Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin has another interesting post on his blog. I don’t know that I entirely agree with this one, but he does raise some good points that are worth thinking about. Unlike a number of pundits we’ve heard from in the past, Shatzkin holds that it is logical for publishers to try to keep e-book prices high to protect the print market. He feels that publishers should stick to doing what they do best, and what they do best is putting books on shelves. From that point of view, “the fate of the big publishers is...

Mike Masnick on TechDirt links to a Slate review by Jack Shafer of an interesting-looking book: I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain are Being Creatively Disrupted, by Nick Bilton. (We’ve mentioned Bilton a few times in the past, such as when he was told he couldn’t read an e-book at a a coffeeshop, or when he got into a discussion with fellow writer George Packer about whether the Internet affects attention span.) The review, and Masnick’s review of the review, focuses on predictions of techno-apocalypse throughout history: ...

The Wall Street Journal’s “Speakeasy” blog has an interview with William Gibson, part of a longer piece it will be publishing in the next day or so. This segment focuses on Gibson’s thoughts about the future of book publishing. Gibson notes that, thanks to Twitter, he is experiencing a larger level of fan engagement than he had been able to previously and finding it “more pleasant” than he had expected. He is also able to get a clearer picture of where the book is being released and when. He also notes that he doesn’t see the...

Here we have yet another story on why print rules and e-books drool, by 26-year-old Emma Silvers who posits the thesis that she is somehow nobly fighting against the tide of her generation, rejecting conformity and marching to the beat of a different drummer and all that. It ends up coming across as smug and smacks more than a little of entitlement. Silvers writes of encountering a woman reading a book on the Kindle and being annoyed because instead of seeing a book cover to give away what the person was reading, she saw the “smooth metallic back...

On Publishing Perspectives, I’ve noticed an editorial by Deborah Willis that reads almost like a response to our recent post by C. A. Bridges on print vs. paper books (though of course they were written completely independently of each other). Bridges admits that a number of things can be done with the physical artifacts that are paper books that can’t be done with e-books, as a reader he finds he prefers the electronic version. Deborah Willis, on the other hand, is concerned about the essential nature of printed books becoming diluted or vanishing as a result of migration...

Over at Gadget Lab, Tim Carmody has an interesting look at why e-book readers are the size they are. It has to do with sheep. More specifically, the sheepskins that were used to make parchment back in medieval days. Folding the parchment a different number of times before cutting produced a different number of parchment sheets of different sizes, which rapidly became the standard sizes of the printing industry. Even after printing moved from parchment to paper, the sizes were preserved out of habit—they were already set up for working with those sizes and there was no compelling...

You know that “print vs. e-books” debate we’re always covering here? The New York Times has an interesting article looking at it from a novel new angle: what happens in households where one person favors print and the other prefers e-books. In looking at these little “toilet seat up or down” style disputes, the article is often rather amusing. “[My wife] talks about the smell of the paper and the feeling of holding it in your hands,” said Mr. de Halleux, 32, who says he thinks the substance is the same regardless of medium....

The Bookseller reports on author Jeanette Winterson expressing dismay over the march of digitization (or “digitisation” as they spell it on that side of the Atlantic). At an event commemorating the 25th anniversary of her novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, she said: "What worries me is that a load of s**** has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that the Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off shelves." She brings up the browser’s dilemma: if you can...

Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb has written a pair of articles considering the advantages that e-books and printed books have over each other. E-books get the nod for social highlighting, notes, look-up of words, ability to tweet and Facebook quotes, and search; paper books get it for feel, packaging, sharing, keeping, and second-hand books. I can’t help but find both of these lists a little lame. The e-books list seems to place an undue emphasis on social networking (the ability to tweet and Facebook quotes? Really? Something that only the Kindle has, and even it only got...

On Newsweek, Malcolm Jones writes an interesting editorial pondering whether e-books might replace printed books, and if so, what will happen to libraries. Although, despite the mention of libraries in the article’s headline (“Farewell, Libraries?”), there is actually relatively little discussion of them within the article (even though one prominent library actually did ditch most of its print books recently, Jones never mentions it)—most of it is related to the same book-as-artifact vs. book-as-content discussion that is rehashed in every single argument over whether e-books are awesome or awful. Expect this kind of thing to come up more...

Amazon still has not reached an e-book price agreement with Penguin, whose contract with Amazon expired (like so many others) on April 1 when agency pricing took effect. Penguin is the only one of the “agency pricing five” not to have come to an agreement yet, and so after thirty days, Penguin’s e-books still are not available via Amazon. Of course, the whole reason for the kerfuffle over e-book pricing to begin with was Amazon’s $9.99 price point for e-books, in which it was buying the books for standard half-hardcover price and then marking them down to increase...

A little over three years ago, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller began writing a Liaden Universe side-story novel, Fledgling—which soon expanded into a sequel book, Saltation. These books were written as crowdfunded “Storyteller’s Bowl” projects: The drafts were posted to the web one chapter per week in return for reader donations, with the promise of a professionally-edited-and-revised hardcover book sent to donors of a specific level at the end of the project. Subsequently, the novels were picked up by Baen along with the rest of the Liaden Universe series, with Lee & Miller to receive part of their...