thanksgiving is for meta

So while navigating separate pages of chapters of a fic to cut and paste into Word (that would be thirty-six goddamn chapters of copy/paste, convert to html, add to calibre, and convert to mobi), I had a lot of time to think one day about reading habits; ie, my interaction with fanfiction. Me and my Kindle did not have a hard bond on the subject of fanfic until my schedule became insane at work this summer and suddenly it was a hell of a lot easier to navigate AO3 on my Kindle to grab fics I wanted to read or do a sweep at home through the archive, add a whole whole bunch to calibre, and upload quickly.

Now with both my Kindle and Kindle Fire, the habit is set; I want it readable on one of them, and if I have time, I'll damn well make it readable, but if I don't, it's a skip. And this, retrospectively, is by far the biggest shift in my fanfic reading habits since the mailing-list to livejournal changeover, which was preceded by the usenet to mailing list (and yes, there's overlap in all of these).

And I say this with complete understanding of my own quirks; AO3's single-one-stop mobi and single-page format reading options have really fed my entitlement, to the point where I'm staring at ff.net hatefully and muttering, and yes, The Paladin Protocol was totally worth it, but still. Thirty six chapters with careful copy/pasting and everything jumping to center abruptly for no reason so I had to format did give me some moments of pure hatred.

To give some context, I was on ff.net before the NC-17 ban and did a full delete of my account when it came down. A lot of this was I wasn't trained into ff.net's structure early on so I had no reason to stay; I was trained into fanfiction in Trek when everyone was getting geocities webpages and everyone on their own pages would do single-page format for long stories (and short) I could download (fairly easily) and I only read short form in email off mailing list. And all my character codes, my pairing code order and fandom acronym and header structure were announced on ASC and pretty much everyone followed it because I don't say everyone in Trek was there, but it sure felt like it.

As far as pairing codes and fandom acronyms go, I'm really into authoritarianism; I am a fan of a certain level of rigid structuring being in place that everyone uses and then a more free-flow beneath that. I have no personal opinion and attach no deep meaning to whether Clark or Lex goes first in a pairing code because in Trek, if I remember correctly, it was based on rank followed by first appearance (see Neelix, Kes, Seven of Nine). And it took me several years in fandom to realize people did, in fact, use pairing code to express a lot more than these people were in a relationship and/or fucking. It could be--and sometimes was--a rather sophisticated expression of how they were fucking and many variations in between.

Has anyone else noticed this kind of shift? In Trek and early X-Men, I was very much save and print, because dial-up was expensive and my computer was slow and a desktop. Late X-Men to SGA, it was very much save to disk and read, because by SV I had a faster computer and by SGA I had a laptop. Late SGA to well, this summer was bookmark to delicious, so I could read it anywhere I had a connection. Now I'm back to the surreality of cut-paste to html to calibre to mobi, plus bookmark to delicious (bundles are back! And fucked up, but I can deal with that, they are still here!) plus save to disk for later mobi conversion. AO3 and the mobile archives are suddenly like, places I spent a lot of time tracking down authors in the hopes that the story they posted to LJ is archived there and trying not to judge them if they aren't (yes, I do not have my entire back catalogue on AO3 yet, but this is because I am lazy and because even after conversion, I have to go in and hand edit some truly hideous things I did in html tags back when I didn't know better. My later stuff when I became a fan of using style sheets is ridiculously easy in comparison).

Also, AO3 is faster than calibre in bulk conversion if not in fine tuning the formatting. And now I'm faintly resentful I can't find a site I can go to, copy in the addresses of a whole bunch of bits of stories, and have them deliver me a single file mobi file on the spot. Which I can honestly say like, a year ago I would have called myself an entitled ass, but that was before I drank the e-reader kool-aid and realized that this was like, the reason I was born, you understand. To clutch my Kindle in one hand and read with a flicker of my finger anywhere in the world without fuss and without bulk (this has transformed flying for me, you understand. Transformed it).

So in light of massive turkey consumption and having a glorious four days of no work and catching up on my sleep and whatnot, anyone else having a revelation in reading habits? And more importantly, and this made me curious, with the advent of ereaders and tablets and very large phone screens, is the future of fanfic archives going to shift to an equal if not higher focus on accessibility on mobile devices instead of on the current computer screen standard size and functionality?

