James Ellroy on Re-Writing History

in Books, Literature | October 8th, 2009

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 goes about writ­ing his­tor­i­cal fic­tion. To get a feel for the book, you can read a PDF of the first chap­ter here. And if you want to get the audio book for free, check out Audible.com’s stand­ing offer.

via Media Bistro

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Will Books Be Napsterized?

in Books, e-books | October 4th, 2009

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 from anoth­er online user at Rapid­Share, Megau­pload, Hot­file and oth­er file-stor­age sites.

Until now, few read­ers have pre­ferred e‑books to print­ed or audi­ble ver­sions, so the pub­lic avail­abil­i­ty of free-for-the-tak­ing copies did not much mat­ter. But e‑books won’t stay on the periph­ery of book pub­lish­ing much longer. E‑book hard­ware is on the verge of going main­stream…

With the new devices in hand, will book buy­ers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded with­out the copy­right holder’s per­mis­sion? Mind­ful of what hap­pened to the music indus­try at a sim­i­lar tran­si­tion­al junc­ture, book pub­lish­ers are about to dis­cov­er whether their indus­try is dif­fer­ent enough to be spared a sim­i­lar­ly dis­mal fate. (Get the rest here.)

Need­less to say, pub­lish­ers are get­ting ner­vous. But some see the “Nap­ster­i­za­tion” of books being more hype than real. As author Seth Har­wood told me on Twit­ter (find our Twit­ter stream here), The “nyt arti­cle on ebook pira­cy is spin. If more peo­ple are read­ing, even stolen books, pub­lish­ers win. Too much fear of zero sum.” In the com­ments sec­tion below, Seth goes beyond 140 char­ac­ters and spells out why pub­lish­ers should take a deep breath. They might actu­al­ly have more to gain than lose, if they play their cards right. Give his thoughts a read, and keep in mind that he land­ed a Ran­dom House con­tract by giv­ing his books away as free audio pod­casts.

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The Book That Changed Your Life

in Books | September 29th, 2009

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 do things that way. They have their own unique take on things. But if you want a more tra­di­tion­al list of life-alter­ing books, then check out this col­lec­tion cre­at­ed by our read­ers and feel free to add your own books to the com­ments. The more, the mer­ri­er.

Fol­low us on Face­book and Twit­ter, where we tweet and re-tweet extra cul­tur­al good­ies that nev­er make it to the blog.

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The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It

in Books, e-books, Technology | August 31st, 2009

zittraincover2Lawrence 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.  You can buy it on Ama­zon for $11.56, or, even bet­ter, you can down­load it for free from Zit­train’s web site. Vis­it the web site, and find the PDF here. Thanks for this tip goes to Tony Yet, who guest blogged TED to Chi­na: An Inside View ear­li­er this sum­mer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Free Audio­book of Chris Anderson’s “Free”

The Future of the Inter­net: A Free Stan­ford Course

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Cul­ture: Avail­able in Text or Audio (For Free)

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Good “Reads” On Audible (with Freebie Possibilities)

in Audio Books, Books, Deals, Literature | August 21st, 2009

paul_austerA 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” here, and, unless I’m mis­tak­en, there’s a way that you can down­load one for free. I’ve cre­at­ed a page where you can get infor­ma­tion on Audi­ble’s (no strings attached) 14 day tri­al here, which gives you a com­plete­ly free down­load of any audio book you choose.

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The Future of Content Delivery

in Amazon Kindle, Audio Books, Books, Podcasts | August 18th, 2009

sigler2This 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 how he built a HUGE online fan base for his fic­tion, land­ed a major pub­lish­ing deal with Crown Books, reached NY Times best­seller sta­tus, and why he insists that giv­ing his fic­tion away for free is the best mar­ket­ing around.

He presents his thoughts on Big Pub­lish­ing, small pub­lish­ing, smart-phones vs. the Kin­dle, and per­haps most impor­tant­ly, lays out the meth­ods by which he pre-sold 1,500 copies of his new, self-pub­lished nov­el THE ROOKIE this April via his own web­site, scottsigler.com. That’s right: For­get print-on-demand and its high­er cost-per-book. Scott breaks down how he pre-sold enough books to pay for an entire print run before THE ROOKIE ever went to press! It’s a mod­el so far ahead of every­one else that we’ve got to take notes!

If you’re a writer or aspir­ing author, you need to lis­ten to this. And don’t let the intro scare you off.

To down­load this file and lis­ten to it on your own time, on your iPod or sim­i­lar device, sim­ple right click this link: DOWNLOAD and choose “Save Link as…” on a Mac, or “Save File” on a PC.

Or lis­ten to it right here:

Seth Har­wood, the author of JACK WAKES UP, will be teach­ing an online course (The Grip­ping Read) with Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. And he’ll also be teach­ing an Author Boot­camp with Scott Sigler on Stan­ford’s cam­pus on Novem­ber 7 and 14. Each course only has a few slots still open.

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Nobel Prize Winner Reads From His New Novel

in Books | August 13th, 2009

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 avail­able in the fol­low­ing for­mats: MP3 — iTunes — RSS Feed. In the mean­time, we’ve added the New York Review of Books pod­cast to our col­lec­tion of Ideas & Cul­ture Pod­casts, which can also be accessed through our Free iPhone App.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter!

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Introducing “Book Oven”

in Books | August 12th, 2009

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 crowd­sourc­ing and does some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent with it. It gives book lovers the pow­er to par­tic­i­pate in the writ­ing, sales and dis­tri­b­u­tion of new books. Above, Hugh McGuire, founder of Lib­rivox, explains the con­cept of Book Oven more ful­ly. (You’ll need to turn up the vol­ume a bit.) The site is cur­rent­ly in alpha, and I sus­pect that you can watch it evolve dur­ing the months ahead. Watch Book Oven Blog to track its devel­op­ment.

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