We’re going to be giving away three free copies of Catherine McKenzie’s best-selling novel SPIN, from HarperCollins Canada, to high-scoring players in our wordish game Bite-Size Edits.
How it works:
* Catherine has added a chapter of a work-in-progress to Bite-Size Edits.
* You can edit that chapter, sentence-by-sentence in Bite-Size Edits.
* Catherine gets to see all the [...]
Do you like free books? Do you like words?
We’ve just launched a Featured Author program on Bite-Size Edits, a wordish game that connects authors to fans and readers through the craft of writing.
Players get points for editing and commenting on random sentences from writers. High-scorers can win free books (!), and points earned in [...]
We’re starting a new feature here on Book Oven, a Friday interview series, every two weeks. We’ll be talking to people who are doing interesting things in the bookish space. Our first interviewee is Liza Daly, of ThreePress Consulting, and the woman who knows all about ePub. Liza, along with Keith Fahlgren, recently launched the [...]
Dearest LibriVox listeners, volunteers, & supporters:
For four-and-a-half years, LibriVox volunteers have been making audiobooks for the world to enjoy, and giving them away for free. We’ve made thousands of free audiobooks that have been downloaded by millions of people; our site gets 400,000 visitors every month. To date, all our costs have been borne by [...]
A recent study, done by Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, estimates that the average American consumes about 36,000 words of text per day, during leisure hours. That number includes print, email, the web, and text messaging. That’s a lot of text. At that rate the average American could read Moby Dick every week.
The question [...]
Towards a world of smaller books, from Crooked Timber:
The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself…
and:
All this may be changing as we move towards an electronic [...]
Marion Maneker, columnist at The Big Money, responds to Penguin CEO John Makinson’s WSJ OpEd. He makes the point more clearly than I’ve yet seen it that the book industry suffers from “oversupply and too much risk.” It’s not digital per se that is the real problem; but digital just makes it easier for others [...]
I was asked to do BookNet Canada’s “Interviews with Industry Innovators.” I did. Here I am, looking a bit pudgier than seems reasonable:
Link at Blip.tv.
There was a big dustup between Macmillan and Amazon over ebook pricing this weekend. Here is Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s take. And Amazon’s announcement that they were backing down. And Charlie Stross’ great outsider’s view.
Whoever won, ebook pricing is a hot, tough topic. I’ll guess this chess match isn’t over yet, so we’ll [...]
There have been a host of complaints about the iPad – it doesn’t do this, it doesn’t have that, why can’t it, I wish it would, it’s closed … Even Hitler was disappointed.
But the iPad represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors and language of “computing.” Or rather it extends that shift that was tested [...]
