Is the new Kindle Fire for reading? Maybe, but it doesn’t really seem so. Now, a lot of this is still informed speculation until we see what people actually use the device for in the coming months. But, we do have a slew of information to go from already.

Just check out one of the promotional images to the left here. It’s telling that other types of media (TV, music, games) are featured prominently, and that the only book in the image, The Girl Who Played with Fire, has to take a backseat to Mad Men.

The Huffington Post has a nice article arguing about all of the things the Kindle Fire tablet is intended for; not for reading: “Amazon Kindle Fire Is Not for Reading – It’s For Challenging the iPad” — maybe this is simply an attempt to broaden the definition of the Kindle brand name beyond “reading” and into “media consumption”?

• “It’s not for reading — the screen glows, meaning that bookworms including the author should scoop up a non-glowing Kindle if they want something that’s good for poring over extended texts as if they were paper. That’s why Jeff Bezos took care to give readers two other attractive options, both with non-glowing screens. Amazon dropped the price on the old one to $80 and released a new touchscreen version today, Kindle Touch, for $100 ($150 with 3G).
• It’s not for reading — it’s for shopping on Amazon (it comes with a one-month trial of Amazon Prime, the company’s shopping club) and consuming non-book forms of entertainment including movies, magazines and music from the Amazon MP3 store, and of course, the biggest app of them all, the web.
• It’s not for reading — it’s for web browsing. Amazon plans to accelerate web browsing on the device with its EC2 cloud computing processors and a new browser called Silk. Faster browsing = better browsing. Oh, and it also runs Flash, which means it will play more of the web’s music than the iPad can.”

“Reason 5: This may be a “placeholder” device

We’re also seeing indications that the Fire is being brought to market so Amazon has a tablet play — not because this is the best design or hardware they could field.

If you’ve looked at how the Kindle itself has evolved, the original Kindle is a substantially more primitive machine than the current e-ink Kindle.

Most likely, Amazon is working on a far better device than the one they’re announcing today — and when they ship that, you’ll feel bad that you bought this one.

Reason 6: A new Nook is coming out soon

We’re also hearing rumors that there’s a new, faster, better, cheaper color Nook coming out in the next month or so, and that Amazon is announcing the Fire as a way of pre-empting that announcement.

The thing is, the Nook color has been something of a pleasant surprise, and it’s likely that the new Nook color would be a substantial improvement on an already fine product.

Once you get a look at the new Nook color, you may regret your purchase of the Kindle Fire.”

Just like the first Kindle wasn’t exactly the slickest device in the world (link: “Why was the first Kindle so ugly?“), maybe the Kindle Fire isn’t the tablet device you’re looking for. Who knows. In terms of other species of ebooks, the Kindle Fire does seem to moving in the direction of the digital comic book area (Comics Alliance: “Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Has Digital Comic Readers In Mind“). Although, this too seems to not be without its problems, as a result of a digital content partnership with Amazon and DC Comics. From the New York Times: “Barnes & Noble in Graphic Novel Dispute” –

“Barnes & Noble said Friday that it was pulling 100 graphic novels from its shelves after the publisher of the books made a deal with Amazon to sell the digital editions exclusively.

“Barnes & Noble works with thousands of publishers to bring customers the world’s largest selection of physical and digital reading content … However, regardless of the publisher, we will not stock physical books in our stores if we are not offered the available digital format. To sell and promote the physical book in our store showrooms and not have the e-book available for sale would undermine our promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime.”

The Guardian (“Amazon’s Kindle Fire: Will it stoke enthusiasm for e-reading?“) also offers a few other perspectives — instead of focusing on what the new device doesn’t do, as tech bloggers are somewhat wont to do — perhaps it’s productive to think about what Kindle Fire might do for books, such as increased attractiveness of color book covers and a general appeal to younger readers:

“As you may know by now, the new Kindle hardware is foresaking e-ink in favour of a colour LCD screen. With much of Amazon’s previous Kindle PR revolving around the benefits of e-ink and its paper-like qualities this is an interesting choice.

What does a transition from black and white to colour mean for Kindle users and authors?

My personal opinion is that the introduction of a colour Kindle has an enormous potential to stimulate the younger generation’s interest in reading, as the absence of colour has always been a drawback among young readers brought up on gadgets.”

Good point. If compared to the Nook Color, the Kindle Fire (and at a similar price point) isn’t meant to replace the Kindle reading experience — but perhaps to go after a different type of reading audience.

