Author name: Kirk Biglione

As controversies go, the Authors Guild vs. Kindle didn’t last long. Last Tuesday, Guild President Roy Blount, Jr. was fuming about infringement of digital audio rights in the New York Times. By Friday afternoon Amazon announced that it would allow publishers to disable Kindle’s text-to-speech (TTS) feature on a title by title basis. Some fear that the Amazon caved too quickly to the Authors Guild’s demands. On the contrary, I think we will one day come to see this decision as a big win for Amazon and not the Guild. Amazon may have given up control over one feature, but […]

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 Pynchon novels available in any ebook store. At least not in any of the ones I’ve checked. That includes the Kindle store, Sony Connect, Fictionwise, the Palm eBook store, and eBooks.com. I understand that most of Pynchon’s novels qualify as extreme backlist, and, as a

We spend quite a bit of time at Booksquare headquarters talking about what’s wrong with the publishing industry. These discussions usually focus on the industry’s seeming fear of new technology and the fact that, some days, it seems like the future of publishing will never happen. We suspect that it’s not so much a fear of the future as it is an overly cautious nature. That and the fact that the existing business model and marketing methods seem to work just fine — for now, at least. It’s that sort of comfort with the status quo that drives us to