New York Magazine book critic Sam Anderson is running a literary Twitter experiment — and no, this isn’t a Twitter novel. In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite. Anderson tweets the best sentence he reads each day, and as he points out, “‘Best,’ in this context, can mean almost anything: funny, beautiful, enlightening, [...]

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, [...]

In the L.A. Times, author Dani Shapiro reflects on the challenges of a writing career–the lost days of “writing in the cold” for years while building a reputation, the recent “blockbuster or bust” mentality, and how emerging writers can persevere in spite of all of this:
I recently had the honor of acting as guest editor [...]

For some time I was one of few standing firmly in both camps—writer and gamer, fiction-fiend and pixel-popper. But the innovative nature of Next-Gen gaming, with its leaps in technology and massive install-base, means games have developed new depth–and the future of gaming promises to look a lot more like literature than flight simulators. This is, in many ways, the rise of a new novel. Like its lexicographic predecessor, the pixilated form revels in moral ambiguity, character motivations, conflicts between free will and fate.

a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)”>Serial literature might make you think Dickens, but it seems to be all the rage now.
This being the 21st century, Twitter is a natural tool for serialization. In conjunction with Electric Literature, Rick Moody published a short story serialized into tweets, with one installment posted every 10 minutes. Reactions to the experiment [...]

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 [...]

Lit journals fold if no one subscribes, and in the digital age, the same goes for podcasts. For the Washington Post’s Book World series, it’s get subscribers, or get the ax. Ron Charles, deputy editor of the section, explained the dire situation in an interview with Washington City Paper:
[T]he paper’s top brass [...]

A recent report finds that in the last four months, book apps are now more popular than games on the iPhone. Says the UK’s Telegraph:
[I]n the last four months, book apps have exceeded the popularity of games apps – with one out of every five new apps launching in October having been a book. [...]

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 [...]

Ever had the feeling that everyone is writing a book these days? Maybe it’s true. In SEED magazine, NYU psychology professor Denis G. Pelli and MacArthur “Genius” Charles Bigelow discuss the rise of “universal authorship”:
We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. [...]