It could change–and probably will when the first flurry is over–but, as I type, the Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s latest thriller The Lost Symbol is outselling the hardback on Amazon.
Five months ago, a group of media executives including Steven Brill seemed to have the field to itself when it said it was building a system for newspapers to charge readers for access online.
The printed word has always had an Achilles heel: factual mistakes. Can the electronic reader help? Anthony Gottlieb investigates …
Hyperion is taking a stab at online publishing with the launch of Kernl, an “e-imprint” it will use to quickly release combinations of text and video.
Kernl looks like a Web video player, with standard viewing and sharing options, but also includes tabs with related text and links. It debuts Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America”–which, like Hyperion, is owned by Walt Disney–with a segment on job-hunting.
Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Mark Twain’s advice was apt in its time but sounds downright quaint these days. The ink-stained publishing world is battling against companies like Google and Yahoo that sell ads via any Internet-friendly gadget. And we know how that fight is going: The buy-ink-by-the-barrel types are struggling.
It’s hard not to love Amazon’s new e-book reader. For starters, it’s gorgeous. Unlike its bulky predecessor, the redesigned $359 Kindle, which came out this week, is light, thin, and disappears in your hands. In my few days using it, I was won over: The Kindle is the future of publishing. And that’s what scares me.
They kept their Twitter feeds quiet and their iPhone cameras dormant. Most of them didn’t want their names to be used. There was more than a little bit of paranoia in the air as the guests arrived at last weekend’s Summit Series event, formally the Young World Leaders Summit–not the most modest of names. It was a gathering of about five dozen under-35 entrepreneurs and executives at a beachfront luxury resort outside the glitzy vacation city of Cancun.
I’ve got a few questions for American magazine publishers: Are you in or are you out? Do you still believe in the very act, the very business, of publishing? And do you still believe in presenting carefully selected words and pictures–expertly produced information–for a targeted audience?
“On or about December, 1910,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, “the world changed.” Sometime during the early aughts of this century, it changed again. The Internet leveled our cultural landscape. There was an epistemological free-for-all, a paradigm shift.
It’s funny how things change. Five years ago I wouldn’t have given second thought to producing print material with digital printing. No, only offset printing. The thought of a brochure, annual report or catalog printed as if it had come out of Kinko’s–excuse me, FedEx Office–was just unbearable, and even the much-hyped and pushed feature [...]
The Boston Globe had a story about the travails of the Portland Press Herald last week, and it included a plaintive and intriguing question from a reader of the struggling, up-for-sale Maine paper: “Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?” We’re going to find out the answer to that before very long, I’m afraid. And it’s worth thinking about what such a city will look like.
Ten years ago next month, in an innocuous suburban garage, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two geeky students at Stanford University, founded a company called Google. They would go on to create what is regularly voted the world’s top brand, earn accolades as the world’s best employers and become billionaires many times over. They would [...]
A recent edition of Science featured a worrying paper by University of Chicago sociologist James A. Evans titled “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship.” Seeking to learn more about how research is conducted online, Evans scoured a database of 34 million articles from science journals. He discovered a paradox: As journals begin [...]
Last week, computer book publisher SitePoint relayed a story about recent experiences with Digg that demonstrates that the Digg system is far from perfect. We’ve written recently on ReadWriteWeb about the decline and fall of quality on Digg, but SitePoint’s anecdote demonstrates that sometimes the wisdom of crowds approach is, well, kind of dumb.
It’s not easy to write a book. First you have to pick a title. And then there is the table of contents. … Oh, and there is all that stuff in the middle, too. The writing. Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it.
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