News
Two stellar websites for The Orion Publishing Group
13 October 2011
Science Fiction becomes online fact with the launch of the SF Gateway and Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
We’re thrilled to be working with Gollancz, (part of the Orion Publishing Group), to create the world’s largest digital SFF library, the SF Gateway. It will make thousands of out-of-print titles, by classic genre authors, available as eBooks.
Building on the remarkable success of Gollancz’s Masterworks series, the SF Gateway launches with more than 800 titles by over 60 authors. It will build to 3,000 titles by the end of 2012 and 5,000 or more by 2014.
The SF Gateway will be closely integrated with the new online edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE) - another fantastic online entity created by STEEL. The SFE is an independent reference that aims to be the definitive, scholarly and critical guide to science fiction in all its forms.
The SF Gateway site will act as a major community hub and social network for SF readers across the world, allowing them to interact with each other and recommend titles and authors. The site includes forums, blogs, regular promotions and is envisaged to become the natural home on the net for anyone with an interest in classic SFF.
Built to the latest standards of HTML5 and CSS3, the SF Gateway site uses responsive web design to ensure a rewarding user experience across a range of mobile and desktop platforms and operating systems.
Gollancz Digital Publisher, Darren Nash:
We are absolutely delighted with the SF Gateway and SFE websites. The team at STEEL has been a pleasure to work with and I’m slightly in awe at how they’ve managed to cram so much work into such a tight timescale.
British Science Fiction Award-winner Alastair Reynolds said:
When I first started reading SF seriously, as a teenager growing up in Wales, one of the first walls I hit was the realisation that many classic and influential works of the field were either out of print or so hard to obtain that they may as well have been. SF is a forward-looking genre but its past has always been as fascinating as its future and, for that reason the SF Gateway is an exciting and groundbreaking venture, which should prove an enormous asset to the field.
Double Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Pat Cadigan added:
This is exactly what I've been hoping for now that the digital book is becoming more widespread. I have always said that the eBook will not be the death of the physical book - the eBook will save so many wonderful books from being lost. We have to remember that what we read is the book - what we read it on, whether ink and paper or pixels on a screen, is just the interface. I'm honestly thrilled about this new project and delighted to be on the list.