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...
Kindlemania Begins, Some Expect a Short Run
Amazon has officially thrown it's hat in the e-book reader market with the release of Kindle, a $399 wi-fi enabled, keyboard equipped, design-needy, proprietary e-book reader.Will this be the device that catapults e-books into the mainstream?Some are not so sure.In his piece at Information Week Amazon Planning E-book Debacle Thomas Claburn flat out pans the Kindle calling the design "a thing of unsurpassed ugliness." and its "failure to learn any lessons from the iPhone will be its doom."David Rothman at TeleRead says the real problem is, and I agree, in the proprietary format or the "F word" as Rothman calls...
A Rogue Bookshop Appears and the Books Are Free!
Free Books! was how the snippet on Shelf Awareness began.The MailTribune of Southern Oregon ran a story on a new bookshop in Medford, Oregon "Ideals in Action. Book Exchange offers free books and runs on online sales."The shop is called the Rogue Book Exchange and their tagline is: Have a book, leave a book - want a book, take a book."It's a free, nonprofit bookstore and we pay the rent by online selling about one in 50 of the books that people give us." says Jenny Hamilton who owns the shop with here husband.An intriguing model to say the least...
Censored in Plame Sight
And the National Book Award for the Altered Book of the Year goes to...Valerie Plame's recently released memoir "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," In fact it just might be the most widely distributed altered book in publishing history.About 15% of the entire book is visibly altered with gray bars eliminating text, sometimes for pages at a time. The CIA originally wanted 35% of the text to be redacted. A court battle ensued between the publisher, Simon & Schuster, and the government. The Bush administration won by about 15%.The title of the book...
Shelfari Stumbles
It looks like things in the book social networking world are heating up.It seems that in their race to gain market share Shelfari has engaged in some pretty dubious behavior including astroturfing (posting on blogs pretending to be users, not employees) and partaking in widespread spamming campaigns.Tim Spalding founder of LibraryThing has documented the travesty over at the Thingology blog. The post is titled Shelfari Spam: "basically social network rapists" with the quote coming from a Gawker post on the issue.Before you get into the well he is the competition of course he is going to knock them read the...