Kindle Singles. Score one for iPad enthusiasts. Soon there’ll be no time to suffer the unfortunate effects of backlit screens. Kindles are better for extended reading? Yeah, well. Whatever.
Savage Chickens cartoon used with permission. … Read more
Kindle
New, improved reading experience. Not.
“Alice” fans and critics (see my last post) likely fall into opposing iPad and Kindle/Sony camps. The former will view Alice as a new and improved kind of reading: “Great! It’s just like browsing the Internet.” The latter — i.e. those who actually enjoy extended reading — will view it with horror: “Whoa! This is just one more patch of digital quicksand.”
In the spirit of deteriorating attention spans and debilitated Muses, and because it’s way easier than writing … Read more
E-readers need serendipity buttons
One burning issue du jour concerns the relative merits of Kindles and iPads. But rarely, now, does discussion swing around to the real advantages of traditional paper books.
If only paper books could perform word searches, eh? How I wished for the missing function when I went looking for a passage I dimly remembered reading somewhere—something to the effect that night air was sweating the fragrance of jasmine. I wanted to use something dangerously similar in a story I was … Read more
Vanity, or Canny? Literary YouTube
The issue du jour in publishing: What’s happening to traditional controls on the industry? Digital technology has plunged us into an era where not only can anyone be a writer, you can be a “published author.” What does this forebode? Check out this video on the Wall Street Journal site and, for any actual readers out there, the story.
The lemmingesque rush to write and publish could well herald further social and cultural change to come. Soon there’ll be … Read more
Unemployed Blacksmiths and Novelists Support Group
It was all foretold in Finnegans Wake. It could have been, anyway.
There’s just no end to human ingenuity. Now you don’t even have to buy an e-book reader to suffer Internet interconnectivity. Ubimark has developed a way for readers to evoke Web connections from a print book by way of cellphone camera and browser. Have a look at the following item (short article & video), “Putting the Web inside the printed book.”
Ubimark, iPads and Vooks … Read more