A Bit More on the Sony Reader
At The Book Depository, Mark Thwaite has a longish post on the Sony Reader. Most of it is a recap of this review, which E.J. wrote about last week. Mark does make a couple of interesting comments though: I’d like to question why [Google Books and the Sony Reader] dominate publishers’ thoughts so much. ...
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More on Reading in America (And Elsewhere)
Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading took up the recent AP-Ispos findings, comparing the finding that the average American reads 4 books a year to other countries (the U.S. comes out well in this, but there are reasons) and pointing to economics as one of the issues adding to this statistic. If people who read 50 or ...
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Live Online, Jelinek's New Novel
Following on E.J.‘s call to make the texts of books available for free online, comes this announcement today from Serpent’s Tail about Nobel Prize winning author Elfriede Jelinek publishing her latest novel Envy on her website. According to the notice, “Chapters appear on Jelinek’s website as she ...
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Bookstore Obsolesence?
Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has an interesting piece today about the future of the bookstores. And according to him, the picture ain’t too rosy: I used to love bookstores — they were magical places where the whole world of information and stories was at your fingertips. But I realized today that the bookstore ...
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My Take on Reading in America
A few days removed from the AP-Ispos survey on reading (or not) in America and John Freeman’s response to this, there are a couple of reactions and ideas that have stuck with me and, I think, are worth fleshing out a bit. First off, John Freeman’s take is not perfect. Obviously, the Reading Room in Las Vegas is a great ...
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John Freeman on America's Non-Reading Culture
John Freeman—President of the National Book Critics Circle—has a post at his Guardian books blog about the recent report that 25% of Americans didn’t read a book last year. America has always had one of the lowest literacy rates in the western world. The former book review editor of the LA Times, Steve ...
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Criticsm of Google's Book Search
Using this essay by Paul Duguid as a basis, if:book takes a look at quality control problems surrounding Google’s Book Search program. As Ben Vershbow asks, “Does simply digitizing these—books, imprimaturs and all—automatically result in an authoritative bibliographic resource?” Duguid’s ...
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