(To be fair, this is also the result of entering a fandom read-only and falling in love with a het pairing so hard I think I bruised myself, but oh my God I love Penny. I just love Penny and I want her to have everything she wants in the universe. And after Rodney blowing up solar systems, Sheldon doesn't worry me at all. Though norabombay thinks what the world needs is support group fic where John Sheppard, John Watson, Penny, and Clark all gather for cookies and xanax to talk about how they deal with genius-teetering-on-the-potential-for-supervillian significant others and everyone sits in awe of Penny who has like, a pack of them wandering around her and she hasn't killed them all yet and how she does it. Because I love Penny. And support groups are a good thing.)

Comments

[ratcreature]

There exists a useful online tool that will make you a single file html or ebook from ff.net stories. I don't know how good the ebook formatting is but the single file html works great. So no c&p needed anymore:
http://www.flagfic.com/howto

[talitha78]

I can vouch for the mobi files. Works like a dream!

[amalthia]

First, if you're still using ff.net I highly recommend you check out the program Fanfiction Downloader. There is no good reason for you to be copying and pasting ff.net chapters into a single file when the program can do it for you. :)

I think it even outputs mobi. Since I discovered this program I find myself reading a lot at ff.net and A03 because it's incredibly hard to beat a single file option and ease of conversion to epub/mobi in Calibre.

Right now I'm unemployed so I'm able to read more on my computer than I had in the past but when I had very little time in the evenings to use my computer I couldn't read the multi-chapter stories on LJ easily or at all.

My fan fiction reading habits completely changed when I got my Sony e-ink device.

[jamafanta]

Seconded! I don't know of any tool which makes LJ easier, but the Downloader works for a number of archival sites (not just ff.net).

[calligrafiti]

I never got into printing out fic (no printer), but since I got an ereader in September I am all about the easy-to-convert AO3 materials. A couple of epic FayJay podfics got me to Barcelona with my usual no sleep on the plane, but at least with sanity intact(ish). Not that those were ereader-specific things, but I followed links off f the stories I was also downloading for the trip and this comment probably would have made more sense if I'd had less wine at dinner. Oh well. Glad you like the Kindle, and I hope the other commenters' ff-related links help.

[serrico]

I read epic novel-sized fic now! Which I used to do in late-Buffy early-SV fandom, when everything was single-page format and nothing hurt, then got out of the habit of doing ~8 years ago because that's about the time when everybody started posting their epic longfics to LJ in multiple entries, and I was stuck with dialup for a *really long time* and sometimes just loading multiple pages on LJ would choke my computer. (This isn't even addressing the "part 1/?" thing, which, yes, did happen on mailing lists, but I'm pretty sure LJ exacerbated it. I still refuse to start reading WIPs until they're finished.) I'm no longer on dialup, and haven't been for a few years now, but the habit stuck: I still don't like having to be stuck at the computer, clicking through multiple pages of a huge story.

But with the Kindle--and AO3's download options/people's willingness and ability to provide PDF files/my willingness and ability to *make* PDF files--MY LONG PERSONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER. The one-file format makes me happy. The portability is magnificent. I've read SO MANY BIG BANGS this year, you have NO IDEA. And when Yuletide comes around, I can do what I did last year and just dump everything I want to read on the Kindle and browse at my leisure.

Ereaders are WONDERFUL for fic. [/true believer testimony]

[seperis]

Seriously, it's like finding out I've been missing a major portion of my brain and now, now it's here and oh, joy. I love my ereader.

[selenay]

When AO3 started offering download options that allowed me to put fanfic onto my Kindle I almost cried for joy. It's the technology that we've been waiting for! I love it and I've been reading more fic this year than I had in a couple of years.

I think this is going to be the way that archive have to go. Making fic available in the two or three main ereader formats can only add to readership and it seems like tablets, readers and phones are turning into the main way that people access the net. They have the advantage of being portable, so people can access stuff wherever they are and making it easy to store things for offline use just makes it even more convenient.

[lorax]

I always read online and never downloaded anything, but now that I mostly read on my phone and ipod, and use calibre to manage everything, I download EVERYTHING to read, unless it's really short, and wonder how I survived before the AO3's neat little epub button.