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And finally — file this one under Interesting Trivia. This bit of information was tucked away in a wrap-up from a conference on ereaders — Publishers Weekly: “Kindle Fire and the Future of E-reading”

“IDC research director Tom Mainelli said the notion that consumers will settle on one device has been discarded. In the U.S., consumers average 6.6 devices/person, while the rest of the world averages 4.8 devices per person. “Multiple devices per person is the new reality; dedicated e-readers remain relevant thanks to lower prices and improved reader experiences”

6.6 devices per person? Really?

To follow up on our recent look at iPhone writing apps, I decided to spend some time putting together a list of favorite iPad writing apps. While it’s hard to argue that an iPad is a proper replacement for a laptop or computer, sometimes it does make a handy writing tool. And the right app makes all of the difference in the world.

Gizmodo (“Information Architects’ Writer, or Building the Perfect iPad App“) has some insight on the thought process that went into the iA Writer  writing app–

“the group outlines the many decisions they made in their quest to design the perfect writing environment for the iPad.

The key to good writing, they say, is focus, and the guiding principle of Writer was to minimize distractions. That means no autocorrection, no scroll bars, and no cut and paste. Just you and the text. A Focus Mode even blurs out everything but the three lines you’re currently working on, keeping your focus locked on the sentence you’re writing.”

Aside from the name (ugh), it’s one of the better writing apps out there: a simple and clean design that is actually really good for writing. If you’re looking for a good writing app to start with, it’s worth a visit to their website: www.iawriter.com.

Two features in particular which impressed me:

• Focus Mode: “Focus mode does not only limit the field of view to one sentence at a time, it also makes sure that the eyes do not need to wander too much around the window while writing“
• Reading Time: “Page numbers work well for physical objects where they have a physical frameset that you can touch, but they are pretty much meaningless for digital text. We believe that reading time is a more useful measure“

Favorite iPad app for book planning and writing: Manuscript ($6.99). I rather like this one. It’s marketed as an all-in-one solution: “Whether you are writing an entire novel, a short story, or even articles for submission to magazines, Manuscript for iPad takes care of the details and lets you focus on writing. This all-in-one writing app will take you from pitch to a publication ready document, in four easy steps” — and guides you through the process (Pitch, Synopsis, Chapter Outline). Also has a nifty Storyboarding feature with index cards.

Favorite iPad app for outlining and brainstorming: OmniOutliner ($19.99). It’s a lot of money for an app that does outlining. But, it does outlining really, really well. Check out their website for more features and see what you think.

Favorite iPad apps in lieu of a real notebook: Moleskine (free) is kind of fun, and looks neat.

But Notebooks for iPad ($8.99) is a much better, full-featured app. It has a ton of file format support: text, HTML, RTF, PDF, MS Office, iWork, photos, iPhone Notes, and Safari web pages. One of the more expensive options, but really a solid and very functional word processing app.

Favorite iPad app for handwriting app: Penultimate ($1.99) is pretty one of the best, if not the best note-taking apps for the iPad. And fun to use, too.

Favorite app for poetic inspiration: PortaPoet ($1.99). Much easier than keeping a rhyming dictionary on hand.

Favorite app for all-purpose sketching: Adobe Ideas ($5.99). For the visually-minded, this is an impressive amount of software to use as a digital sketchbook.

Favorite app for anything PDF-related: iAnnotate PDF ($9.99). I use this all the time. Has all of the annotating tools, document library management, and importing/exporting you could want.

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I have an utter fascination with book lists. There’s something about discovering a great book list that is rewarding for its own sake — whether ranked or unranked — both in the recognition in the familiar and the discovery of the unfamiliar that holds a beguiling power of interest. Not to mention the seemingly endless amounts of new reading material book lists provide us with.  One of the best book lists of them all is The Guardian’s epic compilation: “1000 novels everyone must read“, filled with some familiar titles, novels that we’ve always been meaning to read but never had, and many, many others we’ve never heard of before.

Quite an impressive feat of bookish attention:

“Selected by the Guardian’s Review team and a panel of expert judges, this list includes only novels – no memoirs, no short stories, no long poems – from any decade and in any language. Originally published in thematic supplements – love, crime, comedy, family and self, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, war and travel – they appear here for the first time in a single list.”

The Guardian’s 1000 novels list is organized by seven broad categories comprising the human condition —  be sure to check out the brief introductions to each section; they’re well worth reading: War & travel; Science fiction & fantasy; State of the Nation; Family & self; Comedy; Crime; Love

Here’s a link to the complete list at a glance: The Definitive List.

