Fiercely protective of his writing time, Joshua Cohen (Four New Messages) makes no apologies for keeping his interview answers pithy: “The book is the oil painting above the grand piano of the future. Certain households have them. We/they know who they are.”
Sorry. As a fellow dorky, Asian Harvard grad, I may have gotten swept up in the adoration of Jeremy Lin that’s sweeping the nation world. And, um, the puns—at least the ones that aren’t ethnic slurs. (Don’t get me started on that one, please.) Anyway. Thanks to his underdog-made-good story, Jeremy Lin has thoroughly saturated pop culture—everything from serious discussions of immigration to discount airfares. And now, Linsanity has entered the literary world. In the fortnight since Lin shot to fame, multiple authors have penned ebooks about him for the Kindle. Reports Fast Company: Several of the e-books repurpose publicly […]
In my early 30s, I don’t think of myself as old very often. Except sometimes when I’m on the train or at a park and I see everyone (everyone!) who looks to be about my age or younger, and sometimes people a bit older than me, too, texting like the wind. I’m a super slow texter. Even with my fancy new smart phone, I don’t see myself getting faster any time soon. I guess texting is okay, but I still like to actually talk to people most of the time Am I just not willing to work at it? Or […]
When media outlets that cover the American publishing industry report on book sales and e-books “vs.” print books, they often cite percentages of sales increases and sales decreases as evidence of the current state of affairs. In reality, percentages don’t and can’t offer a full picture. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) recently released book sales data for November 2011. The e-newsletter Shelf Awareness had this to say about the AAP report: E-books yet again had the biggest gain, but the 65.9% increase marked a slowing of what had been triple-digit increases for most of the preceding several years. In […]
News flash: eBooks are growing more popular by the year–wait, make that the minute. But there’s one market where paper books are still king: babies. The New York Times reports that even eBook-reading parents prefer paper books for their tots. This is the case even with parents who themselves are die-hard downloaders of books onto Kindles, iPads, laptops and phones. They freely acknowledge their digital double standard, saying they want their children to be surrounded by print books, to experience turning physical pages as they learn about shapes, colors and animals. Parents also say they like cuddling up with their […]
Is there anything more disrespectful to a book–and its authors and would-be readers–than burning? Book burnings are inevitably associated with censorship and repressive ideology, from the Third Reich to the more recent Quran-burning controversy. Even without those connotations, burning any book–for any reason–sends a shiver down my spine. But can book-burning sometimes be justified? On Cracked, S. Peter Davis writes about book-burnings that are occurring now, all over many countries–and why: For the past year or so, part of my job has been to walk through library warehouses and destroy tens of thousands of often old and irreplaceable books. […] […]
We’ve talked a lot about how technology can bring books to life in new and exciting ways, but I hadn’t seen an example of an ebook that got me really excited until someone pointed me to this one. The brainchild of William Joyce, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore is a wonderful amalgalm of movie, book, and game. A story about a book-loving man who stumbles into a world inhabited by books, it’s at once a dramatization of the power of words and a meta-commentary on literature. Joyce was previously a designer for Pixar, and it shows in the […]
We’re delighted to present another blog post by our able editorial intern, Nicole Aber. Enjoy! With the proliferation of self-published books, especially in e-book format, the New York Times recently took a look at the pros and cons of the controversial route of getting one’s book to market. And since the practice of self-publishing has become so widespread, even the author of the article, Alina Tugend, found herself re-evaluating a publishing form she once found inferior: I’m a snob. Oh, I don’t particularly care what kind of car you drive or if you wear the latest designer fashions, but until […]
We’re delighted to present another post by FWR’s editorial intern, Nicole Aber. Enjoy! Now that Facebook has conquered the world of social networking, could it be setting its sights on online publishing? Rumors have been spiraling recently about Facebook’s acquisition of e-book publishing company Push Pop Press. But the social networking giant says it won’t be dabbling in the e-book world anytime soon. Instead, it says that it will employ the technological know-how of the company—which released Al Gore’s e-book Our Choice—in its ubiquitous social networking platform. A press release on Push Pop’s site reads: Now we’re taking our publishing […]
Okay, so maybe you are a confirmed Kindle-hater. And you’re also a writer. You’ve sworn to yourself that you will never, ever, allow your words to be displayed on a Kindle. But as a writer, you don’t always have control over the format of your book. What to do? At The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg offers 7 ways to “Kindle-proof” your manuscript. For example: Play With Text, Typeface, and White Space eReaders currently use two approaches to rendering text. One is quasi-photographic, but the Kindle’s remains the more battery-efficient method of imposing a standard typeface. This makes the effects of […]
