The future of ebooks or short-lived gimmick?

Phew! I’ve been travelling for work and still editing book 3 of the Embodied trilogy, so the blog has entered a late-winter semi-hibernation phase (and yes, it’s still winter in Montreal!).

Disclaimer out of the way, here’s an article about  Editions at Play, a joint ebook publishing venture between Google Creative Lab Sydney and the design-driven publishing house Visual Editions, which launched last week.

One of my novels, The New Sense, was slated to be made into a similar interactive book before my publisher disappointingly closed shop in 2012. I self-pubbed it in 2013 but I’m still curious to know what the book would have turned out like in an interactive format. What are your thoughts on this kind of ebook? Gimmick or a new medium that’s here to stay?

Punctuation rules!

This is pretty awesome. Also awesomely pretty. Now you can see what books look like with all the words removed and only the punctuation marks remaining. The author of this article compares different works by famous authors, with some astonishing results.

Science fiction becomes science fact

Just a short post because I’ve been terribly busy editing my upcoming book. Today’s momentous news about the detection of gravitational waves originally predicted by Einstein is a huge milestone in the history of science. I read a couple of articles on it, one of them in Canada’s Globe and Mail. The article quotes MIT astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala saying, “We have turned on a new sense. We have been able to see and now we will be able to hear as well.”

What almost made me fall off my chair was his first sentence. Why? Because he said a new sense and one of my novels is called The New Sense. No biggie, you might think, quelle coincidence… But the title refers to a sense that one of the main characters claims to have, and that sense is… the ability to detect gravity!

Mind therefore officially blown. Maybe my superpower is predicting scientific discoveries, who knows?