Why fandom won't leave LJ until LJ collapses

[antennapedia]

This is pretty much what went through my mind when all the kerfluffles happened last summer. I've only gotten around to expressing it coherently now. I continue to think about it because the project is tempting: I look at fanfiction.net and I see a terrible archive platform; I look at LJ and I see an even worse one. But today seems like a great day

Comments

[antennapedia]

When I noticed you'd friended me yesterday, I read your pages on pdf generation and content generation for the Kindle. I started playing with some pdf-building software for Ruby for my own story archive maintenance tool. (Long story short, I just started writing this, because I got sick of relinking in-sequence files by hand, and I am supremely lazy.) Why not generate a for-offline-reading version of each story? The tricky part will be coming up with a format that's simple enough.

The iPhone is a handheld computer and a stunning platform. We're looking at the very beginning of the story there-- wait six months to see what the first way of developers make for it. In the meantime, a simplified html page makes for a pretty sweet reading experience in the built-in html browser.

The Kindle: started reading about what it supports. PalmDoc isn't hard to do, if I recall correctly. I haven't seen one in the wild yet, but the people who own them seem to be huge fans. I've seen some Japanese-only epaper devices that had amazingly readable displays. I think the future converges them. One device in the pocket.

And fandom will, from my point of view, be behind the adoption curve on all of it. But then, I love my gadgets.

[quivo]

The tricky part will be coming up with a format that's simple enough.
This is why I try to save a copy of everything in HTML if possible. Pdfs are pretty, but it is tongue-gnawingly hard to get readable content out of them even if they're tagged and OCRed and all the rest of it. HTML is editable with text editors and printable if you have a web browser and some CSS knowhow, and it can already show up in most browsers.

I got sick of relinking in-sequence files by hand, and I am supremely lazy
God, the AMOUNT OF WORK that goes into ebooks :(. I forsee only treasured fics making the conversion leap through my hands at first-- I was lucky that the fic I tried my hands at was in Markdown already, and thus easily convertible into standards-compliant html. Mobipocket creator doesn't explicitly choke on bad html, it just ends up looking like shit, in subtle ways that my OCD brain cannot tolerate. And then there are all the special characters that neglect to be in Unicode when I download the html files *sighs*. I'm just glad I still had Parallels on hand to use to double-boot WinXP; most of the best tools for conversion are Windows-only.

The Kindle
*flashis her Kindle at you over the interwebs* This IS the future, I swear it. It has its flaws, but there e-ink and a sensible distribution system on Amazon's end and being able to plug it in anywhere that will take USB kinda trumps every one of them. I can't wait to see what e-ink is capable of in ten years-- I may then have one device to rule them all, FINALLY :D.

[antennapedia]

Side comment: I remain stunned that more fans haven't adopted Markdown as their writing format of choice. It has a number of advantages:
- simple to write
- can be pasted directly into email
- is easily turned into simple, clean html that's 1000x better than what Word produces
- is directly supported by a number of good, cheap text editors (I use BBEdit, but TextMate is great here too)

"Coding" a story to post is something that takes me about 2 seconds.

[quivo]

I think it's a mixture of people remaining unaware of more human-readable markup languages and people being scared that using a lang like that would be complicated. I know I was leery of markdown before I actually tried using it, and what pushed me to actually try was how annoying it was to convert stories written in Scrivener (a great writing program which I was using then) to html format without it getting borked up. Oh, and owning Textmate certainly helped-- syntax coloring is totally ftw, and I get itchy when there's none of it.

Another reason I bothered with Textmate and markdown is that I was writing very long pieces at the time, and "coding" them by hand would have been a full-blown nightmare. I don't know how anyone that writes longer pieces manages by hand *shivers*

[treewishes]

And fandom will, from my point of view, be behind the adoption curve on all of it. But then, I love my gadgets.

I was just thinking the opposite! In terms of social networking, fandom jumped way ahead of the curve and embraced comments in ways that blogging is only now moving toward. Fans bought e-readers before they were any good, and now that we're finally getting e-readers like Kindle and iPhone*, we're moving on to podfic. Yes, of course, there are levels and not every fan is at the bleeding edge, but I see a trend.

I see a day coming soon where we'll be able to put skins on SIMS and make them act out our stories. Just wait...

*and my Treo, which has been serving me portable fic for years.