is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Friday
Jul 17, 2009

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others — Martin Ball

This is all the buzz today, but Amazon has removed copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle devices, because of a licensing issue.

Forget the irony of it being Orwell, forget that it’s Amazon, and what you have is the story being about rights of digital delivery. Who own the bits on your computer?

Certainly no print author could come and revoke a book after it’s on your shelf 1. In the internet age, are we learning that this has never happened simply because it is impractical?

Amazon was getting good marks all around on the Kindle (although many copy-lefters are suffering under the weight of their massive schadenfreude and mouthing “I told you so”). Their corporate face, however, needs some work on the customer service-side. Not all publicity is good publicity. Nobody wants to the invisible hand of DRM to reach into the device they bought and monkey with the goods they choose to purchase and keep there.

The title of Pogue’s piece references the Orwell quote from Animal Farm.

All animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others.

  1. However, just in case this becomes practice becomes popular, I’d like to pre-order Salma Hayek’s autobiography, and encourage sloppy copy-editing so as to cause a recall. ↩
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What is Spitball!?

Spitball! is two guys collaborating to write about writing and collaboration. We're writing partners who have worked together since 2000, and placed in the top 100 in the last Project Greenlight for our script YELLOW.

Currently, we are both working on multiple screenplay, short story, and novel ideas independently and together, and collaborate on this blog.

What Spitball! used to be

Spitball! started as an attempt to collaborate on a screenplay online in real time. From January 2006 to July 2007 we worked on an interactive process to decide the story we were going to make. A full postmortem is coming, but you can find the find all the posts by looking in the category Original Version.

During this period, we affected the personalities of two of the most famous spitball pitchers from the early 20th Century. Look at our brief bios for more info about this, and so as not to be confused as to who is talking when.

We rebooted the franchise in early 2009 in its current form.


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Kent M. Beeson

Urban Shockah pic

Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) is a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home writer, living in Seattle, WA with his wife, 2 year old daughter and an insane cat. In 2007, he was a contributor to the film blog ScreenGrab, where he presciently suggested Jackie Earle Haley to play Rorschach in the Watchmen movie, and in 2008, he wrote a film column for the comic-book site ComiXology called The Watchman. (He's a big fan of the book, if you couldn't tell.) In 2009, he gave up the thrill of freelance writing to focus on screenplays and novels, although he sometimes posts to his blog This Can't End Well, which a continuation of his first blog, he loved him some movies. He's a Pisces, and his favorite movie of all time is Jaws. Coincidence? I think not.

Martin McClellan

Burleigh Grimes pic

Martin (aka Burley Grymz) is a designer and writer. He occasionally blogs at his beloved Hellbox, and keeps a longer ostensibly more interesting bio over here at his eponymous website. You can also find him on Twitter.