If you have something to say...
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If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
When it comes to learning to read well, our country seems to be in a never-ending cycle of conflict and consternation. Enter the fray a new disruption: the transition from print to digital books.
Okay, so now we know where the e-book is going. Ever upward. To have predicted that twelve years ago, when I had all my novels reversed from major pu...
The truth is that this dispute is not about saving literature or the sanctity of the literary world, it is about the publishers' business model.
The new ploy by book publishers is to characterize Amazon as a monopoly poised to take over and dictate terms and run rampant over those who create ebook content.
The trouble is that in too many cities and towns, we no longer have a village square except in the form of enclosed spaces owned by profit-seeking corporations. What happened to that protester said a lot more about our privatized idea of community than it does about that one particular incident.
I'm back to where I was in 2009, with a highly praised novel and no one willing to publish it. Before electronic self-publishing became a viable alternative, that would have been the book's death sentence.
Something in it piqued our curiosity and we had to stop reading, or felt we had to. The days of sinking into a book in happy oblivion of the world around us had almost vanished.
If you love finding great deals on books but don't have a Kindle or a Nook, then you're in luck. There are a few ways you can access thousands of $.99...
Count me among those who would much rather hold a book in my hand as I read, pen at the ready, rather than clicking through glowing text on a screen.
Nevertheless, the technology addiction cannot be ignored as a competitor to reading. Indeed, some prognosticators may be right in citing the eventual rise of the tablet as a device of choice for everything under the techie sun, including reading.
If the Internet seemed slow last Sunday, it might have been because around the world, literally millions of new e-reader owners spent a fair part of the day downloading e-books.
The Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet are amazing gadgets, not to mention their e-ink black and white cousins and the various other tablets and the iPad. But now that they're out of the box, what to do with them?
Handwriting is in decline. But writing is on the increase. Paradoxical isn't it? Think about it. How often do you pick up a pen these days? I bet it'...
Tablets bring a non-linear experience to reading a book. Readers can instantly jump from one part of the book to another. There can be hyperlinks to external content. And it is in full color.
In the end, whether the Kindle Fire will compete with the Apple iPad remains to be seen. But Amazon lowering and improving its line of e-readers mean that late, cost-conscious adapters of the e-book revolution will now join the party, more readers either cutting back on or eschewing print altogether.
The number of self-published e-books has surpassed and will continue to surpass books published through the time-honored process of editing and distribution that has been the practice of publishing companies for centuries.