[lurksnomore]

I had/have a similar pattern. Back in the day when I got into HP, I would c&p into a txt file and read on my Handspring Visor. Heh. I still miss Helpful Henry I. Some time after that I moved to using delicious (i think you could chart the growing culture of conectivity by fic readers' reading patterns sometimes) and then there was the firstniteration of deliciousfail. there was delicious fail. That was when i started doing the txt file thing again. Might have been in the middle if SGA? Can't remember, exactly. I noticed when moving to pinboard after delicious/coif fail how may of the docs were 404s in pinboard (I love that pinboard has that function). Now I just read on the iPad (Helpful Henry VI), and store the fics in my dropbox, because it's device independent. What a long, strange way we've cone.

[out_there]

anyone else having a revelation in reading habits?

I'm not at the e-reader stage (hell's bells, I only bought a laptop in the last three months. I am never at the early-adoptor stage with new tech. I just don't trust it enough), but AO3 has spoiled me for reading multiple chapter works on LJ. Mostly because having to click through 18 different pages to read a 60k story is terribly tedious when I know I can click on AO3, save one page to flash drive and then read at home, lying in bed/at my leisure.

I started reading fic in the days of everyone with their own site/geocities and while I've certainly loved LJ (and these days, DW because of the longer word limit and easy crossposting), AO3 has become my favourite way to read long (say, more than fits on one DW page) stories.

Though norabombay thinks what the world needs is support group fic where John Sheppard, John Watson, Penny, and Clark all gather for cookies and xanax to talk about how they deal with genius-teetering-on-the-potential-for-supervillian significant others and everyone sits in awe of Penny who has like, a pack of them wandering around her and she hasn't killed them all yet and how she does it.

Hee! That is amazingly right. That should exist.

[dreamatdrew]

/me heartily recommends instapaper.

[nafs]

http://fanfictionloader.appspot.com/

I actually used to have a way to download all chapters of a fic off of LJ and onto my Palm. It wasn't always pretty and it didn't *always* work, but it did save me a lot of time back in the day. I'm still going through the resulting files to convert them to something my Reader will deal with, and every so often I do a quick search of AO3 to see if something is up there instead. If I can dig out the software and make it work again, I'll comment with more details.

[domarzione]

Just so long as you don't become one of those fannish readers who comment on other people's stories asking when the 100k-word story is going to be available in single-page format because if it's not, you're never going to read it and you want me to read your fic, don't you? Don't you?!?

[seperis]

...not yet, no. *worries*

[brownbetty]

nth-ing the ffdownloader people have mentioned. I have a command line version of it, from before it was given a GUI, which I keep in the hope that I will someday be able to make it work with the henneth-anuin archive.

[strina]

The various fic downloaders are completely to blame for my ff.net renaissance, because if it can't go on my Kindle, I am just not interested. It's not just being able to take the fic with me - revolutionary and amazing as I find that - it's BEING ABLE TO BOOKMARK THE GOOD PARTS. I don't have to remember chapter titles or anything, I can just scan the My Notes and Marks section and bam! Straight to the emotional payoff or hilarious shenanigan of choice.

Another option is Squee!Book (or here, for less-featured, more-tested original), which can download from LJ as well as ff.net and AO3.

[christycorr]

AO3 has spoiled me so bad. I noticed this fairly recently, too.

I actually went through my most recent bookmarks this month to change the links so that they'd point to AO3 (when available, of course); it's so much easier to copy my favourites to my Kindle that way! (Unlike you, I don't really send the fic to my Kindle unless I've already read and loved it. If there were a speedier process to do it in bulk, I would, but it's still too cumbersome, especially considering how many <5000-word fics I read.)

More often than not, I find it annoying to have to read on LJ/DW when I'm on my phone, so I default to mainlining AO3 fic like a madwoman and putting off reading non-AO3 fic.

Which is horrible and I really shouldn't, but oh well. I kind of wish I could persuade all fic authors to post on AO3—it's so much easier to find things! So much more standardised and upfront than LJ! And I don't ever have to ?format=light in a hurry to avoid horrid layouts! :DD

I was a ff.net member when they purged the NC-17 fics; it was very icky and it really pissed me off, so I never really looked back; their layout still creeps me out, so I basically never read there. I'll Google the hell out of a ff.net fic if it's highly recced, in order to try to find a mirror somewhere. Worst case scenario, I'll copy-paste. Just—no.

