Author Topic: The E-Book Files  (Read 169791 times)

Offline serious crayons

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,712
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #90 on: May 18, 2009, 01:29:07 pm »
What is this book about?


Offline MaineWriter

  • Bettermost Supporter!
  • Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 14,042
  • Stay the course...
    • Bristlecone Pine Press
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #91 on: May 30, 2009, 12:06:45 pm »
What is this book about?


Here's the synopsis from booklist. It's good but I find I need to read it in small doses, interspersed with some other stuff.

Braestrup was an accidental chaplain. Her husband, Drew, a Maine state trooper, died in a car accident at a time when he was considering a second career as an ordained minister. After her shock subsided, Braestrup decided to follow in his footsteps and became a chaplain for the Maine Warden Service, which sets up search-and-rescue missions throughout the state. Practical, unsentimental, straightforward, she is the kind of person who considers a book entitled Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? a romantic gift (Drew's to her on her thirty-first birthday). She, not the mortician, bathed and dressed Drew's body. She witnessed its cremation. And, rather anomalously, she, a middle-aged mother of four, works mostly with young men. Her own remarkable story encompasses those of the men and women who work alongside her, incorporating many touching anecdotes, none more moving than that of the state police detective, a breast-feeding mother whose last name is Love, who arrests a sexual predator for a young woman's murder. A poignant, funny book by a sympathetic, likable, immensely appealing figure.
Taming Groomzilla<-- support equality for same-sex marriage in Maine by clicking this link!

Offline MaineWriter

  • Bettermost Supporter!
  • Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 14,042
  • Stay the course...
    • Bristlecone Pine Press
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #92 on: May 30, 2009, 12:14:41 pm »
Taming Groomzilla<-- support equality for same-sex marriage in Maine by clicking this link!

Offline serious crayons

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,712
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #93 on: June 01, 2009, 10:36:49 am »
Watch out on planes, Leslie!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/books/01bea.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

June 1, 2009
Book Fair Buzz Is Not Contained Between 2 Covers
By MOTOKO RICH

The book publishing industry is notorious for jumping on bandwagons: witness the flood of “Da Vinci Code” knockoffs that clogged tables at the front of bookstores a few years ago, and the stream of novels featuring vampires that are crowding bestseller lists now.

So it should be no surprise that at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual trade convention that ended Sunday in New York, publishers seemed to be putting their own stamps on the increasingly frenzied conversation about electronic books that has hijacked the business.

There were the panels: “Giving It Away: When Free eBooks Make Sense and When They Don’t,” “Red Hot Readers: Market Adoption of Mobile eReading Devices” and “Jumping Off a Cliff: How Publishers Can Succeed Online Where Others Failed.” Tina Brown, rasping with a bad case of laryngitis, kick-started a discussion with the chief executives of four New York publishing houses by asking if they were shocked when Amazon.com began charging $9.99 for e-books — “that paltry, pitiful sum.”

Interead, a British company that introduced its new Cool-er electronic reader the first day of the Expo, sponsored a booth at which two blond women in tankinis handed out nonalcoholic margaritas and more potent piña coladas to a steady stream of conventiongoers who stopped by to watch demonstrations of the new devices. HarperCollins decided mostly to forgo the traditional giveaways of advance paperback editions of forthcoming books, and instead gave out gift cards redeemable for electronic galleys of titles like Neil Gaiman’s “Odd and the Frost Giants” and Mary Karr’s “Lit.”

So far e-books represent 1 to 3 percent of total book sales. But they make up the fastest growing part of the industry, and publishers, authors and booksellers have no idea just how big they will become and how they might affect profits and reading habits in the future.

Inevitably there was a backlash. At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”


Anxiety over digital publishing was heightened by the recession that has dampened book sales, and belt tightening was in evidence throughout the convention. Attendance at the event, which gathers publishers, booksellers, authors, agents, consultants and, increasingly, technology companies, was down by 14 percent from the last time the convention was held at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York two years ago.

