"Why can't I subscribe to an author?" asks O'Reilly's Joe Wikert in a post on his personal Kindleville blog last week. He points out that while you can gather all the RSS feeds, Google alerts, and hashtag searches you like, it's not the most efficient way to follow a specific writer's work. Here at Teleread we've highlighted a couple of websites that offer a related service. Book Buzzes watches Amazon and alerts you when an author has a new book coming out, while BookWatch is an iOS app that performs a similar service for iBooks. But those are linked to...

I suppose it was inevitable. As self-e-publishing has drawn more and more attention, with relatively major-name authors deciding to forego pro-publishing and go it alone, and over 1/4 of the Amazon Top 100 list being made up of such books, now signs of an anti-pro-publishing “backlash” have popped up. Blogger switch11 at iReaderReview points out the “mistake” one popular self-publishing author made when he decided to sign up with Macmillan. There’s no other way to put it – Signing a book deal was a huge mistake. John Rector could have been a Top 100 Kindle...

Every year, I approach the coming of April 1 with feelings of existential dread. Since the Internet got popular, April Fool’s Day has been celebrated all over it as International Act-Like-An-A**hole Day. I’ll grant that the obviously humorous stuff, like Gmail Motion, can be pretty funny, but not all humor is that obvious, especially if you have only a passing familiarity with the subject matter. (For instance, a few years ago a prank posting that TSR was buying Middle Earth Role-Playing totally got me.) And then there’s the times when people outright try to put one over on...

The iPad is so popular these days that everything is coming out with special interfaces for it. There was Pulse, which turns a selection of favorite RSS feeds into something similar to a magazine. Then there was Flipboard, which does the same for links posted to social networks. Now here are a couple more web media joining the party. Cooliris, a company known for its browser and iPhone photo apps, has created an app for the iPad called Discover that imports content from Wikipedia and reformats it into an iPad-magazine-style interface. Cooliris hopes eventually to bring the same reformatting technique...

Roger Ebert has an essay on his blog talking about how the Internet has produced a new “golden age” of movie criticism. There are more film critics now, across the Internet, than there have ever been before. The catch is, there’s no real quality control, and most of them aren’t getting paid for it. (Does this situation seem familiar? If you replace “movie criticism” with “writing” and “film critics” with “writers”, the statement is still every bit as true.) Ebert talks about James Berardinelli, one of the most-read film critics in the world (and one of the...

Here is a pair of articles about electronic journalism that talk about how the print and e-journalism traditions are converging. A Newspaper Turns into Blogs First, James Rainey at the Los Angeles Times has a story about a newspaper that has turned into a blog. One year ago, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer entirely shut down its print edition, laid off most of its staff, and made a transition to on-line content only. Now the Post-Intelligencer has become a site where reporters and citizen-journalists alike can blog about local news and other things that are important to them...

Journalist-blogger Alan D. Mutter writes on his blog Reflections of a Newsosaur that the first big web copyright content crackdown is going to commence later this month. Jim Pitkow, CEO of Attributor—the company we covered a few days ago for its survey claiming that e-book piracy had cost the publishing industry $2.8 billion so far—says that “about a dozen” publishers and other media organizations are part of the coalition engaging Attributor to carry out this crackdown. They will start with sites that repost “80% or more of copyrighted stories more than 10 times per month.” After offering...