Posts tagged reading

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

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.

The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime: Forgotten Cops and Private Eyes from the Time of Sherlock Holmes

It is the Victorian era and society is both entranced by and fearful of that suspicious character known as the New Woman. She rides those new- fangled bicycles and doesn’t like to be told what to do. And, in crime fiction, such female detectives as Loveday Brooke, Dorcas Dene, and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard are out there shadowing suspects, crawling through secret passages, fingerprinting corpses, and sometimes committing a lesser crime in order to solve a murder.

The Death of the book

The emphasis shifts with each telling, but every writer, editor, publisher, bookseller, and half-attentive reader knows the fundamental story.  After centuries of steady climbing, book sales leveled off towards the end of  the 1900s.  Basic literacy began to plummet.  As if television and Reaganomics were not danger enough, some egghead lunatics went and  built a web—a web!—out of nothing but electrons.  It proved a sneaky and seductive monster.  Straight to our offices and living rooms, the web delivered chicken recipes, weather forecasts, pornography, the cutest kitten videos the world had ever seen.  But while we were distracted by these glittering gifts, the internet conspired to snare our friend the book, to smother it.

Does anyone want to be "well read"?

Roger Ebert on never having the time in one’s life to read enough, and the problems of accepting your own mortality: 

There is no pattern. My only goal is to enjoy reading. I learn that he average American teenager spends 17 minutes a weekend in voluntary reading. Surely that statistic is wrong. Do they mean reading of “serious” novels? I would certainly count science fiction, graphic novels, vampires, Harry Potter, newspapers, magazines, blogs—anything. Just to read for yourself for pleasure is the point. Dickens will come later, Henry James perhaps never. At the end of the day, some authors will endure and most, including some very good ones, will not. Why do I think reading is important? It is such an effective medium between mind and mind. We think largely in words. A medium made only of words doesn’t impose the barrier of any other medium. It is naked and unprotected communication. That’s how you get pregnant. May you always be so.

Adam Engst on iPad and ereaders

In the past few weeks, in fact, we’ve figured out a sneaky process to create our own EPUB files via Pages, which allows us to make them look a lot more like our PDF originals (previously we were forced to outsource the task and put up with what we got back). And we’re coming close to a site design change that will make it easier for readers to download various formats from their accounts on our Web site, and even to read online.

It’s actually a great workaround. Pages and Scrivener are fast becoming my only tools.

Seriously, I can’t say that working with Amazon has ever been easy for publishers (and we haven’t done much with it), but working with the iBookstore has been the most amazingly horrible, opaque, and frustrating experience I’ve had. Apple’s software is terrible, the iTunes Connect Web site is lousy, and support questions often aren’t answered for - and I’m not kidding here - months. It’s gotten a little better over time, but mostly it makes my stomach hurt.

That’s the reason we don’t do iBooks on Gredunza Press yet. We sell PDF and Epub files, which you can import into iBooks, but there’s nothing in the store from us. It’s a lousy marketplace at this time.

Why are books so big?

Next time you’re squinting at your mass-market copy of Dan Brown’s latest wishing the pages were just a smidge roomier, blame the medievals for not having bigger sheep.

How can you improve the state of eBooks?

• Read voraciously and on every device within reach.
• Take copious notes on the device.
• Take copious notes about the device.
• Take your eBooks on adventures.
• Read while traveling.
• On trains, in planes, on the backs of elephants, by the beach.
• What about the experience delights?
• And, to a lesser degree, what annoys? (But try to focus on delight.)
• Do not feel compelled to scale your map 1:1 with print.
• Write.
• Consider how you write.
• Get a typewriter and write on that. [1]
• Now try writing the same thing on a computer.
• Now get a wonderful pen and write longhand.
• Wax on. Wax off. As it were.
• Try to publish something, anything with a traditional publisher.
• Publish on a blog for a while.
• Think about those processes.