Publishing: It’s funny how often my publishing links are actually about Piracy. It says something about where the industry is going (and where my attention is focused, I guess).The Gurdian asks who’s affected by digital book piracy, and how people react to finding they’ve being pirated. Take down notices, or one-upping the pirates by offering a legal version on the same site for only a small fee.

It’s also funny how often I link to the Guardian when I wouldn’t pick up that paper in a newsagent. Nothing against it, but outside the culture section the way it reports the news doesn’t appeal to me. I can see why a lot of the big news moguls are up in arms about this; it’s certainly not a sustainable state of affairs, but as long as someone’s writing news and editorials for free online I don’t think simply charging people for the same is going to work.

Interest Piquing:  The evolution of the love letter, from secret missives to sexting. Caveat scriptor.

From the BBC, which the newspaper moguls hate because they have no intention of ever charging – the website is a kind of extension to the TV broadcasting, for which most people pay their License fees (of course, you don’t have to pay your license fee to access the Beeb online). Something of the ultimate subscription model, I feel.

InsPiration: Sex and the off-label use of our bodies. For people who obsess about non-procreational sex, there are myriad arguments to defeat them. Mouths are made for eating – how dare we use them to sing? Feet are made for walking – by their argument dancing is sinful.

Procrastination: While I’m thinking about newspaper, how about the Daily Mail-o-matic? based on commonly used buzzword in Daily Mail headlines, the widget generates its own. I’ve got the greasmonkey script installed, so every time I visit the Daily Mail website (usually linked by the BBC, since it’s definitely not somewhere I’d browse normally!) the headlines are replaced with generated ones. It can make it a little hard to find whatever article I’m looking for, like the creepy bendy babies one…

(I’m fairly sure I’ve shared the daily-mail-o-matic before, though anything you can repeatedly hit refresh on is a wonderful timesink. But, if you want to be technical, call the bendy babies the procrastination. There’s more here. Some are cute, but, really, some are just plain creepy. Nothing that can count the days of its existance on one tiny, pudgy hand should be made to smile at me like that)

Publishing: The British Library is digitising its catalogue, and is offering 65000 rare first editions to download FREE for Kindle owners (I’m still trying find out if it applies to people who’ve got the Kindle apps for iPhones or desktops). What’s of most interest, to me at least, is that they’ve digitized their Penny Dreadfuls too. You can also order paperpacks of the first editions (I had to read that several times to actually grasp it – paperback books containing text and illustrations, including page formatting, from the first editions) for £15. There’s also 2 million newspaper pages you can search for free, which is very handy for research! Unfortunately, lovely as the British Library website is (and easy as it is to lose yourself learning about the Magna Carta orShakespeare’s Quartos) it’s not actually easy to find its own news on there

Interest-Piquing: Dear Jerry, You Old Bastard. Really interesting article by one of the many people employed over the years to answer J D Salinger’s mail. And she didn’t even care for Catcher in the Rye. (actually, Slate has several articles catching my interest this week, also including Exile from Grrrville about 90s feminism, and Google Buzz’s massive errors in assumptions about privacy)

InsPiring: The Guardian offers up the Nat Tate hoax as “The greatest literary hoax ever“. My personal favourite is Ern Malley. What’s interesting is where people draw the line between hoax and fraud; Ern Malley and Nat Tate are a hoaxes, but William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries and Konrad Kujau’s Hitler Diaries are frauds. One suspect financial gain probably makes up the largest part of the judgement…

Procrastination: Etiquette Hell. I’ve lost a lot of time reading the archives, and now it’s moved to a blog format. It shows up the differences in teuqette between countries sometimes – the blog owner deems arranging your own birthday party appallingly bad etiquette, whereas in the UK assuming someone else will do it for you is bad etiquette.

No One Can Hear You should pop up on Three Crow Press soon – no sign of it yet, but that might just be those pesky timezones.