We are pleased to announce the third “Boles Book for…” publication in the last three weeks: Boles Book for the Modern Publishing Paradigm! Yes, it’s been a busy 2015 so far with four — yes four! — Boles Books published in the last four weeks; and seven — yes seven! — published in the last four months!
Continue reading → Volume 2: Boles Book for the Modern Publishing Paradigm
We love e-books and the easy way one can publish new work on a variety of reader devices. We also appreciate and respect when hardcover books are donated to a library. There is history in the print; there is provenance in the handing down; there is the mouldering stink of ink and finger grease on the pages.
We are uncertain, however, if a gift of 200,000 electronic books should carry the same glimmer and glitter of a similar hardcover donation:
Cambridge University Library is now home to one of the world’s largest collections of Chinese monographs – following the gift of 200,000 electronic books by the country’s Premier.
Wen Jiabao, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, visited the University recently as part of the University’s 800th Anniversary celebrations.
The gift is one of the largest single donations received in the University Library’s 650-year history and almost doubles the number of electronic books at its disposal.
Is there antiquity in a copiable e-book; can bites and byes be handed down with any authority; has the human aesthetic been deodorized from the virtual page?
While the spirit of the donation is confounding and intense, we to not believe e-books should be the measure of the man in donation or the ethereal university in its appreciative sycophancy.
Yesterday, SuperAgent Matt Wagner Tweeted a link to Peter Osnos’ take on eBooks. Is SuperAgent Wagner oddly tooting his own funeral dirge? Or is Matt Wagner sensing an opportunity on the horizon the rest of us are unable to envision?
Continue reading → Do eBook Authors Need Agents and Publishers?
Steve Jobs is a cranky genius.
After this year’s Macworld Expo failed to ignite the Apple stock price upward or to recreate the same sort of feverish buzz of last year’s Macworld introduction of the iPhone, Jobs decided to strike back against reading to salve his wounds:
Today he [Jobs] had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
One of the harbingers of how fruitful the continued marriage of technology and research can better serve the future is found in the status of the New York Public Library’s position on electronically borrowing books. One can head off to the NYPL eBooks online library and actually check out books by downloading them to your home computer.
These downloaded books are “time bombed” to expire at the end of three weeks so instead of taking the book back to the library you just let the book expire on your hard drive. There are certainly sticky copyright issues that must continue to be dealt with in the internet “borrow but don’t return” lending scheme for libraries; but for those who understand eBooks are good for authors and publishers and libraries the concern over digital rights borrowing can be resolved in the greater favor of the consumer.
Publishers will rent individual licenses for their books that will expire the same way a parking space expires after you purchase its limited use for a quarter. eBooks, for libraries everywhere, means they can finally sustain a relationship with their patrons beyond the walls of their libraries.
You must be logged in to post a comment.