logo

Have You Been Nookd or Kindled?

Courtesy of old college friend Naomi Firestone of the awesome Jewish Book Council, here’s an insane blog post that seems too insane/amazing to be true from a fellow North Carolinian on the blog Ocracoke Island Journal: Some weeks ago I decided that I wanted to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Lou Ann loaned me ...

Do These Numbers Even Make Sense?

Now, it’s nothing new for Amazon.com to release sales information without any actual hard numbers (how many Kindles have been sold?), but this announcement in The Bookseller begs a explanation: Amazon.com customers have bought more Kindle e-books than both hardback and paperback books combined for the top 10, 25, ...

The Aesthetics of Reading

Rob Walker—author of Buying In, one of the best marketing/business books of the past few years—just found a listing on Etsy for a hardcover copy of Buying In that “has been sealed and cut by hand to fit Amazon’s Kindle 6” Wireless Reading Device.” Seriously. Here’s the full ...

Green Apple Books vs. The Kindle

Oh boy, this should be fun. Over the next 10 days, Green Apple Books will be posting short-format, tongue-in-cheek (and maybe a bit over-the-top) videos pitting the Book against The Kindle. Here’s the first ...

Nicolson Baker on the Kindle

The new issue of The New Yorker has a really interesting piece by print-advocate Nicholson Baker about the Kindle. It’s worth reading the whole article—I haven’t read a review of the Kindle quite like this one—but here are a few of the highlights: It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside ...

Kindle and DRM

The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message “Cannot be sent to selected device”. “Oh that’s the problem,” he said “if some of the books will download and the others ...

E-books and justification

If:book has a really cool article on something that I hadn’t yet noticed (not having a kindle, a sony reader, or an iphone): all of the text on these devices is fully justified. if a computer is going to hyphenate something, it needs to know what language the text is in. This is a job for metadata: electronic books ...