offbeat

Songs as books? An illustrated version of Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”

Yesterday I wrote up a whole bunch of notes for what will most likely be another long post about some hypothetical near-future publishing idea. That’s not important (yet). What’s important is that in those notes I used Lady Gaga as an example of how musical artists could offer small written works as impulse-purchase content to [...]

Does a Kindle make a good prison bribe? No, it does not.

The Los Angeles Times reported today that when a prison official returned from holiday vacation last month, she found a new Kindle on her desk. It had been given to her by Fabian Nuñez, former Assembly Speaker for California and father of inmate Esteban Nuñez, who is serving time for murder. The prison official reported [...]

Is a Kindle bullet proof? There’s one quick way to find out.

“Can a book save your life?” That’s what Tom Shillue of the literary journal Electric Literature asks in the clip above, and you can tell he should be taken very seriously because he does that TV news journalist walk toward the camera at the beginning. (EL’s next clip should test which books are sexual predators.) [...]

Amazon pulls Kindle game over offensive language

The new Kindle game Every Word really means every word, even slangish, potentially offensive terms. At his blog laughing-stalk, Erik Deckers wrote that last night he was trying to finish an Every Word game and got stuck on one final, missing term. I was missing one 6-letter word. Not wanting to leave an incomplete board [...]

Author holds virtual book signing event

One of the puzzles of ebooks is how to hold good old-fashioned book signings when you don’t have a printed product to pass back and forth. Sure, you could let an author Sharpie your Kindle, but that’s not really the same. (Not to mention you’ll run out of room fairly quickly.) Sci-fi writer M. David [...]

4 more screens for your Kindle

Medusa! Some old books! A really ugly dog! And a cartoon Day of the Dead box! Now your Kindle can look weirder than ever when it’s not in use. (Don’t worry, it looks awesome when you’re using it.)