Category: publishing

“This feature takes us one step closer towards realizing that goal by helping support open standards that enable people to access these books in more places, on more devices and through more applications.”

Ms. Lester, 26, a Sydney native who graduated from Harvard, used to be a fact-checker at The New Yorker and checked all-star writers Sy Hersh and Jane Mayer.

“It’s in everyone’s best interest for lots of eBook makers to flourish – that’ll keep down prices and keep one company from dictating the terms of eBook sales,” says Farhad Manjoo. “Anyone looking to beat the Kindle, then, should look to the iPod: Study everything that Apple’s rivals did, and do the opposite.”

“The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing.”

“Ariel Dorfman has tackled article nine, that ‘no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile’, while Marina Lewycka has taken on article four, that ‘no one shall be held in slavery’. Top authors around the world, from Joyce Carol Oates to Henning Mankell and David Mitchell, have come together to mark 60 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, penning short stories inspired by each of the declaration’s 30 articles.”

“[W]hereas the old Egyptian library offered a rich diet of philosophy and history to the greatest thinkers of its age including Euclid, Archimedes, and Herophilus, the modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina is coming in for harsh criticism for serving up a very different kind of fare. A row has erupted over the decision to build a food court at the heart of Egypt’s self-proclaimed ‘window on the world’, with campaigners accusing the Bibliotheca’s trustees of selling out the library’s venerable legacy for short-term profit.”

“E-books are about 10 years old. Their growth has been rapid, but they’re still evolving. It’s not yet totally clear, for example, what the Kindle wants to be when it grows up. … The Kindle will get better. When it does, perhaps it will make sense for our titles to be available in the Kindle library for use on it. Whether that happens or not, I see no reason to be frightened of the device.”

The $399 device, called the Daily Edition, will be released this December. Sony says that newspapers and magazines will be available for the new reader (though the company won’t yet say which ones), and the New York Public Library will make its digital lending collection of 29,000 titles available as well.

“The Obama selection is not overtly controversial. In 2006, Bush’s list included The Great Influenza, about the 1918 flu. If Obama were reading that today while his White House was issuing a new report about the H1N1 virus, he’d start a national panic. But his list is also clearly not poll-tested. … [A]ll of Obama’s authors are white men. The subject of the longest book, John Adams, is a dead white male.”

“This is what makes citizen reviewers such a welcome addition to the body politic: Their courageous sniping from behind the bushes, emulating Ethan Allen and the Swamp Fox back in 1776, reaffirms that democracy functions best when you fire your musket and then run away. … I cannot help wondering what a typical Amazon.com review might have looked like had the Internet existed centuries ago….”