Random Thoughts of Barometric Pressures

For a long time now I’ve been looking at Kickstarter and Indiegogo and such. They’re fantastic crowd funding services that specialize in creative projects, rather like this one.

The basic idea is that creators can put together a project, a video describing their vision, a bunch of reward tiers, and a funding goal.

People like you and me then browse the projects, or hear about them on Twitter or Google+, and if you like what you see enough, you support the project by pledging money toward it.

What happens after that depends on the site. If funding is met, the project creator gets the money. If the funding isn’t met, on Kickstarter, that’s it, nothing happens. On Indiegogo, creators can do something called flexible funding, where they’ll get whatever is pledged.

There are pros and cons to each approach, but the jist of it is that it’s a fantastic means for people to raise some money to get an awesome project done.

It sounds pretty ideal for a site like this one, except that writing projects don’t really seem to have a strong appeal on these things. It’s especially tough for a digital writer like myself. I’ve never really imagined my work appearing in printed form. I’m a huge eBook proponent. I don’t actually object to the idea of printed versions, but it’s not really my plan, either.

Which means if I were to eventually go down this route, those reward tiers that I mentioned are tough to do. A lot of rewards are things like copies of the book, author signatures and so on. It’s easy enough to give out digital copies of an ebook, but all my work is already available for free, and I’ve been planning free eBook formats for a while now. So that doesn’t mean a whole lot.

It’s really difficult to sign an eBook. (Though I’ve heard there actually are projects underway to make this happen. I don’t know the details. I am really curious.) I have to imagine that wouldn’t be a great reward though, seeing as how my name isn’t worth anything yet.

This whole question of digital rewards has been on my mind for a while now, not as a focus, but as something rattling around in the back of my head. It’s an interesting problem to tackle. I still need to come up with a solution to it.

Thanks to some bad headaches (weather-induced, I think,) my mind is not in a fictional place. This means no update on The Ship of the Unforgotten today.

Save the Sci-Fi!

I learned of an admirable Kickstarter project the other day thanks to Tom Merritt and Veronica Belmont of the Sword and Laser podcast, and I thought those who follow my blog might be interested in knowing about it. It’s the Singularity & Co. Save the Sci-Fi project.

What they aim to do is save as many old, out of print sci-fi books as possible. Each month they pick a great classic or obscure or otherwise awesome sci-fi book that’s not in print and not online. They track down the author or whoever holds the copyright. They acquire the copyright or get permission from the rightsholder, and turn the book into an ebook for online publication. The resulting ebooks are either free or very cheap.

The Kickstarter for the project helps to fund these efforts to track down and acquire copyrights for the books they save, as well as fund development of the website and open source book scanner they make use of.

There are far too many books out there that are at serious risk of being lost if the paper degrades and nothing is done to preserve them, so this is a fantastic project well worth backing, or at the very least learning about.

There’s several bits of good news about it. The first is that they’re fully funded up to their goal of $15,000. The second is that as of this writing, they have 11 days to go, so you can still contribute and drive them even further past their goal—they sit right now at $24,059. With 11 days left, it doesn’t seem impossible that they’ll double what they were looking for.

Check them out at the Singularity & Co. Save the Sci-Fi Kickstarter! And be sure to let me know in the comments if you decided to back them.