The Future of the Book
April 22, 2009
The Future of Book Coverage, Part I: R.I.P., NYT? 9
by Garth Risk Hallberg
This week at The Millions, we’re attempting to gather some of our thoughts about the ongoing transformation of literary journalism. Today, Garth looks at the death of the newspaper book section. Tomorrow, Max considers revenue options for literary websites, including affiliation with online booksellers. And on Friday, Max will hazard some early guesses about the [...]
April 17, 2009
The Trail of the #AmazonFail 1
by Edan Lepucki
I learned about the Amazon de-ranking debacle on Twitter (follow me @EdanL, y’all). People love to argue that Twitter is a time-wasting site for people to announce what they’re doing: They’re doing their taxes, or they’re drinking the best beer ever, man, or they’re on the toilet. And it’s that, certainly, but [...]
April 9, 2009
Kindle 2 Sends ebook Sales Through the Roof (Around Here) 6
by C. Max Magee
Amazon has been notoriously vague about sales of Kindle ebooks and of the Kindles themselves, but looking at the Amazon stats at The Millions, we can see that Kindle ebook sales have jumped by an order of magnitude since the launch of the new version.
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the second iteration of the [...]
March 4, 2009
eBook Paths Converge 13
by C. Max Magee
When Amazon unveiled its new Kindle recently, I wrote about the twin paths that ebooks seemed to be taking as they gained market acceptance. On Amazon’s path, they would be tethered to the Kindle, while on the Google path, ebooks would be read on iphones and any other similar devices, whether on applications devised [...]
February 12, 2009
eBook Evolution: Amazon and Google on Different Paths 2
by C. Max Magee
Amazon sucked the all the air out of the literary room this week with its announcement of the new iteration of its Kindle reading device. That the announcement was coming had been no big secret to anyone paying attention and pictures of the device had been floating around online for at least five months, [...]
February 9, 2009
The Return of the Kindle 1
by C. Max Magee
The book world’s big news today was Amazon’s unveiling of the latest iteration of its eBook reading device, the Kindle 2. You’ll see that the device itself is now remarkably thin (even to those of us who now take tininess in devices for granted). As the promo copy says, “just over 1/3 of [...]