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...

One of the more controversial e-reading apps to hit in recent days is Flipboard, the free app that aggregates content that friends have shared on social media. I’ve previously reported on the controversy it engendered by its potentially copyright-violating aggregatory nature. Lately, I’ve finally had the chance to examine the app itself. In summary: wow. Flipboard is one of the prettiest things I’ve seen on the iPad yet. And it’s free. If you have an iPad, and are on Facebook and/or Twitter, you have absolutely no excuse not to go and download it. Even if you’re not on social media,...

 Where I buy a print book often comes down to convenience (which store is closest), pricing, availability (is the book in stock?) and loyalty programs (e.g., member discounts).  The choice of a brick-and-mortar vs. an online store adds in the component of urgency; do you need the book today or can it wait till tomorrow? I'm buying ebooks almost exclusively now.  In fact, I can't even recall the last print book I bought for myself.  Although I ditched my Kindle on day one with my iPad, I do most of my book reading in...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting piece from young-adult publisher Jacob Lewis on why he has decided to create an on-line community called Figment where teens can write and share stories. Lewis was inspired by the way teens have adopted cell phones in Japan for many and more general purposes than they are usually used in America. But there was more to it than just wanting to see how well that would work over here. One aspect of the Japanese model that is particularly compelling is the intimate relationship created between writer and reader. Delivered...

Last week, the Society of Professonal Journalists released the first volume of its “Digital Media Handbook”—a collection of essays from its members on the uses of various Internet and digital tools including PDFs, videos, social networking, Google Wave, and so forth. While it probably could stand to be a little better-organized in some cases (why did the essay on using hashtags in Twitter come several sections before the “beginner’s guide to Twitter”?), it has a lot of information that could be useful to journalists only just getting their feet wet in the digital arena. Find it on Scribd...

The Wolfire Games Blog has an interesting post about online-only DRM of the sort we mentioned a few weeks ago, that keeps soldiers and others with poor net connections from playing the latest Ubisoft games. Wolfire points out that Valve created a very similar system in the form of Steam, the on-line installer/game catalog through which Valve sells its and others’ games—but with a couple of crucial differences. For one thing, Steam allows people to play its games off-line. For another, Valve added considerable value, making Steam useful to gamers as well as content providers. ...

Liz Bury at Publishing Perspectives has an interesting article on a consultant’s talk at a recent publishing conference. Clive Rich, principal of Rich Futures, suggests that publishers may become more service-oriented as the Internet and digital media continue to change the face of publishing. Rather than just a statement of royalties, Rich suggests, publishers could provide authors with more information on what kind of deals they are making with his content, and such demographic information concerning purchases as is available. In return, the author may cede some control to the publisher over how his work is marketed. ...

Blogger Ben Forta remarks on a strange conundrum. The 2010 US Census has a fancy website, a blog, and is using social networking to spread the word…but when it comes down to actually filling out and sending in the census form, they require you to mail it back. Using snailmail. The site says they are considering response via Internet “for the future”. Of course, the next “future” census is in 2020. It seems awfully strange in a world where we can download music, movies, and books, and so many government agencies (such as unemployment insurance) have...

Here are a pair of governmental policy changes for the Internet that may have the potential to affect e-book-related matters. The bigger change is that the Obama administration has announced the government is revising its policy on the Internet. Whereas for the first few decades of its life, the government chose to take a strictly hands-off approach, now it will be holding discussions on key areas of Internet policy, such as cybersecurity, Internet governance, and copyright protection. The outcomes of such discussions will be “flexible” but may result in recommendations for legislation or regulation,...

CNet has an article about Smartwords, an idea from start-up company Wordnik that sounds terrific but sure seems hard to describe succinctly. As Smartwords’s website puts it: Smartwords is a lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words. It took reading through the CNet article a couple of times to figure out that it might better be described as “an integrated dictionary on steroids.” Existing e-book apps with dictionary support (such as eReader) are largely limited to clicking on a single word to get a definition. Wordnik wants...

A couple of days ago, I looked at some articles suggesting that the Internet was having a deleterious effect on attention spans. Little did I know when I was writing them that I was buying into a chain of “new media” scares going all the way back to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and beyond. Slashdot links to an article in Slate that goes over the history of these fears. Psychologist Vaughan Bell writes: Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of...

Rupert Murdoch has been in the news lately for his strong stance against content aggregators such as Google News. Interestingly, it seems his daughter Elisabeth does not share his views on content “theft”. In a speech to the NATPE national TV conference, Elisabeth Murdoch recently stated that some piracy may be inevitable. "Fans remain the best salesmen of our content, even if that behavior is on the borderline of piracy. Danger of the new world is that we must concede that we'll lose some control." Murdoch said that social networking might be...