Linked List – Novelr

Marco Arment’s Review of the New $79 Kindle:
Honestly, once I got into what I was reading, I forgot about the cheap, crappy page-turn buttons and the tacky ads on the sleep screen. Even the distorted unblinked text isn’t very noticeable when you’re engrossed in a book.

And therein lies Amazon’s true genius with the relentless pace of making the Kindles cheaper in both price and quality: they know that once you’re reading, minor hardware flaws are quickly forgotten.
Sounds like a good deal. # (0)

Ryan Block from gdgt reports that the new Kindle Fire (Amazon’s new tablet) is based on the RIM Playbook:
Although Amazon did refresh the ID of their PlayBook derivative, I’m told that this first tablet of theirs is “supposed to be pretty poor” and is a “stopgap” in order to get a tablet out the door for the 2011 holiday season — which doesn’t exactly leave the best taste in my mouth. But it’s also not the most uncommon story, either: when you’re breaking into a new market, sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to get in the game. You may remember how crappy the original Kindle was compared to later models!
It’ll be sad if this were true — I’m really hoping that the Fire would pan out – I’ve been doing a heck load of reading on my iPad recently, and a competent, reader-focused competitor can only be a good thing. # (0)

The New York Times reports that “In E-Books, Publishing Houses Have a Rival in News Sites”.
Swiftly and at little cost, newspapers, magazines and sites like The Huffington Post are hunting for revenue by publishing their own version of e-books, either using brand-new content or repurposing material that they may have given away free in the past.
The easier it becomes to publish ebooks, the more publishers we will see. # (3)

Alan Cooper on independent bookstores in the age of Amazon:
Rather than seeing Amazon’s strength as competitive, brick-and-mortar stores should see it as liberating: they no longer have to maintain such a large, expensive inventory of books or maintain distributor relationships to order requested books.

Instead, the local store can offer something unique and desirable: a physical place for readers to go where they are supported and welcome, and where the books on view are personally selected, intimately displayed, and available for perusal. No internet company can provide that.
It’s a beautiful idea — though I suspect there would be some overlap with the library model (which isn’t doing so well). Worth a read for the analysis on historic trends that’s brought us here. # (0)

Lev Grossman argues that we are losing non-linearity in the shift to ebooks:
We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel.
This is a very interesting, if odd, argument to make. I’ve always assumed that digital is as non-linear as they come. But Grossman may be wrong — he’s assuming that the methods for navigating an ebook will always be lousier than that of navigating a codex. That may yet change. # (1)

Impeccable Petunia is the most beautiful web fiction site I’ve seen this year. It’s got some clever design going for it, and has gorgeous illustrations for each chapter. (Some background on the project is also available over at the Huffington Post). # (1)

“Game of Thrones” Author talks about Dwarves, Dragons and Delving into eBooks. At Authors@Google, no less:
After the talk, I was able to chat with Martin a little about ebooks. The author says he carries his e-reader with him now whenever he travels, whereas in the past, he would incur overweight baggage charges because of the 10 or more physical books he would inevitably bring along. But he was also concerned that digital piracy might do to the book industry what it did to the music industry.
Ah, the sweet irony about such things: on the one hand an ebook is small enough, and light enough, to carry in a thumbdrive; on the other it’s small enough, and light enough, to copy and spread. # (1)

Kevin Kelly on ‘Post-Artifact Booking‘:
The primary shift is one of thinking of the book as a process rather than artifact. We are moving from the culture of the book to the culture of booking. Our focus is no longer on the book, the noun, but on booking, the verb — on that continuous process of thinking, writing, editing, writing, sharing, editing, screening, writing, screening, sharing, thinking, writing — and so on that incidentally throws off books. Books, even ebooks, are by-products of the booking process.
This is, of course, not without its problems — Kelly mentions in passing how this new relationship is already allowing spammers to pollute the Kindle marketplace. (via John Tormey) # (0)

The Morning News has the story of Allan Seage: the forgotten writer behind the story of two men at a hospital, one with a window and one without. It’s a tragic, beautiful read. # (0)

Lev Grossman: How Harry Potter Became the Boy Who Lived Forever:
Fictional worlds, while they appear solid, are riddled with blank spots and unexposed surfaces. There’s a moment toward the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when Dumbledore suggests offhandedly that Sirius Black should “lie low at Lupin’s” for a while, referring to Harry’s former teacher Remus Lupin. What exactly did Sirius and Remus get up to there, chez Lupin, while they were lying low? How low did they lie? (Cough, slash, cough.) Rowling never says, but that one little gap has given rise to so much fan fiction that “lie low at Lupin’s” has become a recognized trope of Harry Potter fan fiction, a sub-subgenre in its own right.
Fantastic essay, and wonderful research from Lev Grossman of TIME. # (1)