Unquiet Desperation

“Podcasting Your Novel: Publishing’s Next Wave?” is the title of the latest article featuring the luminaries of the Podiobooks universe. J.C. Hucthins, Scott Sigler, Mur Lafferty, and Evo Terra are all quoted in the discussion of how podcasting novels is slowly changing the publishing world.

It seems a ripe time for novel podcasting to grow. Traditional book publishers are struggling. Book sales are down; MacMillan has laid off employees, as have Random House and Simon & Schuster; and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has suspended the purchase of most new manuscripts. With advance money drying up as well as contracts, Terra says that aspiring writers now feel that “maybe I should try something on my own” and build an audience online.

Read the full article at Time.com

We’re all waiting for it…not the game…the commercials!! Check out this list of what’s coming:

• Amy Borkowsky
• Angels and Demons Super Bowl Ad
• Budweiser Clydesdale Super Bowl Ad
• Carreer Builder Super Bowl Ad
• Cars.com Super Bowl Ad
• Cheetos Super Bowl Ad
• Chuck Super Bowl Ad
• Denny’s Super Bowl Ad
• Doritos “Free Doritos” Super Bowl Ad
• Doritos New Flavor Pitch Super Bowl Ad
• Doritos Power of the Crunch Super Bowl Ad
• Doritos Super Bowl Ad
• Doritos The Chase Super Bowl Ad
• Doritos Too Delicious Super Bowl Ad
• Fast and the Furious Super Bowl Ad
• Frosted Flakes Super Bowl Ad
• GI Joe Super Bowl Ad
• Go Daddy Danica Patrick Super Bowl Ad
• Go Daddy Super Bowl Ad
• H and R Block Super Bowl Ad
• Heineken Super Bowl Ad
• Heroes Super Bowl Ad
• Hyundai Genesis Super Bowl Ad
• Hyundai Super Bowl Ad
• Jay Leno Super Bowl Ad
• Kings Super Bowl Ad
• LMAO NBC Super Bowl Ad
• Land of the Lost Super Bowl Ad
• Medium Super Bowl Ad
• Miller One Second Super Bowl Ad
• Monsters vs. Aliens Super Bowl Ad
• NFL Network Super Bowl Ad
• Pedigree Super Bowl Ad
• Pepsi Super Bowl Ad
• Sobe Lizard Lake Super Bowl Ad
• Sobe Super Bowl Ad
• Star Trek Super Bowl Ad
• Super Bowl Ads 2009
• Super Bowl Commercials 2009
• Super Bowl Commercials Live Coverage
• Teleflora Super Bowl Ad
• Transformers Super Bowl Ad

I’m happy to announce that the next iteration of the Podiobooks.com codebase will be an open source project, released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. We’re redesigning the system from the ground up, taking lessons learned from the last four years and folding them into a fresh batch of binary goodness for all you folks to enjoy.

Why go Open Source?

As the years have rolled by we’ve seen that opening things to a community is a better way to build quality. We’re amazed and humbled by the contributions of both our authors and our members.  We would not be as strong as we are now without them.

If community passion and commitment has carried us this far, why not  be more transparent and get everyone involved on the next iteration of the web site?  There are talented people out there, from copy editors to codemonkeys to folks who excel at finding our bugs. Keeping the codebase a closed system is a dead end. Opening it up is the only way to go.

On a personal note, I have always been supportive of open source software, even though I’ve not been able to contribute to a serious project. This is also my way of giving something back to the community of developers, from whom I have learned so much of the years. I’m hoping that, in years to come, people will learn from our code the same way I have learned from the people who came before me.

How do I learn more, or contribute?

You can follow the progress of the project in two ways:

• A project log is available on our Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/podiobooks
• The source itself is hosted at Github: http://github.com/ctmiller/podiobooks/tree/master

If you have an interest in contributing to the project, please contact chris at podiobooks dot com.

Current Project Details:

Check this out. The first video is a little dry for the first few minutes, but zip to about three minutes in, and it starts to get very interesting. To learn more, visit the article on Hackaday.

I’ve been tagged by Thomas Gideon for the Sixteen Random Things meme. And so, we begin:

1. I’ve often said that one day, I will vanish from the Internet save for a super-secret email address where only certain people can find me. This is not a joke. I’m perfectly serious.
2. I went to college for English, specifically Medieval Literature. I swore that you would never get me working in the programming field.
3. My wife and I met at a medievalist campout in western New York.
4. I prefer Cleveland’s winter to Los Angeles’s winter.
5. When I was a kid, my father used to take me to work with him at NASA. One day, I found an interesting program called Demon which I ran. It caused the printer to go heywire. It’s taken me thirty years, but now I know why it went haywire.
6. I’m perpetually behind the times, as far as music go. Generally, I will not find out I like a band until five years after the CD comes out.
7. I used to hoard books, even ones I had not read. I later learned that I was keeping them, not because I’d ever read them, but because I wanted to be the sort of person who kept those books on their bookshelf. I’ve since gotten rid of them.
8. I once programmed using Microsoft’s WebClasses. I am not proud.
9. All I really want is to use my powers for good.
10. Since moving to LA, I’ve lost 20 pounds.
11. I love to cook.
12. My three favorite comic book characters are Batman, John Constantine, and Green Arrow.
13. My current desktop background has pentagrams on it. Read into that whatever you will. The evil machine must be bound.
14. Some days, I truly miss running a coffee shop.
15. I still enjoy playing Zork.
16. My favorite convention of any type is Origins.

Now, I’m supposed to tag sixteen people: Kris Johnson, C.K. Sample, Nicole Gustas, Matthew Wayne Selznick, Evo Terra, Chris Lester, Michelle Belanger, Chris Finke, Ray Slakinski, Mark Jeffrey, David Mead, Jim Wilson, James Kovach, Beth McCabe, Neil Gaiman, and Mur Lafferty.