The Future of the Book
April 24, 2007
Bandaids for Broken Book Sections 5
by C. Max Magee
It’s no secret that newspaper book sections are endangered. Earlier this month, the Atlanta Journal Constitution eliminated its book editor position, placing the fate of the paper’s well regarded book section in question. Many are assuming the worst, that the newspaper will eliminate the section entirely. There’s even a petition to protect [...]
February 28, 2007
Widget Wars: A New Hope – Updated 4
by C. Max Magee
Publishers want to be the only ones allowed to make digital copies of books, and what does the reading public get for it? Widgets. These self-contained online readers are meant to provide an anywhere-on-the-Web presence for books, especially on blogs and even, god forbid, on MySpace. But before we get to the [...]
February 23, 2007
The Assimilation of the Book Blog 5
by C. Max Magee
I happened to notice recently, in my daily online wanderings, that the nominees have been announced for “The Seventh Annual Weblog Awards.” As usual, the organizers have listed a couple dozen categories, and as usual the same handful of blogs, more or less, are in the running. Many of the usual suspects are [...]
January 31, 2007
A Future for Fragile Books 2
by C. Max Magee
My last post, on Google adding maps to its Google Books pages, generated some interesting discussion about digitizing books in the comments. I can think of many reasons why digitizing books is a good thing, while the motivations of the publishing houses and the Authors Guild in suing Google seem confused at best and [...]
January 30, 2007
Maps Added to Google Books 8
by C. Max Magee
The result isn’t that flashy, but Google’s addition of Maps to its Google Book Search points to the promise of digitizing books. As we have seen with the layers of data that Amazon has added to its database – things like Statistically Improbable Phrases and Capitalized Phrases – digitization of books makes it easy [...]
January 12, 2007
HarperCollins Inks Deal with Digital Book Firm 1
by C. Max Magee
One of last year’s big stories, the publishers’ battle with Google over control of digitized books, has been on the back burner in recent months, but an aggressive move by HarperCollins is pushing it back into the spotlight
In late 2005, Harper, already vocal about its displeasure with Google over the search engine giant’s digital book [...]
