Oh man, I really should have read these free writing guides before I tried to craft my own headline. Now I just feel stupid. Actually, I feel like an SEO rebel, because from what I hear, writing a nonsensical headline is tantamount to Google search result suicide. Oh well! Someday I’ll learn write more better! [...]
books
Angry Robot plans fan-created anthologies via new WorldBuilder site
Fandom breeds content, as nearly any Internet user who has ever loved a TV show, movie or book already knows. Fans love to spend time absorbed in their favorite works by inventing new adventures, filling in backstories, and expanding the characters’ worlds with fresh details. (Or just by making the characters have sex with each [...]
Rowling will sell the Harry Potter ebooks on her own starting in October
The Harry Potter series may take place in the modern world, but it’s always been somewhat removed from it, emphasizing magic and wizarding dynasties over digital technology. The same has held true for the actual books, which have always been sold in print or boxed audiobook versions but never as ebooks, which Rowling dismissed at [...]
BookLikes first impressions: an undercooked indie version of Shelfari
BookLikes is yet another free service for book lovers that promises to make quality recommendations to you based on what others are reading. Unfortunately, it’s not quite ready for public consumption.
Get ‘em while they’re free: 5 books that became famous movies
There’s been a dearth of interesting (to my eye) titles available for free on the Kindle store lately, so I’m happy this morning to post about a set of five new releases to make up for it. Well, “new” isn’t quite right. These are either classics, like E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” or books [...]
Free Stephen King short story from The Atlantic
It’s almost impossible to find a free Stephen King short story these days, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the entire text of a new work, “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive,” has been published by The Atlantic on their website as part of their May issue. In addition, King gives an interview about [...]
Patent lawyer explains rejected Google Books settlement for the rest of us
If you’re in publishing, you probably can already hit all the main points of the Google Book Search settlement story without crib notes, but it can still seem like a complicated mess to outsiders. The website Practical eCommerce asked an attorney who specializes in intellectual property law to explain what’s going on, and I think [...]
Do printed library books really fall apart after 26 uses? (No, they don’t.)
Yeah, I’m still posting about HarperCollins’ new ebook library policy. It’s not just that it’s such a damned greedy, destructive move to make against libraries, the publishing equivalent of clubbing a highly literate seal. It’s that HarperCollins is using this policy change to try to push a 500%+ increase in the frequency with which libraries [...]
Here’s a map of which Borders stores are closing
The Digital Reader has put together an excellent Google Map of all the Borders locations listed for closing in the retailer’s bankruptcy filing. I’ve included the map in an iframe after the jump, or you can click through to view it at Google in fullscreen splendor. I’m not at all surprised at the two Borders [...]
Borders files for bankruptcy, will close 200 stores
As expected, Borders has filed for bankruptcy. John Mutter at Shelf Awareness says the bookseller plans to close about 200 of its 639 stores over the next couple of weeks. Update: Here’s a map of which stores are closing. Mutter writes that since last December Borders has been buying new books “following procedures familiar to [...]
My experience with the Espresso Book Machine
I was in midtown NYC earlier today when I stopped to have a coffee and catch up on my RSS feeds, and I saw a couple of blog references to a video of the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) posted over on NPR’s Science Friday blog. The video is a short, lighthearted overview of an EBM [...]
90-second “A Wrinkle in Time” is like a Spark Notes video made by tiny, insane actors
The problem with old age, or Internet overdoses, or vitamin B12 deficiency (that’s today’s health story), is that you forget the classics. For example, I know Charlotte was a spider, but did she save her pig-baby from a bejeweled Hobbit? Who can say? Similarly, I remember that there’s something called a tesseract, but I think [...]