Technology writer and blogger Robert X. Cringely (the one behind the 1996 TV miniseries Triumph of the Nerds, not the InfoWorld columnists) has announced he is going to be rebooting his written-in-1989, updated-in-1996 history of Silicon Valley, Accidental Empires for the modern Internet age: he is going to blog it. Over the next few months, Cringely will be reposting the entire book to a blog, and inviting reader participation to help him update it for the final e-book form. Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use...

We’ve mentioned the e-writing app Scrivener (available for Windows or OS X) a time or two, and some of our commenters have expressed fondness for it. Indeed, even my brother loves it and has been pestering me to try it; he seems to think that lack of Scrivener is all that’s keeping me from writing the next Great American Novel. I have to admit, with the things I’m seeing about it I’m definitely starting to get tempted to try it out. On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that...

Fair’s fair. If we get upset over something Apple’s done, we should also mention when they fix it. So, remember the kerfuffle over Apple apparently claiming rights in the user agreement over commercial sale of any e-book created in iBooks Author? Well, Ars Technica reports that Apple has just released a patch to the app, and iBooks Author v1.01 includes a clarification in the EULA: it specifically covers only e-books generated in the interactive .ibooks format. (Emphasis mine.) If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated...

A post by Robert McCrum on the Guardian books blog on “the power of paper in the digital era” didn’t turn out the way I thought it was going to from the headline. I expected it to be another one of those “paper books rule, e-books drool” stories we’ve been seeing with increasing frequency lately, but instead it took quite a different approach. McCrum discusses the dichotomy of paper archives and digitization. Thanks to digital copies of records, author Sarah Thornhill was able to do much of the research for a historical novel based on her ancestors without ever...

Novelist Jonathan Franzen, who is winning great popularity lately for his books, recently indulged in a diatribe against e-books, spouting some of the same tired rhetoric that the paper panickers always seem to think is original to them. Paper is permanent and durable, Franzen writes. “The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. You don’t need it to be refreshed, do you?” Funny thing, Jonathan—if it hadn’t been easily downloadable to my electronic device, I don’t think I would have bothered to seek out and read The Great Gatsby at all, and I would have missed out on a...

I’ve reported on the confluence of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and e-books before, but Read Write Web has a story about a new startup, Coliloquy, that is going to produce new branching-story e-books for the Kindle format. But this startup is about more than just letting people pick the story they want to by flipping to page whatever. The article suggests that the e-books will return feedback on what choices readers make so that the publishers and authors can create a better-tailored product. Coliloquy enables episodic content unlike anything previously available on the...

I received an email the other day from Mark Baumer, a writer who is launching a Kickstarter project for $50,000 to write 50 books in a year. On the project website, he writes: Mark Baumer has never published a book. He is going to write and publish fifty books in one year. Each book will be a unique object. There will only be about 100-500 printed copies of each book. He is asking a website for $50,000 to cover the costs of printing, editing, and layout for all the books. All the money raised on this...

Publishing Perspectives has another founder-penned piece promoting a publishing business. This one, called PUBSLUSH Press, aims to crowdsource the gatekeeping process by allowing its users to choose the stories they feel are worthy of publication. The founder, Jesse Potash, was inspired by the story of how much the first Harry Potter novel was rejected (twelve times!) before it found a publisher willing to take a chance on it. Indeed, the publishing world is rife with stories of novels that overcame repeated rejections to become major hits. This suggests that there are still a lot of excellent works out there...

About a year ago, I mentioned Google’s decision to stop active development on Google Wave, and the Apache Foundation’s subsequent move to take ownership. More recently, Google announced it will shut Wave down entirely in April 2012. Wired’s Webmonkey column reports that Apache’s efforts with Wave are now available in the form of “Wave in a Box”, a standalone client/server application that replicates the Wave experience. Wave in a Box consists of two parts, a standalone wave server and a web client. The Wave in a Box web client looks a bit different than...

On FutureBook, Steve Richards (managing director of social media agency Yomego) has a brief piece looking at the rising popularity of online worlds (such as Pottermore and Scholastic’s Horrible Histories World) as ways to market books to kids. He offers a number of suggestions for how the runners of those virtual worlds can make them more attractive and user-friendly to their target audience. Online environments don’t signal the death of reading – far from it. They can actively promote books to children, and pique their interest in new characters and stories. But just as a child...

The Literary Platform has an essay by Richard Beard, Director of the National Academy of Writing, on how writers can help create a new narrative form. The form in question seems to be the appbook—Beard discusses how adding multimedia and clever organization methods for the digital form can turn printed books into something “new” on the tablet. (One example he brings up is myFry, the app edition of Stephen Fry’s latest autobiography (which I covered last year). Beard thinks such apps are a good starting point, though he is careful to differentiate this from run-of-the-mill “enhanced” e-books that...

Despite Our Shadows is a revised re-release of an earlier title of mine, Lambs Hide, Tigers Seek, a noir mystery. Shadows is one of the sexiest stories I've written so far, and when I originally wrote it, I was concerned that the story would be too sexy for mainstream consumption. So I intentionally toned it down and put some of the more racy scenes through the "fade to morning" filter, allowing the reader to fill in the blanks. But when it came for the rewrite, I rethought the idea of editing out or glossing over the sex scenes. Though it may...