As if you needed another reason to switch to an e-reader: now they’re better for the environment, too. According to a report by the CleanTech Group, "e-readers purchased from 2009 to 2012 could prevent 5.3 billion kg of carbon dioxide in 2012, or 9.9 billion kg during the four-year time period." Alex Salkever goes on to say: "The publishing industry is a horrible thing for the environment. Last year the material needs of the book and newspaper businesses in the U.S. resulted in the removal of 125 million trees. Production processes for books and newspapers created 153...

Planning an overnight layover in San Francisco a few years back, I asked a friend from the Bay Area what the best used bookstore in town was. Without hesitation, he said, “Green Apple Books.”  So I went there.  It’s just what you’d expect: the slightly standoffish clerks, the vast selection of Buddhist-themed tomes, the glowing Sherman Alexie recommendations. I surrendered to that wonderful vertigo every avid reader experiences when there are too many good books to count, not enough time, and not enough money.  I walked out exhilarated with two bulging...

More innovation in publishing: Snarkmarket sold 200 hardcover copies of its book New Liberal Arts at $8.99 a pop, after which it put a free Creative Commons-licensed PDF up for anyone and everyone. So Snarkmarket make itself a cool $1,800 (less production costs, of course) before releasing the book into infinity. Aside from the PDF’s inherent weaknesses as e-book format, this is a pretty cool idea. The tiny press run gives value to the hardcover, certainly pays for the free PDF giveaway, and gets the interest up for the next book to be thusly released. I agree with...

Editor’s note: A list of earlier posts on the topic appears at the end. Court is TeleRead’s book reviewer. – D.R. Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, academic, entrepreneur, and author Ann Kirschner asks, “Do I love books or do I love reading?”---in light of the ever-expanding publishing universe. For me and probably most readers, it’s an easy question to answer: reading. I don’t much care how my reading comes as long as it’s written well. Kirschner wasn’t sure. So she decided to conduct an experiment, reading Dickens’ masterwork Little Dorrit four ways: paperback,...

OR Books, a new publisher aimed at progressive readers, will use e-books and POD to bypass bookstores. Publishing industry veterans John Oakes and Colin Robinson plan to "skate into the future" of publishing. Evidently they intend to cut the big chain bookstores out of the loop.  In a promotional video, they are shown standing gleefully in front of a closed Barnes & Noble megastore in New York. No mention of goliath Amazon, however. And no word on how they'll be doing this, exactly, or when. They do claim to be "platform agnostic", so let's hope this...

The good folks at Feedbooks are improving their publishing application programming interface (API). Writers can now “switch to the Table of Contents (ToC) of your book while editing, to drag & drop parts/chapters/sections and re-order them the way that you want.” Sounds very user-friendly---another online publishing option for potential authors. But quickly reading the post the first time, I mistakenly thought Feedbooks was going to let the reader perform these in-book mashups.  It got me to thinking: why not? When a mashup will work For novels that rely on straightforward linear progression, a...

TeleRead book reviewer Court Merrigan will be teaching Upward Bound kids in a summer program. Feed him ideas. Here’s one: Blogging would be a great medium for the kids’ book reviews. Second photo is from a UB project unrelated to his. – D.R. Blogs and e-books for high-risk, high potential kids? Topics like those are on my mind these days. Among other subjects, I’ll be teaching Beginning Blogging. I’ll have a computer lab, about 10 kids, and 5 hours a week for 5 weeks.  Blogging for better English The kids are...

Stop the presses, as it were. The Espresso Book Machine “can print and bind books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait,” according to the Guardian. Currently it has access to 500,000 books, but the British bookseller Blackwell’s hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer---the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response...

There has been a decided uptick in interest in Mark Twain recently. All to the good: the great satirist deserves as large an audience as he get in this and any other time. Now HarperStudio is getting in the game with its release of Who is Mark Twain?, a collection of 24 previously unpublished essays by him. And if you buy the hardcover, you also receive the DRM-free e-book. While I can’t see why anyone would buy both a hardcover edition and an e-book, if HarperStudio is giving it away and it’s DRM-free in the bargain, I don’t see how...

Password Incorrect is a truly zany collection of “tech-absurd” short stories by Nick Name, pen name for Polish author Piotr Kowalczyk, which only a networked world could have unleashed. It’s available for free from Feedbooks. Start with the title story to see the absurd in action. My Kindle sat untouched for a couple weeks while I transitioned back to the U.S. from Thailand.  When I got back to my Kindle’s homepage again, I did a double take---Password Incorrect?  What password?  I never needed a damn password before!---until it all came back to me.  My reaction is strikingly similar...

The poet Norman Savage, whose autobiography Junk Sick I reviewed here, has begun posting poems on his blog. You don’t want to miss them. Some of these originally appeared in the countercultural magazine Changes, started by Susan Graham Mingus, wife of Charles Mingus. The poem “Sunday” came complete with pictures by Andy Warhol. (Unfortunately Savage is unable to upload them.) That’s all right. The poem speaks for itself. An excerpt: SUNDAY body repose, mind nomadic; constant flux even on the day of...

A book is forever. A screen of text is not. So says Stephen Carter (photo) in a Daily Beast post titled Where's the Bailout for Publishing? I would say he has it backwards: online is forever. Books are made of glue and paper, mostly of the high-acid type that quickly turns into so much dust and pulp. I have whole shelves doing so before my eyes, particularly the ones I owned in Thailand, where the climate is particularly merciless to cheaply-made books. They’re churned out by a publishing industry mostly concerned with this quarter’s bottom line, not eternity....