The book is on fire, a period of hot speculation and rapid innovation. If this period is a book burning we cannot say that it is censorship. After all, the e-book is just a new format of the book. The content is still right there, see? Does format matter?  From the view of physics nothing is lost in a fire. Energy is not created or destroyed; it is transferred from one form to another. Small consolation to the person whose house has burned down. Transition always entails loss to those invested in the old way. A way of life was...

Twenty years of the World Wide Web only increased the sale of books. Just a few years after the Kindle was launched e-book sales are accelerating and print sales are plunging. Here are the facts that interest the numbers nerds who follow these things. Amazon September 16, 2009. Sales for Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol sold more copies for Amazon's Kindle than in hardcover. This fact was interesting but not so surprising. The book was the much anticipated sequel to the popular The Da Vinci Code. It was just faster to download Kindle copies than print ones. Print sales caught up later in...

The book is on fire, so we are told. In 2007 Amazon released its e-reader, the Kindle, its brand suggesting a gentle flame by which to read. In 2010 we reached a tipping point with e-readers as sales of e-books soared. Last week Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, a tablet. With its low price, enthusiasts are predicting a hit. Is the book really on fire? The metaphor is too easy, a cliché, but is it accurate? Things are changing fast. Digital technology has revolutionized publishing. The big book stores are closing. Libraries are now popular data access centres. Is...

Congrats to contributor John Meidema.  His Slow Reading has been translated into Portuguese by Cristina Cupertino....

John Miedema, who has contributed a number of articles to TeleRead, has released two WordPress plugins.  Here's what the WordPress plugin directory says about  BiblioShare: The BNC BiblioShare plugin is for book reviewers, book bloggers, library webmasters, anyone who wants to put book covers and data on their WordPress blog or website. Use the plugin button in the WordPress visual editor or insert a 'shortcode' with a book number in a WordPress post, page or widget. The plugin will display a book cover image, author, and other book data from BiblioShare (http://biblioshare.org). The plugin is...

John Miedima is a regular contributor to TeleRead and his Slow Reading has been released as an ebook. Here's what his blog says about it: Ebooks get a shakedown in chapter two of Slow Reading. When it comes to reading anything of complexity or richness, I assert that “e-book readers aspire to print” and “e-books are metadata for print books”. You can read all about it in the e-book version of Slow Reading now available from Powell’s for $7.70. (The print price is too expensive at Powell’s. If you want the print edition, buy it cheaper from...

Commenting on Clay Shirky's new book on 'Cognitive Surplus,' John Miedema informs us that:   "As Shirky observes, Wikipedia was built out of one percent of the hours spent watching television in a year.  However, before the web, we also spent more time reading long-form books, shaping the capacity for complex cognition, something that’s changing with the switch to scanning snippets on the web.  As MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte observed: 'my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared.'  This deficit also has enormous consequences.  The capacity for complex thought is required to meet the complex social, political and environmental...

The digital world has substance in its own right, but we invented digital technology to enhance our physical world. It’s funny how we forget that sometimes. Take ereaders. Ereaders like the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo are popular right now. They are nifty. You can download books, you can click from one page to the next using buttons instead of fingers. They are lightweight if you’re the sort to carry a library with you. But is that it? I found the Kindle’s note-taking functions disappointing, especially when I wanted to transfer my notes to my computer. Turns out, proprietary concerns over copying...

Generation X’ers have a unique perspective on information technology. Born in the sixties, this generation had their primary education in the old world of print and analog technologies, and their secondary education and first jobs in the new world of digital information technologies. I participated in the transformation of my family’s printing business, from old style presses to digital typesetting and copying. Having a foot in both world allows for a two-step, a dance between worlds. The two-step is a universal pattern. On the surface we see opposites: male and female, old and young, hot and cold. As we investigate the...

I’ve been diverted by an experiment in epublishing. It must remain a sideline till I’m clear of other projects, but as I experiment with it I will document findings in a series, call it Epublishing Take 1, starting with this post. Building an epub ebook from scratch. I stumbled across a tutorial on how to build an epub file from scratch. It took about sixty seconds to create my first epub ebook. Building an epub ebook using eCub software. I used eCub software to create an epub ebook from a handful of text files that make up the content of my side...

Editor's Note: This is part 8 of 8 of John's Kindle Shakedown series, and you can also find it on his blog here. Thanks, much, John for allowing TeleRead to reprint your series and I, for one, hope to hear more from you in the future. PB An invitation for feedback is included with the Kindle. As a conclusion to my Kindle shakedown series, I am sending this open letter to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com. The letter is also being emailed to kindle-feedback@amazon.com and jeffb@amazon.com. Dear Jeff Bezos, Thank you for making the Amazon Kindle available in Canada. I...

For those of you who have been following John Miedema's posts, the latest one of which is here, you might like to listen to him being interviewed on via negativa. Some, not all, of the topics covered in the interview are: Is the length of a book an indication of profundity? Are books mind-altering substances? Which kinds of writing work better in print and which work better on the web? How do you reconcile technophilia with bibliophilia?...