≡ Category: Books, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
Thanks to George Smyth of the One Minute How-To Podcast, I bring you this quick discussion of how to build an online author fan base. This is a quick breakdown of the method that’s worked for me. If you’re looking for more quick how-to’s, visit: www.oneminutehowto.com
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≡ Category: Audio Books, Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Every June 16 is Bloomsday, which commemorates James Joyce’s Ulysses (get free audio of the text here). In Dublin and around the world, celebrations usually include a reading of Joyce’s classic. Last year, in New York City, one high-profile event featured Stephen Colbert reading the part of Leopold Bloom, the character around which the sprawling novel [...]
≡ Category: Books, e-books | ≅ 2 Comments
Earlier today, Seth Harwood wrote about a new challenge for writers — making sure books get distributed through as many digital reading platforms as possible. His thinking dovetails nicely with Wired’s list of the “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature.” Here are some of the Wired items that mesh or flirt with what Harwood is talking [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, e-books | ≅ 4 Comments
A couple of weeks ago, crime writer Seth Harwood wrote a very popular piece here - How I Sold My Book by Giving It Away. Now he’s back and telling us about the new challenge of writing in the digital age. Take it away Seth (and check out his new book JACK WAKES UP )…
The [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
When I develop the curriculum for Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, I often like to create courses around big, hard books that students have long intended to read, but have never quite pulled off: James Joyce’s Ulysess, Plato’s Republic, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, you get the picture. For many students, it takes a course, or something equivalent, [...]
≡ Category: Books, Film | ≅ 2 Comments
From the Freakonomics blog:
We’ve written before about the occasional hyper-critical comments on certain blogs, but such comments are like valentines compared to what some Amazon.com customers heap upon The Rolling Stones, The Godfather, The Diary of Anne Frank, and other standards. The Cynical-C blog lists the most caustic of these every day.
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Most Popular | ≅ 19 Comments
Today we’re featuring a piece by Seth Harwood, an innovative crime fiction writer who has used the tools of Web 2.0 to launch his writing career. Below, he gives you an inside look at how he went from podcasting his books to landing a book deal with Random House. If you want to learn more [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books | ≅ 1 Comment
The ground underneath traditional publishing has shifted once again. Scribd, the “YouTube of documents,” has opened up a new store where authors can upload and sell their books. And here’s the clincher. You don’t need a costly gadget (like the Kindle) to read these digital books. Any computer with an internet connection will do. And [...]
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It started as an audio podcast (iTunes - RSS Feed - MP3) and now it’s being released in print by Random House today. Seth Harwood’s Jack Wakes Up is out, and you can read the first three chapters as a free pdf here. A couple of weeks back, we featured a short video showing how Harwood has used web 2.0 (podcasts, videos, [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
A quick fyi: You can download a free PDF of Michael Scott’s Young Adult novel, The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. It runs about 375 pages and is available for a limited time thanks to Powell’s web site. Get it free here. Or buy a copy (and read user reviews) here.
≡ Category: Art, Books, History, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Another big digital archive went live this week. Backed by the United Nations, the World Digital Library wants to centralize cultural treasures from around the world. Manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings — they will all be absorbed into this growing online collection, and users will be able to [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media | ≅ 6 Comments
After Seth Harwood got his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he began publishing in traditional magazines and journals, as most young writers do. But those publications were slow to launch his career. Things changed, however, once he started publishing online. And they really changed when he released his crime novel Jack Wakes Up as [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Mark Twain died nearly a century ago but that hasn’t slowed him down. Twain has a new book coming out today. It’s called “Who is Mark Twain,” and it brings together 24 previously unpublished stories, one of which you can read over at The Wall Street Journal. The piece is entitled “Frank Fuller and My [...]
≡ Category: Books, Film, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
J.G. Ballard, the author of Crash and Empire died at 78 this weekend. Here we have a short interview from 1986 where he talks about how violent sensations now lubricate our modern world. It’s this line of thinking that finds its way into Crash, a controversial book that David Cronenberg brought to the big screen in [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Not long ago, I flagged a piece by Leon Wieseltier called “The Tolstoy Bailout,” and it makes a great case for why great books matter, especially in these hard times. As he put it, “In tough times, of all times, the worth of the humanities needs no justifying. The reason is that it will take many kinds of [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Miragebookmark has gathered some notable photos from unconventional bookstores around the globe.
