Category Archives: digital

Lessons from the Music Biz: Arcade Fire

The Montreal/Texas band Arcade Fire has just released a new album, Suburbs. Arcade Fire is about as big as indie bands get, and their plan is to stay indie – as far as I know.
You can buy the new album here:
http://www.arcadefire.com/ …
And some interesting notes about how you can buy:
* Premium digital ($7.99)
* CD + [...]

1 Comment. Leave yours?

An Open, Webby Book Publishing Platform

Ever since Book Oven shifted focus in November 2009 to Bite-Size Edits, I have been wanting to write about one of the major reasons for the shift: my realization that:
a) the world needs an open book-publishing platform
b) rather than building from scratch at Book Oven, we should have started with Wordpress, and built atop it.
I [...]

1 Comment. Leave yours?

Why “Talk” Culture Ruins Everything

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani takes on the Internet, remix culture, post-modernism and the technology-induced Decline of Western Civilization. She quotes the usual suspects: Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen, Nicholas Carr as well as Cass Sunstein, Farhad Manjoo.
Picking on traditional media has become a tiresome sport. Much more interesting to explore successful new [...]

9 Comments. Leave yours?

Friday Interview: James Bridle

When I first started closely following the big changes in the publishing industry, James Bridle’s blog BookTwo was one of my first stops. And since then I’ve continued to watch with great appreciation as James has pushed and poked at “publishing.” The passion that drives his endeavours – passion for books, for words, for writing, [...]

1 Comment. Leave yours?

Free Books and Featured Authors!

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 [...]

5 Comments. Leave yours?

Friday Interview: Liza Daly & Ibis Reader

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 [...]

1 Comment. Leave yours?

Oversupply and Too Much Risk

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 [...]

Leave a comment

Why the iPad Matters

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 [...]

20 Comments. Leave yours?

Nick Carr, Debased Digital Text, and Intellectual Pointillism

On the Britannica Blog, Nick Carr looks at how digital is changing our relationship with text, and doesn’t like what he sees. We’re turning into debased computers, he thinks:
We’re rapidly moving away from our old linear form of writing and reading, in which ideas and narratives wended their way across many pages, to a [...]

4 Comments. Leave yours?

DRM: My Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that DRM is bad for the publishing business, and hence the publishing business should ditch DRM for that reason. The people who are actually studying the impacts of DRM vs no-DRM – O’Reilly and Brian O’Leary leading the charge – seem to suggest that hypothesis is correct. For now, anyway. My read [...]

7 Comments. Leave yours?