The Future of the Book
March 3, 2008
Free Beautiful Children: The Numbers 11
by C. Max Magee
Random House’s experiment allowing readers a limited time only free download of Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children is now over and the numbers are in. Random House publicist Jynne Martin tells The Millions that during the 72 hours that the site was up, it received just under 30,000 pageviews, 20,000 unique visitors, and just under 15,000 [...]
February 27, 2008
Beautiful Children Goes Free 3
by C. Max Magee
Random House has decided to take a bold move this week, making one of its hottest titles available for free download for a limited time. Charles Bock’s debut effort Beautiful Children has set the literary world aflame, attracting glowing notices from the New York Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere, and nosing onto the NYT Bestseller [...]
January 31, 2008
Big in Japan: A Cellphone Novel For You, the Reader 22
by Ben Dooley
A week ago, an article in the New York Times created a mini-furor in literary circles. As the resident Japan expert in my circle of friends, everybody was asking me, “So what’s the deal with these cell phone novels?” The NYT article was the first I’d heard of them. I did a quick Internet search, [...]
November 20, 2007
Kindle: Amazon’s New Firestarter 4
by Buzz Poole
The media is aglow with the heatless light of Kindle, Amazon’s just launched reading device that is essentially an iPod for books, magazines and blogs. The online demo video trumpets the wonders of this text vessel. You can drop the thing, read it in direct sunlight and, most notably, use it and acquire new reading [...]
November 5, 2007
Ad Supported Content Hits the Library 0
by C. Max Magee
It’s a story likely to make some readers queasy. Several British libraries have begun working with a direct marketing firm to stuff inserts into books at check out. “They’re going to be inserted right next to the panel with the return date on it, which means that everyone will look at them at least once,” [...]
November 1, 2007
Giving It Away for Free 3
by C. Max Magee
Too often, as we look at the impact of new media on publishing, we are relgated to trading in hypotheticals. “If all the books in the world were searchable…” This week’s article in The New Yorker on digitizing books covers that ground (though the article’s writer Anthony Grafton is aiming mainly to deflate the hype [...]