The collection takes you from Holland to Paris, Helsinki, and Porto (Portugal), then to San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Calcutta and beyond.
Worth paying a visit.
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Wired Campus” Blog:
“Cole W. Camplese, director of education-technology services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, prefers to teach in classrooms with two screens — one to project his slides, and another to project a Twitter stream of notes from students. He knows he is inviting distraction — after [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Noted by the LA Times:
Without permission or advance notice, FiledByAuthor has cataloged the information of about 1.8 million authors into individual pages. There are biographies, photos, links to purchase books from online retailers and links to share the author’s FiledBy page through a dizzying list of social networking sites. And everyone is there, from the [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Dick Cavett, who hosted the “The Dick Cavett Show” from 1968 to 1982, now blogs for The New York Times. And, this week, he took his readers back to 1981, to when he hosted John Updike (recently deceased) and John Cheever (d. 1982) on the same show. The Times offers a complete video of the [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 3 Comments
Have you ever lied about reading a book? Well, if so, you’re hardly alone. According to The Guardian, 65% of people polled in a survey admitted to having made such a lie. And what books did they claim to have read? George Orwell’s 1984 ranked #1. Then the order went something like this: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
When David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) committed suicide last September, he left behind family, friends and an unfinished third novel, The Pale King. This week, The New Yorker takes a long look at Wallace’s life, career, bouts with depression, and the novel he began in 1997. The magazine has also posted an excerpt of The [...]
≡ Category: Books, History | ≅ 2 Comments
The Wall Street Journal asked Gordon Wood, one of America’s leading historians, to pick his favorite works of US history, and here is what he had to say.
1) The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It - Richard Hofstadter
2) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution - Bernard Bailyn
3) White Over Black - Winthrop D. Jordan
4) Mothers of [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a handy way to weather the recession with your intellect and pocket book intact…
In this very down economy, you can keep feeding your reading habit by book swapping. Yes, that’s right, book swapping. What goes on here is fairly straightforward. You give away books that you’ve already read. In exchange, you get books that [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature, e-books | ≅ 3 Comments
Wow. Point your mobile web browser to books.google.com/m and you can read full books on your portable device. According to The Globe and Mail, Google is making 500,000 books, most from the public domain, freely available to you. And if you live in the US, the number will reach 1.5 million. The collection includes works [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
We noted last week that New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik has just released a new book, Angels and Ages, which examines the unique stamp that Darwin and Lincoln placed on our modern times. Thanks to The New York Times, you can now read the first chapter of Gopnik’s book for free. It will give you a [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Sad news. John Updike, one of the most prolific authors of the last half century, has died at the age of 76. The cause was apparently lung cancer. Get the obit here.
In November, Updike published The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, the bestseller he wrote back in 1984. On [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google, Harvard, Web/Tech | ≅ 1 Comment
In the latest edition of The New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, a prominent French historian who now runs Harvard’s Library system, puts out a tantalizing idea: “Google can make the Enlightenment dream come true.” Having settled its lawsuit with publishers and authors, Google is now steaming ahead with its effort to digitize millions [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 2 Comments
Toronto writer Robert Boyczuk has released the short story collection Horror Story and Other Horror Stories in trade paperback. You can purchase it on Amazon, or download it in a free PDF format here. Also now available is a free audio/mp3 version of Boyczuk’s short story, “Falling”. These finds were highlighted by Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing. Doctorow has elsewhere called Boyczuk a ”supremely talented short-story [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 5 Comments
What are the 1000 best novels? The Guardian thinks it knows. This list was put together by The Guardian’s review team and a panel of experts. As you’ll see, the definitive list is helpfully subdivided into themes: love, crime, comedy, family and self, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, war and travel.
On that note, [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Between 1968 and 1972, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog. For Kevin Kelly, the Catalog was essentially “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his generation, a kind of Google 35 years before Google came along. (On a side [...]
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