ebooks

Jul. 28, 2011

Nook: So far, so good

In my first week with a new Nook, I am delighted with ebooks.

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Jun. 28, 2011

The Death of Print

The sales figures for April 2011 are in and the PW headline says it all: digital jumps, print plummets.

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Apr. 6, 2011

The end of the shy author?

Laura Miller wonders about what is lost in the new publishing model of author-as-promoter. (link)

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Mar. 22, 2011

Seth Godin: Ten Bestsellers

Seth Godin’s memorable presentation at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in February 2008: *10 Bestsellers: Using New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books.* (video)

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Oct. 17, 2010

What are books good for?

So what are books good for? My best answer is that books produce knowledge by encasing it. Books take ideas and set them down, transforming them through the limitations of space into thinking usable by others.… [T]he two cultures of the contemporary world are the culture of data and the culture of narrative. Narrative is [...]

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Aug. 22, 2010

Why the novel will survive the disappearance of the book

Media evolution, of course, does claim casualties. But most often, these are means of distribution or storage, especially physical ones that can be transformed into digital bits. Photographic film is supplanted, but people take more pictures than ever. CD’s no longer dominate, as music is more and more distributed online. “Books, magazines and newspapers are [...]

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Apr. 11, 2010

Is an ebook still a book?

When a printed book is transferred to an electronic device connected to the Internet, it turns into something very like a Web site. — Nicholas Carr, “The Post-Book Book,” quoting his own upcoming book The Shallows

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Apr. 6, 2010

Will e-novels be shorter?

Will e-novels be shorter than p-novels — you know, books, the things made with paper and ink?

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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.

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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.

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