Posts tagged reading
“ Canadian bookselling chain Indigo Books & Music is joining Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million in their refusal to carry any Amazon Publishing titles in their stores.”
“In our view Amazon’s actions are not in the long-term interests of the reading public or the publishing and book retailing industry, globally,” says Indigo VP Janet Eger. So refusing to stock titles due to business conflicts helps readers?
Protectionism is the last gasp of the obsolete. (Via paidContent)
The NY Times picked the most Lex Luther-ish image they could find of Bezos for their feature on Barnes & Noble.
I strongly suggest reading this piece. The tale of Barnes & Noble’s push to position themselves as a technology company is fascinating (in a tilting-at-windmills sort of way). The finale of the piece reveals how frail the state of the major publishing industry, with companies staking their future on the success of large brick and mortar bookstores and upward trending print and eReader sales.
That’s not an eReader, it’s an Escape Pod
Buried in the middle of a holiday sales report, Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) announced that it will “pursue strategic exploratory work to separate the Nook business” from the rest of the company. “We see substantial value in what we’ve built with our Nook business in only two years, and we believe it’s the right time to investigate our options to unlock that value,” B&N CEO William Lynch said. B&N projects the Nook business will reach $1.5 billion this year.
Finally, B&N admits what the Nook business has been all along: an attempt to distract investors from the fact that they’re a brick and mortar bookstore. Initially, it attempted to transition the company from a book seller to a technology outfit, thereby appealing to potential suitors. And while they grew fast, they didn’t grow fast enough. The gains aren’t enough to stop the bleeding of oversized store leases and declining book sales.
So the Nook ceases to be a Hail Mary and starts to become an escape pod. Instead of polishing B&N for sale, the Nook will spinoff, flounder, and eventually be sold on its own.
Also, what happens to the Nook’s claimed advantage of in store sales once B&N spins it off?
This is why I’ve been so frustrated with Nook champions in the tech sphere: they’re recommending a device dependent on DRM content locked down by a flailing company. Nook proponents in the gadget press fell for the fake out: Barnes & Noble distracted them with tech specs while the company burned. When you’re buying an eReader these days, you’re consciously or unconsciously making a bet on the company’s future. And Barnes & Noble has never had much of one.
All of J.D. Salinger's Short Stories from the New Yorker
In a lovely tribute, The New Yorker has made all 13 of J.D. Salinger’s short stories available online.
And now, I’m off to add all of them to my Instapaper account.
On the other hand, Plastic Logic’s Que will be loved by all the frequent fliers with expense accounts. (Via CrunchGear)
Oh, Alex. Only the nerds will love you. (Via eBookNewser)
“ Read voraciously, many books at a time. Only then will you hear the conversation taking place among them.”
I would pay $20 a month for Instapaper if it let me select specific articles and output them wirelessly to a Kindle, complete with a TOC and sections.
But in the meantime: my project for the first quarter of 2010 will be an application that pulls your starred articles from Google Reader, let’s you check off the ones you want, and outputs a formatted ebook file complete with TOC. I’ve been hunting online with little luck for a script that parses XML into a Kindle-compatible MOBI file. Something tells me there’s a large stumbling block up ahead…
Three Definitions of “Reader”
Somewhere between the second and third definitions lies the feed reader, the delicious account, the “read later” tag, the favored tweets. The device becomes the tool by which we produce the anthology. But whereas the old readers were constrained by what could fit between two covers, the new ones are infinite—they have neither beginning nor end, only the interminable middle, extending out in all directions, too far for the eye to see.
(Via A Working Library)
