New Writing International is aiming to compile a definitive list of blog novels.
"We have been hit with a procession of distribution-related problems which have put us into a financial situation that is forcing us to close our doors," they explain. "For the better part of the year, we have been paying very high return fees to our distributor — many generated by books being sent back by the currently less-than-stable Borders — fees which have slowly been bleeding us dry... Try as we might, we have been unable to figure a way out of this situation as we have never been long on capital and with the economy being in such a disastrous state, there is no hope of finding any money from an outside source."
What will be the relationship between authors and publishers as they become tethered for life with no divorces?
Forget right reversals Google has wiped that of the agenda in one swoop and some major publishers have got their way, albeit with Google’s considerable help. There is now no ‘reprint under consideration’ only a notice saying ‘Go get it from Google’.
Over the past year I have been moving toward a "paperless" work-style. Most of my important documents and text are now in electronic format - most of the time PDF. As a result, I can literally have an entire reference library with me at all times on either my iPhone or iPod Touch. Unfortunately, PDFs can be huge, and that is where the problem begins.
The handhelds seem to be able to handle rather large files but, unfortunately, they can take a long time to load. Try to resize them and you end up waiting a long time. Moreover, flipping from one page to the next is at best, a slow process.
That's where the tip comes in...
Shrink PDFs!
Most PDF programs offer the option to shrink PDFs. Unfortunately, the quality is often rather poor. Apago's PDFShrink for the Mac, however, offers a huge degree of control over the compression and quality. After a bit of experimenting I found a setting that provided excellent compression but maintained the high degree of image quality that I want when reading documents. A 7MB PFD files was reduced to just 1MB. The result? It loads super fast on my iPhone and, once loaded, is much easier, faster and stable when resizing or flipping pages.
If your site looks like someone threw up in HTML all over it, your visitors might expect your writing is similarly chaotic (and in my experience, truly lousy websites almost always go with truly lousy writing, just as truly lousy publisher sites are the mark of a business with a less than professional attitude.)
Nick Belardes believes in brevity. He hews close to that hallowed maxim, beloved by middle school English teachers and old-fashioned newsmen alike: Keep it simple, stupid.
“People need to be educated to be more concise,” says Mr. Belardes, a journalist and novelist based in Bakersfield, Calif. “Every day, we get these super-long-winded e-mails. You can communicate more if you say a little less.”
Earlier this year, Belardes was cleaning out his desk drawer when he came across an unfinished manuscript for a workplace novel called “Small Places.”
He briefly considered shipping the thing off to publishers for consideration. Instead, he decided to serialize “Small Places” on Twitter, a popular microblogging site.
And the freebie? Well I wouldn't want to leave my WATE listeners out, so here... Digital Magic, the sequel to Chasing the Bard, free and complete. Enjoy and spread the word about it and Double Trouble.
I've just learned that my publisher, Kaplan, has sold the rights to the Korean and Japanese versions of Financial Armageddon.
In celebration (or, perhaps, as a final inducement to those English-speaking readers who've not yet gone out and bought a copy of their own), I've just uploaded a PDF version of Chapter One, entitled "Debt," from the hardcover version of Financial Armageddon.
Google: It’s hard to overstate how important this agreement is for Google. Google has essentially acquired the digital rights to the long tail. At least the portion of the long tail that’s locked up in out of print books. That’s a VERY long tail.
Amazon: Amazon’s 190,000 Kindle titles look puny compared to the millions of books Google now has access to. Granted many of those Kindle titles make up the big head of consumer demand, as opposed to the long tail. Still, Google now has the ability to monetize millions of books Amazon can’t, if for no other reason because they’re out of print. What’s more, under the new agreement Google has the right to sell printed copies of those books via print on demand. And I have a sneaking suspicion that Google still has a few more surprises in store for us. Android may turn out to be more than just a mobile phone platform.
[. . .] the settlement money will partially be used to fund an independent, not-for-profit Book Rights registry which will work towards ensuring authors and publishers receive the money they are owed under the agreement, and the revenue split between the rights holder and Google is set at 63-37 respectively, which is surely the right way round.
Every week I receive and search for great book trailers to promote on Christian Fiction Blog. In the beginning I was excited about what I found. It was a new concept, so I was game. However, after a few months of posting book trailers and reading others I've come to a conclusion. Book Trailers Don't Work and here's why:
His first podiobook, Max Quick 1: The Pocket and the Pendant, has received over 2 million downloads to date.
Half of all those surveyed who identify as "blog readers" (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don't necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.
That's still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of "blog readers," and four percent of all those surveyed.
