Killer links:

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By Robert Nagle

Some brief links I stumbled upon that grabbed me. Semi-related to publishing.

• 2 good articles about Web typography from Smashing Magazine: Best Practices and some usability tips. See also Richard Rudder’s elements of typographical style applied to the web.  Here’s also an article about font-stacks and embedded fonts.
• Joanna MacNeil on why teenagers read better than you and the new self-publishing: If I could enter Max Frisch’s “I’m Not Stiller” in a search engine and receive several recommendations of similar books, you bet I wouldn’t care if they’re self-published or not.
• Virginia Woolf: “Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last a hundred years. The life of the average book is perhaps three months. Why not face this fact? Why not print the first edition on some perishable material which would crumble to a little heap of perfectly clean dust in about six months time? If a second edition were needed, this could be printed on good paper and well bound. Thus by far the greater number of books would die a natural death in three months or so. No space would be wasted and no dirt would be collected.”
  
• Paula B does an outstanding podcast that is a book review of Chris Anderson’s Free . From the transcript:

Now we know just what Anderson is about: it’s all a game. You just have to make sure you’re on the winning side, but don’t worry, Eric Schmidt has got you covered, so you’ll be all right.  The problem with Anderson is that he thinks everyone is like him: smart, innovative, resilient, outgoing, and well-connected….The only mystery as far as I see it is why he thinks everyone is or should be like him. Free forces everyone to become an entrepreneur; to find ways to bounce back from financial devastation should you not be so lucky as to be on the winning side; to be so versatile and intelligent that you can pick up new skills virtually overnight if you have to. It forces you to, except what if you don’t have the capacity?

• Olivier Morin and Sophie Claudel on trolls (or “conversation hackers”). This article is long and so good I could not possibly excerpt it.
• Editorial Ass on why you should never submit unagented stuff to publishers. This blogger is smart, funny and knowledgeable about how publishing works.

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