These posts may or may not be related to any of the other categorised, tagged or archived content in this collection.
There are 3 quick changes that I like to make to ebook css, whether starting a new ebook or doing QA on an existing ebook. These changes help me to:
I achieve this by:
Have you seen Google Chrome's video about children's book author Dallas Clayton? I happened to catch it during X Factor commercials last week. (Don't judge. I was curious.)
The ad describes Clayton's goal to write and illustrate a story for his son about "dreaming big." After shopping An Awesome Book to publishers with no success, however, he made the decision to post it on the web for free.
We think ads in books is a New Thing.
Broken Toys, a novel by Anna Caroline Steele, was published in 1884.
Amazon's KDP Select introduced a new tranche of self-publishers to the upper reaches of the charts for the first time. For the first couple of months of this year, a new seam had been discovered in this self-publishing "gold-rush."
It didn't last too long, however. By the end of March, even those newly minted authors were openly considering leaving KDP Select, despite how successful it had been for them.
While the Department of Justice lawsuit against the agency model rages on, the question I keep hearing, with a note of desperation, is: “What exactly are they suing about?”
I guess that’s kind of crucial to understanding the lawsuit. And while Appazoogle has written about the agency model in the past, we've yet to give you a play-by-play breakdown of the mechanics of this DOJ-angering monster.
This blog post was featured in Carnival of the Indies, issue 17.
E-books have come in for some criticism lately. Jonathan Franzen, apparently one of America's greatest novelists, thinks they have no permanence, and worries that they are "not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government". Antonia Senior, writing in the Guardian, sneers at "genre fiction"
As reported yesterday, the Department of Justice has filed its antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five of the largest publishers (Macmillan, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster).
A settlement has been agreed with HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster; Macmillan claimed the terms were too onerous, and Penguin appears to have refused to contemplate settling.
The agreed settlement must still be approved by the court, but among the conditions are the end of Agency (despite the attempted spin by PW in the above-linked article) and the return of pricing control to the retailers (such as Amazon).
Here’s a pretty novel use of Twitter: follow the Titanic on its voyage towards impending doom – by following @TitanicRealTime. This account seems to be owned by The History Press, a UK-based history publisher.
Some samples:
#officer Clocks keeping bridge time now set back to 11.3p.m. This has extended the third watch by 29 minutes.
#passenger Standing at the front of the ship all I can see ahead is a horizon of water. I look forward to seeing New York.
Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals, doesn’t have many friends of late. Earlier this year, a group of academics led by British mathematician Timothy Gowers started a petition to boycott the publisher—a petition which, as of April 10, included the names of over 9,200 researchers.
The stated impetus of the petition is Elsevier’s high prices and restricted distribution models.
The mushrooming public interest in ebooks and their corresponding technology is heralding the dramatic return of the serial novel, or so I’ve heard. There’s been talk of a literary throwback with a modern kick. In proper steampunk fashion, the buzz surrounding this revival has been awash with a bizarre mixture of techy excitement and Old World nostalgia.
It should not be surprising that Charles Dickens, whose works helped to popularize the genre during the Victorian period, was resurrected as the poster child for the neo-serial novel.
