The Future of the Book
October 7, 2009
Adventures in Machine Translation 1
by C. Max Magee
Using Google to create a passable translation of the blog posts of a Spanish or German blogger is one thing, using it to translate a work of literature is quite another.
August 27, 2009
The Post-Kindle World 3
by Garth Risk Hallberg
The woman reading Bolaño switched halfway through my ride to a Kindle. I’m not making this up.
July 27, 2009
Revisiting a Literary Throwdown: Zombie Books for Free 1
by C. Max Magee
It was a battle between an evangelizing visionary and a sage defender of the past, perhaps the first big tussle in the great sorting out of publishing’s new look in the digital age. This was 2006, when Wired Magazine technology evangelist Kevin Kelly wrote about the helter skelter future of books in the digital age. [...]
July 20, 2009
Amazon’s Orwell Repo an Orwellian Move 3
by M. Ryan Calo
M. Ryan Calo is a residential fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. He frequently appears in radio, press, and online to discuss new technology. Everyone knows Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451. First published in 1953, Bradbury imagined a world in which government “firemen” could enter your home at any time [...]
June 2, 2009
Ether Between the Covers: Gifting Books in a Digital Age 13
by Edan Lepucki
I.The other day, while looking for books to buy my future nephew, I recalled The Real Mother Goose, a classic I had loved as a kid. I could conjure the cover, with its illustration of a witch and a baby, riding a giant, flying bird (a goose, I guess). And the border was checkered – [...]
May 28, 2009
Follow the Money: The ebook Pricing Wars 3
by C. Max Magee
Last week, self-published author Bryan Gilmer struck a chord with his guest post about using discount pricing to generate ebook sales. By dropping the price of his book to $1.99, Gilmer was able to tempt many new readers to buy his book, which, in the process, catapulted it up Amazon’s rankings, generating even more visibility. [...]
