Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘ebooks’

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Columbia Publishing Course takes on digital publishing

We’re delighted to present another post by our awesome FWR editorial intern, Nicole Aber.  Enjoy! Going into the publishing industry now requires a whole new skill set from the days when American classics like East of Eden and The Great Gatsby were released in the early and mid-twentieth century. Now, those interested in the publishing field are faced not only with print media, but also questions of how to keep publishing in pace with the ever-increasing digital world — questions of the utmost importance for those enrolled in a course all about publishing. Students attending the Columbia Publishing Course this […]


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Marginalia and the e-reader

by Celeste Ng

Partway through his essay on marginalia, Sam Anderson tells the story of lending a friend his copy of Infinite Jest—complete with his own annotations—then borrowing it back partway through: The fresh one, she told me afterward, felt a little lonely by comparison: she missed the meta-conversation running in the margins, the sense of another consciousness co-filtering D.F.W.’s words, the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes to the footnotes. On our wedding day, my husband received a copy of Infinite Jest from his childhood friend as a wedding gift, complete with dogeared pages and scrawled marginal notes. “This book,” said […]


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26 years old. 100,000+ ebooks sold per month. The future of electronic publishing?

by Celeste Ng

Is self-publishing really a viable option for writers? It is for Amanda Hocking. USA Today reports on the 26-year-old self-published success story: Fed up with attempts to find a traditional publisher for her young-adult paranormal novels, Hocking self-published last March and began selling her novels on online bookstores like Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com. By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads. More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books. Internet-fiction site Novelr analyzes how […]


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Dzanc eBook Club

by Lee Thomas

Addicted to browsing the shelves of used bookstores for that $3 copy of Chekhov’s stories? Sad you can’t do the same with your e-reader? Well, Dzanc’s eBook Club comes close, letting you gather an armful of fiction at a fraction of the retail price. Here’s how it works: Dzanc Books is excited to announce the launching of the Dzanc Books eBook Club. Sign up now and get eleven books for $50! With the proliferation of eReading devices and increased interest in reading books on kindle, Sony e-Reader, Nook, etc., Dzanc Books is making it both easier, and less expensive for […]


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Which are greener: paper books or ebooks?

by Celeste Ng

On Slate, Brian Palmer asks that very question: Think of an e-reader as the cloth diaper of books. Sure, producing one Kindle is tougher on the environment than printing a single copy of Pride and Prejudice. But every time you download and read an electronic book, rather than purchasing a new pile of paper, you’re paying back a little bit of the carbon dioxide and water deficit. The actual operation of an e-reader represents a small percentage of its total environmental impact, so if you run your device into the ground, you’ll end up paying back that debt many times […]


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The Future of the Book? Try Futures.

by Celeste Ng

As Barnes and Noble looks to sell itself, chatter about the “future of the book” has grown. But would “futures” be more appropriate? NPR investigates: Dan Visel, a founder of the appropriately named Institute for the Future of the Book, points out that, first of all, a “book” can mean many things: A cookbook, a comic book, a history book and an electronic book are all animals of different stripes. “It would be a mistake to think that these various forms have a single, unified future,” Visel says. “Rather, I think it’s more appropriate to say that there are futures […]


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eBook Readers Read More, Socialize More?

by Celeste Ng

Okay, they’re lighter. They’re cheaper. Some have argued that they’re greener, too. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that ebook readers read more books: A study of 1,200 e-reader owners by Marketing and Research Resources Inc. found that 40% said they now read more than they did with print books. Of those surveyed, 58% said they read about the same as before while 2% said they read less than before. And 55% of the respondents in the May study, paid for by e-reader maker Sony Corp., thought they’d use the device to read even more books in the future. […] […]


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(How) Do Authors Make Money?

by Celeste Ng

Tim Ferriss, author of the Kindle-published The 4-Hour Work Week, has an interesting look at the economics of how writers get paid: – For a hardcover book, authors typically receive a 10-15% royalty on cover price. This means that for a $20 cover price, the author will receive $2-3. If you have a $50,000 advance, a $20 cover price, and a 10% royalty, you therefore need to sell 25,000 copies (“earn out” the advance) before you receive your first dollar beyond the advance. This is the basic rule, but several quietly aggressive outfits — both Barnes and Noble’s in-house imprint […]


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Free Books for A Small Price: The Future of E-Reading?

While Apple and Amazon wage price wars over hardware and e-books, the new Spanish-based firm 24Symbols aims to use their gadgets’ own Wi-Fi connections against them. Using the Kindle and iPad’s internet browsers, 24Symbols promises totally free e-books. Readers will be served advertisements in return for free access to a wide-ranging catalogue, from comic books to novels. Springwise.com recently highlighted the new firm by linking it to popular free ad-based serving platforms in the music world: Just as ad-supported sites like Pandora and Spotify let music lovers listen to and share their favourite music for free, so Spanish 24symbols is […]


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Choose Your Own E-venture

by Celeste Ng

If you decide to follow the tunnel, turn to page 151. If you decide to cross the bridge, turn to page 12. Remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books? Now you can enjoy the series in ebook format with the new iPhone app U-Ventures. The app was created by Edward Packard, one of the authors of the original Choose Your Own Adventure series and creator of U-Ventures. In an interview with NPR host Neal Conan, Packard comments on some of the narrative changes made possible by the new digital format. First there are the obvious bells and whistles that ebooks […]




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