(Mostly) Bookish Links for July 25 - 31, 2010

• I knew there was a reason those sparkly vampires repulsed me (via BoingBoing)
• June 30th was Penguin's 75th birthday. They've been posting all sorts of good stuff in celebration. (The Penguin Blog)
• A federal judge ruled that it's ok to break DRM if you are not doing it to infringe on copyright (BoingBoing)
•  The Book Depository Live lets you watch people all over the world buy books. It's a lot more interesting than I just made it sound. (via TeleRead)
• I want this pen (via BoingBoing)
• The longlist for the Booker Prize was announced. (via GalleyCat)
• Here's a list of the 100 best magazine articles ever. Makes me sad about David Foster Wallace all over again. (via I can't remember. It was on BoingBoing but I could swear I saw it somewhere else first.)
• And now, a book trailer for the new book by the always delightful Mary Roach (Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void):

Link Roundup for July 18 - 24, 2010

Here are the best (mostly book-related) things I saw online this week:

• William Faulkner’s lectures have been digitized and are now online (via TeleRead)
• Cast your vote for the top 100 thrillers ever written (via The Memory Project)
• A Pictorial Tour of New York's Bookshops (The Penguin Blog)
• The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. Beautiful design and looks like a fascinating read. (via Book Covers Anonymous)
• Artisanal Pencil Sharpening. Great gift idea for your favorite book blogger/nerd/office supply aficionado (via Beerorkid)
• Amazon reports that the Kindle format is now outselling hardcovers (via Galleycat)(see also: TeleRead)
• Booksquare summarizes the kerfluffle over Andrew Wylie's exclusive deal with Amazon
• FlipBoard is a new kind of social media news reader (via Scobleizer). BoingBoing and Gizmodo wonder if it's legal. Here's what it looks like:

Link Roundup for July 11 - 17, 2010

Here are the best (mostly book-related) things I saw on the interwebs this week:

•  #bookstorebingo on Twitter. If you've ever worked in a bookstore you'll be able to relate. For example, @Watermarkbooks "had a summer-long Jane Austen bookclub. Had someone ask when she would be there."
• Read an excerpt of University of Nebraska Press's Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey by Robert V. Camuto (UNP blog)
• Jeffrey Eugenides talks with his editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux about his next book (Work in Progress)
• Video games inspired by literature: The Great Gatsby video game (via GalleyCat)
• Ebooks are not subsidiary rights (Black Plastic Glasses)
• A contest that will pick one person to live at Chicago's Museum of Science & Industry for a month (via BoingBoing)
• Study like a scholar, scholar (via TeleRead)

More effing reduxes

This essay has been sent around, linked to a lot by those in publishing, and I'm sorry for the repeat; I believe even Jana has linked to it! However, it explains the economics of pricing e-books and why Amazon would make the moves it does wrt cloth copies and pricing. Here. It explains the debate on pricing from the publishers' POV.

[link] Dear Author's iPad eBook App Roundup

Dear Author did a nice comparison of the currently available iPad eBook apps:

There are several ebook reading applications.  There is no perfect reading app despite the iPad having multiple advantages over eink devices.

I haven't used Kindle on the iPad yet. And I'll continue to not use it if it insists on displaying everything right justified. I've read a little bit on the iBooks app, but not enough to have an opinion on it yet. All I can say is that nothing has annoyed me so far. I'm really waiting for the Barnes and Noble eReader app which, according to Dear Author, is awaiting approval from Apple.

New York Times on e-books, iPads

Today's New York Times contains David Pogue's funny review of iPad: The Apple iPad is basically a gigantic iPod Touch. The review is in two sections: one for tech-heads, one for "regular people." The upshot seems to be that while regular people will probably love the iPad, tecchies are less enthusiastic. (Perhaps this is true of all things in life.) Some quotes from the review follow.

