Much of the negative response to LendInk came about because of a series of misunderstandings about how the service worked, and also a lack of knowledge about how Amazon handles lending for Kindle books. But the incident also says a lot about how authors view lending of e-books to begin with — many seem to see every book loaned as a potential sale that has been lost, just as the music industry used to look down on file-sharing of music as theft. But they are just as wrong.

Fear of piracy mixed with misunderstanding

It’s not clear how or why LendInk first attracted the recent fuss, since the service — which has been run by a single individual, founder owner Dale Porter — has been around for close to two years. At some point, an author noticed that their book was listed as being available for lending on the site, and sounded the alarm on Twitter, as well as discussion forums devoted to Kindle-published authors, saying the site was pirating their content. This eventually turned into a hue and cry by dozens of authors, all of whom called on their colleagues to send LendInk copyright-takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Those notices ultimately had the desired effect, and the company’s website was taken offline by its web-hosting provider. The situation was complicated by the fact that the service had more or less been running on auto-pilot for about 18 months because Porter — a disabled army veteran — had been dealing with health issues. As a result, copyright notices and angry emails from authors didn’t get an immediate reply, and that likely caused the anger to escalate.

In most cases, the authors who got the most upset about LendInk completely misunderstood the purpose of the website. To them, it looked as though the service was hosting copies of their books and allowing anyone to borrow them, something that would clearly be a breach of their rights as copyright holders — like an e-book version of MegaUpload.

Some authors are against sharing on principle

In fact, however, all LendInk did was allow readers who already owned e-books to connect with other readers who wanted to borrow them. As Porter explained in a statement posted to a reader forum, only books that had already been approved for lending by Amazon could be shared through the service, in the same way they can with services such as Lendle (whose CEO has posted a response to the LendInk incident).

Some authors didn’t even seem to be aware that their books could be loaned under the terms of their agreement with Amazon to publish on the Kindle, and a few later apologized for their attacks on LendInk — but others seemed unrepentant about their criticism, and argued that built-in approval for lending of e-books between complete strangers was somehow wrong. At least one author argued that sharing of books was fine between two friends, but not between two people who had been connected by a website or service like LendInk.

Aside from the misunderstandings about the service, the dissatisfaction felt by some authors about the whole idea of e-book lending seems to be driven by the same impulse that keeps publishers from making sharing easier: namely, the idea that every book that gets shared is a book that isn’t bought, despite the fact that plenty of evidence shows that sharing — and even outright piracy — in many cases helps increase the demand for content. As musician Neil Young put it recently: “Piracy is the new radio — it’s how music gets around.”

The sooner authors and publishers get used to that idea, the better off they will be. And taking down an innocent web service, whose only purpose was to try and increase the potential market for their books, is just an attempt to postpone the inevitable.

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Margaret Atwood doesn’t really need to find new ways to get attention: after all, the 72-year-old Canadian-born author and poet has already won a slew of awards, and is seen by many as a candidate for a Nobel Prize. Most authors her age would be resting on their laurels somewhere, but Atwood seems to have an unquenchable curiosity about new things, including Twitter. Now, she is working with the online writing community Wattpad to try and encourage new writers, and is also involved in a crowfunded effort to create a service called Fanado that authors can use to connect with their readers. Other authors may want to slow down, but Atwood seems to have no interest in joining them.

Wattpad is a Toronto, Ontario-based startup we’ve written about before that recently raised $17 million from a group of venture backers including Khosla Ventures and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. An online writing community that writers can get involved with either through the web or via mobile apps, Wattpad has more than 3 million users and over 5 million pieces of content uploaded to the network. And as Khosla Ventures partner Andrew Chung pointed out after the firm financed the company, the kind of interactive model that Wattpad is based on is very different from more traditional self-publishing services, which is one of the things that attracted Atwood about it.

Wattpad allows young writers to experiment

Instead of just uploading books, many members of Wattpad’s community upload unfinished chapters that are still in development, or pieces of poetry they need feedback on, and then get comments and advice from other users of the service — both other writers and readers. In a piece she wrote for the Guardian recently, Atwood talked about how that process could help young writers experiment and develop their own voices, giving them tools that writers of her generation never had at their disposal:

No one need know how old you are, what your social background is, or where you live. Your readers can be anywhere. And if you’re worried about adverse reactions from your teachers, your grandmother, or others who might not like you writing about slavering zombies or your relatives, you can use a pseudonym… [and] not only that, you’ll have readers who leave encouraging comments on your message board, thus boosting your morale.