3. The interface is slow and clunky. I said the same thing about the iliad - but the iphone has spoiled everything else. Friends who were with me when I bought it couldn’t get their brains around the lack of a touchscreen and the slow responses of the physical buttons. The PRS-700 seems a lot better.
4. The flash between page turns is pretty annoying. Hard to tell how annoying after only a quick ‘read test’ - and that was going to be what *this* flight was for. Sidetracked by the net instead!!
Once I’ve read a whole book on the Sony, I’ll post more comments. But it seems like a pretty cool toy so far. (And there’s *plenty* at the Borders in Silver Spring if you’re taking this as a recommendation!!)
An interesting opportunity from the current download ‘buy to own’ is ‘rent to read’. As libraries of works become permanently available why would you want to own digital books, which are hard to share and offer little other than convenience? Why not rent on demand? It doesn’t stop the consumer buying perpetual access, or a physical digital bundle; we merely question why you would buy a download that could be as obsolete as an 8 track in only a short time? The file could be read online with rich functionality, reference linking, multi media materials such as podcasts, videos and even games tied in. Imagine you want a quick read and log on via the mobile, you continue your read in a café via a laptop, then at a friends house via their PC and finally to bed with the physical book itself. The digital access control is not in the device but the centre making it friendlier.
If library can offer digital books for free, why buy them anyway? Now is that wise?
Imagine carrying a tablet around with you with a screen 2.5 times larger than the Kindle, weighing two ounces more and a third of the Kindle's thickness. It will enable you to read your daily news digitally and is the latest ebook eink device to hit the market. Today many of us get our news feeds free direct to our mobiles and PCs, but that obviously is not seen as the answer for these technology people. Some may say that it is technology for the sake of technology.
The problem with the Amazon ebook model is that it is Amazon format, through an Amazon store, at an Amazon price point, over an Amazon connection to an Amazon device – a truly ‘exclusive’. If Amazon were to dominate the ebook market we would have a monopoly where scarcity should not occur and it is illogical to have a monopoly.
However, some would argue that this ‘exclusive world domination’ approach could be the best thing for the market. The likes of Sony would probably disappear as fast as ‘live book search’ and the others settle for the scraps. Importantly the mobile market would seriously take off and that’s one Bezos has got covered and where there are truly giants at work today. The online offer would become increasingly attractive to many. We may finally understand that downloading is not the only solution and hording loads of titles on a device just to own them is crazy in this networked age.
A gift from us this week before Halloween, the story that Olivia Laing recently called, "Scariest story ever, so horrifying that to this day I can't keep it in my house"[.]
But even as my sales were growing, the tours themselves were getting less bang for the effort.
The media was harder to get. Even if I had some cool new nonfiction hook (corpses who wake up in morgues in VANISH. Or the how-to of shrinking human heads in THE KEEPSAKE) the TV and radio spots weren't there as they used to be. I'm not the only novelist who faces this dwindling of interest; it seems to be a problem for all of us. The publisher pays to fly you into a new town, puts you up in a hotel, all to speak at a bookstore where you end up selling maybe thirty hardcovers. Without any TV or radio or print coverage, does that make economic sense?
Sony has consolidated its digital-book efforts at its North American headquarters in San Diego, relocating hardware and software operations for its Reader electronic book device from Japan.
The company declined to say how many employees made the move from Japan.
While consumers in the United States often lag behind their counterparts in Japan in adopting new technologies, in this case it's the opposite, said Steve Haber, president of Sony's Digital Reading Business Division.
Because the device is selling better in the United States, it made sense to merge operations here, Haber said.
Industry analysts say the Reader is being outsold by upstart competitor the Amazon Kindle, which features a wireless link for e-book purchases from Amazon.com.
But Haber takes exception to recent published reports that said the Reader sales are only a fraction of the 380,000 Kindles expected to be sold by the end of the year.
Neither Sony nor Amazon release sales numbers.
“We've sold hundreds of thousands of Readers and millions of electronic books,” Haber said. “We're happy with the sell-through.”
Haber said Sony plans to add wireless at some point, but it will not lock readers in to any one retailer.
“It will be consistent with our open platform,” he said.
We are now delivering a service for magazines in the Dazed group which allows users to browse these magazines for free, but not to read them properly. The browsing is limited to the two-page per screen view, at this resolution most text is unreadable but the pictures are fine. As each new issue is published it will be available in this browse mode until the succeeding issue appears. Here is the current issue of AnOtherMan. The site is simply branded for the magazine's style.
Do you know the generic campaign the book trade should have? One that stresses book ownership. Why is it only in the film world that we see signs saying: ‘Own it now on DVD?’ Why don’t we ever see that for books? I’m partly playing devil’s advocate here. We all know the reasons. With very few exceptions – Harry Potter, a new Hannibal Lecter title, perhaps – there just isn’t the ‘must have’ quality to books.
