I wrote and posted this blog entry entirely using my new Asus EeePC 900, including rescaling the photo. The Eee is a tiny laptop around the size of a large paperback book. It has no moving parts (it has solid state memory like flash cards rather than a hard disk). So far I am extremely happy with it, but since I haven't had it long enough to know if it will break – I am on day 3 – I am so far reserving a final judgment.

The Eee advertises itself as “Easy to Work, Easy to Play, Easy to learn” (hence the name), and in fact it was very easy to start using productively. Within 10 minutes of opening the box, I had it connected to my home Wifi router and was able to read my mail on the web. It took longer to set up a real mail program (Thunderbird, which was preinstalled), but that was mostly because I had to download all my mail from my server onto the Eee because I keep mail on the server to make it available on my computers and mobile phone and the Eee. My home Windows network was able to see the Eee without any configuration beyond one check box to enable sharing, but I have not yet succeeded in seeing the Windows network from the Eee.

New on The Hyperliterature Exchange for March 2008: a review of 'The Way North' by Joel Weishaus.

"The page as a whole... is giving off all sorts of different signals about its content, and the experience of reading it is dominated by moments of transition, from one voice to another, one type of discourse to another, and one text-style to another. The overall impression is that this is not the kind of smooth, homogenous discourse we are used to reading in print, but the text equivalent of a collage."

To read the whole review, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewthewaynorth.php .

The Hyperliterature Exchange is an online directory and review of new media literature for sale on the Web. More than 120 works are now listed. Please visit and browse at http://hyperex.co.uk .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

Early boosters of digital technology predicted a paperless world, where we would carry around all our books in electronic form, storing a whole library in a tiny device. Long before the web was invented, Project Gutenberg used the old text-only Internet to build a large repository of free public-domain books stored as plain text. These e-texts were useful to scholars and students who wanted searchable versions of classics, but, for lack of portable reader, they did nothing to replace the book.

For years, I have been reading in the technology press about the failure of the electronics industry to design a usable e-book reader: Many expensive devices intended to replace the old-fashioned paper book have been introduced, and they have not been successful. All the commentaries in the technology pages complain that "until there is an e-book reader that you can take in the bath or read comfortably under a tree, no one will read e-books."

A few months ago, I discovered almost accidentally that there already is a substantial (if still somewhat obscure) body of e-books in actual use. I purchased my first mobile phone (despite being an "early adopter" of most new technology, I had steadfastly resisted becoming "one of those cell phone people"). I chose a phone which could do email and web browsing. Once I got it set up, I did some Googling to find out what else I could do with the phone, and I discovered Mobipocket, a French website (recently acquired by Amazon) which distributes a free e-book reader for mobile phones and PDAs, along with a PC version (also free) which allows you to order books from Mobipocket's store and organize your e-book and e-news (the reader is also an offline RSS reader) collection. You can also read your e-books on the computer.

One of the best aspects of the Mobipocket site is the large collection of free e-books (over 15,000 in French and English). Almost every imaginable classic book which is in the public domain in English or French is available for free, and there are also many obscure titles.

New on The Hyperliterature Exchange for May 2007: a review of 'Croatian Tales of Long Ago, Part Two', edited by Helena Bulaja; written by Ivana Brlie Mazuranic; and animated by Edgar Beals, Mirek Nisenbaum, Laurence Arcadia and Helena Bulaja.

"Every animation on this CD is worth seeing for its own sake; but when they are viewed in conjunction with the original Tales, and the background information about Mazuranic herself, then a much more rich and complex picture emerges..."

To read the whole review, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewcrotales2.php .