Plus, for reading uber-long fics on my computer, I can have all the chapters on a single page. The beauty. I can't even. ♥ ♥

(I have a Pinboard archive account, which stores at-the-time-of-bookmarking snapshots of all my bookmarks, so it's a definite plus to have all the chapters stored in case the fic goes kaput.)

tl;dr *sighs* Hi, my name is Chris and I'm an AO3 addict.

[two-of-tree.livejournal.com]

I've been using this (http://fanfictiondownloader.net/) to download multi-chapter stories from FF.net, if it's any help?

[two-of-tree.livejournal.com]

Also have heard of this one (http://www.flagfic.com/) but haven't tried it out yet. Must remedy that.

[mylenn.livejournal.com]

Might I suggest http://dev.squeebook.net/ ?

It is supper easy, downloads to multiple ebooks formats and will allow you to upload many chapters at a time. I have never had any problems with the ebooks it produces. It is the only site I use nw to get fanfic onto my ipad/iphone.

[vicki_rae.livejournal.com]

Yes. This. I always look for an AO3 link.

I copy pasted together all the many many parts of Beadattitude's Checkmate series and turned it into one ebook but there are very few multi-multi part fics I'd do that for.

Every AO3 fic of any length at all that looks interesting goes on my Kindle for reading at a later date. Any fic on LJ or DW that I really want to read (that's more than one part) gets copy pasted into word and Kindled. And everything I adore no matter how short also gets Kindled.

My only problem now is remembering to leave feedback. I finally started tagging fics on my pinboard as unread-kindle so I can find them again to leave comments.

[lincolnkw.livejournal.com]

damn you.

I now find a need to read that story in your last paragraph. The only Het pairing I find myself reading and there is a sad lack of stories that I can find for it.

That aren't painful to read. Huzzah to the Paladin Protocol!

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I love that story so much. I mean, thirty-six chapter cut and pasting to get it, and I was okay with this because holy God yes.

There are some good ones at AO3 as well, but I'd kill for more super long ones. Just want so much.

[etui.livejournal.com]

I have over 500 fics converted to epub for my iPad, but I only make the effort if I have read and loved it first, so I still do the first read online. I don't need or want paper anymore, though. It's wonderful to have all the stories I love in one small package. I also combine a story and all its sequels into one epub, which makes it so much easier to keep reading once I've started a series.

I burned through a lot of stories over the summer. I've taken a break to try and read through some of them, but I've got a lot more I'd like to convert so I can get rid of the printed copies.

I love AO3 for the ease of downloading and I always try there first for stories I want to save. I have also figured out how to convert from a Word file, for stories I had saved that aren't online anymore, and to do "view source" and copy and paste html from other sites. And I curse as I do this for the 10th chapter in a fic that could have been posted in 2 or 3 parts on LJ based on its length. I feel your pain with the 36-part FF.net story. I still edit all the files before I save them to standardize the html/css to display them the way I want, but that's often a lot easier with AO3 files than other sources. The worst mess I've had to deal with looked like it started out as a Word document which was saved as html, then run through Calibre to create an epub. Both MS and Calibre add a ton of style codes to the html, and it wasn't pretty trying to figure out what they were doing. After that, I started using Sigil to create the epubs rather than Calibre.

I have learned so much about html and css from this process. :)

[vicki_rae.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I adore Sheldon and Penny and don't see Sheldon/Penny but here's the thing. I didn't see canon Kirk/Spock at all either until I read, um, I think the first one I read was You'll Get There In the End, and then War Games & Repeat Offender. I have all three saved in Word and on my Kindle.

And oh hell yes Kirk/Spock works in canon and I say that as a hardcore Kirk/McCoy and Spock/Uhura shipper.

Do you have a link handy for Paladin Protocol?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

*g* Oh yes, I do.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5623923/1/The_Paladin_Protocol

I also have the mobi and I think I have an HTML of the entire thirty-six chapters in a single file. Email me at seperis at gmail if you want me to send that.

[belleweather.livejournal.com]

I came in to fandom in 1997-8, so still in the mailing list/archive era, and I was mainly into X-files. I didn't have internet access at home, so every day I would go to the library and cut and paste all the interesting fic I could find into wordpad and save to my 3.5 inch floppy so I could read it on my ancient black and white 386 laptop (with no modem). I'd save my favs to disk and then delete everything on the floppy to be ready for the next day. Something like ffnet or LJ, where fic wasn't in one long page would have been terrible for me at that point, since I got half an hour of computer time at a shot and needed to grab-and-go as quick as possible. Which meant I was willing to try all sorts of cracktastic and crazy stories (including my first slash story) especially if they were long, because otherwise I had nothing to read at all, and couldn't get more stories until the next time I went to the library.

