Farhad Manjoo, Amazon, and Independent Bookstores [Controversies]
Following on my post from yesterday, which was following on Richard Russo’s op-ed piece, which was following on Amazon’s “Price Check special,” today Slate’s tech guy, Farhad Manjoo, has his own piece about Amazon and indie bookstores—one that has seemingly pissed off everyone I know. If ...
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New Books in German: The Buzz Videos
For the past year or so, the German Book Office has been putting together short videos with German readers (critics, translators, agents, etc.) talking about titles featured in the New Books in German publication. All of these are available here, and in honor of the 30th edition of New Books in German, they created a ...
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Jellybooks: The Last.fm of Ebook Discovery?
Today’s Publishing Perspectives is all about Jellybooks, a new service for “Discovering, sharing and group buying ebooks.” Online book discovery was the focal point of the last couple weeks of my “Intro to Literary Publishing” class, so this comes at a perfect time . . . Anyway, here’s a ...
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Kindle Fire Usability Study
Amazon.com’s new Kindle Fire offers a disappointingly poor user experience. Using the web with the Silk browser is clunky and error-prone. Reading downloaded magazines is not much better. Still, user testing with the Fire did help us understand what the new generation of 7-inch tablets is good for: Are they more like ...
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Angel Igov's "A Short Tale of Shame"
Following up on the announcement from a few weeks back of the co-winners for this year’s Contemporary Bulgarian Novel contest, below you’ll find a long excerpt from Angel Igov’s A Short Tale of Shame. I would try and summarize this, but the summary would be long and confusing and much broader than what I ...
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Richard Russo, Bookstores, and this Amazon Price Check Thing [Controversies]
We talked about this very briefly on last week’s podcast, but now that Richard Russo has written an op-ed piece for the NY Times, I feel like it’s worth exploring this Amazon Price Check controversy in a bit more detail. First off, for anyone not familiar with this recent Amazon vs. Indie Bookstore kerfuffle, ...
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1Q84
Like many an English-speaking Murakami fan, I have been waiting to read 1Q84 for almost three years. That’s right, three years, since around January 2009, when news reports from Japan were just announcing that Murakami had finished his latest novel, one still without a title and rumored to be twice as long as Kafka on the ...
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