Lady Chatterley’s Brother Lady Chatterley's Brother. The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series,  called “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future. Read an excerpt.
Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:
Translate This Book! Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating  read" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle.
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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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A poster named "Ian" in a forum on the website MobileRead (a website for people who read books on mobile devices) has made the following claims about Amazon's Kindle in a posting entitled "Amazon has banned my account – my Kindle is now a (partial) brick":
I have been a loyal Amazon.com customer for many years, but today, I received an email stating that I have been banned from the site and my account has been closed, because I apparently have an extraordinary rate of requesting refunds due to a variety of factors. . . .
. . . continue reading, and add your comments
Chad echoes a point I've made before: e-readers like the Amazon Kindle don't necessarily make sense for those of us who don't need access to 500 books at any given moment, but they do have specialized applications. For instance, letting bookstore employees read ARCs:
Jessica’s main focus in her post is on replacing traditional print advanced reading copies with e-version—something that makes a lot of logistical sense to me. The unit cost for printing galleys is more than the unit cost for the finished book, and (for small presses at least) . . . continue reading, and add your comments
As I've been reading Ted Striphas's The Late Age of Print, I've been seeing books and ebooks in very new ways. That is, I'm beginning to see the interconnectedness of copyright, production, distribution, and fair use/reuse swirling around books and reading. I'm also starting to see how greatly all of these are being impacted by developing technologies.
So this note about an informal "boycott" of ebooks over $10 on Amazon strikes me as very interesting.
Kindle books are kinda like movie tickets. While you can re-read the book, you cannot: donate it to a library, sell it to . . . continue reading, and add your comments
As digital music has taken on a larger and larger role in my life, I've realized just how much I dislike CDs. In fact, I'm at the point now where I'll pretty much just spin a CD one time: when I rip it to my computer.
This raises a good question: Why do I even need CDs? I never use them to actually listen to music, they're ugly, they clutter my apartment, they usually cost more than downloading the same music from iTunes. In fact, now that all my music is digitzed, I'm tempted to ditch all of my . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Evan Schnittman makes some valid points about how ebooks will change publishing, although I can't agree with his title, Why Ebooks Must Fail. More on that in a second, but first, what I see as the most important aspects of his post:
And therein lies the dilemma… how does the publishing industry fund the creation, editing, design, production, marketing, e-warehousing, and sales of ebooks, if the income isn’t there? How do ebooks cover the huge advances needed to buy books if we cannot generate the cash, especially at their extremely low, discounted prices, cover the advances that an . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Advance review copies seem to be one aspect of the book business that has a lot to gain from the increasing digitization of publishing. After all, ARCs are meant to be disposable (all those "not for resale" warnings), and every publicist I've ever talked to has had the experience of shipping them out by the hundreds with little actual result.
So, when I discovered a new service that wants to make electronic galleys available to reviewers, journalists, librarians, and other people, I wanted to know more. To find out, I conducted this interview with Fran Toolan of NetGalley.
(for . . . continue reading, and add your comments
A couple weeks back I reported that Authors Guild was looking into legal action over Kindle 2's "read aloud" feature. Apparently this was not some off the cuff remark.
In no less a forum than The New York Times, author Roy Blount, Jr acts as spokesman for AG against K2:
True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Harper Studio is supposed to be a "new" kind of publisher. Forget those fat advances and celebrity memoirs . . . Harper Studio is all about trimming the fat and good publishing.
I'm not so sure. Since I've been reading the HS blog, I've already noted some questionable assertions about ebook pricing. Now HS makes this groundbreaking discovery:
He told me he thinks we’re having the wrong conversation. It’s not about how fast we can get to zero — it’s about how the content should be built……and then he said something that really inspired me: The first . . . continue reading, and add your comments
This is the biggest problem with the Kindle:
Amazon must address the needs of very real readers who read only a few books and magazines at a time, who like to download classic non-copyrighted lit and work-related documents for free, and who like to leaf through pages randomly. This last thing is important, though it may be insurmountable: Airport-friendly page turners don’t really require non-linear random-access reading, but everything smart from Harry Potter to Infinite Jest does, and that’s one concern that the Kindle, or any ebook reader, still does not address well.
Sure, there are people . . . continue reading, and add your comments
Continuing the ebook pricing conversation, Rich Mintz (from Obama’s online campaign) has this to say:
As a heavy consumer of books (and a former independent bookstore owner), I’m not particularly interested in what publishing executives tell me books should cost — what matters to me is what the market tells me they actually do cost.
If the market as a whole can produce and distribute printed books profitably for $27.99, it seems to follow that it can produce and distribute e-books (which are logistically much simpler) profitably for $9.99. Empirically, the market is doing so . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?
Naked Singularity Big Read Schedule
More on Bolano’s Journalist
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
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