Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘kindle’

Shop Talk |

Why buy the cow?

by Lee Thomas

The Los Angeles Times Book Section reported back in May that the top 10 e-books on Kindle are all free. Not surprisingly, Steig Larsson now holds the top three slots with his Millennium Trilogy, which range between $7.15 and $9.99. That still leaves plenty of free books in the top tier. The current top of the free e-book list is a debut novel, The Heir by Paul Robertson (Bethany House). It’s a page-turner, the kind of book I’ve torn through at the beach or on cold winter evenings, when it’s pitch black outside by 4 p.m. Robertson has come out […]


Essays |

The Age of Binary Bookmaking

by Michael Rudin

Today’s technological delights are well on their way to becoming tomorrow’s demands, entrenching themselves in ways that will do more than force bookbinding as a business model to adapt, but allow writing, as an art form, to expand and thrive. These are good things. Welcome to the age of Binary Bookmaking.


Shop Talk |

Single-serve Short Stories on Kindle

by Celeste Ng

Most of the talk about e-readers centers on full-length books. But The Atlantic has recently worked out a deal to publish a series of Kindle-only short stories, each retailing for $3.99. It’s the literary equivalent of a pop single. Six stories have been published so far, by authors such as Jennifer Haigh, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Paul Theroux. Here’s a description of Patricia Engel’s story “The Bridge”: Available exclusive to the Kindle, “The Bridge,” by Patricia Engel, is the story of Carlito and Reina, a brother and sister from Miami. When he was a boy, Carlito was thrown from a bridge […]


Shop Talk |

New Yorkers heart books and satire, want free Times, music

by Celeste Ng

Last week, New York magazine polled 100 pedestrians in SoHo about where they got their information and entertainment and found some encouraging news–at least about books. Of those polled, 67% spent $50 or more on books in the past year; 19% had spent over $250. (By way of comparison, well under half of those surveyed spent $50 or more on music–whether online or on CD–and 63% said they’d be unwilling to pay anything for online access to the New York Times.) Additionally, 90% said they did not own an e-reader like the Kindle or the Nook, and 68% said they […]


Essays |

My Kindle, Myself

It was cold and white and looked not unlike a refrigerator for guinea pigs. It had far too many buttons. It stalled for an annoying millisecond when flipping between pages. There was no way I would ever be able to suspend my disbelief and fully enter the world of a book.

And then, somewhere over Georgia, I changed my mind.


Shop Talk |

Does the brain like e-books?

by Celeste Ng

The rise of the Kindle, and the recent advent of competitor e-readers the QUE, the Nook, and the Alex, have sparked much discussion about the future of paper books, publishing, and the universe. But there’s been little discussion about whether e-books are really a good substitute for, you know, book books. The New York Times‘s “Room for Debate” column asked several experts to weigh in: Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium? […]


Shop Talk |

four ways of looking at a novel

by Anne Stameshkin

To answer the personal question “Do I love books, or do I love reading?” — and the larger question “In which format(s) is the book most likely to endure?” — author Ann Kirschner (Sala’s Gift) tried Dickens’s Little Dorrit in four formats: paperback, audio, iPhone, and Kindle. She discusses her impressions of each in this Chronicle of Higher Education article. Among them: the particular pleasures of audio books, why the iPhone e-reader is “a Kindle killer,” and the power of story to transcend any device. Read Little Dorrit in paperback. Listen to Little Dorrit as an audio book Read Little […]


Shop Talk |

In Praise of Brevity, Part II: how the Kindle might help popularize the short story

by Anne Stameshkin

A. O. Scott, from this weekend’s NY Times: “And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention? Why wouldn’t you collect dozens, or hundreds, into a personal anthology, a playlist of humor, pathos, mystery and surprise?”




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