“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”
― Douglas Adams
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown - Telegraph
“The satire was angry that day my friend. Like an old man trying to return soup…”
Photo: Kirsty Mitchell
(Source: kirstymitchellphotography.com)
Old and New. One thing I like about this picture is how it highlights the real and significant impact of digital on publishing. The book section seen in the background of this photo is know as the Bargain Section. It is filled with overstock inventory remaindered at bargain closeout prices. These are books that would be otherwise pulped and destroyed. All of them could be contained in the little glowing device in the foreground and not an ounce of paper wasted. Not a digital word declared out of print because sales volume didn’t justify a reprinting.
The problem is that there is a huge percentage of the business of traditional publishing centered on the waste of getting content through the distribution pipeline. Remainders to secondary markets, used bookstores, foreign rights sales, are all branches that break the fall of bad decisions. As digital publishing develops and matures these branches one by one are cut off and with each misstep the fall becomes faster and faster. ~ eP
Old and new. #Bookstore #eReader #Nook #Books #vscocam
I am so starting a ‘walk’ for Book Pain Syndrome. (Instead of a ribbon our symbol will be the tassel from a $0.99 bookmark) ~ eP
statisticalprobabilityofanything:
They need to invent a comfortable reading position
the joy!
(Source: aurielleomega)
OverDrive and Sourcebooks to Launch Ambitious Ebook Data Experiment
“We want to demonstrate once and for all the enormous influence of the library demographic, and that when libraries put an ebook in their catalog it serves a valuable role in increasing exposure and engagement with an author’s work,” said Steve Potash, OverDrive’s CEO.
What Is the Business of Literature? by Richard Nash
This is an excellent essay on books, content reproduction, literature, and the sometimes violent nature of transformation.
A business born out of the invention of mechanical reproduction transforms and transcends the very circumstances of its inception, and again has the potential to continue to transform and transcend itself—to disrupt industries like education, to drive the movie industry, to empower the gaming industry. Book culture is in far less peril than many choose to assume, for the notion of an imperiled book culture assumes that book culture is a beast far more refined, rarified, and fragile than it actually is. By defining books as against technology, we deny our true selves, we deny the power of the book. Let’s restore to publishing its true reputation—not as a hedge against the future, not as a bulwark against radical change, not as a citadel amidst the barbarians, but rather as the future at hand, as the radical agent of change, as the barbarian. The business of literature is blowing shit up.
Amazon going after short shorts
*sigh* Amazon, I really mean you no ill will but you are really working hard to be a dick. ~ eP
Today I received an e-mail from Amazon about one of my short stories (the shortest one I have ever written). The email was as follows:
Hello,
During a quality assurance review of your KDP catalog we have found that the following book(s) are extremely short and may create a poor reading experience and do not meet our content quality expectations:
<Name of Short>
In the best interest of Kindle customers, we remove titles from sale that may create a poor customer experience. Content that is less than 2,500 words is often disappointing to our customers and does not provide an enjoyable reading experience.
We ask that you fix the above book(s), as well as all of your catalog’s affected books, with additional content that is both unique and related to your book. Once you have ensured your book(s) would create a good customer experience, re-submit them for publishing within 5 business days. If your books have not been corrected by that time, they will be removed from sale in the Kindle Store. If the updates require more time, please unpublish your books.
This is causing some lively debate online. What are your thoughts?
The panel is a form of punctuation. With digital comics that punctuation can take on new and powerful nuances. The same is true with digital books. Page breaks, scrolling up and down versus left to right, even fade to black can happen and have meaning in an ebook, The key is learning this new dialect and using it appropriately. ~ eP
“Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” ― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
http://www.futurebook.net/content/what-do-readers-really-want-ebook-frontmatter-and-endmatter
“This a page, usually printed with only the book’s title, that precedes the title page in the book. When dinosaurs roamed the earth, the function of the bastard title was to identify and physically protect the paper text block until it was bound. Sort of like the tissue paper they still put in fancy wedding invitations. I daresay that ebooks do not require any such protection. It is utterly without use in an ebook. Begone!”
