Publishing
Dec. 20, 2009
The View from Below: A midlist author watches the ebook wars
The publishing industry is a futures market – a Silicon Valley for books, with every publisher a venture capitalist searching for the Next Big Thing.
Tags: Amazon · ebooks · featured posts
Dec. 17, 2009
“Your Whole Reading Life, Always With You”
Michael Tamblyn’s presentation at the O’Reilly TOC conference in Frankfurt, October 13, 2009. (Actually this is Tamblyn’s recreation of the talk, which was apparently not recorded.) Tamblyn, of Softcovers, discusses what is missing from the current ebook experience.
Tags: ebooks · Michael Tamblyn · video
Dec. 16, 2009
Publishing Agonistes
The major publishers are in a difficult position: they are service companies that function like manufacturing companies — 20th century businesses in a 21st century economy. The control of the book business is gradually slipping out of their hands. — William Petrocelli, “No One Warned the Dinosaurs. Will Anyone Warn the Publishers?”
Tags: ebooks
Dec. 1, 2009
Lukewarm Kindling
Anthony Grafton on the Kindle, which he loves but describes as “reading free of visual delight”: Open an old-fashioned book — a book published by Zone this year, or, even better, by Alfred A. Knopf thirty or forty years ago, or, better still, one printed by Aldo Manuzio a few hundred years before that — and you [...]
Tags: Anthony Grafton · ebooks · ereaders · Kindle · technology
Oct. 30, 2009
“Immersive text-only experiences”
Over the course of the [Frankfurt Book] Fair various players offered phrases such as “a digital manifestation of what was a book” and “long-form narrative delivered digitally” and “story-telling” and “immersive text-only experiences,” and it is clear that the reason for such a profusion of vague terms is not obtuseness but a recognition that we’re [...]
Tags: ebooks
Oct. 28, 2009
Philip Roth on the novel’s “cultic” future
More clips from this interview here.
Tags: ebooks · interviews · Philip Roth · video
Oct. 19, 2009
Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” Tiles
Cory Doctorow and his publisher, Tor, have a neat promo for Doctorow’s forthcoming novel Makers. The novel will be published in November but is currently being serialized online in 81 installments. For each installment, Tor has commissioned a small square illustration. These illustrations fit together like tiles in any arrangement you like. Tor has assembled [...]
Tags: bookselling · Cory Doctorow
Aug. 14, 2009
Lawrence Lessig on the Google book search settlement
Will Google Books, the audacious attempt to digitize every book ever written, have the perverse effect of making books — and ideas — less available, less ubiquitous, less free? Will copyright laws require that most of the books written in the last century be excluded from the new digital online library? Is this progress? This [...]
Tags: copyright · Google · Lawrence Lessig · video
Jul. 27, 2009
“Free” and the Future of Publishing
An internet entrepreneur suggests book publishers take a lesson from web start-ups.
Tags: featured posts · Fred Wilson · free · Malcolm Gladwell · Seth Godin
Jul. 14, 2009
E-Books and Distracted Reading
Author Steven Johnson on e-books and linear, deep-focus reading.
Tags: ebooks
