Shifti.org, the on-line transformation story writing site I’ve written about and whose sysadmin I have interviewed, is currently down with a hard drive failure. As it is run largely as a personal project of its sysadmin, Daniel Hazelton, he depends on donations to keep the site running, and he had already been running a donation drive to pay the Internet bill. He’s going to need more money to fund a new hard drive, and there is currently a PayPal donation button on the site itself. I realize not many of TeleRead’s readers are necessarily fans or even readers of...

The other day, after I used my Facebook credentials to create a Scribd account in order to download The Shadow Girl of Birch Grove, the fact that I created an account was shared to my Facebook friends—and a number of them subscribed to my Scribd feed. This was news to me, as I had not actually contemplated putting anything on Scribd for subscribers to read. But on the other hand, now that I had a Scribd account, it presented an opportunity to try it out. So I took a couple of the stories I wrote for the “Paradise”...

Earlier this month, as a guest writer on Charlie Stross’s blog, Elizabeth Bear wrote an essay about “the future of web publishing,” centering around the “hyperfiction environment” called Shadow Unit in which she takes part. I couldn’t help but be amused by the subject of the post. You see, history repeats itself. Bear et al may very well be right about being part of the “future” of Internet publishing—but in the format in which they are writing, they have also stumbled squarely onto its past. To note, I do not mean this in any derogatory sense. Though I have not read...

One of the chief functions publishers serve is gatekeepers. Because they invest a lot of money into publishing and publicizing a given book, it is in their best interest to make sure that book is good. Hence, with the understanding that not every book is to every reader’s taste, we rely on publishers to filter out the “slush” and give us books that are good to read. But now the Internet has come out to play, and writers who do not want to have to bother with going through the traditional publishing structure can post what they write freely or inexpensively,...

The line between e-books and other Internet writing has been diminishing over time, with commercial e-self-publishing sites such as Smartbooks or Scribd, independent story hosts such as Shifti.org, and fanfic downloaders and converters that turn stories posted on fan-fiction hosts into formatted e-books. One of today’s big buzz-words is “the cloud”, referring to the practice of storing data on remote Internet servers for access anywhere. The e-book sites I mentioned above are places where reading material sits in the cloud—but writing is moving to the cloud, too, to let people work on documents remotely without the...

When I was writing my series about “Paleo E-Books”, one of the sites I mentioned was Shifti.org, the wiki successor to the defunct Transfomation Stories Archive. In the course of writing about it, I came to read some of the stories there—and found I enjoyed them enough to contribute a few myself. While independent e-publishing sites such as Smashwords or unfiltered document hosts such as Scribd are what generally come to mind when you think of independent e-publishing, smaller themed fiction sites such as Shifti represent another way—one which does not tend to get as much media coverage....