Online Originals, Old Favorites & Literate Smut

UPDATE:  Nerve is back and it's more robust than ever. Its fresh brand of "literate smut" was a welcome balance to the carloads of illiterate and often offensive websites purveying traditional, simple-minded porn when it premiered. Now the magazine has a new look, new versions in French, Spanish and German, and a new members-only section called NerveCenter ("The Community of Thoughtful Hedonists"), where "more challenging" photos appear and where members can find one another via personals, chat and the like. We're glad they're back. And if you prefer your smut in print, you can buy the book (an anthology of writing from the magazine) at a 20-percent discount from our bookselling co-conspirators at amazon.com.

Sherlock Holmes's creator and others whose copyright has lapsed are at home at The Litrix Reading Room. This site purveys, at no cost to readers, the complete text of a selection of works now in the public domain. In plain vanilla are rendered titles by Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, Agatha Christie, Victor Hugo and many another. And it's all easy to read, easy to download, easy to print (if you have the time) -- all of which gives the ring of truth to proprietor Stan Jones' claim that his site, published from Anchorage, Alaska, is "a quiet place for lovers of good writing."

On the commercial side of the downloadable text ledger, Online Originals is the standout so far. The young digital publishers at O/O believe that conventional book publishing has changed dramatically in recent years, with most of the world's publishers now owned by a handful of media conglomerates, and the result of that being a strong tendency to accept manuscripts largely by celebrity authors whose output conforms to the mainstream (mass) market. Online Originals aims to counter the trend by making available new, unusual, and innovative works chosen for their intellectual or literary merit, rather than solely for their commercial potential. Small presses and certain scholarly presses have been pursuing the same admirable goal in print for some time, of course, but O/O's innovation is to exploit a new medium to deliver these works at consistently low prices while offering authors a uniformly generous cut of the proceeds. O/O is pioneering in other ways, too: it has become the first cyberpublisher to have a "virtual novel" (The Angels of Russia by Patricia le Roy) nominated for Britian's distingusihed Booker Prize. The British papers have been abuzz with the story, but their American counterparts have either missed or ignored it.

   Also Of Interest: 1st Books Library [ more downloadable books ]

Assistive Media, an Ann Arbor nonprofit, is in the download biz, too, but its free files are audio (and thus require the free RealPlayer plug-in for your browser). Assistive Media produces recordings of published works, many of them drawn from such magazines as The New Yorker and Wired, for "persons with text-reading/access barriers" -- which we think may translate as "people whose eyesight makes it difficult for them to read." (The size of the text at the website would seem to confirm that guess.) A good idea, we say, akin to our old fave The Radio Reader on NPR. You might want to pass the word along to a friend who misses the pleasures of the current prints.

McLuhan Was Wrong: Blithe House Quarterly is a solid contribution to good writing on the web, but the medium by which this literary magazine delivers its excellent short fiction by gay writers is a pointlessly tarted up web interface. While the message is eloquent, straightforward and well worth any reader's time, the 'zine's "cover" and TOC pages are long to load and short on content. If you get past the wallpapered-to-death top pages, you'll find sufficient reward in the text to keep you coming back. It would be a shame to miss the message here just because you have to wade through all that visual debris to get to it.

Virtual Ink is Clearinghouse approved.

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