Do Kindles Get Heavier With Every E-Book Downloaded?

Yes.

How Do You Explain a Kindle to Charles Dickens?

Follow Rachel Walsh's lead.

From a small piece on How to Be a Retronaut...

Rachel Walsh is a second year Illustration student studying at Cardiff School of Art & Design. She was given the project:

‘“Explain something modern/internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900”. I made this to explain Amazon’s Kindle to Charles Dickens.

Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote?

It looks that way.

From a piece in the New York Times...

All this is discouraging for a champion of footnotes like myself. The footnotes are among the first things I look at when I pull a book from a store shelf. My editor gamely tolerated my inclusion of many in my own book (though we removed more than we left in). I would be proud to be a footnote in someone else’s work.

Of course, scholarly books are still full of footnotes. The prototypic footnote is the source note, providing a citation for each proclamation in the text (early annotations were sometimes called “proofs”). These footnotes range from useful to pedantic, sometimes lending an air of authority, sometimes providing a map of the writer’s path. Legal writing in particular is rife with these footnotes, perhaps an acknowledgment that law is built on laws-past.

But I champion another species of footnote: the wandering footnote. These digressive notes, seeing a sentence that some might consider complete, determine to hijack it with a new set of ever more tangential facts. In the wayward note, the bumps and curves of the author’s mind seem to be laid plain on the paper. I came of intellectual age hearing the author’s sotto voce asides in the philosophy essays I loved. I still recall footnotes that begin, enticingly, “Imagine that . . . ”; “Consider . . . ”; or even, in one of J. L. Austin’s famous thought experiments, “You have a donkey. . . . ” I had the feeling of being taken into confidence by a wise fellow during an erudite lecture, and being told something even more clever and lucid.

Toddler Book Apps

Interactive versions of books for very young children are becoming mainstream. Are they enhancing early reading experience – or diminishing it?

From an article in the Guardian...

I love huddling over books with my daughter – sharing words, stories and ideas. The relationship between adult narrator, child and book is complex. I just don't see how there can be an app for that. Am I deluded? Is the digitalisation of picture books inevitable?

Children's laureate Julia Donaldson certainly doesn't think so. She vetoed an ebook of her bestselling The Gruffalo, because she thinks interactive book apps for the very young are a bad idea. Her opinion is shared by children's librarian Ferelith Hordon, who chairs the judging panel for this year's Kate Greenaway and Carnegie medals.

"I have concerns about how such apps are presented," Hordon says. "I don't think that they're the book, and I think that that should be made very clear. They are great fun and they have their place. But on the whole, they distract from the reading experience. For very small children there is something very special – and something that needs to be treasured – in listening to the parent's voice reading.

"If you start putting pop-ups and twiddles and voices into the picture book experience, where is the difference between that and a film or a game? In this world in which there is so much noise and movement is there no value in promoting stillness and thought?"

Should We Fight to Save Independent Bookstores?

Yes.

From an article in the New Yorker...

I was explaining all this over e-mail to a colleague, who replied, “I know bookstores are supposed to be good things, but we don’t have video stores anymore, and maybe we need to get used to the new order instead of lamenting the old.” This is what I’d say to his point: it totally sucks that there’s no more video stores. I spent long nights hanging out at Kim’s in college, deliberating for hours over which random German film from the nineteen-seventies to take home with me. I actually watched stuff like that all the way through then, maybe since I’d spent so much time and energy looking for it. I even miss Blockbuster: when I was a kid, the Friday-night trip to the video store to pick out a movie was the most exciting event of the week. How I watch a video now is: I browse on Netflix for a while, start watching something, get about five minutes in, wonder if I’ve made the right decision, and start the process over. It’s ridiculous, and yet I can’t…stop…clicking…

My point is that I wish we had been able to save the video store. I know the young citizens of the new order don’t miss it, but kids don’t miss anything: they’re kids. And since we haven’t entirely killed the bookstore yet, I would like us not to. Going into bookstores to browse, to attend readings, to interact with the staff, to see the selection they’ve curated—all these things excite me and entice me to read. If my book-buying experience becomes simply me sitting alone on the couch click, click, clicking, I don’t know what I’ll become (I’ll probably forget I’m looking for books and jump over to Netflix).

What Will Amazon's Digital Library Do To Real Libraries?

Publisher's Weekly discusses Amazon's proposed new launch.

From the article...

But can local branches, many already running dry, survive if Amazon gives Prime, which is becoming more and more of a deal at $79 as it decorates its price tag with feature after feature, and its users the capability to access any book a library could provide, without having to leave one’s home? Publishers, reportedly worried that Amazon’s digital library will devalue books in the eyes of consumers, obviously have the rights to the books and can put the brakes on the plan. But once one publisher signs, and assuming it finds success, expect a flood of others to follow. And really, it’s hard to imagine a feature that puts books right in front of your nose and charges you no additional cost not taking off.

Interestingly enough, Amazon’s digital library for a subscription fee idea is basically what Google was looking to achieve before it was condemned to litigation limbo. Google, in scanning thousands and thousands of books, was looking to present to subscribers a vast well of literature and research materials. And what makes this whole story even more interesting is that their first clients were to be institutions–like libraries.

Great (Digital) Expectations

The Economist looks as the fast moving, fast growing digital book industry.

From the article...

To see how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.