Robert Sindelar, managing partner of Third Place Books, an independent bookstore in Lake Forest Park, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, said that this year he brought only three people to the convention, as opposed to five in previous years. He said sales were down nearly 5 percent in the first four months of the year, following a 9.5 percent decline in 2008.

Still, he said he would never consider giving the BookExpo a miss altogether. “It is good for us to come to remind them as they are seeing those 10 Kindles on the subway on the way to work what value we feel we bring to the industry,” Mr. Sindelar said.

It was a bit more difficult for booksellers to find some publishers at the convention this year as several of them had decided not to build their customary large booths on the exhibition hall floor. Some small presses had no visible presence at all, while venerable publishers including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Macmillan, the company that owns Farrar Straus & Giroux and St. Martin’s Press, holed up in bunkerlike rooms in the bowels of the convention center, far from the fray of the exhibition floor.

Random House, the world’s largest consumer publisher, provoked endless chatter about its decision to take a vastly reduced space on the exhibition floor with room for just four autograph signing stands, moving all its meeting space into a windowless room downstairs.

But as rival publishers carped that Random House was missing the opportunity to make serendipitous connections with booksellers walking the exhibition floor, a schedule of book signings by authors like Lorrie Moore and Tracy Kidder attracted crowds. Even though Pat Conroy canceled an appearance because of his health, hundreds of people waited in line for an hour to pick up an advance copy of his latest novel, “South of Broad.”

Whether all those people were actually going to help sell the book was another question. One of the first three women in line for “South of Broad,” an elementary school librarian from Pennsylvania, confessed she was just grabbing a free copy for herself.

Some publishers wondered how much value they were getting from the show. It has been a perennial question for a long time but one made more urgent by changing economic times. “Frankly, standing out there it’s like Groundhog Day,” said David Shanks, chief executive of Penguin Group USA. “It seems like one B.E.A. after another every year, and you all sort of run into each other.”

Rick Joyce, marketing director of Perseus Books, said that “in a weird way, these conventions were like the Internet before the Internet” in that they enabled networking. The challenge, Mr. Joyce said, was to figure out how BookExpo “could do something that the industry needs rather than continuing to do something that is better done on the Internet.”

For Perseus, the answer was a stunt: over 48 hours, the company produced “Book: The Sequel,” a collection of first sentences to imagined sequels of famous books submitted online by readers around the world. Editors, designers, production staff and publicists worked in a corner of Perseus’s booth wearing baseball jerseys emblazoned with the book’s logo. On Saturday the publisher distributed 13 editions, including paperbacks, e-books, audio and even Braille versions.

But for many attendees the Expo remained much the same as always: a chance to schmooze and reconnect with contacts throughout the industry, even if some of the parties were more subdued than in years past.

And booksellers, a reliably starry-eyed lot, still craved interaction with authors. At a party given by Hachette Book Group on the roof of the Hotel Gansevoort in the meatpacking district, Mary Yockey, a buyer at Anderson’s Bookshops in Naperville, Ill., said she was thrilled to meet Julie Powell, author of “Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.” That book has been made into a movie, to be released in August, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. Ms. Powell also has a new book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession,” coming out later this year.

“I’m going to read the first book again,” Ms. Yockey said. “We sold tons of them.” And she hopes to do it again for the new one.


Offline MaineWriter

  • Bettermost Supporter!
  • Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 14,042
  • Stay the course...
    • Bristlecone Pine Press
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #94 on: July 14, 2009, 07:27:34 am »
I realized I haven't updated this list in a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading! June was a stressful month for me (my father is very sick) so some things, like posting here, fell by the wayside.

Anyway, I read this in a day or so. Very sweet, very light, a fun romantic comedy:



This was very good. It will make you want to visit China and have Sam Liang cook for you. Too bad Sam is a fictional character!