The Hyperliterature Exchange is an online directory and review of new media literature for sale on the Web. More than 120 works are now listed. Please visit and browse at http://hyperex.co.uk .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

How to Judge a Book by its Cover: An Algorithm by Millie Niss

As all avid readers know, you can judge a book by its cover. The methods for doing so depends on what kind of book you want and on the current publishing trends in your country. Thus the method given below is the one I use when I want a good, entertaining contemporary or at least modern novel of the page-turner variety which is well enough written so that I do not imagine myself editing it with a red pen as I read. In the U.S., such novels are marketed as "literary fiction," ("serious fiction" is sometimes a synonym) but some books with that marketing designation are too trashy and others are too "literary" to fit this particular need of mine.

When I want a different kind of book such as a poetry book or a computer book, I find myself using completely different methods, many of which are in direct contradiction to the method used in my algorithm. As I reread my algorithm for typos, I noticed with a start that a design-in-progress I made for a poetry chapbook I am working on with Martha Deed would be eliminated many times over by the the criteria used in the algorithm. I then realized that this is because I don't like novels which are explicitly funny but I want more humor when reading (or writing) experimental genres of poetry. I find that most jokes get stale if extended throughout a novel-length text, even ones which are hilarious in shorter forms. This applies even to Great Writers, not just to the likes of me and people I know: Swift's A Modest Proposal (an essay written in 1729) is a classic text which still has its bite now, whereas Gulliver's Travels (a novel length allegory/parody) is remembered mostly in cartoon form, not as social satire.

I have given the algorithm in pseudocode. In doing so, I have tried to strike a balance beween my desire to write like a real programmer and my desire to be understandable to non-programmers. As a result, I used a much more old-fashioned programming style than is currently in vogue (pure declarative with no fancy data structures). I used javadoc-style comments as a nod to web programmers, but the rest of the pseudocode is quite un-Javalike. I actually don't speak fluent Java anyway and have a heavy C (not even C++ — only in computers can a thirty-three year-old be an old-timer) accent when I try.

I've been spending an evening looking at Michael Szpakowski's movies (Film doesn't apply here, nor does cinema; movies does), which he sent me on a CD. The movies are available on Szpakowski's web site http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/Some_QuickTime_Movies/index.html, and also on his relatively new vlog, "Scenes of Provincial Life," http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi, in which he publishes a combination of new works and older movies from his archive.

I don't know where to begin to write about them, as they put me in a mood in which I'm somewhere, but I don't know if this where is sustainable anymore.

New on The Hyperliterature Exchange for May 2006: a discussion of the digital revolution's impact on the UK's small literary magazines in the UK, including Aesthetica, Birmingham Words, Incwriters and Route.

To read the whole review, go to http://hyperex.co.uk/reviewezines.php .

The Hyperliterature Exchange is an online directory and review of new media literature for sale on the Web. More than 120 works are now listed. Please visit and browse at http://hyperex.co.uk.

New on The Hyperliterature Exchange for November 2005: Edward Picot reviews "Inanimate Alice", a new media fiction from Kate Pullinger and Babel, and "Aftershocks", a new media murder documentary from Martha Deed.

"Both 'Inanimate Alice' and 'Aftershocks' use unanswered questions as a technique for capturing our attention. They exploit the fact that when things are left unresolved, we feel more obliged to read on, in search of a resolution. But both stories go further than simply arousing our curiosity..."

To read the whole review, go to http://hyperex.co.uk/reviewafteralice.php.

The Hyperliterature Exchange is an online directory and review of new media literature for sale on the Web. More than 120 works are now listed. Please visit and browse at http://hyperex.co.uk .

- Edward Picot: personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

This first piece in the Reviews category is a contest, open to anyone anywhere. The contest asks you to identify the novel described in this post, which was recently published in paperback in the US and presumably in other markets as well. The first person to email me with the title and author's name at admin@sporkworld.org (please also email men2@columbia.edu which is my personal email address, since I am using the sporkworld address for the first time) with the correct answer will win, and I will publish their name and send them the prize, which is the novel in question. I will send the prize to any mailing address world-wide. If you want to enter the contest but pass on the prize, that is ok also. I will publish your name as the winner in that case and will send the prize to the next person who emails me the correct answer. If you used a digital search method to discover the answer, describe it in your email.