Nabokov to the left...a brilliant writer, not the glibbest talker No longer can typical authors just write well for their books to sell. They must also perform—in newspaper and radio interviews and in readings, and maybe even on net.radio or YouTube. Zero or little publicity? Then writers might not even get into the local B&N. much less be able to to compete there. Some authors thrive in such circumstances and actually want to be multimedia performers. I’ve asked one of our favorite contributors, Kat Meyer, to go ahead with a post on...

Amazon Kindle Review has a compilation of reviews of newspapers that the Kindle can display. For the Kindle, the New York Times is the best-selling newspaper. But, in 150 customer reviews, the august Times gets an average rating of just three of five stars. Some people want the $13.95 monthly subscription price slashed. Others gripe that the Kindle edition does not include all the articles. If you own a Kindle and are a newspaper reader, you might want to go to the Kindle Review site and check the Times review and the others. For now,...

Engadget’s Michael Gartenberg and Techdirt’s Michael Masnick square off in opposing columns about the merits or lack thereof of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Gartenberg feels that DRM has been demonized unfairly, and that it enables new business models that could not exist without it. Take subscription services for example. Sure, I'd love a service that would allow me to download unlimited content in high bitrate MP3 format for a reasonable fee every month. Except economics and greed will never let that happen (although I suspect we'd see a lot users sign up for...

Is Barnes & Noble high-pressuring writers to link their sites to its online store? Our friends at GalleyCat have the story, following up on SmartBitches, Trashy Books. Somebody at one publisher is even said to have emailed writers: “I’m not exaggerating when I say they WILL NOT ORDER the book unless their site is listed.” Ouch! Now here’s a special e-book angle. When happens when interbook linking is common? Will B&N---and Amazon!---seek special favors? And do some very nasty things to avoid disintermediation? In fairness to B&N: GalleyCat reports: “One editor writes in to...

New York Times reporter Brad Stone’s take on sales figures for the e-book version of The Lost Symbol---versus the numbers for the p-book---inspired lots and lots of skepticism from E boosters. And I’m still waiting for him to write on social DRM and certain nuances of e-book standards that he and the Times have yet to explore, despite some progress in a recent article. But Stone is right on the mark in highlighting another Kindle issue. And that’s the ticklish little matter of opening up the Kindle to third-party developers. Look at all the apps for...

With all the negative press that the Google Book settlement receives, it's important to print the positive as well. This is by Quentin Hardy and appeared on Forbes.com. I do not often feel a lot of sympathy for large monopolistic corporations, particularly when they have some history of unilateral moves. In the case of Google Books, and all the negative attention it has received over the four years this case has gone on, I might make an exception. ... If Google's actions seem entirely wrong, consider how we would feel if, in response to all the criticism, Google simply destroyed the...

If you are looking for a new phone with ereading capability then check this out. AT&T is offering the 3G 8GB refurb for $49 and the 16GB for $99 with the typical 2 year contract. I'm still using my 3G as I'm not eligible for an upgrade to the 3GS until December. It works just fine with everything I throw at it, including high CPU-usage applications like real time GPS navigation. Here's AT&T's Facebook entry about the pricing....

RWood, at MobileRead, says he received an email from the eReader people saying that it will be ported to the new Palm WebOS, but no release date was given. As there is currently no ebook reading software for the new Palm, other than by emulation, this is certainly good news....

Now take a look at this: create a book online using the Wiki format, then make it available as an ebook and then go on and use print on demand to make it a pbook and then revise the Wiki and make the newest versions available - is there any new technology these guys have missed! Take a look at The Symbian Blog. My previous post about on-demand publishing in July gave some hints about why we think wiki books are so cool. With help from contributors like Pankaj and Bogdan, wiki books provide useful information to developers on...

We had previously discussed Banned Books Week here. Now, Resource Shelf has compiled a listing of resources for this effort. Gary tells me that the listing will be updated periodically during the week. You can find the listing here....

Gary Price, who runs that wonderfully informative site Resource Shelf, send me the following email. Nice to see the Library of Congress stepping up to the times. Launching today is a new site from the library called Read.gov. I have an overview post here if you're interested but that's really not the reason I'm writing. http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/09/26/all-sorts-of-features-read-gov-launches-today/ Part of the site is the reason. At the moment they have 29 "classic" books for teens and kids that can be read in their entirety online. Move through a book page-by-page (forward or backwards) by simply clicking on the page you’re currently reading or looking at. The LC Book Reader also...

 Phony memoirs and other frauds are bad news for the publishing industry, whatever the medium---E or P. The typical nonfiction book undergoes less fact-checking than articles in major magazines. But what if publishers in many cases required writers to deposit their documentation for perusal---either immediately or in the future? And perhaps even more usefully, what if the files would then be available others writing on the same topic? The new DocumentCloud project is working toward the latter goal, shared documentation, for media organizations and eventually others. In this case the participating sites will house the...