[Frankfurt] Book fair Director Juergen Boos signalled the trend in his opening speech: more and more books are offered in digital form. This year it's around 30 percent of all books, most of them digital versions of books already in print (the so-called tree books
Penguin publishers CEO John Makinson told Reuters: "They have become mainstream in the sense that they are a genuine consumer product for which there is real appetite, so this is not the province of geeks any longer."
Makinson said Penguin was now publishing all new titles both as printed books and e-books and was digitalizing its backlist.
Technology research firm iSuppli predicts that global e-book display revenue will grow to $291 million in 2012 from $3.5 million in 2007.
However the e-book has achieved enough momentum for continued existence. At the Frankfurt Bookfair there was discussion about the ePUB format, a standard based on XML and also about the role of XML in general. Liz Thompson reported in Publishers Weekly that Mike Shatzin had proposed publishers work in XML for intellectual property as the sun of a new system, with the "book as merely one orbiting opportunity."
The Frankfurt meeting on ePUP organised by The International Digital Publishing Forum heard thst year-to-year wholesale eBook sales are growing at 71 percent and there have now been over 2 million ePUB downloads from Feedbooks. Feedbooks can create a variety of formats for e-books from most web sources.
What about the Amazon Kindle, you ask? To my taste, the putative advantages of the Kindle--Wi-Fi, a keyboard--are in fact its weaknesses. (Sony says Wi-Fi will come in future Reader models; the latest one, released earlier this month, has an onscreen keyboard.) I know myself well enough to realize that given Wi-Fi connectivity, I will take advantage of it and wander off to TMZ.com when I should be paying attention to Jane Austen. It takes maybe 15 seconds to buy a book using my PC and download it to the Reader. Such gratification is instant enough for me.
The Reader is more refined and user-friendly than the iLiad and, although smaller, it's just as comfortable to read, much lighter and feels more sturdy. It isn't cheap, but it's almost half the price of the iLiad. However, £200 is still a lot to pay to read a book, and we hope to see prices come down as more eBook readers are released.
In an email to subscribers, Amazon says its founder Jeff Bezos will be appearing on Oprah to talk to her about her new favourite gadget.
Today was great because I have a visitor in my bedroom/window, the author Diana Spechler who wrote “Who By Fire.” I just started reading it at the time of this blog and I have to go back in the window to finish it. So far though, I like her humor and her wit. It is a great tale.
Guest blog post from author Diana Spechler
I was thrilled to be invited into Dave's "room" yesterday to read my new novel from the Sony Reader. An event coordinator put up a sign to attract attention (Now reading Who By Fire by Diana Spechler), and set up a speaker on the sidewalk, so that Midtown pedestrians of all ages could hear me read a few scenes.
Thanks to the technical acumen of my lovely wife, we now have the first 20 minutes or so of So Dark the Night available for your listening pleasure. In all, we’ve recorded the initial 75 pages as a teaser and, depending on feedback from readers and listeners, we may do the whole novel.
I’d finally read Spider Kiss in the past year. But I understood only after the film that it would have been better if Harlan had read it to me. I couldn’t pick up on his cadences. He read a passage from it — a passage I recalled reading and thinking about at the time — and was shocked that I didn’t really get it until the words came out of his mouth. The emotion he imbued the words with were lacking in my own mind.
We have tried many times with her. We will continue.
After my initial infatuation with the LAT Kindle edition wore off, I began to focus on some rather annoying limitations.
* No images of any sort. No diagrams, tables, or illustrations. No photos. No comics. NO COMICS!? No wonder the Kindle edition is cheaper than the print edition.
* Limited skimming. The top stories display a very brief summary. Many of the stories below the virtual fold display only the title. A surprising number of titles are not self explanatory (journalism 101, anyone?), meaning you have to click through to find out what the story is about. The Kindle is not exactly what I would call speedy, so this process can get tedious.
* Paging through the news as opposed to scrolling through the news. The first week of reading the LAT on the Kindle I found myself attempting to scroll through stories using the Kindle scroll wheel. Instead, I had to train myself to use the page buttons. It’s like reading a paperback edition of the LAT, which is something that I find to be completely unnatural.
Strangely, I have no trouble flipping pages on the Kindle when I’m reading books. This scrolling preference is clearly something I’ve developed from reading news online. I suspect this small interface quirk speaks volumes about the Kindle’s suitability as a replacement for reading news online.
