The mainstream U.S. book industry keeps shrinking rather than reaching out for new markets. Sadly, reflecting turmoil in both the book and newspaper businesses, the Washington Post is killing off Book World as a regular supplement. And this isn't the best year for the book biz in other countries, either. How to respond? Long term, some of best juiciest pickings could be in developing countries---where millions in time will start using e-book-capable tablets, smart cellphones and other devices. So, with interest, I'm watching the e-book-related hardware efforts of One Laptop Per Child, which, as in the case of netbooks, could...

Received an email from Tizra: Now, with the introduction of a fully self-service version of the Tizra Publisher web application, this online publishing upside is within reach of whole new categories of content owners--both inside and outside the traditional publishing industry. The new self-serve signup means that anyone can have access to the same highly flexible content management and online commerce capabilities MIT Press uses in its CISnet collection of online computer science books (http://cisnet.mit.edu). Recently MIT Press has been joined by new Tizra customers including Indiana University Press, University of Tennessee Press, the Association of Research Libraries and Bloomsbury Academic. The...

The following essay was written in August, 2002 for Jeff Kirvin's "Writing on Your Palm" blog (which has since shed its non-Jeff bloggers and become Jeff's personal blog instead). A LiveJournal post from Bruce Baugh on the subject of adapting RPG matter to an iPhone-readable  format caused me to think about it again—and then I noticed as I was trying to google it so I could link to it that the WoYP archives seem to have gone away. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve this piece from the blogger.com "edit your blog posts" menu. I was tempted...

Over on Time Magazine, Lev Grossman has written an article looking at the future of the publishing industry in the new "digital age." Grossman touches on and ties together a number of related topics. He discusses the way that vanity publishing has largely lost its stigma over the last few years, going from the last refuge of the talentless to just another way to get books noticed. He talks about the outdated advance and consignment systems that have constrained traditional publishing since the Great Depression, and how e-books might represent a way to bypass some of those constraints. And...

I'll leave it to others to offer detailed assessments of John Updike's place in the literary constellation. When it came to writings on the strange ways of the middle class, I myself preferred the much-out-of-fashion Sinclair Lewis  even though Updike's style was more graceful. Babbitt has held up surprisingly well---with its reflections on American materialism. Cellphones and computers, as objects of machine-lust, are the new radios and "motor-cars." In loving the hardware, let's not forget books and words. Of course there was much more to Updike than just dissections of the middle class in such works as...

He starts out: Confession time. I was wrong about reading ebooks on the iPhone. The article then goes on to discuss what Apple would have to put into place to do sell books on iTunes. Interestingly, one the things he finds that might discourage Apple is Overdrive's recent actions: A source of books. This almost goes without saying, but before Apple can begin selling ebooks, they...

I picked this up from Adrian Graham's site. It is a 35 minute presentation by Google's Veronica Liesaputra given on June 26, 2007. It is highly technical and here is the abstract posted for the talk: An electronic book is defined as a digital book that not only captures the affordances of a physical book, but also transcends the limitations of its paper counterpart. There is much debate as to whether the use of the book metaphor is appropriate for an electronic document. User studies suggest that current popular document presentations (HTML and PDF) are not always the...

Amazon is expected to unveil the Kindle 2 on February 9 in New York City---with such improvements as a faster screen, perhaps a refined keyboard, and better page-changing controls. The screen and keyboard improvements just might lead to more interactivity. So what do you think are the chances that the Kindle 2 will have something else? ePub? My guess is, No. But hope lingers despite Amazon's format chauvinism. Any reason why Jeff B. might surprise us? I suspect the Kindle will have ePub in time if Jeff stays in the e-book hardware business. Just not now. I'll also be curious if...

Further anecdotal evidence that resistance to e-books is futile: Gareth Powell tells how he bought iPod the Missing Manual (O...

I came across this site today from a link in my RSS feeds. However, I forgot who posted it, so my apologies to the poster. This is a neat site: ...

Thanks to Eugene Woodbury for the link to this long article. Having spent a fair amount of my working life traveling back and forth to Japan I find it especially fascinating. Eugene says: Great story. I think Cory Doctorow and Paulo Coelho would approve. Following Starts, other publishers like Goma and Asuki Media Works moved in to cherry pick cell phone novel sites online and put out the next big hit. The number of cell phone novels in print began skyrocketing in 2006, when 22 books hit the shelves; the following year, there were 98. Even a no-name author...

Aaron Pressman laments Amazon's failure to follow up on the Kindle in a thoughtful blog posting today. I think it...