Category: words

“Serving up relevant recommendations (and sometimes that means genre fiction rather than literary fiction) is critical to keeping subscribers engaged. Thus the acquisition of BookLamp by Apple could possibly herald Apple’s entry into ebook subscription services.”

“Despite her family’s best efforts to represent her as a talented amateur after her death, the fact was that she was up at her desk as early as Marianne, writing and revising early in the morning.”

“Books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more,” Amazon said in the statement, which was posted on the forum for its Kindle ebook reader. “If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.”

“The poet Frank Bidart, the critic James Wolcott and the playwright David Rabe are among the winners of the 2014 PEN Literary Awards, announced today by the PEN/American Center.”

The Times‘s app critic (yes, it has one) looks at an encyclopedic offering from the Poetry Foundation for discovering new poems; a Shakespeare app that includes all the sonnets and plays; two packages, for writing haiku and for longer verse; and an app devoted entirely to Eliot’s The Waste Land. (includes video)

“In a post on its website, Amazon made the argument for lower e-book prices and outlined that it would be willing to continue accepting 30 percent of e-book sales, its current take, if Hachette stopped pricing titles at $12.99 and $14.99. The company did not suggest that Hachette lower all e-books to $9.99, leaving room for exceptions for specialized titles that warrant higher prices.”

When Salman Rushdie donated his archives to Emory Univeristy, he didn’t mean only his papers: the collection includes four of his old computers (and will include all his later digital effects). How do archivists go about making the material on these old pieces of technology available to the public?

For the broader world of people who read poetry — and many who don’t — the brouhaha was a chance to ask a more basic question: Just who are America’s state poets laureate, and what do they do anyway?

“Unlike in France, Italy or Germany, where publishers banded together to create options to Amazon, British and American publishers still seem bent on competing with one another, even as Amazon eats into their finances.”

“I don’t know that I would be this free. I don’t know that I would be who I am. I don’t know that I would be writing, and I certainly don’t know that I’d be writing about the stuff that I’m writing about.”