Having started rather late, books are swiftly following music and newspapers into the digital world. Publishers believe their journey will be different, and that they will not suffer the fate of those industries by going into slow decline. Publishers’ experience will, indeed, be different—but not necessarily better.

Will the Nook Save Barnes & Noble?

Well, certainly Barnes & Noble hopes so.



From an article in the Independent...



Barnes & Noble, the largest chain of bookshops in the US, said sales of physical books are sliding sharply at its stores and it no longer expects any of the company's growth to come from that traditional business.



The company is pinning its hopes instead on the Nook e-reader, a rival to Amazon's Kindle, and on sales of e-books for the device, which it promised to double to $1.8bn (£1.1bn) this year.



B&N's latest quarterly results, out yesterday, showed the accelerating changes in the way books are read and sold, and underscored the difficulties facing traditional bookstores.

Is This the End for Books?

That's the question posed, recently, by the Guardian.



From the piece...



Are books, like defunct internet pages, heading towards the point where they will be archived as an academic curiosity? Some think so. You won't find any shortage of people willing to pronounce the printed book doomed, arguing that the convenience and searchability of digital text and the emergence of a Kindle-first generation will render them obsolete.



Certainly, electronic books have overcome their technological obstacles. Page turns are fast enough, battery life is long enough, and screens are legible in sunlight. Digital sales now account for 14% of Penguin's business. But there are reasons to reject the idea that the extinction of the printed book is just around the corner, just as there were reasons to reject the notion that e-books would never catch on because you couldn't read them in the bath and, y'know, books are such lovely objects.

It's Time for Book Publishers to Play Dirty

So says an employee at Powell's Books for the Chicago Tribune against e-books.

From the piece...

Last month a fellow bibliophile, someone with whom I work at a bookstore in Portland, Ore., described one of Kindle's newest TV commercials. In it, a woman in red struts past her friend who asks where she's going. "I want to get a book that came out today," she says. When he tells her that he does too, she suggests he join her at the bookstore.

"I'm good," he says, then pushes a button on his Kindle. "Got it."

"It made me want to run out and buy one," my co-worker said, "and then want to cry." I know exactly what she meant: Even to a devout bibliophile, the ad is so effective that it arouses conflicting urges to own a Kindle and resist it on principle.

Another issue the commercial raises is one so obvious that I am shocked I haven't heard it before: Why hasn't America's publishing industry launched an ad campaign as seductive and aggressive as the Kindle's? Not to market front-list titles or authors, but to market the paper book form itself? In other words, sell consumers on the exclusive pleasures and qualities traditional books offer that e-books cannot. That's exactly what Kindle's TV commercials have been doing, saying here's what we can do that regular books can't.

E-Books and Paperback Book Publishing

E-books continue to change the face of book publishing. Indeed, now book publishers are putting out paperbacks in no time flat.

From a piece in the New York Times...

Publishers say they have a new sense of urgency with the paperback, since the big, simultaneous release of hardcover and electronic editions now garners a book the bulk of the attention it is likely to receive, leaving the paperback relatively far behind. They may also be taking their cues from Hollywood, where movie studios have trimmed marketing costs by steadily closing the gap between the theatrical release of films and their arrival on DVD.

“I’m looking to do it more and more,” Jane von Mehren, the publisher of trade paperbacks at Random House, said of releasing paperbacks early. “We feel as though there is this trade paperback book buyer that we want to make sure is still getting served. The idea that someone would wait for a year is an assumption that we should no longer make. So we’re looking at shortening the window.”

The future of the trade paperback has been a frequently debated topic among publishers, who have long seen the paperback release as a moment of reinvention, in which they can take a book that was already out, redesign its cover and pitch it to a wider audience.

“We think our job as paperback publisher is to find the second life for the book, to bring an extra dimension to the audience for the paperback,” said Anne Messitte, the publisher of Vintage/Anchor, part of Random House. “We watch each book very carefully to determine the best moment for paperback publication.”

Digital Lit

The Globe and Mail discusses how e-readers are changing the way books are written and how they're read.

From the piece...

Some speculate that the move to reading off electronic tablets will force writers into shorter and more direct narratives. Others worry that the rush to add video will turn writers into screenwriters on creative teams that produce novels as a branch of filmmaking, and they wonder if the nifty interactivity of video games can ever be applied to serious writing to create a new digital literature. As for us faithful readers, will we be hard-pressed to ever find a writer who can still produce a good old-fashioned novel?

“There is a kind of reading people do on screens that is different from the reading they do on the page,” Lev Grossman, the American novelist and technology writer for Time magazine, recently told the Book Summit, an annual industry conference in Toronto. “It is powerfully linear, which can be really intoxicating … [On an e-reader] I sometimes find my finger is clicking faster than my eyes are going. I have to keep up with my madly clicking finger. It’s a … very powerful narrative, very plot-y feeling to the reading and, as it happens, I am a plot-y writer.”

The e-book format doesn’t encourage lingering on particular images or phrases, referring back, skimming forward or comparing passages; so Grossman predicts the emergence of hybrid novels that combine literary fiction with plot-driven genre writing. For example, his 2009 book The Magicians – an adult science-fiction/fantasy novel about a youth who enrolls in a university of witchcraft but finds it unsatisfying – operates both as genre fiction and as a critique of genre fiction.

Not everyone agrees, however, that the e-book will make much difference to writers’ style.