On the iPad book reading app, from the tech part:

There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces). And you can’t read books from the Apple bookstore on any other machine — not even a Mac or iPhone.

The book reading app, from the regular person part:

The new iBooks e-reader app is filled with endearing grace notes. For example, when you turn a page, the animated page edge actually follows your finger’s position and speed as it curls, just like a paper page. Font, size and brightness controls appear when you tap. Tap a word to get a dictionary definition, bookmark your spot or look it up on Google or Wikipedia. There’s even a rotation-lock switch on the edge of the iPad so you can read in bed on your side without fear that the image will rotate.

I want to fast-forward three to five years ahead, when the little bugs are fixed and the price is low and I can just go get one of these. Or, you know, an iPhone. It's hard waiting for technology to smooth out!

Another NYT article, this one on how since e-books have no discernable covers when you are reading them (all an onlooker can see is the device you're using to read), the e-book thus takes away a certain instant visual marketing/advertising component from publishers. It's here.

I can say that I've had several conversations with people who have Kindles, mostly on planes. Usually, we are discussing how much we enjoy the device, or how much we like the other person's carrying case or whatever. What we're reading at the time tends not to get mentioned.

I have to say, I love trying to see the covers of other people's books. Perhaps e-book readers need a back window, one that shows the cover or title of the book you're reading. Or not. As much as I love seeing what other people are reading, I love even more the fact that e-book readers enable me to "anonymously" read or buy any old trashy thing I feel like. In general, I probably shouldn't worry about that kind of thing, but that's another topic for another day.

Current Obsession: Tiny Art Director

I can't shut up about this. It's pure genius: great idea, perfectly executed.
Tiny Art Director

More about Tiny Art Director

• here's an interview with author and artist Bill Zeman
• Boing Boing post about TAD

Barnes & Noble Ebook/Ereader Survey

Part of the B&N survey

I stumbled across this survey yesterday. It's a Barnes & Noble survey they link to from their main site. Here is the link. In case that doesn't work, you can find it from the Barnes and Noble ebooks page: look for the "Send Feedback" link in the list on the lefthand side.

What a smart thing for them to do! I love it when I have something to say as a customer and a company makes it easy for me to say it.

Now everyone please go over there and ask them to add a Pre app. :)

[link] TeleRead: How THIS e-book fan buys

A Sony Reader user from Canada reviews some ebook sites, including Fictionwise, eReader (one of my faves), Smashwords, and Baen Books.

How THIS e-book fan buys | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

[link] Interview with Mimi Smartypants

Fiction Writers Review >> [interview] Type type type: A Conversation with Mimi Smartypants

I experienced what Margaret Lazarus Dean describes here while reading her description of it:

Rather, what I experience sometimes when I read her diary is that strange phenomenon that first brought me to fiction as a child, and has kept me here all these years: the eerie way in which another human’s mind can reach across all gaps of time and distance and stranger-dom into your own mind and stir a feeling that had never been stirred there before. That sense of seeing something described that you had never seen put into words, that you would have assumed could never be put into words, yet finding that seemingly singular and resistant thing rendered perfectly specific and clear, even sonorous, and, maybe even funny.

If you don't already read Mimi Smartypants, you should start now.

OR Books, a new progressive publisher, will try e-books and POD to bypass bookstores | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

OR Books, a new progressive publisher, will try e-books and POD to bypass bookstores | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Very exciting: I love the model and the list of authors they've worked with is very promising as well.

OR Books from OR Books on Vimeo.

See also: BoingBoing article

Book Blogger Appreciation Week : September 14-18, 2009

Book Blogger Appreciation Week : September 14-18, 2009

Check it out: there will be awards, prizes, and giveaways. Nominate your favorite book blog; follow BBAW on twitter; be a part of the book blogging community.

BookArmy is a new social networking site for books

I just joined bookarmy. From what I can tell, what sets bookarmy apart from the other book sites (GoodReads, Librarything, etc.) is that it is set up specifically as a social networking site for books. Before they can lure me away from GoodReads, though, they need to get those apps/widgets created so I can flow my current reading list to this blog.

