|
Archives
By Month
By Category
Contact Us
If you know about a story that we should be following, let us know.
BookShift
Speculative Fiction Novelists Find Success with Online Donations
Over the years, many authors have tried versions of the online donation model, with mixed results. But one specific genre of writers, speculative fiction, seems to be experiencing a moderate level of success. Back in 2000, Stephen King became one of the first major authors to offer a book online using an "honor system" to solicit donations. The book was...
more »
4MR
4 Minute Roundup: Kindle DX; Google vs. Newspapers
Here's the latest 4MR audio report from MediaShift. This week I look at the unveiling of the new wide-screen Kindle DX aimed at newspaper, magazine and college textbook readers. Will people pay $489 for it? Plus, I look at the AP and News Corp.'s moves against Google, with the AP playing hardball for running content in Google News. Meanwhile, Google...
more »
NewspaperShift
Should Newspapers Create Consortium for E-Readers?
COLUMBIA, MO -- I am attending a half-day symposium here at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri's journalism school, this time a meeting of the "Digital Publishing Alliance," a group of newspapers and tech folks who are looking at how newspaper content might work on various e-readers like the Amazon Kindle. The timing of the meeting is...
more »
BookShift
Glaser & Son Consider Pros and Cons of Kindle 2
I am what you might call the late early adopter. Rather than live on the bleeding edge, I wait safely until Version 2 comes out with the bugs and problems fixed. I got Windows 98 in '99, waited for the iPhone 3G, and checked out the Kindle 2 rather than 1. But when my e-book reader from Amazon arrived in...
more »
BookShift
5 Great Services for Self-Publishing Your Book
In past posts, we've looked at some of the questions a new writer should keep in mind when considering whether to self-publish her opus. But let's say that an author has made up her mind that pushing ahead without a traditional publisher is the way to go. With the rise of new print-on-demand (POD) technology, literally dozens of self-publishing companies,...
more »
Guides
E-books are electronic books, or books you can read on your computer or on handheld devices such as e-readers or smartphones. The first e-book was likely created by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois in 1971, when he typed in the text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence onto an early version of the Internet. Hart founded the Gutenberg Project, an online collection of e-books that are taken from public domain books.
more »
Legal Drama
Can U.S. Laws Protect Online Speech from Foreign Libel Suits?
"...in cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance." That's a remark famously made in 1997 by John Perry Barlow, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow's complete statement is well worth re-reading but one implication of this particular remark is that the reach of American constitutional values may be limited by our country's physical borders. When...
more »
BookShift
6 Ways Authors Can Succeed by Self-Publishing Books
When most authors write a book, they go the traditional route: pitch it to publishers, wait months for a reply, shop it around, wait some more, go through rewrite, and wait some more... But when blogger Sramana Mitra partnered with Amazon's BookSurge to self-publish her new book, she was taking a different route. For a book about web technology and...
more »
Legal Drama
Court Rules Print-on-Demand Service Not Liable for Defamation
Book publishers can be sued if they publish a book full of libelous statements because, the reasoning goes, a publisher should know what it prints. The publisher reviews the manuscript, edits and proofreads it, and distributes the finished book to retailers. It is involved in every part of the process. But the Internet has given rise to a new...
more »Your Take Roundup
Kindle, E-Readers Must Be Cheap, Flexible to Supplant Books
Are e-readers like the Amazon Kindle going to make print books obsolete, or will people's undying love for the printed book continue on in the digital age? While the Sony Reader didn't catch fire, the recent release of the Amazon Kindle has brought another round of debates over the future of the print book.
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
5 Reasons I Won't Give Up Books
Last month at the highly anticipated MacWorld conference here in San Francisco, Apple honcho Steve Jobs said some words that left many agape. Those words weren't "Macbook Air" but "people don't read anymore." He was predicting a doomed future for Amazon's new Kindle e-reader. Shocked, I've been going over this for weeks now, trying to cut through the punditry...
more »Your Take
What might entice you to use e-books or e-readers like Kindle?
It seems like every few years a new e-book device comes out that promises to revolutionize our reading experience, hoping we'll throw out our book collection and read everything electronically. Recently, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle have been the contenders in e-books, but many people complain that they are not open enough for different types of books and that...
more »Philosophy
New media have certainly changed the landscape of communications and education in an even more dramatic manner than electronic mass media did as was documented and analyzed by "Marshall McLuhan" in 1964. I had the good fortune to collaborate with Marshall back in the 1970s and have tried to carry on his tradition, as have others, by focusing on the impact of media independent of their content. McLuhan's pithy way of describing this approach was through the use of his one-liner "the medium is the message," which he made famous in his '64 book "Understanding Media."
more »Open Source Reporting
Eliminating Physical Media Sprawl of CDs, DVDs, Books
Lately, I have declared my own personal war on clutter in my life. That means all the paper littering my home office had to go. Those outdated hats from Burning Mans past also were out, as were old loose photos of places I don't remember. But for whatever reason, in each clean sweep I do of my stuff, I can never part with my collections of books, CDs, VHS and DVD movies (not to mention vinyl records and audiocassettes).
more »BookShift
Your Take Roundup::Books Don't Need Digital Reinvention, But...
The promise of digital books or e-books or the universal library is that we can have all the books ever printed available on any device to read. While it's an idea that sounds good in theory, many of you were skeptical that the good old book really needs to be reinvented, scanned and put onto an electronic device. Perhaps...
more »Tags
Best of MediaShift
