NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Amazon.com tells us that over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books sold,  it has sold 143 e books. James Patterson has apparently sold 1.14 million ebooks to date,  867,881 of which were Kindle books from its ebookstore. Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts have each, according to Amazon, sold more than 500,000 Kindle books. Amazon’s Kindle bookstore now offers more than 630,000 books, Amazon says, plus 1.8 million free, out-of-copyright titles.

All I can say is hooray for all the trees saved, and for all the time future book collectors wont have to waste sifting through so much shit on the shelves. But wait. Before we celebrate. This perspective from Wired magazine:

"The overall e-book market is still a 90-pound weakling next to the Asiatic elephant of print publishing. According to a report from Publisher’s Weekly last year, hardback sales were projected to be about $4.4 billion in 2009 (including both adult and children’s titles), while paperbacks were expected to generate $5.1 billion in revenue, audiobooks $218 million, and e-books just $81 million — less than 1 percent of the print equivalents. That’s not even counting textbooks, Bibles and professional books — with those included, Publisher’s Weekly estimated the overall book market at $35 billion in 2009.

Not only is Kate Pullinger an accomplished novelist, she’s also an adventurous thinker, experimenting with fiction written not only for the printed page but for all sorts of digital platforms, including the cellphone. Recalling the last five minutes of my recent conversation with Kate, I couldn’t help but think of Lydia Davis, her superb hyper-short fiction…and how well suited it is – intentionally or not – to the cellphone and its reading public.

Here’s "Disagreement" from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (FSG, 2009):

"He said she was disagreeing with him. She said no, that was not true, he was disagreeing with her. This was about the screen door. That it should not be left open was her idea, because of the flies; his was that it could be left open first thing in the morning, when there were no flies on the deck. Anyway, he said, most of the flies came from other parts of the building: in fact, he was probably letting more of them out than in. "

Too arduous? Try this:

"A Double Negative"

"At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child."

or this:

"They Take Turns Using a Word  They Like"

OTTAWA & CUPERTINO, California—April 1, 2010 — BookHunterPress.com, Inc. (BHP), today announced that, subject to closing conditions, it has reached an agreement to acquire Apple’s iPad. This just two days in advance of iPad’s country-wide launch. The new AppleBookHunter iPad will be available in all 8,000 US BookHunterPress ® retail stores and most Best Buy stores this Saturday, April 3, beginning at 9 a.m.

BookHunter retail stores will offer a free Personal Setup service to every customer who buys an ABH iPad at the store, helping them customize their new BHPiPad by setting up their email, loading their favorite BookHunter apps from the App Store, and more. Also beginning Saturday morning, all US BookHunter retail stores will host special iPad workshops to help customers learn more about how they can fly using this magical new product.

About Apple:

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

About BookHunter.com

And, because of this new acquisition,  a one year subscription to this on-line database at 75% Off the regular price: just visit here

Press Contacts:
BookHunter Press iPad Acquisition
Media Hotline,
613-842-9800

(April Fool’s)

According to AppAdvice  Apple has imported the entire Project Gutenberg library of over 30,000 out-of-copyright books into iTunes, making it very easy, apparently, for iPad owners to access them. Apple’s $9.99 bestseller price puts the iTunes book store in direct competition with Amazon’s e-book store and the iPad head-to-head with Kindle. While the Kindle can also read the ePub format from Project Gutenberg, users reportedly have to go through a more convoluted download process to get books to the device.

Photo: Nigel Beale.

Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist he often focuses on describing the minute physical detail of our surroundings, straws and escalators for example, writing on provocative topics such as voyeurism, phone sex  and planned assassination.  Enthusiasts laud his ability to explore and illuminate the human psyche, critics call him a boring gadfly. Much of his non-fiction deals with the printed word, how it’s presented, stored, consumed. 

We talk here about the future of the book, ebooks, the ipad, the Kindle, brodart dust jacket covers, Daniel Dafoe, bloggers, CIA, weapons scientists at the Library of Congress, letterpress printing and the pulling of books off shelves.

Please listen here:

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4791lSG_NGk

(via Ed Champion)

Copyright activist, speaker, teacher (how about ’speacher’…or ’spreacher’), columnist, science fiction novelist, short story writer, co-editor of  Boing Boing,  and the very manifestation of articulate dynamism, Cory Doctorow was in town recently to promote his novel Little Brother (free download here), a fast paced, current-day 1984-like polemic calling for teens to subvert security measures, especially those used by governments that claim to "defend my freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights.”

As Austin Grossman puts it in the New York Times:

MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy…Little Brother argues that unless you’re passably technically literate, you’re not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — that in fact it’s your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."

I’m clearly not nerdy enough… incarcerated I am in fact by technological illiteracy…incapacitated too…neither machine I used to record my conversation with Cory worked for the full duration of our encounter…they did however capture enough, thankfully, to provide his engaging take on the future of the book, the seeds of its destruction…and mention of a guy with a lemon up his nose. Please listen here:

(For discussion of copyright, please watch this space over the coming days for my interview with the acknowledged giant in the field, Bill Patry).

Subscribe to the Biblio File Podcast here 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q946sfGLxm4

Espresso Book Machine.

From the 1984 Books in our Future report., by the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress of the United States: