‘New Kinds of Authors, New Kinds of Books’: Four of them While it’s hardly the norm to introduce a book to you at its end, that’s actually a good place to start in talking about the author, designer and developer Peter Meyers’ Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience. Scheduled to chair a… Read More
Is 'out of print' running out of time?
Never being ‘out of print’ is not good news You can’t self-publish. Because you can’t get your rights back. And your book is nowhere to be seen. Kill the entire outmoded concept of “out of print.” Instead, the contract should define when book rights are being “inadequately exploited” and therefore available for reversion to the… Read More
Give Her Credit: Sarah McIntyre Torches For Book Illustrators
#PicturesMeanBusiness And So Does She Once you break yourself of tweeting to her as@Jabberwocks — she definitely is not Brown University’s dramatically lit all-male a cappella group — Sarah McIntyre is one of the most colorful forces of nature you’ll find in your Twitter stream. She is @Jabberworks. And yes, she’s talking to you. She’s attaching the hashtag#PicturesMeanBusiness.… Read More
Can digital community support writing, really?
Not unlike climate change, it’s something that digital-age writers worry about, but can’t nail down. I’m not sure what effect the accepting warmth of digital communities has on our literature. I don’t think encouraging people can make bad writing suddenly appeal to the masses. Are the communities going to start getting the same blame that self-publishing… Read More
Enhanced ebooks and steel filing cabinets
Funny how #FutureChat can change your mind. Camille LaGuire, whose beret-ed avatar is familiar to many of us in our weekly discussion from The Bookseller and FutureChat, started Friday’s chat by announcing: Not sure I have much to contribute about the Future of Enhanced books discussion on #FutureChat today. By later in the day,… Read More
Gray Areas: ‘The Elements’ Of Good Book Apps
‘Programmers Need To Be Treated As Top Talent, Just Like Authors’ A funny thing happened on the way to digital books and ebook enhancement: We forgot that we knew what we know. Theodore Gray At the end of last week, we published an articulate essay at The Bookseller’s The FutureBook by developer and designerTheodore Gray. In… Read More
In Publishing's CyberVillage: So Much Anger
Calling Them Out Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh IRL, in real life, if you were mad at someone for something, would you walk into the village square, face the buildings, and start yelling that person’s name and your complaints about them? You’d be calling them out, physically, demanding that they change their ways and accusing… Read More
Enhanced ebooks: 'Is That All There Is?'
“Perhaps we are already discovering that this new world is a touch more fertile” for enhanced ebooks than we thought. Or is this wishful thinking on my colleague Philip Jones’ part? His musings on this issue are timely, particularly as they came to us in his Tuesday FutureBook column, The smart book for a new… Read More
Two New Efforts In Publishing Diversity: ‘Learning From Each Other’s Narratives’
‘There Are So Many Reasons To Write’ We’ve joined the global conversation on the intersection of race and writing. But is it enough? These viewpoints echo that of Zed Books’ Crystal Mahey-Morgan, who told me in an interview for The Bookseller less than a year ago: “We need to move beyond rhetoric and good… Read More
1.1 Million Copies Later: Go Mock A Watchman
‘I Told You So’ In under a week, Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman has sold more than 1.1 million copies in the States, according to HarperCollins, as reported by Sarah Weinman at Publishers Lunch. Don’t worry, there are 2.2 million more copies for you to buy, we’re told. In the UK, my associates at The Bookseller… Read More