I drifted out of X-files when the show started sucking, and didn't get back into fandom until 2003. By then I had a good laptop and wireless DSL and had been on LJ for a couple of years. Everything was posted chapter by chapter, which didn't bother me since I had always-on internet. It also meant I read a lot of shorter and mid-length work, because popping open a tab was less commitment than downloading to a disc with limited space.

I got my Kindle a year ago, and the ability to take fanfic with me easily -- like, to toss it in my purse the way I would with a trashy novel to read in a waiting room or on a bus -- was totally life-changing. I don't use Calibre, (it irritates the snot out of me) so everything that I convert off LJ is cut-and-paste either into textedit or into an online converter which spits out .mobi to download. It's a LOT to commit to for stories I'm not sure about or something that's only going to take me 5 minutes to read. I have never been a supporter of AO3 or OTW, but the ability to easily download .mobi versions of fic has significantly changed my thoughts about the archive, because being able to download, e-mail, synch and go is such a seductively useful functionality to have.

It's interesting, though, that the way I'm reading now really hearkens back to the way I read in my X-phile days -- I'll troll LJ and the archive for new, exciting fics, download a mess of them, synch them to my Kindle and then read until I run out of stuff to read, rinse and repeat. It also means a distinct preference for either short fics (1000-1500 words) or long epics, since that's what makes most sense on my Kindle and that I'll totally go for length and ease-of-download over quality in choosing what to read.

[wynddancer.livejournal.com]

Reading on FF.Net or LJ is a huge PITA but it's doable to see if you want to commit to the whole process of copy and paste and convert to mobi. On the Kindle go to the address where the fic is on ff.net or LJ, and switch it to Article Mode, this prevents the LJ scrolling and allows you to enlarge the font on ff.net and LJ for reading. Then, you'll need to switch back to web mode to surf for the next part, if necessary. It's what I do to determine if a fic is good enough for the whole copy and paste, etc., process

[chosenfire28.livejournal.com]

God I love this post.

After I got my Kindle AO3 pretty much became my favorite place ever. I grabbed a ton of fics there by searching my favorite pairings and finding the longest complete stories. Right now I am nearing 300 fanfics on my Kindle (and probably 100 books, maybe).

I've found myself getting annoyed with large fics posted to LJ or even dreamwidth that don't have a PDF download or an AO3 link, if I am really wanting to read the fic I will do the copy/paste into a word doc, save as a PDF, and use Calibre to convert it to a mobi. So far it's been worth it. I actually prefer to read longer fics on my Kindle, its easier on the eyes and its more comfortable to settle down and read on.

I've noticed a definite shift too in posting to AO3. It's starting to become really apparent at big bangs. If people don't post to AO3 they might make a PDF or someone will make one for them. For the major big bangs I run the mods at AO3 actually gave me over 50 invites, so I plan to dole those out to whoever is interested to get more long fics on AO3.

[arete.livejournal.com]

A couple people have posted online webapps for dling off ff.net; there's also a program Fanfiction Downloader (http://www.fanfictiondownloader.net/) (one of the webapps is based off it) that I prefer to use. Granted I then run the result through Sigil 'cause I prefer epub and nicer css than ffdl does it, but it does the job nicely enough. And if its a wip, the first section ffdl creates has all the info, including when you dled the story off FFN.

[veronamay.livejournal.com]

I too originally went with the save to disk process back in the mailing list era (and have gone back to it today when downloading epubs from AO3 for my non-wifi Sony Reader). Aside from that, I have a Gmail account that I use with the toread bookmarklet (http://toread.cc). It works like a charm: screengrab the LJ/DW page(s), the formatting usually doesn't screw up, Gmail is easily searchable, it's always accessible, and I don't run the risk of losing the fic if the author takes it down or I have a hard disk disaster (which happened last week).

ETA: to fix my borked coding. WTF, self.

[inteligrrl.livejournal.com]

I myself am currently dipping my toes into TBBT. Any recs in particular?