Top Ten Reasons Why the Kindle Won’t Be an iPod for Books

in Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books, Most Popular | August 11th, 2009

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 read­ing: ful­ly portable, a nice thing to own and put on shelves, great for shar­ing, good in bed, at beach, etc. If you lose it or get it wet, no big deal—easily replace­able.

3) Music has con­stant­ly found new for­mats that improve on the old. Same for the iPod. It’s unques­tion­ably bet­ter than that big­ger, skip­ping CD play­er. Books haven’t been able to improve on the form for cen­turies.

4) Hold­ing 100 albums in your hand is great. Hold­ing 100 books? Not as much.

5) How often do you real­ly go away for so long that you need 10+ books? (Book­stores are every­where.)

6) Kin­dle is too expen­sive (see #1) and too big.

7) Books take much longer to con­sume, don’t work well in indi­vid­ual (shuf­fled) parts, and we often only read them once.

8.) Now that you can car­ry music on your phone, and the iPhone has bun­dled music, email, inter­net, and tele­phone in one small size, is any­one real­ly will­ing to buy a big­ger iPhone or Kin­dle just to read books on it?

9) Most of us spend more time lis­ten­ing to music than read­ing. We just do; it’s eas­i­er to do while we’re involved with oth­er things.

10) Books: they’re bet­ter!

Seth Har­wood pod­casts his ideas on the pub­lish­ing indus­try and his fic­tion for free at sethharwood.com. He is cur­rent­ly fig­ur­ing out how pub­lish­ers should best approach the new, emerg­ing e‑book mar­ket. Hear his ideas in his lat­est Hot Tub Cast™ and read them here soon. His first nov­el is JACK WAKES UP, in stores now.

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Will Amazon (or Apple) Cut Publishers Out of the Loop?

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Books, e-books | August 11th, 2009

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 Apple does the music mar­ket. The only thing stand­ing in Jeff Bezos’ way? Steve Jobs. Why? Because Apple can pro­duce an e‑book read­er that actu­al­ly appeals to a mass mar­ket, and Ama­zon can’t. And guess what? Apple is rumored to have a new device com­ing out this year. More on that here. Thanks to Seth Har­wood for send­ing this along.

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Junot Díaz Reads From “Drown”

in Audio Books, Books, Literature | August 5th, 2009

Junot_Díaz

Image by Christo­pher Peter­son, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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 to pub­lish The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao. But the patience paid off. The nov­el won him a Pulitzer in fact. And it’s an excel­lent read. Real­ly.

Hav­ing said this, I want to high­light Díaz read­ing one of his ear­ly New York­er sto­ries that also found its way into Drown. It’s called How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Hal­fie). The free audio clip, which is list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books (and pro­duced by The New York­er), has some col­or­ful lan­guage, but it’s not gra­tu­itous.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

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Chris Anderson @ Google

in Audio Books, Books, Google | August 4th, 2009

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 gen­er­ates bil­lions of dol­lars by serv­ing free con­tent and ser­vices. With the talk above, you get an intro­duc­tion to Ander­son­’s take on “free” and some good Q&A. The pre­sen­ta­tion runs about 53 min­utes in total.

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New Pynchon Book Out Today: Watch the Trailer

in Books | August 4th, 2009

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 Twit­ter

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Never Mind Amazon, Get Your Free Orwell Here

in Audio Books, Books | July 22nd, 2009

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 stream them, from this page. On a more per­ma­nent basis, you can find Orwell’s 1949 work housed in our Free Audio Book Col­lec­tion along with lots of oth­er free texts.

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The Future of Content

in Books, Media | July 12th, 2009

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 to make mon­ey in an era when con­sumers expect infor­ma­tion-based prod­ucts (books, news­pa­pers, etc.) to be free. The talk is mod­er­at­ed by James Fal­lows, and fea­tures Josh Tyrang­iel (man­ag­ing edi­tor of Time.com), Priscil­la Painton (edi­tor-in-chief of the Simon & Schus­ter adult trade imprint), Bob Pittman (for­mer CEO of MTV Net­works, AOL Net­works), and Deirdre Stan­ley (exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent and gen­er­al coun­sel for Thom­son Reuters). It runs an hour plus.

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View from the Bookstore Shelf

in Books | July 7th, 2009

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 keep blog­ging, pod­cast­ing, and doing my damn­d­est to get the book to sell. That’s fine with me. I’m com­fort­able in the social media/Web 2.0 space and I can tweet my head off and Face­book-share with the best of them. But is this the nir­vana I’ve pined for, worked hard toward and wait­ed to achieve? In a word: No.

My main point is this: as writ­ers we bet­ter enjoy the climb as we’re going up the moun­tain; the process has to be enjoy­able. For me, this hap­pened when I built an audi­ence by pod­cast­ing my fic­tion as free, seri­al­ized audio­books. Once I devel­oped a rela­tion­ship with fans, I had the feel of being a real writer, a suc­cess, way before my book ever hit a sin­gle store or shelf.

Why was that good? Because the old mod­el toward writ­ing suc­cess (get­ting fans by find­ing read­ers in stores, in print) takes a very, very long time. Even for the luck­i­est of us—and I now count myself among these (see para­graph one)—this takes mul­ti­ple books and at least a few years after your first major-mar­ket pub­li­ca­tion. I know many of us come to writ­ing for what it gives us in our rooms, the lit­tle vac­u­ums in which we work, but in all hon­esty it just feels bet­ter when you know there are peo­ple who actu­al­ly want to read what you’re work­ing on—especially peo­ple who aren’t relat­ed to you or going to cri­tique you. Let’s just accept that. It doesn’t make us bad writ­ers to admit we want read­ers. (more…)

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