What is bookarmy?
Bookarmy is a social networking website for every sort of reader. Whether you’re a bookaholic or someone who picks up a book only once a year while relaxing on holiday, bookarmy is the place to discuss and review books, build reading lists, get the best book recommendations, and where you and your friends, family or classmates can read books together.

What makes bookarmy different from other book sites is that here you can make direct contact with authors; see what star rating they have given books, browse their reading lists, ask them questions about their own writing, and recommend titles to them.

Why did we create bookarmy?
Quite simply because we love books and we wanted to design an easy and reliable way for people to talk to other readers and decide what to read next.

For more information, you can also check out their blog.

(via BoingBoing)

Books/Publishing Links for the Week

• Designing a Book Cover: 101 by Henry Sene Yee from Henry Yee on Vimeo. (via The Book Design Review)
• Been keeping up with The Books of the States? Get caught up with The Roll Call at Omnivoracious.
• A story of good design and independent publishing: Sexy Librarian over at Caustic Cover Critic
• A new Editorial Director was announced over at Soft Skull Press: Denise Oswald (via GalleyCat)
• Layoffs at the University of New Mexico Press (coverage at The Chronicle of Higher Education; Poets & Writers; Publishers Weekly; GalleyCat)
  

The Book Cover Archive

Are you a fan of great book covers? Yes? Then I recommend you head right over to The Book Cover Archive: An Archive of Book Cover Designs and Designers. You can browse by designer, title, author, art director, photographer, illustrator, genre, publication date, or publisher. What more could you want? What's that? A blog, you say, to go along with the archive? Here you go: the Book Cover Archive Blog.

Time Magazine's Books Unbound by Lev Grossman

A broad overview of the book publishing industry: past, present, and future.

Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

Not that Old Publishing will disappear—for now, at least, it's certainly the best way for authors to get the money and status they need to survive—but it will live on in a radically altered, symbiotic form as the small, pointy peak of a mighty pyramid. If readers want to pay for the old-school premium package, they can get their literature the old-fashioned way: carefully selected and edited, and presented in a bespoke, art-directed paper package. But below that there will be a vast continuum of other options: quickie print-on-demand editions and electronic editions for digital devices, with a corresponding hierarchy of professional and amateur editorial selectiveness. (Unpaid amateur editors have already hit the world of fan fiction, where they're called beta readers.) The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast loamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube-style by the anonymous reading masses.

All the top pen news

How did it not occur to me previously that there are pen blogs? I have a feeling I'm going to be spending way too much time at Alltop: Pens.

Tomato Nation/Donors Choose fall contest

Amazing:

$111,352 dollars raised, 1162 donors participating, and 19,577 children reached.

Tomato Nation/Donors Choose fall contest update

Amazing: over $100,000.00

From Sars:

Think about it: you did something. You did…something. Even if you only had five bucks, you put it to good use; it counted, and more importantly, you believed that it counted. You tried to make a difference in the face of depressing amounts of evidence that one person, or a small group of dedicated but non-rich people, can't. We can. You did. You did.

Keep it up—the contest continues until the end of the month.

Between Panic & Desire by Dinty W. Moore

This UNP book is on my list to read. I hadn't read anything by Dinty W. Moore until today when an acrostic piece by Moore was posted over on Sweet Juniper. Go read it—I'll wait. While you are there, check out the photos (I especially recommend the ones of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository).

While you're already clicking around, check out Moore's website and his flickr page.

About Between Panic & Desire:

“Insouciant” and “irreverent” are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore’s books—and, invariably, “hilarious.” Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, “A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,” this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own.

Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author’s early life—the Kennedy assassination, Nixon’s resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few—shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today’s world for all of us who spent our formative years in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms—a coroner’s report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan—aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.