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,...
Digitization and the Bookseller
BooksnapWelcome to the next disruptive technology for the book trade.The force of commerce and the march of technology are soon to meet again at the booksellers door. The door might not be open for long but if entered correctly it might become a new source of revenue for the bookseller.Once Google's romance with the libraries is over do you think Google will stop looking for other sources of information to feed the machine?I would guess within 5 years or so Google will have cycled through the library trade and determined who they will be playing with and they will know...
New York Booksellers Ask Spitzer to Reconsider Online Sales Tax
Last week, 29 New York State bookstores all members of the American Bookseller Association (ABA), signed on to a letter sent to Governor Spitzer asking him to revisit his recent decision not to "enforce sales tax laws" or more precisely to start collecting sales tax from online retailers (ie. Amazon).Somehow they believe this will help level the playing field in the bookselling world. Do they not realize that many of their customers buy books online too? and that even if they had to pay sale tax the book will still be cheaper when purchased online!Also, the 'independent businesses are vital...
Books as Investments. Asia Joins the Fray
This came in a bit late for my previous post Book Collecting Juice which including a link to a recent article in the Telegraph about books as an investment.The Standard, an English language paper in Hong Kong, has a piece by Ronald Chan titled Judging the Fine Print which comes on the heels of the inaugural Hong Kong International Antiquarian Book Fair that will take place from November 30 to December 2Chan, founder and chief executive of the private investment company Chartwell Capital, says:"The growing interest in rare books has finally hit Asia, with alternative investors seeing them as an...
Starbucks Meet Anne Fadiman
Honoré de Balzac: The Patron Saint of Coffee Coffee is the name of the essay and it appears in Anne Fadiman's new book At Large and At Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist published by Alan Lane in the UK.Fadiman is fully caffeinated the entire time she is researching and writing the essay, sharing the same caffeine buzz experienced by the literary giants who populate her essay.Who knew that it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "who had swallowed oceans of coffee in his younger days and regretted his intemperance," who first summoned a chemist to see what the magic ingredient...