Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison in 1909. It’s the Only Known Footage of the Author.

in Books, Literature | March 18th, 2010

Here’s a lit­tle nugget for you. The great inven­tor Thomas Edi­son vis­it­ed the home of Mark Twain in 1909, and cap­tured footage of “the father of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture” (says Faulkn­er) walk­ing around his estate and play­ing cards with his daugh­ters, Clara and Jean. The film is silent and dete­ri­o­rat­ed. But it’s appar­ent­ly the only known footage of the author who gave us Huck­le­ber­ry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain would die the next year.

Find works by Twain in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

And if you like what we serve up, don’t miss us on Twit­ter on Face­book. It’s any easy way to share cul­tur­al gems with fam­i­ly and friends.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Shirt­less in 1883 Pho­to

Thomas Edi­son Recites “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb” in Ear­ly Voice Record­ing

Thomas Edison’s Box­ing Cats (1894), or Where the LOL­Cats All Began

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The End of Attribution?

in Books | March 17th, 2010

A cou­ple of days ago, we fea­tured a video post­ed on Pen­guin’s YouTube Chan­nel that used a smart video tech­nique to restore faith in the future of book pub­lish­ing. A cou­ple of our read­ers were quick to point out that the video’s cre­ative ele­ment was high­ly sim­i­lar to an award-win­ning video called “Lost Gen­er­a­tion”. (See above.) And yet there was no attri­bu­tion. A prob­lem? Par­tic­u­lar­ly for an enti­ty in the intel­lec­tu­al property/copyright busi­ness?

UPDATE: Tonight, anoth­er read­er tells us that “Lost Gen­er­a­tion” has its own ori­gins in a 2006 adver­tise­ment for Argen­tin­ian pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Ricar­do Lopez Mur­phy called “The Truth.” Does this make this style of video a meme of sorts? A style that’s so out there that attri­bu­tion is not worth a both­er? Per­haps I’m hold­ing Pen­guin’s feet too close to the fire on this one. Per­haps (as, Maria, a blog­ger col­league men­tions via email) this high­lights a big­ger prob­lem. Too much deriva­tion. Not enough orig­i­nal think­ing all around.

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The End of Publishing. Or Is It?

in Books | March 16th, 2010

Smart and hope­ful. But you need to stick with it for a cou­ple of min­utes. A job well done…

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GoodReads

in Books, Literature | March 9th, 2010

A quick heads up for book lovers: Goodreads is a large social net­work for read­ers, with over 3,000,000 mem­bers who review, rec­om­mend and swap books. The site also fea­tures “book-give-aways” for its mem­bers. This month you can enter to win a free copy of If You Fol­low Me, a nov­el by Male­na Watrous, a tal­ent­ed col­league of mine at Stan­ford. About the book one review­er said: It’s “the kind of book you fin­ish and then clutch to your heart as you run around telling every­one you know that they have to read it.” The book is hit­ting the book­store shelves today, and you can sign up to win a free copy until March 16.

PS Male­na will be teach­ing an online writ­ing course through Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies this spring. The course, called The Cre­ative Writ­ing Coach, is open to all. Mean­while, we’re also pilot­ing our first online human­i­ties course, a phi­los­o­phy course called Envi­sion­ing the Good Life. Watch the video intro­duc­tion for the course here.

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Henry Miller on New York

in Books, Film, Literature | February 28th, 2010

(NOTE: some strong lan­guage here...)

Back in 1975, film­mak­er Tom Schiller (only 20 years old at the time) made a short doc­u­men­tary on the nov­el­ist Hen­ry Miller (Trop­ic of Can­cer, Trop­ic of Capri­corn). In the scene above, Miller, then 81 years old, rem­i­nisces about his dif­fi­cult ear­ly life in New York, and it all takes place on the set used to shoot the movie Hel­lo, Dol­ly!. Schiller’s com­plete film, Hen­ry Miller Asleep and Awake, can be watched for free on Snag­films. (It’s also avail­able at Ama­zon on DVD here.) The run time is 34 min­utes. Excel­lent find by Mike.

Note: We’ve added Hen­ry Miller Asleep and Awake to our grow­ing film col­lec­tion: Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Film Noir, Doc­u­men­taries & More

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British Library to Offer 65,000 Free eBooks

in Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books | February 7th, 2010

From the TIMES ONLINE:

More than 65,000 19th-cen­tu­ry works of fic­tion from the British Library’s col­lec­tion are to be made avail­able for free down­loads by the pub­lic from this spring.

Own­ers of the Ama­zon Kin­dle, an ebook read­er device, will be able to view well known works by writ­ers such as Charles Dick­ens, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as well as works by thou­sands of less famous authors.

You can read the rest about this Microsoft fund­ed ini­tia­tive here. In the mean­time, we’ve made it rel­a­tive­ly easy to down­load major clas­sics to your Kin­dle, iPhone, smart­phone or com­put­er. See our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks (and Audio Books).

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Top 10 Reasons Why iPad Marks Kindle’s Death

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Books, e-books, Web/Tech | February 3rd, 2010

Caveat: If you missed it, yesterday’s post was 10 Rea­sons iPad Will Not Kill Kin­dle. So take every­thing here with appro­pri­ate grains of salt.

10.) Books with graph­ics. Many books con­tain pho­tos, graph­ics and dia­grams that the Kin­dle does not han­dle well, if at all. When peo­ple real­ize that the iPad will do this flaw­less­ly, they’ll head in that direc­tion. Exam­ple: while read­ing the new Carv­er biog­ra­phy on my Kin­dle, an expe­ri­ence that I loved, I had to miss out on all of the pic­tures col­lect­ed from Carver’s life. Once you take into account news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines, there’s even more weight on iPad’s side.

