I was cruising through the AL.com Book Forum last night and ran across a new book blog in town, Breaking the Spine. I have to say I enjoyed flipping through all the posts and reading all the questions she poses to her readers. Might be fun to keep up with this one!
Tag Archives: author
Book festivals from around the world
Though not a very large event, our young and humble Alabama Book Festival is always an event we travel too. It’s always fun to snap pics of authors you’ve heard of, but never seen. I have yet to meet an author who’s face matched the one I had given them in mind. After scrolling through Kimbooktu’s photos of a Ducth book fetival, I clicked around for a few others…
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Ghost (Writer) in the machine
Philip Parker is the most prolific author in history, according to Amazon. The NY Times ran this article about Philip Parker and his amazing technicolor technical writing machines. Apparently, Parker unleashes his computers on the Internet, which look in every nook and cranny to glean all stats, numbers, data, etc. Then Parker peppers in a few introductions and transition pieces, hits another button to format, create charts and an index and…. bam! You have a collection of 200,000 “published” books (actually they’re sitting in a POD database waiting until someone buys one).
Most are dry niche-technical stuff. The kind of specialist info you might expect from a data miner like the one he is running. But he says that he’s looking to produce works in one area-of fiction… the romance novel.
“I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
Wow. Writing so formulaic that someone thinks a computer could do it? It will be interesting to see if it ever happens.
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Ghost (Writer) in the machine
The NY Times ran an article about Philip Parker and his amazing technicolor technical writing computer program. Basically, his machine collects every factoid, statistic and number from the web, Parker then peppers a few introductions and transitional phrases in there, hits another button to format and index… and bam! You have a collection of 200,000 separate books “authored” by one man.
No doubt, the texts are dry and boring. But I bet some neat trends start to appear in what his program finds online. It’s a pretty interesting way to collect data and organize it for a book. Though I imagine, if you ever want anything beyond tables and graphs, you’ll always need that human element.
Of course, there is romance fiction which Parker said he has already targeted with new algorithms…
“I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
So we’ll have to wait and see if it ever goes any further!
