An image has been making the rounds on Reddit of this clever bookshop sign, spotted on the door of The Albion Beatnik in Oxford. Reaction seems to be mixed; some people see such gimmicks as incredibly pretentious. Others are more sanguine and feel, as I do, that it's meant to be a little tongue in cheek, and that if it works, more power to them. Buried amongst the comments are some other gems, including this bookmark giveaway that another reader reported spotting: "Please use this free bookmark wisely. Do not leave it in the rain, nor throw it at your enemy. Eschew...

Initially, Reddit didn’t seem to want to take responsibility for the user-generated content on its website—even as users acted as Internet sleuths, trying to find clues in the Boston Marathon bombing. When Reddit’s Erik Martin (pictured at left) was asked at the paidContent Live event last week if the point of the site was to “bless the chaos” and take responsibility for what people post, Martin said: “Yeah, we are sort of groundkeepers. We are facilitating the platform. We facilitate an action there to let people create spaces … I think in this case a lot of people just want to do...

The Rise of the Digital New Media Entity panel at the paidContent Live conference was one of the more interesting ones on Wednesday. The moderator was Jim Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group. He weaved current events into the discussion to talk about how these new platforms have a responsibility for what is being put on their sites, especially when it comes to sites with large amounts of user-generated content, like Reddit. One particular topic that was raised involved the subreddit in which users have been combing through photos of the bombing at the Boston Marathon. Weisberg asked Reddit’s Erik Martin about his...

Well, that was fast. Digg announced yesterday that they are building a Reader replacement. Apparently they’ve been planning it for a while—they're just moving it up the priority list. Good for them! I’m liking this part of the announcement: We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting. Don’t get us wrong: we don’t expect this to be a trivial undertaking. But we’re confident we...

The modern phenomenon known as the Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session is perhaps a perfect example of the sort of knowledge acquisition that is only possible because of the Internet. But you know that already. Here's something you probably don't know: A gentleman by the name of Gary Shapiro will be hosting a Reddit AMA tomorrow (that's Tuesday, February 26) from 2-3 pm EST. If you have any interest in the future of consumer electronics and consumer technology industry in general, this is one you probably shouldn't miss. That's because Gary Shapiro is both the president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics...

Create your own pulp magazine covers with Pulp-O-Mizer (i09) Husain urges publishers: 'act now to keep bookshops' (The Bookseller) Macmillian's Tor Books Now Accepting Direct Author Submissions (People Who Write) Attention 'artisan authors': digital self-publishing is harder than it looks (The Guardian) Amazon's Future Is Not in Selling Stuff — And That's a Good Thing (Wired) Publishers' fear of e-books is hurting libraries (Seattle Times) When a Cover Can Ruin a Book (Publishers Weekly) Reddit Book Exchange Now Open (GalleyCat) Kindle Daily Deals: Sara's Game by Ernie Lindsey (and 3 others)...

I'll admit to not having been familiar with the story of horror writer and now-legendary Reddit user Dathan Auerbach until I read about him in a recent blog post by Matthew Cavnar, the vice president of business development at Vook—one of our favorite e-book publishing companies. Cavnar, by the way, happens to be a great writer, so I'll let him tell the story of how the Reddit community helped to turn Auerbach into something of a self-publishing sensation. (And for the benefit of those who may not know, Reddit is a hugely popular online forum and social news website that was founded in...

Reddit has an interesting thread soliciting reasons (or rationalizations) from people about why they pirate e-books. There are people who say things like “I'm poor and I like to read, but I can't pirate food, so I pirate everything else,” or “I limit myself to pirating things that are out-of-print or otherwise unavailable through a legal digital outlet.” And there are even some who admit, “I don't justify it, just like I don't justify speeding or rolling stops. It's wrong (in whatever way you want to define ‘wrong’), but there's an infinitesimal chance of getting caught, so I'm just...

I wrote, a couple of April Fool’s Days ago, that the rash of fake stories on April 1 might serve as good practice for us to use all year ‘round in figuring out whether that story our friends emailed to us is true. It turns out that redditors—the denizens of news discussion forum site Reddit—have that ability in spades. The Atlantic recently posted an article about a college course professor T. Mills Kelly offers from time to time at George Mason University which tries to teach its students to become better at evaluating historical fact by creating historical...

A number of websites are going dark tomorrow to protest the SOPA legislation that could impose harsh restrictions upon the Internet. These sites include Mozilla, reddit for 12 hours, and Wikipedia for a full 24 hours. Google will also place a SOPA-related link on its homepage. Wales explained that the Wikipedia blackout comes as a result of feedback from the Wikipedia community, Not everybody is sanguine about the blackout. On just-launched Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily, Paul Carr writes in agreement with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s tweet calling the decision “foolish”. Carr blasts Wales for “[making] a...

Internet writers have been banging away online for years, throwing out some great ideas and then developing them on public forums in collaboration with other writers. It took a couple of decades from when they first started doing it, but the inevitable has finally happened: Hollywood has taken an interest in, and acquired rights to, one of those stories. The interesting question is, what rights can Hollywood really have in it? The story in question, Rome, Sweet Rome, is the sort of time-travel-alternate-history story that Eric Flint has been writing for Baen for years in his 1632 universe. It...

From Reddit comes the heartwarming story of a 27-year-old man whose 13-year-old brother saved his allowance all year to chip in (with other members of the family) toward buying him a Kindle for Christmas. The 13-year-old is the only child of the family who still lives with his parents, and since his father suffered congestive heart failure and has to remain bedridden most of the time, the boy has to do most of the work around the house. The family has gone through financial hard time since then, due to medical bills. Money has obviously been...