarkesworld Magazine. It's a fantasy magazine that "moved from print to Web". When buying, considers the commercial aspects of the story, particularly length; longer stories are harder to turn into podcasts, and take up more of the "best of" print book when that's done.
[ckd: I'm really pleased by the panelist choices here; we have a set of people all of whom have actually done this, and with significantly different viewpoints. Kudos to the Readercon program folks.]
My notes on the discussion don't go into deep detail, but touched on things such as the "5000 word attention span limit" (Bobet attributes this to the Internet being a two-way medium, which changes the reader's expectations), the issue of longer stories needing some way to "mark your place" (segueing into a discussion of PDA reading in an e-book format rather than as a web page), the question of how you do ads in a longer story (break it into multiple web pages?), the idea of serialization (Lilley: "they won't come back for the next chunk"; Bobet: "they will if it's good enough"), and of course a mention of Shadow Unit.
1200: Satire With and Without Freedom of Speech
This was both deep and fast moving; definitely "wear your life jacket" territory. (Appropriately enough, Jim "here are all the ways things can kill you, and what to do about them" Macdonald was on the panel.)
Quick hits: James D. Macdonald saying that magic realism was the Latin American version of the Lem/Zemyatin "sneak it past the authorities" trick. James Morrow: "Rush Limbaugh is the piano player in the whorehouse of the Bush administration." Macdonald: "There's a word for stories with only one level. That word is 'unpublished'." Paul Di Filippo, after a question on whether "satire exhaustion" had set in: "The Onion just did 'Whale Oil Once Again Economical'." Morrow: "Satire should be pointing up to a better world."
After that, I got my membership for next year.
That was the con that was. I didn't see everyone or everything I would have liked to, but I never do.
