Category Archives: Linked List
A List Apart, the industry bible for web-designers, has a piece called Web Standards for E-books. Interesting to note that the “dominant ebook format today is XHTML” (thx, Derek). # (2)
Saturday, 6 March, 2010
- Books in the Age of the iPad. Craig Mod writes:
We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet. These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.
Mod says something rather interesting when he talks about the potential for digital: that fiction would become edgier, riskier, a direct result from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. And a direct result of this: a rise in the importance of editors. Whole article’s worth a read. (via df) # (2)
Thursday, 4 March, 2010
- Would You Fck Rebecca? – a short story by Andrew O. Dugas. I live for fiction like this. I’m not sure how Fictionaut will survive, given that the site won’t be closed-door forever, but I’m enjoying it here, now, while the writing’s still fresh and beautiful. # (4)
Monday, 8 February, 2010
Wednesday, 3 February, 2010
- On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing.
My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?”
Amazing. # (0)
Tuesday, 2 February, 2010
- The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination, a commencement speech by J.K.Rowling at Harvard.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
Watch the video, don’t read the transcript. # (0)
- An outsider’s guide to Amazon vs Macmillan. Charlie Stross writes:
… to customers, Amazon would like to be a monopoly (i.e. the only store in town). To suppliers, Amazon would like to be a monopsony (i.e. the only customer in town). Their goal is to profit via arbitrage, and if they can achieve those twin goals they will own everyubody’s nuts — the authors, the customers, everyone. They are, in fact, exactly the kind of middle-man operation that the internet tends to squish, gooily.
It’s also worth noting that Amazon is the only company on the market that doesn’t do ePub. Everyone else – Sony, Apple, Baen, is going with the format, and ePub doesn’t force DRM down anybody’s throats. # (0)
- Snarkmarket on storytelling on the iPad:
And now this new device takes the iPhone’s virtues and scales them up—plus, no text messages while you’re reading. So more than anything else, the iPad looks to me like a focus machine. And it looks, therefore, like such an opportunity for storytelling, and for innovation around storytelling. It looks like an opportunity to make the Myst of 2010.
If Robin is right, the multimedia ebook may have just found its messiah. # (0)
Friday, 29 January, 2010
- Farhad Manjoo, in Slate Magazine, on why computers should be more like toasters:
Not long ago, I got a letter from a reader named David Hildebrand that nicely summed up the problem. Hildebrand managed to teach his 82-year-old mother how to use a few easy programs, but that wasn’t enough: “While one or another program may be simple enough to use,” he wrote, “it is still very difficult to manage folders, force-quit applications, adjust screen displays, tweak volume, and do all the other fairly arcane things one must learn about an OS in order to get the simpler applications to be simple.” The reader wondered whether that would ever change. “In short, when will the computer become an appliance?”
This is exactly what the iPad plans to be, to the average user. Arguments about the iPad’s screen quality, its wireless connectivity, its lack of published content, is besides the point. People aren’t going to buy the iPad for ebook reading – they’re going to buy it for whatever reason and then they’re going to buy ebooks on it. Computing is what the iPad’s going to be about, and that’s why the Kindle is screwed. # (1)
- HTMLGIANT on (author) bio envy:
I often struggle with my author bio, feeling that I need to “impress”
journals with publication credits or honors, uncertain if they’ll think
I’m so charming once I say what I really am, which is an administrative
assistant (ppl. who have “failed” in life). Writers are pressured into
offering themselves as more interesting or accomplished than they are,
resulting in cloying tales of the minutiae of one’s life: has lived in n
number of continents; nominated n times for a pushcart (or
“lesser” award); “splits” time between New York and [other metropolitan
city, preferably in Europe]; is also a [insert other artistic
vocation]. There’s a mix of glibness and desperation in these long
drawn-out bios, as if the writing weren’t enough. Save the narrative for
your characters, not your bio.
Watch out for the brilliant last paragraph. (via LitDrift) # (0)
- Concerning iPad and Kindle & Skiff.
If Apple can bomb so badly on the name choice for an important product launch, they are probably getting other things wrong as well. Maybe people who are manufacturing e book readers will listen to consumers. I am looking for the perfect e reader. It has not yet come out. Here is what I’m looking for in my dream e-reader.
I love the idea that Rudi Stettner, a sample size of one, is all out and ready to teach Apple the right way to build good products. Give it a year, I say, and she’ll be eating her hat. (Update: Stephen Fry gets it.) # (0)
Wednesday, 20 January, 2010
Sunday, 27 December, 2009
- David Ulin, from the Los Angeles Times, speaks of our changing relationship with the written word:
What has changed is our sense of text as fixed, not fluid, as something solid to which we can return again and again. That’s the influence of the Web, of course, where story has no end and no beginning, and readers are not passive but play a determining role. This is scary to a certain way of thinking, but I want to look in the opposite direction, to suggest that what is more compelling is how this opens up the possibilities.
This essay is a wonderful way to wrap up 2009, book-wise. I take particular comfort in Ulin’s conclusion about books: that despite the technological chaos of the last decade, reading – for better of worse – is here to stay. (via) # (2)
