Over the past two or three months, you may have begun to notice that nearly every time you get around to catching up on your digital publishing news, yet another media outlet is announcing their new e-book division. And that's definitely a good thing—don't get me wrong. But so many of the bigger media companies launching digital imprints today seem to be repurposing much more old content than they are creating new stories. To me, that sometimes comes as a bit of a disappointment. It seems a little cheap, almost. But a new company that refers to itself as a digital...

Robert Ebert was my first and last source for movies and writing. The iconic film critic died Thursday at 70 years old, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. More than 10 years ago, movies were one of my main joys. With my film passion came the need to write. So I created a website for my movie reviews. I would watch a film, write a review and then read Ebert’s review. I felt inadequate every single time. But I didn’t hang my head in disgust. Ebert made me want to be better. I found his writing engaging and passionate, two qualities that stood out in...

By now, the success of indie author Hugh Howey has been widely publicized, including here on TeleRead. Howey wrote Wool, a book split into five novellas set in a dystopian future. Read Joanna Cabot’s review of the Wool Omnibus here. Howey recently did a radio interview with Orla Barry of The Green Room on Newstalk, during which he discussed his deal with movie director Ridley Scott (Prometheus, Black Hawk Down), who bought the movie rights to the book. Howey also discusses the rise in popularity of Wool. Howey didn’t expect Wool to take off the way it did, gaining steam without much marketing on...

It seems like more and more people lately are coming to the same conclusion as Gabe Newell of Valve about piracy as a service problem. Paul Tassi has an op-ed on Forbes in which he points out that no matter what Hollywood and other media industries do, they will never manage to stomp out piracy through legislation. It’s already illegal in most of the world, but that hasn’t slowed it down much. Right now, Tassi writes, pirates have a big advantage over commercial interests in how easy it is to download and view their media. The editorial mostly applies...

This Saturday, I drove about 30 miles west of Springfield to visit the Gay Parita Sinclair, a restored period filling station in Paris Springs, just west of Halltown, Missouri on old Route 66. Several huge photo blow-ups of the place hang on the wall in the breakroom at TeleTech where I work, in keeping with the building’s “Route 66” decor theme. It was only last week when I googled it that I realized I had actually driven right past it without even noticing it twice while on my way to Carthage. I guess I’d mentally filed it...

I found a link to this video yesterday in Jimbo Wales’s post surrendering his editing privileges. Wales said it “moved [him] deeply” and was why he felt so strongly about wanting Wikipedia to be above reproach. I can’t speak to whether Wales’s actions were justified, but the 8-minute mini-documentary about a remote village in Peru is remarkably interesting. It includes some shots of students using green-and-white OLPC XO-1 laptops, and talking about how they learned to use them by exploring the applications. The students said that if one of them discovered how to do something new, he...