* The Kindle is wireless, but it’s not connected. Reading the LAT on the Kindle is like reading an ebook of a newspaper. It’s a straight analog to digital conversion (minus the images and tables) with none of the benefits traditionally associated with digital news distribution.
It's because trying something for free is the best way of discovering it. And free doesn't mean sampling a quarter of a cookie - it means the whole cookie. It doesn't mean someone spraying my wrist with perfume - it means them putting a small bottle of the fragrance in my shopping bag. It means spending a weekend in a hotel and taking two showers using the same soap. It doesn't mean reading the first five pages of my book online - it means reading my whole book for free as a way of discovering me as an author.
What a colossal ripoff.
I went to the site, clicked the link, and I was required to give a lot of personal information (which I did). When I finally clicked the "download PDF" link, (after entering the free code) there was no PDF, only a 1 k file called "ebx.etd". NO PDF, NO BOOK.
So basically I just wasted a lot of time and gave away my personal information to your publishing company... FOR NOTHING.
Dear Reader,
I want you to discover the worlds I'm exploring in the Reincarnation series so much, I'm offering you the first in the series - THE REINCARNATIONIST - free.
No strings, just the free book — all you have to do is click on either of the links above and download the entire novel and start reading THE REINCARNATIONIST (which has just been released in paperback) now! Readers and reviewers say it's "un-put-downable."
The series continues with THE MEMORIST (which is out now) - and early reviews and reader reactions is the same - it seems I've tapped into a universal interest with these books that explore who we were and who we are while at the same time giving you a page turning read. I hope you'll agree.
My preposterous (but hopefully effective) cover copy for Spaceman Blues called it a “literary retro-pulp science-fiction–mystery–superhero novel.” But when I think back to why I first picked up this book and started reading it, I can’t help recalling a line Brian wrote on his cover letter when he first submitted the book to us a bit over five years ago: “This book is painted in browns and grays, sparked by sudden fires. I suspect it is not for everyone, though I hope it is for you.” Here’s your opportunity to find out which camp you fall in.
As usual, the links above will only work if you’ve registered for Tor.com and are logged in, so if you haven’t joined the site, you might want to do so now. In return, you’ll get access to this book, many other useful site features, and more free e-books in the months to come.
Urban fiction’s journey from street vendors to library shelves and six-figure book deals is a case of culture bubbling from the bottom up. That is especially true in New York, where the genre, like hip-hop music, was developed by, for and about people in southeast Queens and other mostly black neighborhoods that have struggled with drugs, crime and economic stagnation.
Writers like Mark Anthony — who at 35 is Ms. Miller’s contemporary and the author of “Paper Chasers,” based on his youth in Laurelton — found themselves being rejected by agents and publishers. So they paid to self-publish their books, with rudimentary design and cheap bindings, and sold them on 125th Street in Harlem, or on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, around the corner from the borough library’s main branch. Soon, a stream of people — high-school students, first-time library users, the library’s own staff — were asking for the books. And the librarians went out on the street to buy them.
Mainstream publishers saw dollar signs and jumped in. St. Martin’s Press now publishes authors from Mr. Anthony to the rapper 50 Cent — another Queens native, born Curtis Jackson — and a subgenre of black erotica led by the writer Zane.
“There are black librarians who hate the genre, because they feel like it’s an embarrassment culturally,” said Vanessa Morris, an assistant teaching professor of library sciences at Drexel University.
But she says the genre tells the stories of African-Americans who survived the 1980s drug wars: “This is about documenting history, or, I should say, collective memory.”
Librarians point out that Harlequin romances, the Bobbsey Twins and even paperbacks were once considered too lowbrow for libraries — and that Stephen King and Ms. Collins also trade in sex and violence.
Frankfurt - Sony is to offer its e-book reader, a replacement for paper books, in Germany from the spring of next year, the Japan-based media company said Wednesday at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Sony Reader device went on sale in the United States in 2006 and in Britain last month.
Sony said it would link with a German book wholesaler, Libri, and a retailer, Thalia, to market the device, which downloads books from personal computers.
Libri, which is to oversee sales of books in German that can be read on the device, said it aimed to have thousands of titles available at launch. No euro price for the 260-gram device was announced.
mozambook publie les grands textes de la littérature. Les ebooks sont au format Microsoft Reader (PC et PocketPC) et pdf (lisibles avec Adobe Acrobat Reader et Acrobat Ebook Reader). Ebooks et lecteurs sont gratuits. Le catalogue compte à ce jour 117 titres. La lettre d'information vous tient régulièrement au courant des dernières parutions (inscription au bas de cette page).
N'hésitez pas à nous contacter si vous voulez contribuer à l'enrichissement de la bibliothèque.
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