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...

Maybe it's just me, but it seems like I've been hearing about more and more companies lately—some of them new, and some that have been around for awhile—that are putting together large and (presumably) expensive teams of designers and developers to create digitally-enhanced "electronic reading experiences," as they're often called. The latest such organization I've heard of is Byook, a French company that was founded in 2009 by three friends who worked in the video game and digital entertainment industries, and they refer to their product as "a new reading experience." That might be a bit of a stretch, given the...

Marvel Comics has opened a new on-line comics store on Marvel.com, powered by comiXology. It offers “hundreds of collections” and other titles, and allows access to those titles from anywhere, including via the Marvel Comics iOS and Android devices. It is also cross-compatible with the Marvel Comics on Chrome store, meaning that purchases made through Chrome will show up on Marvel.com. Perhaps most importantly, if you purchase a digital comic on Marvel.com, you can now read it on the Marvel Comics app for your iOS or Android device. This will allow for a more complete digital...

A court in the UK has issued an order compelling UK ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, the BBC reports. Previously, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) music lobby group had asked the ISPs to do so voluntarily, but they had declined to do so without an actual court order. Critics of the move warn that it could represent the start of a slippery slope toward censoring sites promoting other causes or behaviors. ISP Virgin Media told the BBC that content providers need to offer a carrot as well as a stick: "As a...

Here's an interesting article from TorrentFreak.  I thought cutting down piracy was supposed to increase sales.  I guess not. A new report from the Hadopi office, conveniently written in English so it can be used by lobbyists all around the world, is claiming the following. “Benchmarking studies covering all of the sources available shows a clear downward trend in illegal P2P downloads. There is no indication that there has been a massive transfer in forms of use to streaming technologies or direct downloads.” The report goes on to cite a variety of statistics ranging from a 29 percent decrease in visits to “pirate”...

The practice of windowing—staggering releases of some media work in different places or formats—has been common practice for the movie and television industry for some time. It used to be mainly a feature of staggering film releases from one part of the world to another, then from theater to video once video became an established format. Lately, it is being used to hold movies back from Netflix and Redbox after their release on home video. An example of windowing prompted The Oatmeal comic about someone seeking to buy the first season of A Game of Thrones that subsequently...

How to get kids to read? Lauren Grossberg has a suggestion: Find young-adult books that are being adapted into movies, then encourage the kid to read the book first, then see the movie and compare. There are plenty of such books around—the Harry Potter and Twilight series are obvious choices, as is The Hunger Games. Encouraging your children to read the novels before going to the movie allows the child to practice reading skills and to develop their own opinions and imagination of the ideas and concepts in the novel.  Then when watching the movie, it...

Not ebook related, but this is so interesting that I just had to post it.  From Open Culture: The great French filmmaker François Truffaut would have turned 80 today, and to celebrate, we’re bringing back a wonderful series of audio recordings — Truffaut’s lengthy interview with another legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock. Back in 1962, François Truffaut, the inspiration behind French New Wave cinema, met with Hitchcock. And, assisted by a helpful translator, the two directors talked through Hitchcock’s life and vast filmography, moving from his early films shot it Britain (Blackmail, The 39 Steps, Secret Agent), to his later Hollywood productions – North by Northwest, Psycho and Vertigo....

Piracy has been a constant in all media industries for the last few years, with trade organizations complaining that it’s been cutting into their revenue. Yet for the last few years until 2011, despite all the MPAA’s furor over piracy, the movie industry has been having record sales with each year being better than the last. Oddly enough, now that movie revenues have dropped a bit for 2011, analysts are not blaming piracy. A Chicago Tribune article sourced from CNN begins: The curtain is falling on the worst year for Hollywood in recent memory. ...

Marketing guru Seth Godin has a piece on PaidContent (reposted from his Domino Project blog) responding to an interview with the head of Ingram Books about the future of books and publishing. In the interview, Ingram CEO David “Skip” Prichard trots out some of the usual predictions about the future of the book—multimedia extras, print-on-demand, physical bookstores finding “niches” to adapt to, and print publishers still being necessary. Godin calls Prichard’s views “economically ridiculous,” basing his argument on Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory. Godin suggests that the broad consumer choice the long tail makes possible will drive down production...

Speaking of content producer paranoia, TorrentFreak conducts an interesting intellectual exercise comparing the number of BitTorrent movie downloaders to the amount of Netflix traffic. Torrentfreak points out that Netflix now consumes more bandwidth than even BitTorrent, and crunches some numbers to find out how much more Hollywood would earn if every single BitTorrent downloader switched to paying Netflix for their movies. Torrentfreak estimates that three times as many movies are watched via Netflix as are streamed via BitTorrent, and concludes: In the whole of 2010, Netflix paid the movie studios $181 million in licensing fees...

I found a pair of unrelated stories concerning Russia and piracy today in my Google Reader trawl that make for an interesting juxtaposition. On Publishing Perspectives, Daniel Kalder interviews Sergey Anuriev, the CEO of Russian e-publisher Litres.ru. At the time the company was founded in 2007, there was no legitimate e-book business in Russia—it was “a 100% pirate market.” But at the time it launched, new legislation had founded new civil courts in Russia, which made it easier to fight piracy. At the moment, the Russian e-book market is still very small, and Anuriev estimates that still 90%...