In the past, Atwood says, writers like her had to scribble in notebooks or journals, experiment with poems in high-school yearbooks and keep their most heartfelt writing “in our sock drawers” for fear of ridicule. As they grew older, they helped to create literary magazines and journals that were chronically underfunded and handed out in coffee houses and other locations after Poetry Night or other open readings. The feedback that Wattpad writers can get, she says, is not only invaluable but actually recreates the kind of process that writers like Charles Dickens got when they serialized their work in magazines.

Atwood also notes that networks and communities like Wattpad aren’t necessarily a replacement for the traditional publishing industry, but more like an enhancement or addition to it. Some members of the Wattpad community have already gotten interest from mainstream publishers based on the response and the following they’ve gotten from other members of the service (in addition to becoming a member of Wattpad and posting poems of her own, Atwood has agreed to judge a Wattpad poetry contest). As she describes it:

Publishers bring a lot to the joint venture that is producing a book. Not everyone wants to read those kinds of books, and not everyone wants to write them – but they remain a huge aspiration for many. For those who want to hone their writing skills, schools and tools are increasingly available. In my view, Wattpad is not a replacement for publishers, but a gateway leading to them.

Atwood is also helping to create an interactive artists’ platform

In addition to her work with Wattpad, Atwood is one of the founding artists involved with a startup called Fanado, which is trying to raise funds through the crowdfunding service Indiegogo in order to launch a kind of digital-community platform for artists. The campaign, which closes at the end of July, has already raised $53,000 towards its goal of $85,000 and offers a number of perks — including the chance to become a character in a new Atwood novel, which comes with a donation of $10,000 or more (one fan has already claimed that perk, but two more are still open).

The idea behind Fanado is to give authors tools that they can use to interact with fans remotely, including the ability to share live video and audio of readings or get-togethers with a community, and to sign and distribute both electronic books and printed books, as well as CDs and other offerings related to a work. In some ways, Fanado is the logical extension of an earlier project that Atwood was involved in, which led to the development of an electronic book-signing device called the “Long Pen” — which authors could use to sign physical books in remote locations while on a virtual book tour.

But my favorite part of Atwood’s piece defending her experiment with Wattpad is when she talks about how people seem to see these projects as undignified in some way, as though they are beneath someone of her advanced age and/or standing in the literary community. As she puts it in the Guardian post:

Once again people are giving me strange looks… “But Margaret,” you can hear them whispering. “You’re a literary icon at the height of your powers; it says so on your book covers. Why are you sneaking out with an online story-sharing site heavy on romance, vampires and werewolves? You should be endorsing Literature, capital L. Get back up on that pedestal! Strike a serious pose! Turn to stone!

At her age, the literary legend argues, “you can afford to be undignified; you’re free to explore, and to guinea-pig yourself, and to stretch the boundaries.” Not only is that what Atwood wants to do, in multiple ways, but her support of Wattpad seems to stem from the belief that young writers need somewhere to do that as well, and that writing as a whole is better off for it — and that’s a pretty inspiring message.

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Russo’s daughter Emily, an independent bookseller at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, “will find your next favorite author. You would not believe some of the young, incredibly brilliant authors in the pipeline,” Russo said. “Emily will recommend them to you if you go to her store.” But you’re “not going to find out about [them] as a result of Amazon algorithms.” [Note: While Russo didn't elaborate, I don't think he's suggesting here that Amazon's algorithm is purposely covering up these authors; rather, he's suggesting that an algorithm can't replace an actual person who is knowledgeable about books and can make individual recommendations.]

Our staff writer and legal reporter Jeff John Roberts asked Russo what the solution is, since we can’t turn back time. Should the publishing industry turn to lawsuits as the music industry did when facing digital transition? No, says Russo, referring to the DOJ price-fixing lawsuit against publishers and Apple: “Right now the government seems to have Amazon’s back.” Instead, he said, authors, publishers, agents and readers “should just put the pressure on.” Referring to sales taxes, he said, “Amazon has been doing things that are incredibly predatory for a long time, but when enough people call them on it, they tend to back off.”

