ebooks
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
Dec. 1, 2009
Put down your Kindle and watch this
Letterpress printing is the craft invented by Gutenberg five hundred years ago: printing one page at a time using moveable type that is literally pressed into the paper. It is still practiced, apparently, by the Firefly Press of Somerville, Mass. Obviously the switch to digital books has everything to do with efficiency and nothing to [...]
Tags: book design · ebooks · printing
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
This is your brain on e-books
Jonah Lehrer on the neuroscience of how our brains process the words we read and how that process will be affected by ebooks.
Tags: ebooks · Jonah Lehrer · Kindle
Jul. 14, 2009
E-Books and Distracted Reading
Author Steven Johnson on e-books and linear, deep-focus reading.
Tags: ebooks
Jun. 24, 2009
Publishers as booksellers?
In a long and interesting interview with Poets & Writers magazine, Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has an interesting prediction for the future of book-selling: publishers, not online retailers like Amazon, will profit from selling directly to readers. It makes a lot of sense, especially as book-selling transitions more and [...]
Tags: bookselling · ebooks · Jonathan Galassi
