Booksquare

Except for the annoying crashes that require hard restarts (which require the acquisition of a paper clip), I’m pretty happy with the Kindle reading experience. It’s not a device that will light the world on fire, nor is it the “iPod of ereaders” (stop with the dumbness, people). It’s a good gateway device, however.
The next [...]

Not long ago I was lamenting the fact that it was literally impossible to read Thomas Pynchon on a Kindle. It’s not because the Kindle isn’t suited to reading long and complex novels, but rather the fact that there are no Pynchon novels to be found in the Kindle store.
In fact, there are no [...]

If you examine it on the whole, the publishing industry is an unsustainable mess. Think about it: bad economic theory, out-of-touch decision making, Peter paying Paul or the piper or someone, deregulated approach to the market. Hmm, sounds like another entity we know, doesn’t it?

The future of publishing is not about technology or widgets [...]

So I’d like to talk about disenfranchisement of readers. It’s happened twice in this political season, and I think we need to talk openly about it before it becomes a serious trend. You all remember that little issue with Chelsea Green and the decision to bypass traditional bookstores in order to make a POD splash [...]

[BS: For those who don't know, we have an intern at BS. She nearly quit (due to the situation noted in paragraph two below), so we had a "negotiation". She will be allowed, under limited circumstances, to write for this site. She will also take over daily BS cat maintenance responsibilities. You know what that [...]

I remain bemused by authors who insist, when refusing to grant ebook rights, that their works are meant to be experienced in a certain (bound and printed) format. It’s a bit quaint, when you think about it, that they would impose their own vision of art on the beholder — it’s a bit like Michelangelo [...]

Here we are in 2008 and Chelsea Green, a small publisher, took a chance. It thought, “Hmm, offer an exclusive window to Amazon for our new book on Barack Obama, or choose broad distribution? We choose Amazon, and Amazon alone.” Which, of course, angered all the other booksellers in the world, the booksellers who see [...]

So here I am, in London, part of a country with neither the Sony eReader nor the Amazon Kindle, yet dinner conversation turned, as conversations often do, to the fact that the Sony eReader will soon be available in the UK. I think that’s just cool, even as I think, “What’s taking so long, Sony, [...]

Last night, I had dinner with the digital team from Harlequin — one of the most, if not the most, forward looking publishers when it comes to migrating to a digital future — and came away feeling positive about the mindset of the industry. Today, I’m feeling like we’ve taken two steps back. The fine [...]

Rumor has it that I’m going to be on News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight. I’ll be talking about the demise of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Eight minutes isn’t near long enough to cover a topic this broad; it’s barely enough to get started with the conversation.
Yesterday was the last day for the [...]