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 generation of ereader will surely be more of everything. Of course, the fine-tuning of the perfect ereading device is not the issue. The ebook business is building itself without the perfect device. eBooks are not going to be the next big thing; they’re going

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

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 or free samples. It’s no wonder that we endure a never-ending succession of “it’s the end of the world as we know it” articles about the publishing industry. New York Magazine has given us the latest, a gloomy piece chock full of quotes from gloomy