It probably goes without saying that longtime Knopf author Russo wouldn’t go the self-published route. “The thought of publishing a book that Gary Fisketjon has not edited,” he said, “literally chills my blood.”

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Thanks to the rise self-publishing tools, from Amazon’s Kindle platform to Apple’s iAuthor software, anyone who wants to write a book can do so and theoretically reach an audience of millions — as self-publishing superstars such as Amanda Hocking and John Locke have shown. But this explosion of amateur authors and publishers also means a lot more competition for an audience. So how do writers make money? First of all, according to author and marketer Seth Godin, they have to give up the idea that they somehow deserve to be paid for their writing.

In a recent interview with Digital Book World, the writer and creator of the Domino Project — a joint publishing venture with Amazon that he recently wound up — was asked about his advice that authors should give their books away for free and that they should worry more about spreading their message and building a fan base instead of focusing on how to monetize it right away. And how would he respond to writers concerned about their ability to make a living from their writing? Godin’s response:

Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word — over.

The rise of the amateur has disrupted all forms of content

This probably isn’t the kind of message that most authors (or creative professionals of any kind) want to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The rise of the amateur, powered by the democratization of distribution provided by the Web and social media, is something that is disrupting virtually every form of content that can be converted into bits. To take just two examples, the news industry is struggling to adapt to an era where anyone can commit “random acts of journalism” with a blog or smartphone — and where sources of news have the ability to publish their own content instead of having to go through a middleman — and photography has been battling the rise of the amateur for years now.

The crucial principle at work in all of these areas is the idea that your real competition isn’t the book or news outlet that is better than you; it’s the one that is good enough for a majority of your audience. So maybe the Huffington Post version of that news story isn’t as good as the one in the New York Times, but it is good enough for many readers. And maybe those vampire books by Amanda Hocking or the detective novels from million-selling author John Locke aren’t as good as yours, but for hundreds of thousands of weekend readers they are probably good enough. Godin’s point isn’t that you can’t make money; it’s that you have to think differently about how to accomplish that task.

If you’re a mystery writer, can you find 1000 true fans to pay a hundred dollars a year each to get an ongoing serial from you? It’s not the market’s job to tell authors how to monetize their work. The market doesn’t care. If there’s no scarcity of what they want, it’s hard to get them to pay for it.

Who says that artists have a right to make money?

Film director Francis Ford Coppola said something similar in a recent interview, in which he discussed some of the lessons he had learned over decades of practicing his craft. He also talked about how the Internet — and specifically the widespread downloading of music and movies — has changed the nature of the business. Somewhat surprisingly for someone who has been involved in creating some of Hollywood’s biggest commercial successes, Coppola said that he sympathized more with those doing the downloading than he did with the content creators whose work was being affected:

As we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

As media theorist Clay Shirky has pointed out before, abundance breaks a lot of content-related business models that were built on scarcity, and that includes the ones that have supported the book-publishing industry for so long. That’s why publishers have been scrambling to try to lock down their content — including jacking up the prices that libraries pay for e-books — and it’s why authors who have a built-in audience are using the Web to connect directly with that audience. Godin’s message may not be a popular one, but it is the way that content works now.

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Over the past few months, Google has been rolling out new features for search results that allow writers to tag their profiles and blog posts and have them show up in Google with a photo and other information attached. Now the web giant has announced that these will also show up in Google News searches, but there is a catch: The new features are only available to writers who have created and linked to a profile on Google’s new Google+ network. Is the search company helping authors get discovered more easily, or has it crossed the line by trying to promote the use of its own social network over others?

In a conversation about the new features on Twitter on Wednesday night, Emily Bell — the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a former head of digital at The Guardian — made it clear that she didn’t like Google’s approach at all, saying she was “appalled,” and that the requirement to use Google+ profiles smacked of “coercion.” Bell elaborated on her opposition in a blog post, saying the move felt like similar attempts by giant corporations such as Microsoft to use their dominance in one area to force users into adopting services in another. Bell added:

By telling journalists that their visibility will only increase (a good thing) by using a particular social platform which demands specific protocols, it is a form of coercion. Profiles on publishers own platforms will not be featured. Neither will profiles on Facebook or Twitter.

