AussieCon runs this week, Thursday to Monday, with about a bajillion panels on everything from fantasy cities to cyberpunk feminism. I've gone through the program, marking the panels I want to attend (and wishing that I had a few shared-mind clones to see the ones that clash), and wondering how the whole process is going to work for people who can't take an entire morning off to register tomorrow... eek. Ah well.

In actual news, Wylie's lost his fight against Random House for the ebook rights. The rights return to Random House - a strong reminder to read your contracts carefully for which rights revert when and why.

Jessica at Dystel and Goderich muses on intellectual property vs creative commons. There's long been the argument that IP exists solely to protect a wealthy nation's ability to make money at the expense of poorer nations. While the argument's obvious with pharmaceutical companies, it also covers authors' copyright. While I'm a strong advocate of copyright, there does seem to be an issue to resolve, here.

Joe Konrath is musing on some of the possibilities that self-publishing grants in terms of creative control - releasing different versions of books, for example, or revitalising the 'choose your own adventure' style of novel into a more literary concept. I'll admit, I'm intrigued by the notion of playing with the format like that.

Henry Baum gives us a brief impression of his day on Kindle Nation - complete with supposed SNAFU by Amazon. Amazon disabled his buy-button in the middle of the promotion because Kobo had undercut the price of the book in a way that wasn't in Baum's control. Mini-Macmillian-dummy-spit all over again.

And on a completely unrelated note, because someone asked me the other day: Nathan Bransford explains to us what 'High Concept' actually is - and it's not what it sounds like.