As experiments with publishing goes, this is an interesting one: you can download Australian writer Conor O’Brien’s new collection, Quiet City, for the price of a tweet and / or Facebook post.  Just go here and follow the clickys.  Alternatively, you can get the paper book for $12. I’d never heard of Connor O’Brien until about 7 minutes ago.  Now I’ve got his book and am subscribed to his blog.  I guess that’s the point. Via Court Merrigan's blog...

One of the best surprises I got this Christmas was the gift of a used iPod Touch by my sister-in-law. She belongs to an iPhone family, and they’ve gotten so many iPhones over the course of the last few years that the Touch, originally bought for the kids to play with, was relegated to sitting around unused for months since the kids get to play with the older-generation iPhones now. And as a result, I have an iPod Touch again for the first time since losing my original one in June. It’s just a 1st-generation model, and only 8...

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...

Here’s some interesting synchronicity: at about the same time as a Twitter-based long-article aggregation service gains a website, a website-based such service jumps to Twitter. Longreads started out as a Twitter feed for articles between 1,500 and 30,000 words long. It now has its own website, Longreads.com, which serves as an aggregator, archive, and search tool for the service. The man behind the project, Mark Armstrong, said he wants it to serve as a “Techmeme for long stories”. I learned about this move in an article on TechCrunch by M.G. Siegler in which he said he uses Instapaper...

Lawrence Lessig has a piece in the Huffington Post stemming from a presentation he gave last week at an award ceremony. Lessig was a judge for a video remix contest put on by web video host Vimeo, and as part of his participation on a panel he gave a speech relating to the importance of remixes, and how they relate to copyright and fair use. (Lessig is known for his expertise in this field, given that he has written entire books about remix culture and related matters.) I bring this up not to touch upon Lessig’s statements about...

There's an article at Econsultancy that speaks to this issue. GigaOm's Matthew Inghram criticised the new Esquire app for not have any connectivity to the internet. Of course, anyone from GigaOm is, by definition, a techie and I wonder how much their complaints resonate in the real world of readers. On the whole, interactivity is a non-starter for me. Patricio Robles of Econsultancy says: Ingram has a point. Many iPad apps do sort of, as he writes, resemble "an interactive CD-ROM from the 1990s." But is that really a problem? Let's be honest here: it's quite questionable as to whether being...

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...

That's according to a report in The Bookseller this morning. According to research and consulting organisation YouGov's TabletTracker report, exclusively seen by The Bookseller, 78% of iPad owners with wi-fi and 3G contracts have downloaded the iBooks app. This is more popular than the app for social networking sites Facebook (52% of wi-fi/3G owners have downloaded) and Twitter (34%). Despite the presence of other reading apps on the iPad such as Amazon's Kindle or Stanza, those who have downloaded iBooks use it frequently. The report found around half of users are using iBooks at least three times a week. Almost a quarter...

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...

On TechCrunch, Paul Carr has an interesting piece on online journalism being used to show up traditional print journalism. (It is also being covered by ReadWriteWeb.) It talks about Adam Penenberg, who in 1998 exposed one of print journalism’s big names of the day, Stephen Glass, for fabricating his news stories. Penenberg has been at it again. Having written a book in 2003 about Ford’s negligent attitude toward the safety of its SUVs concerning a woman, Donna Bailey, who was nearly killed in an accident, he recently learned of a recent court award of $131 million in damages...

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,...