On Elezea.com, blogger Rian van der Merwe shares some thoughts about the unsightly clutter that has been showing up on webpages for some time now. He cites as examples a Harvard Business Review article that has not one but two overlapping ads in front of it that must be clicked to be removed, and Cracked.com “where in my unscientific estimation about 15% of the page above the fold is devoted to the actual text of the article.” And there’s other clutter, too: a multitude of social network “like” buttons and follow-this-site social network and RSS feed links, There are...

Reading is a deeply solitary, immersive activity. We bury ourselves in books for hours at a time, and if you’re like me you can be decidedly grumpy if someone comes up to try to have a conversation with you while you’re reading. So, naturally, the biggest thing e-books need right now is something to make them more social. Because despite engaging in a solitary, immersive activity, e-book readers secretly just want to have conversations with everyone about what they’re reading. At least, that’s what the people behind Subtext seem to think. TechCrunch is reporting that this startup...

John Green's work-in-progress novel, "The Fault in Our Stars", reached the top spot on both Amazon's and B&N's sales charts last week less than 24 hours after he promoted it through his social networks, and without the help of his publisher, Dutton Children's Books. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Green's self-promotion strategy, which makes use of an impressive number of followers across multiple platforms (see image below). Over at Giga Om, Mathew Ingram writes that while not everyone has the self-promotional skills or publisher backing that Green enjoys, this story is more evidence that marketing power is shifting from...

Literary agent Jenny Bent made an interesting blog post a few days ago, taking on the question of whether traditional publishers are needed as “gatekeepers” anymore. Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom was that such gatekeepers were necessary to prevent readers from being overwhelmed by a flood of poor-quality self-published dreck. But, as Bent points out, this is changing. What I'm loving most about the success of independently published e-books is that many of them didn't pass the "gatekeeper" test--the individual author tried and failed to get an agent or publisher and decided to do...

Salon Magazine’s Laura Miller has an article looking at the recent moves by Barry Eisler away from and Amanda Hocking toward traditional publishing, and how the current author-marketed nature of the publishing industry means that even traditionally-published authors have to be their own publicist to a greater or lesser extent. This is, of course, a problem that has been apparent at least ever since the Internet expanded beyond the ivory towers of government and academia, and publishers started standing back and letting authors do more of their own marketing while they did less. It didn’t spring fully-formed from the...

The idea of scribbling electronic notes in the margins of e-books is not new—David Rothman mentioned it back in 2006, though I’m sure it’s actually older than that. But last month the New York Times covered the fact that e-books meant scribbling in the margins would be much harder. ReadWriteWeb reports on an API created by ReadSocial, a new project from the founders of BookGlutton, to try to make e-reading more social. Through a proof of concept Firefox and Chrome extension called Readum that uses Google Books, users can highlight, annotate, and share on Facebook passages from a Google...

On Booksquare, Kassia Krozser has a really interesting (and really long) essay about the social nature of reading and how to accommodate it in the Internet age. She points out that, much as e-book companies like Copia are making a big deal out of intersecting social networking with reading, our reading has almost always been “social” in the real world—we started out discussing stories around fires, and we still discuss (and review, and write fanfic of) stories even today. The big difference is that we’ve moved it on-line. Krozser spends much of the essay talking about a proposed all-inclusive system for...

Lately, social networking has often been hailed as a kind of great equalizer to help writers connect better with fans and sell more books. It’s a way to connect with fans, show that you’re a real person, and show the human face behind your stuff so they might be more inclined to support you. But, as guest writer Daniel Kalder notes in a Publishing Perspectives editorial, too much emphasis on social networking as a sort of publicity cure-all is fundamentally misguided for several reasons. For one thing, it runs the risk of turning into specious “magical thinking”. ...

TechCrunch has a three-minute video demo from a startup called Rethink Books who is looking to build a social network interface around e-books. From the video, this seems to revolve around integrating Twitter into an e-reader app and then using tweets as shared annotations linked to particular parts of a given e-book. The Kindle already allows some integrated social network sharing, but does not seem to go as fully into the networking aspect as Rethink’s application. Certainly, social networking is one of the major drivers of Internet use nowadays, especially on mobile devices—and lack of it has been...

A couple weeks ago, I posted about reviews of Nick Bilton’s new book, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works. After reading the sample chapters, I was intrigued, but I don’t have the money right now to go around buying books just because I want to read them. So I hopped on the web, and a short time later I was reading the book for free. (That is to say, I placed a hold request at my public library’s website, and a few days later picked up the hardcover. Why, what did you think I...

Adrianne Jeffries at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece looking at how the focus of Twitter has shifted over the years. It started out as a way to communicate with friends, sort of instant messaging on a time delay, but its role has changed considerably as more and more people began using it as a way to share links they found interesting—and more and more media sources began making it easy to share links via Twitter. Now, Jeffries writes: Twitter is increasingly about news, content and information in an easily-digestible format. By delivering real-time updates...

The Bookseller’s FuturEBook blog has an interesting look by Chris Meade at how today’s authors have more power to promote themselves and build relationships with fans than ever before, leading to a new viability for self-publishing. The Amplified Author of 2010 (term coined for authors engaged in the social web) can sit at her desk and speak directly to her readership through a blog, can expand that circle of readers gradually by using Twitter and other social networks, can find an active readership interested in offering criticism and ideas, can publish work through print...