I don’t like it when someone denigrates a book they haven’t read, or a movie they haven’t seen, but at the peril of doing so, I’m moved to say a few things about a book I haven’t read, Senator Barbara Boxer’s second attempt at writing a novel, Blind Trust. Off the bat, I wonder if Read more…
“Portions of the advice hereafter may be helpful to the neophyte screenwriter. Much of it, though, will prove to be dubious, unsound, wildly subjective, and oftentimes, flat-out wrong. May God grant you the wisdom to know the difference.” This is the disclaimer that runs across the top of “Questionable Advice,” the Q & A advice Read more…
Amazon started shipping their new version of Kindle last week, the DX. Apparently Amazon is aiming the DX at students (textbooks), magazine and newspaper readers, and business people who are able to e-mail Microsoft Word files and Adobe PDF documents to their Kindle. There is a charge to e-mail documents to your Kindle. According to Read more…
In The Post-American World , Fareed Zakaria writes that Indian newspapers are booming “a rare oasis of growth for print journalism—and overflowing with stories about businessmen, technological fads, fashion designers, shopping malls, and of course, Bollywood (which now makes more movies a year than Hollywood).” From what I know of India today, the Indians who Read more…
…Mike Zatzkin, a lucid observer of—and commentator on—the publishing industry, has an interesting dialoge on his March 18th blog regarding the current and future predicament of e-books. Check it out: The Idea Logical Blog.
Edward Nawotka, in a March 16 Publishers Weekly article, writes about the contrast observable at the Spring Book Show, a remainders show held in early March in Atlanta. There are plenty of remainders available because of huge returns due to a weak Christmas season. Savvy retailers were scarfing up bargains by the pallet load, yet Read more…
A few interesting moves in the book publishing industry this week. First, Thomas Nelson has begun a program called NelsonFree in which the price of a hardcover book also includes an audio download and an e-book download. The downloads will be available in MP3 format for audio and a number of e-book formats including EPub, the odds-on favorite right Read more…
Ok, I’m the first to admit it, I have an ego. This article is great, but the photo, well, it’s awful. Not that the photographer had much to work with. If the cover of Book Business is today, can the cover of TIME be far behind? <grin> You can check out the article here: Book Read more…
In the February 2009 Independent Book Publisher Association‘s Independent, intellectual property rights attorney Jonathan Kirsch has an article that does a good job of summing up the proposed Google copyright settlement. The background in a nutshell: In 2004 Google began work on Google Book Search, a word-searchable database of both copyrighted and public domain books. Read more…
I started Michael Dibdin‘s Dead Lagoon last night. I’ve read one other in this “Aurelio Zen Mystery” series. Aurelio Zen is an Italian police officer and the books are set in Italy. Although the author, according to his bio, lives in Seattle the location details appear authentic and adds to the enjoyment of the story. Read more…