9.) Cost: Seri­ous­ly, Ama­zon real­ly over­stepped their bound­aries when they set Kindle’s price at around $300, as they did. If they had made it $100 or less, they would have prob­a­bly have sold 4 or 5 times the num­ber of devices, hook­ing more read­ers to their book­store and their device. Look at Gillette as an exam­ple: which costs more—the razor or the razor blades?

8.) “I love my Kin­dle!” – less than two mil­lion peo­ple have bought the Ama­zon prod­uct. By com­par­i­son, over forty mil­lion iPhones and iPod Touch­es have been sold. No one knows how many folks will rush out to buy an iPad, but if pre­vi­ous iPhone sales and the buzz around the iPad are any indi­ca­tion, this is going to be anoth­er big win for Apple.

7.) iPad is a Kin­dle: just use that free Kin­dle app on your iPad and you’ve got the whole Kin­dle store wide open to you. You can even take your whole Kin­dle library right over to Apple’s iPad with the Kin­dle App.

6.) Cost, again: with iPad com­ing in at a low $499 for a device that’s much bet­ter made and fea­tures much more capa­bil­i­ty than the Kin­dle, with at least four times the mem­o­ry… well, you get the pic­ture. Oh jeez… I just found out the Kin­dle DX goes for $489. Oh, Mr. Bezos… what are you think­ing?

5.) Capa­bil­i­ty. Peo­ple don’t want a ded­i­cat­ed read­ing device: if you can car­ry around a device the size of your e‑reader, but also use it to check email, surf the web, watch TV and movies, lis­ten to music, use office-type apps, etc. then that’s going to win in today’s econ­o­my.

4.) Book pric­ing. It looks like Apple, the dia­bol­i­cal pricers of all songs at $.99, might wind up being the pub­lish­ers’ dar­ling in the e‑book mar­ket by pric­ing their titles high­er than Ama­zon has been. So far it looks like ibooks will be clos­er to the $14.99 price point that pub­lish­ers like. Right now, as evinced by this past weekend’s squab­ble between Ama­zon and Macmil­lan, pub­lish­ers appear to be fed up with Amazon’s pric­ing strat­e­gy. Apple may just become pub­lish­ers’ white knight. (more…)

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10 Reasons iPad Will Not Kill Kindle

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Books, e-books | February 2nd, 2010

Caveat: before half of you get your shorts in a bunch, tomor­row’s post will be: Top 10 Rea­sons Why iPad Means Kin­dle Is Dead. With that said, have at it!

10.) Tak­ing read­ing from a sim­ple print­ed page to an e‑book envi­ron­ment such as the Kin­dle is a great step for­ward. Its ease of use, porta­bil­i­ty and stor­age are ide­al for read­ers. No more inno­va­tions need­ed!

9.) The enjoy­ment of read­ing has always tak­en place with­in a reader’s mind. This is both why read­ing is great and why the words on the page don’t need to be in flashy col­ors or fea­ture fan­cy graph­ics.

8.)  Added cost of iPad and $30/month fee for 3G from AT&T (the real­is­tic cost) make Kin­dle a bet­ter deal. Enough said.

7.) Every­one hates AT&T, their 3G ser­vice is spot­ty at best, and NO ONE who’s buy­ing a 3G iPad will use less than 250MB a month, so the $14.95 price point for 3G is use­less!

6.) Glare/e‑ink. You can always read dur­ing the day­time with your Kin­dle. Take it to the beach, read in broad day­light. e‑ink is sim­ply eas­i­er on read­ers’ eyes than back-lit pix­els.

5.) There’s no need for a device that fits between lap­top and smart phone. Both are extreme­ly portable and serve dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es. If I want to curl up in bed with a movie or the web, I can use my lap­top for that already. If I want to curl up in bed and read, I can use my Kin­dle!

4.) Apps! That’s right: The new open­ing up of Amazon’s Kin­dle for­mat to app devel­op­ers will mean a lot more ver­sa­til­i­ty on the device. Once a few folks come along and devel­op email clients or web browsers for the Kin­dle, Kin­dle will become even more use­ful as a poten­tial smart phone substitute—the niche that iPad seems intent on fill­ing.

3.) The new price-shar­ing announce­ment (70% publisher/30% Ama­zon) for Ama­zon’s Dig­i­tal Text Plat­form (DTP) makes Kin­dle more attrac­tive once again to all the pow­ers that be in pub­lish­ing. If they can get this pesky text-to-speech bat­tle cleared up, things will be even bet­ter.

2.) Big pub­lish­ing is cur­rent­ly doing so much of their sales through Ama­zon, that they might be afraid to car­ry busi­ness over to Apple. Sure, they will sell books there, but keep in mind that Apple might have to keep prices in the iBook store high­er than at Ama­zon.

1.) “I love my Kin­dle!” –Seri­ous­ly, a lot of read­ers are devot­ed to these devices, includ­ing me. I’ve found a nice cov­er that makes the Kin­dle easy to hold. I real­ly like the ease of buying/storing books on it. And I just want a plain, sim­ple device to use for read­ing.

The opin­ions expressed above are not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Open Cul­ture or the author.

Up next (tomor­row): Top 10 Rea­sons Why iPad Means Kin­dle is Dead

Seth Har­wood is a vora­cious read­er, sub­ver­sive pub­lish­ing maven and crime nov­el­ist. His next book Young Junius will be avail­able from Tyrus Books this fall. He’s sure to have some crazy pro­mo­tions going at his site this spring as well.

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