Blogger and programmer Kevin Marks made a similar point during the Twitter back-and-forth with Emily and others, including O’Reilly writer Alex Howard. Marks said that linking only to Google+ profiles was too restrictive, and that using thumbnails or links to other profiles on competing networks as well would be more “web-like.” As Marks pointed out, there are a number of ways that Google — which has been a firm advocate of open-source software and interoperability in other areas, a stance that has caused clashes with Facebook in the past — could do this, by using open standards such as hCard, rather than giving preferential treatment to its own network.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that GigaOM was approached by Google early on in the roll-out of the new author tag features, and I took part in the beta trial by adding a link from my WordPress profile to my Google+ profile (which I already had). This caused my blog posts to appear in search results with my avatar photo attached to them, and other information — such as a link to my Google+ page and the number of “circles” that I have been added to on the service. A screenshot is embedded below:

From the point of view of a writer and journalist, having a photo and a link to my profile appear on search results is a positive thing — as Alex Howard also noted in his post on the topic. At a time when journalism is hopefully becoming more human-centered (despite attempts by media organizations to prevent this from happening with close-minded social-media policies), having those photos and links helps to build trust and a personal brand with readers. I created a profile on Google+ for the same reason I create one on almost every social service or network: because I want to be found, and I want people to read what I write and then tell me what they think.

That said, however, I share some of Emily Bell’s discomfort with the way that Google has done this. It’s good to have a profile appear in search, and it may even be good to have the number of circles I appear in show up in those results as well — but the fact that this gives Google’s own network a boost rather than the other networks that it competes with feels wrong. It may not be enough to contribute to an anti-trust case against the web giant, but it feels as though the company is trying to put its thumb on the scale and give Google+ a leg up in the social-identity race, which is heating up.

That was enough of a concern when the results just showed up in search, but Bell’s point is that now these enhanced profiles are going to show up in Google News, and that’s going to create a number of issues: for one thing, it could make it look as though certain writers are preferred by Google simply because they have Google profiles. And for another, it could give the impression that Google is also trying to tell users of the service what news they should read, which I am not a fan of for a number of reasons.

I think Google needs to reconsider how it has implemented these new features, and add support for links to other services as well. Whether it will do so or not remains to be seen, but the message behind these and other moves is clear: Google+ is not just a social network, it is an attempt to create a unified social backbone for all of its services — and the full implications of that are only just beginning to become obvious.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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Hot on the heels of Amazon signing publishing deals with authors, and thus doing an end-run around their publisher partners, another major e-reader company says it plans to do the same: Kobo is launching its own publishing arm and looking to sign deals with authors directly. All of this is more proof (as if we needed any) that the Internet is potentially lethal to middlemen. Does this mean that traditional publishers will soon be extinct? No. But it does mean that they are going to have to work harder to try to do what Amazon is already doing — namely, making it easier and more profitable for authors to reach their readers.

For months now, Amazon has been busy ramping up its publishing unit, which it beefed up earlier this year with the hiring of publishing-industry veteran Larry Kirshbaum. It has signed deals with popular authors like Tim Ferriss, as well as thriller writer and former CIA operative Barry Eisler, who turned down a $500,000, two-book contract with a traditional publisher to self-publish and then accepted a deal from Amazon instead. Although Kobo is a relatively small player in the U.S., it has a strong presence in Europe, and CEO Michael Serbinis says adding publishing services for authors is now “table stakes” for a digital-book distributor — which raises the possibility that number two player Barnes & Noble could be the next to join the fray.

All that matters is connecting writer with reader

As I described in a recent post, Eisler said that what made the decision to go with Amazon easy was that the web giant promised to not only get his books to market faster — both in print and electronic form — but also offered to sell them at a lower price than the traditional publisher, and apparently (although the terms of his deal weren’t released) gave him a bigger share in the proceeds to boot. He told the CBC that he has been making “far more per unit than I would ever make with a legacy publisher, and I’m also selling the book in far more volume than I would have with a legacy publisher.”

Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti gave the most succinct comment about the new world that publishers find themselves in: a wakeup call that should be posted in giant letters in every publishing house and agency. In an interview about Amazon’s moves into signing authors directly, he told the New York Times:

[T]he only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.

