K Sawyer Paul: The Sony Reader Wi-Fi Review

ksawyerpaul:

Though the Kindle is obviously the most popular e-book reader around its easy to forget that Sony has actually been in the game longer than Amazon. In fact, Sony has had more revisions of their reader than Amazon. Sony is also taken a different marketing approach than Amazon,…

Why and How I Self-Published a Book

I’m seeing more and more of posts like this lately.

Advances are quickly going to zero. Margins are going to zero for publishers.  There’s no financial benefit for going with a publisher if advances are going to zero and royalties are a few percentage points. The publishing industry does minimal editing. The time between book acceptance and release is too long (often a year or more). That’s insane and makes zero sense in a print-on-demand world when kindle versions are outselling print versions.

He makes a lot of good points, but that’s the best one.

E-Book prices fuel outrage

An e-book that costs the same as a printed book doesn’t feel right. No trees died to make it. No heavy machinery ran to print it. No planes flew to ship it. You might need to buy one of those new $139 Barnes & Noble Nooks, announced this week, to be able to read it. So why should you have to spend as much as you would for a heavy hardcover book to own it?
Blame the latest phase of the digital content revolution, now more than ten years strong. As first happened with music, then movies, then print news, the book publishing industry is experiencing a shake-up of rules and roles. In particular, the changing relationship between the book publisher (the company that creates books) and the book retailer (the company that sells books) is causing a chain reaction of confusion, mistrust, and price hikes.The good news is that this phenomenon is inspiring enterprising startups to rethink aging models of book pricing.
The bad news is that it’s pissing people off.

The Kobo Reader Touch

Just as I’m considering buying the Sony pocket touch, here comes this little number. Handy compare chart, too. I really, really like the idea of reading life, an xbox live-style acheivements for your own books. And $129? If it’s as good as it seems to be, we’ve got a new number 1 ebook reader.

Amazon to Allow ePub eBooks on the Kindle e-Reader

With many companies all telling us the same thing off the record it is confirmed that the Amazon is moving in this direction.

The lack of epub used to be the reason not to go with a Kindle, but in the last year or two other reasons have sprung up. This is possibly great news for a contingent of digital readers who don’t like their Sony’s or Nooks, but it’s also a news item that holds far less weight than it would have in 2009. Like the article suggests, Kindle isn’t an ebook reader so much as a platform, and that platform is available on so many devices that it no longer seems like Amazon has created a walled garden.

You still won’t be able to read your epub Amazon books on your Sony Reader (at least, I highly doubt it). To do that, Amazon would have to cede control of its rights management to Adobe, creating a step in between the customer and the product that Amazon customers aren’t used to. Having one format only matters if that format is transferrable.

As for the other reasons that have sprung up, each ebook reader has made unique cases for themselves. The Nook has transformed into an Android tablet, and the Sony Readers all have really cool touch screens and stylus capabilities (great for highlighting, note taking, and margin-doodling—really, all the things people still like real books for). I wouldn’t say either platform has blazed ahead of the Kindle for these things (they certainly haven’t) but that the conversation hasn’t been about file formats in a long time.

The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels

And there is, connected with this phenomenon, what I think of as Long Novel Stockholm syndrome. My own first experience of it—or at least my first conscious experience of it—was, again, with The Recognitions. With any novel of that difficulty and length (976 pages in my prestigiously scuffed and battered Penguin edition), the reader’s aggregate experience is bound to be composed of a mixture of frustrations and pleasures. But what I found with Gaddis’s gigantic exploration of fraudulence and creativity was that, though they were greatly outnumbered by the frustrations, the pleasures seemed to register much more firmly. If I were fully honest with myself, I would have had to admit that I was finding the novel gruelingly, unsparingly tedious. But I wasn’t prepared to be fully honest with myself. Because every couple of hundred pages or so, Gaddis would take pity on me and throw me a bone in the form of an engaging, genuinely compelling set piece. Like the wonderful episode in which one of the characters, under the impression that he is being given a gift of $5,000 by his long-lost father whom he has arranged to meet at a hotel, is in fact mistakenly being given a suitcase full of counterfeit cash by a failed confidence man. And then Gaddis would roll up his sleeves again and get back to the real business of boring me insensible with endless pages of direct-dialogue bluster about art, theology and the shallowness of post-war American culture.

A must-read

Dale Peck Says Writers and Readers Must Fight Against Publishing Industry

Because the only way we can get on with our business is if we finally bury publishing’s corpse and rechannel the energy we’ve spent propping it to build something new. Something that serves the needs not of editors, or marketers, or publishers, or shareholders, or the culture industry, but of writers and readers, who together are recto and verso of the literary community, which is to say, the only thing that matters.

Hallelujah.

How Viral PDFs Of A Naughty Bedtime Book Exploded The Old Publishing Model

The response from his friends was so fierce that Mansbach decided to make his joke book a real one. Go the Fuck to Sleep, which he bills as a “children’s book for adults,” will hit stores on June 14, published by the Brooklyn press Akashic. If it’s not even due for a month, though, how did a little 32-page book already snag a film option deal with Fox 2000 and, today, reach the pinnacle of online publishing commerce world?

The answer appears to be piracy.