Authors have experimented with Twitter fiction before, and even fictional characters from a musical have taken to Twitter to do a little world building (and marketing). But Reif Larsen's enigmatic matryoshka doll piece is the first I've seen in a while to make such effective use of the format. Here are some examples from the blog A New Kind of Book: here’s what Reif wrote on July 19th: Package from Serbia just arrived. I did not request such a package. I wonder the % of unrequested packages that end up being life-changing. That’s odd, I thought. A little quirky, a...

Ever since Amazon launched its Kindle Singles program back in January, writers and organizations have been able to submit content for consideration. Amazon downplayed this though, offering only an email address and a suggestion that "serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers" submit. This week Amazon opened up a little and launched a submissions page that provides more details of its submission policy, and in the process turns the program into something resembling a disassembled magazine or journal. For instance, the program's editors will consider pitches for unwritten works as well as works-in-progress. You can also submit...

Sometimes I think you can make e-reading news out of just about anything. Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics, has taken a look at the recent Netflix price hike in an article on the Nieman Journalism Lab blog, and compares Netflix’s attempts to shift customers to digital streaming and away from costly physical media to newspapers’ attempts to move customers on-line and away from costly print media. (Mathew Ingram also has a piece analyzing Doctor’s analysis on GigaOm.) Doctor’s piece is long and involved, going into detail on Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s strategy. It also discusses newspaper publishers’...

Like a creeping zombie that refuses to lie down and die, it appears that Fusion Garage is primed to claw its way out of the grave with another try at a tablet device. Liliputing reports that Fusion Garage has sent a device to the FCC for testing. Details are sparse, but it’s apparently tablet-shaped. This wasn’t entirely unexpected, given that the company said last year it had a new model planned for this year. All the same, it’s still a little surprising they’re actually going through with it. Fusion Garage’s first device, the JooJoo, might as well have...

I’ve touched on the “freemium” philosophy of giving some content away for free and charging for extras before, but here’s a post on AllThingsD with some interesting new findings touching on video gaming. It covers a study by Flurry, an analytics provider for mobile games on Apple and Android devices, on the spending habits of freemium gamers. (Found via Slashdot.) Of the people who play freemium games on iOS or Android devices, the study reveals, most will never spend money on the games at all—only 3% are likely to do so—but within that 3%, the average transaction is $14...

Kno, the company that had been designing a two-paned e-textbook tablet reader before deciding to get out of the hardware market and concentrate on software for existing tablets, has released a survey that states that American college students hate lugging books around so much that 73% of them would be willing to give up sex if it let them avoid carrying books. (Gee, I didn’t think a Kindle made you look that nerdy.) I find it a little ironic this study came from Kno, since their proposed (and abandoned) textbook reader would have been as heavy as a laptop,...

Wired’s Gadget Lab has a feature profiling a new, specifically-for-books flatbed scanner, the Plustek OpticBook 3800. The defining features of this scanner seem to be a thin bezel that allows all-the-way-to-spine scanning, and a specially padded liner to eliminate distortion. I’m actually a bit surprised that Wired is so excited over this scanner, given that in the last couple of years we’ve already seen a number of book scanning apparatuses (both do-it-yourself and commercial) that leave a one-page-at-a-time flatbed in the dust. The future of non-destructive book scanning seems to involve digital-camera rigs that can snap shots of two...

My father-in-law, Bob—a Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran—recently surprised us all by bringing a slender box along with him on his latest visit. Inside the box lay a Nook Touch Simple. "This is a good one, right?" he asked. "The ad online said it can hold 1,000 books..." I told him I had heard good things about the Nook in general, but was not familiar with how a 'Simple' operated. "Well, you can't go wrong with the name," Bob replied. "But, help me get that free book off there, the one it came with... Dracula. I don't wanna read that." After I removed...

The Poetry Foundation's free poetry app, released for the iPhone last year, can now be installed on iPads and Android devices too. Here's more info from the press release: The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce that its POETRY app is now available for the first time for Android and iPad. The free app has been updated for all mobile devices, including the iPhone. The updated POETRY app now offers audio versions of many of the 1,700-plus poems included in its virtual poetry library, links to biographies of poets whose work is featured in the app, source...

I posted earlier about some problems I have been having recently with error-filled ebooks---I am not talking about major editing-process errors, rather, I am talking about typos and formatting glitches resulting from unproofed conversions. People used to complain about these at times before ebooks 'hit it big,' but now that we e-reading customers are a more mainstream group, the complaints are getting increasingly vociferous and this has been the first year where I have really noticed a widespread problem myself. But just how widespread is this problem? Is my feeling that these days, I am becoming more of a copy-editor...

College bookseller Akademos issued a press release earlier this week announcing the launch of a digital reader "that will allow its member institutions to access electronic content from traditional publishers and from open resources, such as the Connexions Consortium, World Public Library, the Guttenberg Project, and many others." The announcement says the device displays EPUB files, will allow students to make notes, and will apparently be linked to an online store where students can purchase print copies. Unfortunately, that's about all it says—there's no other info about the device, and no links to other info pages. (Even the link to...

My to-be-read pile of ebooks keeps growing. Unfortunately for publishers, however, it keeps growing with free offerings from both publishers and self-publishers. I admit that a lot of the free self-published books should never have seen fingers on a keyboard, but I also have to admit that I am finding a lot of good reads among the free self-published books. Some are very high quality, many are just good reads. But “just good reads” is more than enough. These are books that aren’t of the caliber that one would choose for a book club discussion, but they are decently written and...