Josh Lanyon's new book is a fun and fast read (unfortunately, I don't have a cover image available):

Somebody Killed His Editor: Holmes & Moriarity, Book 1

I loved this one too. Young adult, so a very fast read (I read it in about five hours). It's about Bobby Framingham, who is a high school senior, star quarterback on the football team and gay. A very well-written "coming of age" story.



L
Taming Groomzilla<-- support equality for same-sex marriage in Maine by clicking this link!

Offline serious crayons

  • BetterMost Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 22,712
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #95 on: July 14, 2009, 09:26:40 am »
This was very good. It will make you want to visit China and have Sam Liang cook for you. Too bad Sam is a fictional character!

I already want to visit China and have Sam Liang cook for me, and I haven't even read the book!

Thanks for the update, Leslie. I'm sorry to hear about your father.

If you're interested in nonfiction, I've been reading "Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life" by Winifred Gallagher and can highly recommend it. It's about attention in all its many forms, and how ultimately our lives are made up of the things we pay attention to.



Offline Jeff Wrangler

  • BetterMost Supporter!
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,165
  • "He somebody you cowboy'd with?"
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #96 on: July 14, 2009, 11:21:46 am »
Thanks for the update, Leslie. I'm sorry to hear about your father.

Me, too.  :(
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline MaineWriter

  • Bettermost Supporter!
  • Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 14,042
  • Stay the course...
    • Bristlecone Pine Press
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #97 on: July 14, 2009, 04:21:42 pm »
Thanks for the kind words, everyone. As for my dad -- he's in long-term care, won't be coming home, and the prognosis is poor. We are just taking things one day at a time.

I had a bittersweet father's day. About two years ago, I discovered a website where a man was posting letters from his grandfather who had served in WWI. He was posting the letters in "real-time," ie, he'd post them on the date when they were written, 90 years later. Sometimes several weeks or months would go by before he'd post an update, and as the whole experience was going on, I didn't know if Harry would live.

The website became a bit of a worldwide phenomenon and the man (it was Harry's grandson, Bill) was interviewed in a variety of places, including the BBC. After all this hoopla, he was offered a contract to put the whole thing together as a book. I ordered it ages ago (publication kept getting delayed) intending to give it to my dad. It finally arrived and now, my father is not in any shape to read anything or even look at the pictures. Oh well, I am glad to have it and to have the whole story put together in one place.

Here's the book:



It's for sale at Amazon. And here's a link to the website:

http://wwar1.blogspot.com/
Taming Groomzilla<-- support equality for same-sex marriage in Maine by clicking this link!

Offline oilgun

  • BetterMost 1000+ Posts Club
  • ******
  • Posts: 3,564
Big Brother: Amazon Remotely Deletes 1984 From Kindles
« Reply #98 on: July 17, 2009, 08:40:32 pm »
So Orwellian!  This really creeped me out for some reason:

Big Brother: Amazon Remotely Deletes 1984 From Kindles

Ever bought a book from Barnes and Noble, then turned around to find it missing from your bookshelf and replaced with a voucher? Bizarre though it may seem, that’s exactly what’s happened to hundreds of owners of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm books, with Amazon remotely deleting copies on user’s Kindles and crediting their accounts.

While this might be understandable if the copies were distributed illegally, the cause here appears to be a publisher which decided it simply didn’t want to offer a Kindle edition any more. Amazon’s response, as posted in the forums:

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store

All of which underscores the fact that “buying” a book in the digital realm isn’t the same as “ownership” in the real world. As David Pogue at the NYTimes explains: “apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.”

Or as one of Pogue’s readers describes it, “it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”


source: http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/


(My apologies if this doesn't belong here)

Offline MaineWriter

  • Bettermost Supporter!
  • Moderator
  • The BetterMost 10,000 Post Club
  • *****
  • Posts: 14,042
  • Stay the course...
    • Bristlecone Pine Press
Re: The E-Book Files
« Reply #99 on: July 24, 2009, 06:31:43 pm »
Actually, it was determined that the copies were illegal uploads.

L
Taming Groomzilla<-- support equality for same-sex marriage in Maine by clicking this link!