Much like newspapers used to control the channels through which news flowed before the web came along, book publishers have always been the gatekeepers who stood between authors and their readers — for the most part, they determined whose books would be published, how much attention they got, how much they would be sold for, and so on. The web has disrupted that to some extent all by itself, but Amazon has poured fuel on the fire with its Kindle self-publishing platform, which has allowed authors like Amanda Hocking and John Locke to bypass traditional industry channels. Why wouldn’t an author want to sign up directly with the retailer who actually delivers their books to readers?

Amazon could find itself disintermediated as well

What’s interesting about Grandinetti’s comment, however, is that it doesn’t exclude Amazon itself — or other book retailers — from being disrupted. We’ve already seen what that can do to real-world booksellers like Borders, which had to enter bankruptcy liquidation, but Amazon and Kobo (which is part owned by Canadian book retailer Chapters Indigo) also have to prove that they offer something extra for authors too. Otherwise, some writers might decide to take a cue from Tim Pratt and use Kickstarter to finance their books and sell them directly to readers. Amazon gets a cut of Kindle sales like Amanda Hocking’s, but likely not as much as it does by signing an author to an exclusive publishing deal.

So what can publishers do? The same thing Amazon is doing: give authors what they most want and need. It’s a quick and painless way of reaching their readers — as many readers as possible, in as many different ways as possible. Also, make sure they are really adding value to that relationship with an author, not just counting on the former gatekeeper status to keep authors in their stables.

Simon & Schuster made an interesting move recently by offering its authors more sales data and other information about their books, as a way of providing something they couldn’t get elsewhere. That’s smart; many authors are looking for more of that kind of data, so that they can take charge of their own fates, instead of just waiting for a publisher to do everything for them. Amazon is also trying to add services for authors, like its @author program that makes it easier for writers to connect with readers. Those kinds of features are likely to become even more important selling points as books become more social.

It’s also worth noting that Amanda Hocking, who became famous for making millions by self-publishing her books for young adults on the Kindle, signed a deal with a traditional publisher earlier this year. In a blog post about her decision, she said that publishers can still provide some necessary things, even for a self-published author — including a strong editor, as well as some marketing muscle and the ability to help writers move from just being successful to being global superstars. Unfortunately for publishers, Amazon and other e-book distributors like Kobo likely have their sights set on providing most of those services too.

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Using social-media tools like Twitter, Facebook and blogs has become almost a necessity for musicians, authors and creative professionals of all kinds, as a way of both promoting their work and connecting with their fans. But can doing all this get in the way of the creative spark that makes them artists in the first place? Singer John Mayer raised a warning flag about exactly that in a recent presentation to young musicians, telling them to avoid social media and concentrate on the music. Fellow musician David Usher, however, says that while he agrees Twitter can become addictive and distracting, young artists still need to do it.

Mayer, who has won several Grammy awards for his music, told students at the Berklee College of Music in Massachusetts that using social media — including his blog and a very active Twitter account that at one point had more than 4 million followers — got so distracting that he started focusing on that rather than creating new music. According to a Berklee blog post about his presentation, Mayer said that he started asking himself questions like “Is this a good blog? Is this a good tweet?” instead of “Is this a good song title? Is this a good bridge?” Mayer added:

I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic… I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.

Mayer’s struggles with Twitter have been well publicized, thanks to his former relationship with actress Jennifer Aniston, which made him a target of the tabloid press. He quit Twitter in late 2010 — after reports that his “obsession with Twitter” caused problems in his relationship with the actress — and he has spoken out before about how he believes that no one who participates in Twitter has created any “lasting art.”

To see if Mayer’s views were shared by other professional musicians, I asked David Usher for his thoughts on the topic. Usher, a Canadian singer-songwriter whose former band Moist had a number of top 10 hits in the late 1990s (and someone I consider a friend, in the interests of full disclosure) has been an avid user of all forms of social media in his successful solo career, including his blog, Twitter account and Facebook page. He even helped develop a digital-media tool called DEQQ that allows fans to talk with him directly and get updates about songs.

