Tag: Books and Technology

E-Books in the Round: Google’s Digital Bookcase

The digital designers at Google have come up with a new way to browse Google Books. The challenge - designing a 21st century virtual bookcase to display e-books. They "imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online—many more than fit on a traditional shelf."  And what they came up with is a bookcase that's an infinite 3D helix. That you can spin  side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. The shelf holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books.The books...

Continue Reading →

Book App Review: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

 "Morris Lessmore loved words. He loved stories. He loved books. His life was a book of his own writing, one orderly page after another..."So begins The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by William Joyce, an interactive digital narrative based on the award-winning animated short film of the same name. Created by Moonbot Studios the app "blurs the line between picture books and animated film" and adds further fuel to the ongoing debate of what constitutes a book, for the app is not based on a book and has yet to be "in print" (a picture book version is...

Continue Reading →

The Ghost of Greenwich Village: A Debut Novel by Lorna Graham

Random House has released this preview of Lorna Graham's soon to be released debut novel on Scribd.It includes a map of the writers and poets who appear in or inspired Lorna Graham's debut novel The Ghosts of Greenwich Village. The story centers around a young woman who moves to Manhattan only to find that her apartment is haunted by the ghost of a writer from the Beat Generation. The book is a trade paperback original published under the Ballantine Books imprint.The preview also includes the cover image and the first chapter.

Continue Reading →

25 cent e-books: Unbridled success or just the nature of the Internet?

The numbers are in from Unbridled Books catchy 25 e-books for 25c promotion.For those who missed this one it was a partnership between Unbridled Books and the ABA (American Booksellers Association) in which independent bookstores across the country that where set up for e-book commerce could offer a range of books from the publisher for 25 cents each.During the three day event 145 independent bookstores sold a total of 15,807  e-books (this number does not include the e-books sold at Powells or other large shops that do not use the ABA e-commerce platform). Though acknowledging that the model is indeed...

Continue Reading →

James Joyce: Then and Now

 First Edition of Ulysses by James Joyce. Published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922The beginning of Ulysses as it appeared on Twitter June, 16, 2011. In honor of Bloomsday, the novel is being tweeted in 140 character increments @11yssesThis is not the first time the paths of Twitter and Ulysses crossed. In 2007, before Twitter was a household name, the folks at Booktwo.org tweeted the entire novel. It took 257 days! See more at our piece from Dec. '07, The Twitter Edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. Leopold Bloom The portrait of Leopold Bloom above is from Ulysses "Seen". A new...

Continue Reading →