≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
James Ellroy’s new crime fiction novel, Blood’s a Rover, takes you back to the tumultuous summer of 1968, to a world inhabited by J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, the Black Panthers, and the mob running their rackets in the Dominican Republic. Above, in his own inimitable style, Ellroy gives you the scoop on how he [...]
≡ Category: Books, e-books | ≅ Comments
The rise of e-books opens up new horizons for readers, and also the possibility that books will be “Napsterized,” as The New York Times explains. The Times article begins:
You can buy “The Lost Symbol,” by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.
Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
This week, This American Life aired an episode that tells “stories of people who believe a book changed their life.” (Click here, scroll down the page a little, and then click on “Full Episode.”) It’s a good program for book lovers, but don’t expect to hear about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Salinger. This American Life doesn’t quite [...]
≡ Category: Books, Technology, e-books | ≅ Comments
Lawrence Lessig calls Jonathan Zittrain’s book “Absolutely required reading.” Cass Sunstein says it’s “Absolutely essential reading.” And Lawrence Tribe declares that it is “The most compelling book ever written on why a transformative technology’s trajectory threatens to stifle that technology’s greatest promise for society.”
The book is The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
A quick note: Audible has recently launched a series called the Audible Modern Vanguard (more details here) that brings groundbreaking works and authors into unabridged audio for the first time. Here, you’ll find works by Paul Auster (one of my faves), Saul Bellow, John Cheever, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Kennedy.
There are some good “reads” [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Audio Books, Books, Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ Comments
This podcast (get it here) presents the thoughts of Scott Sigler–media maven, NY Times Bestselling Author of INFECTED and CONTAGIOUS (both available free as podcasts), podiobook dynamo, and social networking mastermind–on none other than ”how will people read books in the near future?”
In this repodcast of his keynote speech at this year’s Balticon conference, Scott talks about [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
J.M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. This coming December, Viking will release his latest novel, Summertime. The New York Review of Books recently published two excerpts from the book (here and here). And you can now listen to Coetzee read the first of the two excerpts. It’s called “Undated Fragments.” It’s [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
The folks who brought you Librivox (one of our favs) are now rolling out a new site: Book Oven. The beauty of Librivox is that it has used crowdsourcing to produce the largest collection of free audio books on the web (and we’ve featured many of them in our collection of Free Audio Books). Book Oven takes [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Books, Most Popular, e-books | ≅ Comments
A little sidebar to our previous post that wonders whether Amazon’s Kindle can revolutionize the book industry…
1) When you buy an iPod, you can transfer all of your current music onto it. With Kindle you have to start buying all new books.
2) The paper-form book (aka “dead tree version”) is still the best technology for [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Apple, Books, e-books | ≅ Comments
If you’re wondering where the book/publishing market is heading, then you’ll want to give this insightful article a read. Fast forward five years, here’s what you’ll likely find: Amazon, using the Kindle and on-demand publishing, starts working directly with authors and cutting traditional publishers out of the loop. It will dominate the book/e-book market, much as [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
I first heard about Junot Díaz in the early 90s. He was only in his 20s, already publishing in The New Yorker, and getting a lot of wunderkind talk. By 1996, he published, Drown, a bestselling collection of short stories that earned high praise. And then, things slowed down. It took a good eleven years for him [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Google | ≅ Comments
Chris Anderson, the author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price (download a free audio file of the book here) is making the rounds, promoting his new book. Of course, it was only natural that Anderson (also the author of The Long Tail and editor-in-chief of Wired) should pay a visit to Google, a company that [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
Thomas Pynchon’s new book, Inherent Vice, is on sale today. Check it out. Below we have, yes, a video trailer for the new book, and it sounds like Pynchon (who has famously stayed out of the public eye) is actually narrating the thing.
Become of a Fan of Open Culture on FaceBook here or follow us on [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books | ≅ Comments
The whole mini-controversy surrounding Amazon’s deletion of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle accounts reminded me of something. Over at the Internet Archive, you can find 1984 available as a free audio book. And, nicely, the recording is professionally done. You can download the full zip file here. Or alternatively you can get the individual mp3 files, or [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media | ≅ Comments
Late last week, we featured the free audio and text versions of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Today, we highlight a conversation that recently took place at The Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival, and it focuses on a similar question, really the main question preoccupying many business leaders these days : How [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
I’m proud to say my first novel, JACK WAKES UP, is available in hundreds of bookstores nationwide—Barnes & Nobles, Borders, Independent Booksellers, and most-likely the store closest to you. Three Rivers Press (Random House) has sent out 6,000 copies of the book for people to buy.
So now what? And how does it feel?
Well, apparently, I [...]
≡ Category: Books, Web/Tech | ≅ Comments
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
Play Now | Download
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ 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 | ≅ 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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ 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 | ≅ 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 | ≅ Comments
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 [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ 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 | ≅ Comments
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 | ≅ Comments
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 [...]
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