It looks like the next generation e-book reader will be part of your phone.Rise of the mobile novel sets alarm bells ringing in Japanese literary circles is the title of Richard Lloyd Parry's piece in the London Times."For the first time, Japan's fiction bestseller list is dominated by books published, read and, in several cases, written on mobile telephones."I repeat:publishedreadand sometimes written on CELL PHONES!How does it work:You pay about $2.50 a month for a subscription to download novels from the publishers website to your cell phone."The stories are divided into gobbets which can be read in about three minutes,...
Is the Kindle the Ultimate Reading Machine?
Evan Schnittman, vice president of business development at Oxford University Press, has an interesting, positive take on Amazon's Kindle that is worth a read.One thing to keep in mind argues Schnittman is that us book-focused news types are not the target audience for this product. This one is for the pure readers. Not the book collectors, the booksellers, not for the book as an object gang but "for folks like my sister-in-law Laurie, a voracious reader of print books" as Schnittman says.He goes on:"Immersive reading has always been the bane of electronic content. As extractive content such as reference has...
DRM Drama: The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Mark Pilgrim has created a clever little piece, The Future of Reading ( A Play in Six Acts), about the inherent dangers of Digitial Rights Management (DRM).Using sources like Steven Levy's Newsweek article The Future of Reading, Kindle's Terms of Service, Jeff Bezos 2002 letter to the Author's Guild and George Orwell's 1984, Pilgrim adequately conveys some of the pitfalls of the DRM approach.The six acts are:1. The act of buying2. The act of giving3. The act of lending4. The act of reading5. The act of remembering6. The act of learningHere is Act 1:When someone buys a book, they are...
Feds Drop Subpoena. Amazon Does Not Have to Reveal Names of Used Book Buyers
Finally there is some good news coming from the government about our First Amendment rights.U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker has ruled that Amazon does not have to reveal the identities of thousands of people who purchased used books through Amazon Marketplace.At Amazon's request the court documents from Crocker's June ruling have just been unsealed. "The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote. "It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting...
Another Amazon Innovation: Free Content For a Fee
As the media shower for Kindle enters its second day the blogosphere remains saturated with Kindle related posts.Forget the design, forget the compatibility issues, forget the price tag, the glaring day after issue is the potential copyright problems around the Kindle offering paid subscriptions to blogs that are otherwise available to all for free on the internet.I emailed Ron Hogan of GalleyCat fame after I realized that he was unaware that GalleyCat was available as a Kindle blog subscription for $1.99 a month. In a post yesterday he was relating author Seth Godin's experience with Amazon and Godin's decision not...