This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Posts Tagged: kindle
This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world.
...more
This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...more
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.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Are cheetahs sprinting toward extinction? Chinese-American writer Ken Liu brings “silkpunk” to science fiction. Self-publishing coaches—the new sexy in a Fifty Shades world.
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The Rumpus Interview with Becky Tuch
Becky Tuch discusses founding The Review Review, motherhood, creativity, and the future of literary magazines.
...moreAmazon Unintentionally Rewards Scammers
Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited product offers readers an all-you-can-eat model for book subscriptions. The books are mainly self-published titles (and Amazon pays authors by the number of pages read). The model sounds great in theory—readers download books risk-free, encouraging discovery of new books. But since Amazon counts how far into a book devices sync to calculate payments, […]
...moreConvincing People Plastic Is Paper
Amazon just announced its newest Kindle model—there are slight technological enhancements over its predecessor, but the bigger shift is in significant aesthetic changes meant to make the device feel more like a book. But plastic polymers are never going to have to same feel as paper, even if a device can hold an entire library. And […]
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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.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Chicago’s Wicker Park has been gentrifying, but Quimby’s, a quirky indie bookstore, remains a haven for alt lit. Amazon probably doesn’t care whether customers buy anything from its physical stores. The New Yorker takes a look at why China is cracking down on dissidents, including Hong Kong booksellers that disappeared late last year.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A huge new bookstore in the heart of Mexico’s drug cartel region hopes to combat ‘narco culture’ by offering an alternative, including classes for children and adults. Innisfree Poetry Bookstore in Boulder, Colorado has plans to move to a larger location. Mumbai, India, has seen the rise of new bookstores—but many are unique passion projects […]
...moreAmazon’s Self-Publishing Scam Artists
Amazon’s self-publishing tools mean its never been easier to publish a book—and scammers have figured out how to churn out low-quality content to earn large amounts of money. The Washington Post (a company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) takes the time to explore one such entrepreneur who has “written” more than eighty books. Turns out that globe-trotting polyglot Dagny […]
...moreAmazon Dedicates $10 Million to Translations
AmazonCrossing, the Amazon.com publishing arm that deals with works translated into English, will dedicate $10 million to expand its efforts over the next five years. This move will most likely position the publisher as the largest of translations in the US: Even without exact numbers, there is more than enough evidence to suggest that AmazonCrossing […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
The Canadian bookstore that discovered a hundred-year-old photo album has solved the mystery of the photos’ origin. They belonged to an Edmonton man born in 1919. San Francisco is a city filled with bookstores, and SF Weekly takes a look at some of the best. Oxford Bookstores in Kolkata, India will hold a literary festival […]
...moreA Look Back at Amazon’s Twenty Years
Publisher’s Weekly has a retrospective on Amazon.com’s 20 years of selling books, DVDs, electronics, and everything else. The article cites the introduction of the Kindle and the Kindle e-bookstore as Amazon’s most important innovation, but is quick to cite the company’s other advances—as well as the many controversies sparked by said advances. For example, before it […]
...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.
...moreEarn Fractions of a Penny With Amazon
Last month Amazon announced it planned on paying authors participating in its lending library program by number of pages read. The system is intended to encourage better content and reward longer works. Now, the Guardian reveals that some payments to authors could be as low as $0.006 per page.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Mars: The ultimate back up planet. Goodbye, ladyblogging. How does social media walk the line between enabling hate speech and not giving it a megaphone. The Kindle cannot kill the bookstore. NOT EVER! Using algorithms to buy art. Connecting into the hive mind.
...moreReviewing the Absurd
Wired is launching a book review section—of absurd self-published titles. Jason Kehe will in fact be judging books by their cover, selecting the books he reviews for the regular column by browsing the blog Kindle Cover Disasters. The first title in the series is Moira, The Zorzen War, The Divided Worlds Book 3: If you’re […]
...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.
...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 […]
...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. […]
...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 […]
...moreThe Scorpion Always Bites the Turtle
During Amazon’s skirmish with Hachette, one group that rallied to Amazon’s defense were the self-published authors who claimed that the Kindle allowed their overlooked voices a platform. Now, those authors find themselves sinking as the online retailer has turned on them with the Kindle Unlimited service, undermining their book sales. Kindle Unlimited provides Prime subscribers […]
...moreCrowdsourcing Publishing
As if upending the publishing industry with its ongoing battle with Hachette wasn’t enough, now Amazon wants to cut out publishers entirely. Amazon is launching a new program called Kindle Scout, a system where customers will read excerpts and vote on which books will move forward with publication. Voting for a winner gets users a free […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
A world of enchanted objects is both alluring and deeply terrifying. And now, a little about how Silicon Valley treats the LGBT community. It’s every bibliophile’s wet dream, but is Kindle Unlimited worth it? Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to “Like.” The Internet killed 007.
...moreThe Hawking Index
The Hawking Index was created by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg to measure how much of a book readers were actually reading, by analyzing Amazon’s “Popular Highlights” feature on Kindle devices. Over at the Guardian, writer and literary critic Alex Clark and columnist Tom Lamont debate whether it is truly important and necessary to get through a […]
...moreBook of Oaths
Suzi LeVine became the first U.S. Ambassador sworn into office on a Kindle. She also took her oath of office not on the Bible, but on the U.S Constitution (open to the Nineteenth Amendment, the amendment granting women the right to vote). The New Yorker looks back at the history of oath taking and the […]
...moreHow to Look Like You’re Reading Something Smart on the Bus
You’re a reasonable reader. You like the aesthetics of an old-fashioned paper-and-glue book, but you’re not averse to turning the virtual pages of an e-reader either. If that description sounds like you, here’s a DIY project you might like: making an old book into a Kindle case. (Physical-book purists, do NOT click the link. You […]
...moreThe Gideon’s Bible, Kindle Edition
If you left your favorite religious text at home on your next business trip to Newcastle, don’t sweat it. The Hotel Indigo Newcastle is swapping all their bed stand Gideon’s Bibles for Kindles, allowing guests to purchase other “preferred religious books” for only £5. Read more here.
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