Amazon to pay royalties for fan fiction

Todd Bishop on the new “Kindle Worlds”:

The company says it will license rights to popular books, games, movies and other content to let independent authors write their own stories based on those worlds, and receive royalties from sales of their fan fiction through the company’s Kindle Store.

Seems like a smart idea. Though I have to imagine the most popular worlds, like Star Wars, would never agree to this. 

The Virginal Man of Steel

Dave Itzkoff talks with director Zack Snyder about his upcoming Superman film:

What drew Mr. Snyder in as he first read the “Man of Steel” script (while Mr. Nolan and his wife and producing partner, Emma Thomas, waited in his driveway) was a vision of the character that felt both classical and contemporary. On the one hand, Mr. Snyder suggested that for Clark Kent to be fully fleshed out, not every moment in his maturation needed to be depicted.

“We assume that Clark is not a virgin — I do,” he said. ” You don’t see that, but that’s the assumption.”

I love the notion of Snyder telling his producer (and wife) and Christopher Nolan to “wait in the car” while he goes to read a script. 

[via @anthonyha]

Learning From Los Gatos

Steven Johnson responding to a New Yorker column by George Packer:

Sure, companies went public or sold for staggering sums, but companies have been going public or selling out for generations without creating tens of thousands of millionaires along the way. The defining difference between Silicon Valley companies and almost every other industry in the U.S. is the virtually universal practice among tech companies of distributing meaningful equity (usually in the form of stock options) to ordinary employees. Before companies like Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard began the practice fifty years ago, distributing stock options to anyone other than top management was virtually unheard of. But the engineering tradition that spawned Silicon Valley was much more egalitarian than traditional corporate culture.

Many great points here.