In Internet time, the late 1990s might as well be 2,000 BC. Thus, it is singularly appropriate that a particular ebook website founded in those days had an Ancient Egyptian motif. Alexandria Digital Literature, or Alexlit for short, started by former Wizards of the Coast employee Dave Howell, was one of the first commercial ebookstores on the Internet. It focused mostly on short stories and novellas, and it was selling books and stories at reasonable prices in unencrypted formats months before Baen started its Webscriptions program. It also kept items on a user’s purchased bookshelf permanently accessible once they had been purchased.
Alexlit subsequently purchased Mind’s Eye, another unencrypted ebook vendor, before it reorganized itself into the Seattle Book Company. (The Seattle Book Company since reorganized into a subsidiary of RosettaSolutions, an e-publishing company meant to leverage the ebook conversion engine that powered Alexlit’s e-sales.)
Unlike other ebook vendors, Alexlit had a unique gimmick to get people to come to the site in the first place: a collaborative filtering automatic book recommender named (by user vote) Hypatia. When you started using it, Hypatia would ask you what books you had read, and how much you had liked or disliked them. Once it had enough ratings to build up a good picture of your interests, Hypatia would compare your profile to the profiles of the thousands of other Alexlit users, find the ones that were the closest match to your tastes, and see what books they liked that you hadn’t read yet. It would then list them in order of how much it thought you would like them, and then you could go buy them or place a hold with your local public library. Once given sufficient information, Hypatia was right far more often than it was wrong, and it pointed me to many books I have since come to love.
But over the last few years, Alexlit grew increasingly unreliable, and for the last few months it has not worked at all. However, that will be changing quite soon. Recently, Howell announced that Alexlit suffered a server failure stemming from years of benign neglect, but the recommender is in the process of being restored to full functionality and will hopefully be available again very soon. Ebook sales may follow sometime after that, but I, for one, cannot wait for the librarian to be available; it has been far too long since I have been able to get book recommendations that reliable.
Furthermore, I am delighted to announce that on Sunday, May 27th at 1 p.m. Eastern/10 a.m. Pacific, I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with Alexandria Digital Literature founder Dave Howell on my book-related talk show, The Biblio File. The topic of the interview will be primarily Alexlit’s original founding and imminent return, but I will also talk about the ebook industry in general and how it has changed since Alexlit was founded. After I finish my prepared questions, I will bring in any callers for a panel discussion.
Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so.
I’ve written a comprehensive page on the various methods of connecting to TalkShoe at that covers in detail all the ways to listen or participate, but I will summarize now.
If you just want to listen, you can do that via streaming audio from the TalkShoe page itself, while the show is airing: http://terrania.us/biblio/ Also, the complete show will be downloadable as an MP3 file (you can also use RSS to syndicate it to your podcast-sync software of choice if you like) starting about half an hour after the show ends. No registration of any kind is necessary to listen.
If you would like to listen and have the opportunity to converse with other listeners and submit questions via text chat, you can register at talkshoe.com (it’s free) and download their Java-based text chat client, which includes the ability to listen via streaming audio at the same time.
If you would like to phone in and listen that way, as well as having the opportunity to ask a question on the air, you can register at talkshoe.com and phone in to (724) 444-7444. (It is a Pittsburgh number, so it will be a long-distance call for most people.) You will be asked for the show’s ID number, which is 7022, and your PIN number, which you set when you register. You can phone in with or without also using the chat client, though you should use the chat client if you wish to be able to signal that you would like to be unmuted to ask a question. (You can also phone in via Voice Over IP applications, for free, which I cover in detail on the tutorial page mentioned above.)
Finally, if you will not be able to participate live but would still like to submit questions, leave a comment here or email me. I can’t promise I’ll ask all questions that are submitted but I will try to ask any good ones.
