Long Live the Book: Jessica Pressman’s Bookishness
It opens a field of inquiry that stretches to the far corners of culture.
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Posts Tagged: e-books
This Week In Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Writing History
I was pretty sure I could produce a manuscript superior to anything [this editor had] ever published before by letting my cat walk over my keyboard a few times.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jessica Berger Gross
Jessica Berger Gross discusses her new memoir, Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home, walking away from her parents age of twenty-eight, and the importance of boundaries.
...moreDon’t Buy Mark Haddon’s New Book on Amazon, Says Mark Haddon
Author of bestselling book-turned-play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Mark Haddon recently published a new book, The Pier Falls. The book comes in two editions: just the text, available on Amazon, or including illustrations by Haddon, available only in hardcover at bookstores. At the LA Times, Michael Schaub reports that Haddon described […]
...moreAmerica’s Reading Habits
The Pew Research Center has released an interesting set of data on reading in America, and it’s not all bad. In fact, their data indicates, among many things, that print books are far from obsolete—and actually dominate e-books—and that reading consumption has stayed mostly the same since 2012. So while we might not be reading more, at […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #71: A Michael Bay Film Eating Itself
“Love,” then is not to be taken lightly here. It is being engaged at full force, megaphonically.
...moreNo More Book Shaming
It’s no secret that libraries have had a rocky relationship with publishers since the ebook boom began in the late aughts. Publisher’s Weekly suggests three ways the two could work to heal the rift, but one of the suggestions is surprising: librarians need to stop “book shaming”: What today’s library elite seems to forget is […]
...morePaper, Please
A study of 300 college students in the United States, Germany, Slovakia, and Japan found that 92 percent preferred to read paper books over e-books. The students preferred paper because of the “lack of distractions that are available on computers as well as the headaches and eye strain that can result from staring at a […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Dean Koontz
Dean Koontz talks about his newest novel, Ashley Bell, overcoming self-doubt, and “what this incredibly beautiful language of ours allows you to do.”
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Rick Moody
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Rick Moody about his new book Hotels of North America, unreliable narrators, hotel porn, how titles are uncopyrightable, and Internet comment sections.
...moreVideo on Demand
How many times have we been told that digital technology will fundamentally alter the way we interact with text? There was hypertext fiction, which added hyperlinks so you could choose your own path through a story. Pfft. There was the enhanced e-book, which was like a regular e-book except it might decide to play audio […]
...moreE-books Threaten Warehouse Jobs
The rise of e-books are threatening jobs in publishing once again—this time, it’s the warehouse workers that once distributed physical books. Penguin Random House is laying off warehouse workers, since electronic books are delivered wirelessly and never need to be stored.
...morePrinted Books Are Here to Stay
A recent New York Times report showed that e-book sales are declining while printed book sales are doing well. Over at Lit Hub, Adam Sternbergh argues that the printed book is going nowhere, for at least another 500 years: Whatever medium the music is delivered in, the song remains the same—once it gets to your […]
...morePrint Soldiers On as Digital Sales Slump
Ebook sales have fallen 10 percent in the first five months of 2015. The surge of electronic books between 2008 and 2010 coupled with the stress of economic depression on independent bookstores seemed a portent of an all-digital future, but print books remain and many digital consumers are returning to physical books. The New York […]
...moreEbooks Are Changing How Writers Write
The rise in popularity of e-books are changing how readers consume books. Readers now have short attention spans, and that is leading to writers adopting new styles. The Guardian takes a look at the impact of the rise of e-books on new works.
...moreIndie Bookstore Customers Shun E-Books
E-books are proving unpopular for independent bookstores. Amazon’s juggernaut Kindle device is only available from the online retailer, but independent bookstores can still sell e-books through devices like Kobo. But the Denver Post has found that customers of indie bookstores just aren’t buying e-books.
...moreLearning Outside the Classroom
With the goal of “encouraging kids to become lifelong readers,” the Obama administration has teamed up with charities and publishers to offer digital books to children of low-income families. The books will be made available through an app developed with the help of the New York Public Library.
...morePublishers Earn More than Authors on E-Book Sales
Authors are earning less on e-books than on physical ones, and the villain isn’t necessarily Amazon. According to the Author’s Guild, a professional organization for writers, publishers are now taking closer to 75% of an e-book’s profit, up from only 50% of traditionally published books. While Amazon’s downward pricing pressure has squeezed profit from everyone […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Jeremy Hawkins
Author Jeremy Hawkins discusses his debut novel, The Last Days of Video, the resurgence of the independent bookstore industry, and allowing nostalgia to have presence but not precedence in one’s life.
...moreWord of the Day: Nesh
(n.); soft, delicate, tender; from the Old English hnesce (“soft in texture”) or Gothic hnasqus (“tender; soft”) “Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth over the merits of print versus digital books so many times, it’s as if I were in an abusive relationship with myself. But my mother’s passing and the sentimental value […]
...moreBooks for All!
For the San Francisco Chronicle, Jim Kuhnhenn reports about President’s Obama’s new initiative to provide low-income students with e-books.
...moreThe Thing Itself
You can’t put everything in the cloud. Over at The New Republic, William Giraldi makes the case for holding onto books in their physical form: We might be reading them—although I find that an e-reader’s scrolling and swiping are invitations to skim, not to read—but fully experiencing them is something else altogether.
...moreClean Reader, Dirty World
When the Clean Reader app tried to censor books for profanity, writers were understandably pissed. The creators responded by removing their catalogue, but does their technology have implications for the future of intellectual property?
...moreThe Best Worst Cover Art
Thanks to the Guardian, we are now aware of a little blog called Kindle Cover Disasters. The site collects the best of the worst e-book cover art ever to be copy-and-pasted on a home computer using Photoshop and some stock photos. The hilarious results can serve as a reminder that writers may be artists, but not […]
...moreA Subway Library
Beijing’s subway system is adding a new amenity: a library. The ultra-modern system already has underground wi-fi, but will now also include QR codes to free e-books. The books in the M Subway Library are curated by the National Library of China. Of 70,000 possible books, the librarians choose 10 that are thematically related. The […]
...moreThe Web Isn’t Nirvana (But You Can Get All Their Albums For Free)
On February 26, 1995, just about twenty years ago, Newsweek published an article by Clifford Stoll called “Why the Internet Won’t Be Nirvana.” In it, Stoll provides a litany of faults to be found in the nascent web. Although there’s a decidedly un-zen tone to the article, Stoll makes some surprisingly accurate predictions—right alongside some laughable ones. […]
...moreBy Any Memes Necessary
The long-awaited release of The Autobiography of Malcolm X in ebook format is on track for May of this year, to commemorate what would have been the activist’s 90th birthday. The print edition has been available from Ballantine, an imprint of Penguin Random House, for some time; the author’s estate is spearheading the digital publication in […]
...moreWriting Erotica for Money
Once the story was actually finished, and there was no money to be made, all ambition tied to it evaporated, and now I’m left pretty much where I began. Ruthlessly lazy, without much money, and stuck for the foreseeable future at an annoying day job. Like pretty much every other writer in the world, I […]
...moreI Can’t Quit You
Readers stop reading a book they enjoy when they put it down and forget to come back. Readers finish books they hate when they are assigned it for book clubs or else they want to hate-read and laugh about [it] with their friends . . . Just as a half-read book isn’t necessarily a failure, […]
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