Usher, who is currently on tour, said that he has also struggled with the impact that social media has on his life as an artist — primarily the effort and time that it takes to engage in all of those forms of communication, but also the psychological distraction that always being connected brings. While Usher said he loves to “play with all the new shiny social media toys” when they come out, and loves the fact that Twitter and Facebook provide “a new way for us to communicate and connect,” he also finds it a distraction.

The addiction to the endless interruption and engagement does make it hard to find the flow of creation. The endless ping of your phone makes it harder to live in the moment, to be present. Observing life is so much a part of the creative process for me that the constant distraction of social media has become problematic.

The singer said that while he has not cancelled Twitter or shut down his blog the way Mayer has, he is trying to scale back his involvement more. “I want to try to figure out how to stay connected without being the guy who is always looking at his iPhone — it’s not an easy balance,” he said. Some of that involves trying to connect more aspects of his social-media world together, such as syndicating his blog through Facebook and Twitter, and connecting Facebook comments into his blog. “I’m really trying to limit the pages I need to look at to stay connected,” he added.

One thing the singer disagrees with when it comes to Mayer’s views on social media, however, is the necessity for young artists to use these tools to promote themselves and their work. In his Berklee presentation, Mayer said that the constant urgency that some artists feel to update their blogs or YouTube channels with new songs or clips was also a distraction, and that musicians should focus on writing good music and let the promotional part wait until later. Usher said this wasn’t a realistic approach:

I actually don’t think it’s great advice to tell young artists not to bother with social media. It’s like saying don’t use the telephone. That’s fine if you have a huge machine that will do all your talking and promotion for you — but most of us still need to let people know we are playing. You can have the greatest songs in the world but if the room is empty, it still sucks.

In the end, the singer-songwriter said, artists of all kinds, whether new or well-established, have to find their own “social media voice,” and then manage that in such a way so that it doesn’t become too much of a distraction. I think this advice extends beyond just the artistic world. Anyone who has spent much time on Twitter or Facebook or even Google+ knows that such networks can become a “time suck” that threatens to overwhelm other aspects of your life. Some of that — and some of the talk about Twitter “addiction” — might be explained by the chemical changes in the brain that research shows take place when we engage with others through social media.

The bottom line, however, is that while managing the use of these networks may be difficult, it is becoming a skill that we all need to master, whether we are famous musicians or not.

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Plenty of authors take to Twitter as part of a marketing strategy for their books, and some even stick around, among them Chuck “Fight Club” Pahlaniuk and Brazilian magic realism author Paulo Coelho, and science fiction author and Boing Boing founder Cory Doctorow. But few of the published authors who have adopted Twitter have the stature of Margaret Atwood, and even fewer stick with it the way the grand dame of Canadian fiction has. Not only has she continued to tweet enthusiastically since her book “Year of the Flood” came out, but she seems to really enjoy the interaction, as she describes in a piece written for the New York Review of Books.

One follower led to another, quite literally. The numbers snowballed in an alarming way, as I scrambled to keep up with the growing horde. Soon there were 32,000—no, wait, 33,000—no, 33,500…And before you could say LMAO (“Laughing My Ass Off,” as one Twitterpal informed me), I was sucked into the Twittersphere like Alice down the rabbit hole. And here I am.

Atwood says there were already two other Margaret Atwoods on Twitter when she joined, including one that used her photo, but she managed to wrestle the account away from them with the help of “the Twitterpolice.” And she says that in order to gain followers she “hummed a few bars from ‘Mockingbird Hill’—Tra-la-la, twittly-deedee—and sacrificed some of my hair at the crossroads, invoking Hermes the Communicator” (she also got some help from McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves, a veteran Canadian web guru).

Atwood calls the Twittersphere “an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden.” But she seems to particularly like the back-and-forth with her followers: “Despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers,” she says, adding that they include “a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They’re a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it’s immediately forthcoming.”

The author notes that her followers and fans have caught typos and love to respond to verbal challenges, including one that she started during the Olympics to suggest a more Canadian version of the official government slogan “Own The Podium” (her suggestion was a polite “a podium might be nice”). Atwood says it was “like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!” And in the end, she says:

So what’s it all about, this Twitter? Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let’s just say it’s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.

Well said, Margaret. But then, we probably don’t have to tell you that.

Post and thumbnails courtesy of Flickr user Peter A Wolf