"Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a story about a young man who loses his job as part of the Great Recession of the early part of the 21st century, and gets a new one working a night-shift at a 24-hour bookstore in San Francisco. He quickly discovers that there's much more than meets the eye to this store. And before long, he's criss-crossing the country and enlisting all his friends in the quest to hack the code behind this mysterious place. "I actually wrote this book for myself—or for people like me—because I was tired of people asking the question, 'Books, or cool digital...

To be honest, I don't really have much to say about Justin Hollander's anti-ebooks op-ed that showed up in the New York Times on Tuesday. But because its main focus was Education Secretary Arne Duncan's recent proclamation that "over the next few years, [paper] textbooks should be obsolete," I figured it was an essay the e-book community should probably pay attention to. Hollander is an assistant professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, and to be fair, his piece isn't necessarily anti-ebooks per se. Instead, he's arguing for the superiority of paper textbooks over their digital cousins. "Digital-learning technologies, like e-readers and multimedia Web sites...

By Brian Howard RELIVE THE 2012 PUBLISHING BUSINESS VIRTUAL CONFERENCE Free publishing resources now available on demand, for a limited time What were you doing last Thursday? No matter. We here at the Publishing Business Group were putting on another installment of the Publishing Business Virtual Conference and Expo. Whether you were online with us or not, you can now, starting today, access all 12 book, magazine and technology sessions from the conference, plus two keynotes—from Globalvision’s Rory O'Connor and the New York Times’ Charles Duhigg—on demand. Any time you want. Did your lunch run long and you missed “Organizations Confronting Digital Change”? Have a gruelling production meeting...

Editor's note: Rob Walker is the sort of writer whose name you may not be familiar with, but whose work you've almost certainly encountered—at least once or twice, if not dozens of times. Walker is also an incredibly prolific creator of content, but he's probably best known as the author of "Consumed," a legendarily quirky New York Times Magazine column about marketing and the culture of American consumption.  Earlier this year, Walker compiled a selection of "Consumer" columns into e-book form as something of an experiment. In the following post, which originally appeared on Observatory, the blog of the Design Observer Group, Walker takes...

It's been my experience that avid readers tend to be the sorts of people who take great pride in their intelligence. And intelligent people, for reasons that are obvious enough, aren't always forthcoming when they encounter complicated subjects they don't entirely understand. I mention this because I suspect that a decent portion of the e-reading community is having a hard time wrapping its collective head around the now-approved e-book pricing settlement situation. And that's a shame, because this particular case offers anyone who's interested a fantastic opportunity to observe the process of free-market capitalism in all its exquisite absurdity. I'll be the first to admit that all the...

From the Great Ideas Department of the Nieman Journalism Lab's website today comes a semi-sarcastic yet truly brilliant advice-essay from Rex Sorgatz, who has just succeeded in handing the New York Times their next million dollar idea ... for free! (Nice guy, huh?) I'll skip the paraphrasing and let those of you who are interested in such things read Sorgatz's piece yourselves. But the gist of it is this: He's proposing that as part of the Times' ongoing effort to stave off bankruptcy, they create an exclusive and trendy membership club that comes with discounted access to various Times-produced content and events. (Sorgatz even went so...

This stunt is already experiencing its blowing-up moment on various ebook and lit blogs, so I'll keep it brief. And to be honest, I can't quite decide if this story—by New York Times tech columnist David Pogue—is a truly important one, or if it's little more than a cute trick. Time will tell, I suppose. At any rate, here's the story: In a column published last Thursday, August 2, Pogue freely admits to having downloaded an ebook copy of a Robert Ludlum novel from a torrent site. Pogue writes that neither Amazon nor B&N nor iBooks, Kobo or Sony was offering the ebook for sale....

Here’s an amusing little blog post from the New York Times about reading and guilty pleasures. It seems to be saying that people feel guilty about reading modern (allegedly inferior) stuff they like instead of reading all those old hard-to-plow-through “classics” that (they feel) aren’t much fun to read. The article is kind of amusing because the way it starts, by questioning whether one genre can or should be considered inferior to another, you assume it’s going to say that modern stuff isn’t necessarily any worse than older stuff—then it takes a screeching 180-degree turn when it suggests that,...

Do as I say, don’t do as I do. In response to the Phoenix editorial about the New York Times committing a copyright violation by posting a PDF of a 36-year-old newspaper article even as Op-Ed columnist Bill Keller blasts the copyright violations of others, Keller suggests that irony should be “[kept] out of the hands of the clueless,” but seems to be clueless that he’s committing a significant irony himself. Keller writes that since the paper the article came from was long defunct without digital archives, he assumes the author of the article felt reposting the article...

When it comes to copyright and piracy, it often seems that some of the most vehement objectors don’t practice what they preach. The Boston Phoenix’s Carly Carioli has posted an editorial to the Phoenix’s blog calling out the New York Times, which published a couple of scorching columns on piracy over the weekend, for at the same time ripping off an article to which the Phoenix holds the copyright. The article in question is a 36-year-old investigative report into football injuries which was scanned and uploaded in PDF form to the New York Times’s website and linked from an...

On the New York Times Bits Blog, Nick Bilton suggests that both Apple and Google are engaged in (separate) projects to turn smartphones into more wearable devices. Apple has already been wearable in some respects—you could clip the iPod Shuffle to your clothing, or attach the iPod Nano to a wrist strap to make it impersonate an oversized watch. Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the...

Could we be getting closer to a free Kindle—but not one provided by Amazon? The rapid price drop of the Kindle led some to speculate that, if prices kept falling at the same rate, it would be free by the end of this year. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen, but the prices sure have fallen, haven’t they? Rumors have long been with us about free Kindles. In 2010, Mike Arrington heard from someone claiming Jeff Bezos was considering giving free Kindles to all Amazon Prime subscribers. More recently, Amazon reps told an AllThingsD reporter...