One could spend forever with a list like this. One of my personal favorites is the Comedy section:

“Comedy is not humour. You shouldn’t expect to be laughing all the way through these novels. Sometimes you will be, but at other times you will be crying. Every comic, it is said, wants to play Hamlet, and many comic novelists — Evelyn Waugh, archetypally — have a serious purpose. The world’s hypocrisies and deceptions are targets that must be attacked, comedy the literary weapon of choice. The greatest comic novels — Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Oblomov, Bouvard et Pécuchet, Dead Souls, A Handful of Dust, Pnin — demonstrate that the comic mode can sustain the very greatest writing. Comic writing can be a brutal, unforgiving business, yet it can produce great and multi-layered prose, combining comedy, pathos and satire.”

1000 novels everyone must read: Comedy (part one)

1000 novels everyone must read: Comedy (part two)

1000 novels everyone must read: Comedy (part three)

1000 novels everyone must read: Comedy (part four)

Amazon has finally made Kindle ebook borrowing available at more than 11,000 public library locations in the U.S., which is fantastic news. This also means that borrowed Kindle books work on any Kindle device and all devices that use Kindle apps,and even PC-reading with the Kindle Cloud Reader.

The Amazon.com page – Public Library Books for Kindle – has some simple steps on how to search and borrow Kindle books from your local library.

Instructions:

1. Visit the website of a U.S. library that offers digital services from OverDrive.
2. Check out a Kindle book (library card required).
3. Click on “Get for Kindle.” You will then be directed to Amazon.com to redeem your public library loan. You may be required to login to your Amazon.com account — or create a new account — if you’re not already logged in.
4. Choose to read the book on your Kindle device, free reading app, or Kindle Cloud Reader.

“Users can also highlight passages, add notes, and bookmark pages in the books, without worrying about defacing the actual book. Highlights, notes, and bookmarks are stripped from the book when your time with a volume ends, but Amazon saves them on its servers for if you ever happen to borrow the book again.”

At the moment, the initial offerings of Kindle-supported ebooks at libraries appear to be somewhat underwhelming. But, it’s a start.

And from the publishers’ perspective, the new Kindle-Library Loan union appears to be the cause of at least some consternation. From The New York Times: “Amazon’s Kindle Connects Library E-Books” –

“The introduction of the Kindle, the biggest-selling e-reader, opens up library e-books to a wider audience, heightening the fears of publishers that many customers will turn to libraries for reading material. If that happens, e-book buyers could become e-book borrowers, leading to a potentially damaging loss of revenue for an industry grappling with a profound shift in consumer reading habits.” 

Clearly, there are some issues still to be determined between balancing the need on the one hand for publishers to preserve their ebook sales, and for establishing what lending rights a library is entitled to with an ebook on the other hand (i.e., how many times can an ebook be loaned?). In the longer view, I would find it hard to believe that Kindle ebooks in libraries isn’t a good thing for all parties involved. This is, after all, kind of a big deal, in terms of making ebooks that much more mainstream to all book readers. Think of Kindle book borrowing as a potential first step in the consumer/ebook relationship lifecycle. The more that ebooks become a familiar part of mainstream book culture, the more people will become comfortable with the idea of buying ebooks as well.

After all, some of that tension between libraries and book publisher sales is simply an old question with a new twist — some people prefer to buy books, and some people prefer to rent books. At least for me, I have to think to myself if a book warrants buying and owning forever, or is simply a two-week affair, to be read and forgotten. If I borrow a book from the library, chances are I wasn’t going to buy it in the first place.

From that same NYT article came this interesting piece of information: “About 67 percent of libraries nationally offer access to e-books, up 12 percent from two years ago, according to the American Library Association. Most libraries work through OverDrive, which acts as a middleman between publishers and libraries.” I was pleasantly surprised to see that many U.S. libraries offer ebook access.

The New York Public Library (“Library Books on Kindle: A Visual Walkthrough“) has a simple, but excellent walkthrough for checking out Kindle books. I hope other libraries noticed, and will follow suit on this one for the sake of their users.

PC World (“Amazon Kindle E-Book Lending Program: What It Needs to Succeed“) take a wide view look at the new Kindle Library loaning program, and some of the key challenges. A little more context on the tug-of-war with the above mentioned issues of Kindle loans vs. book publishers’ bottom lines –

“publishers fought with the Kindle’s lending program, which allowed Kindle owners to lend e-books to anyone with an email address for 14 days. Though lending on the Kindle maintained the e-book’s DRM, the two parties made an agreement that publishers would be allowed to designate which books it wanted to be lendable. The result: Not that many are. Basically, if publishers aren’t happy, the Kindle Lending Library won’t work.”

The new Kindle library borrowing could in theory be as good an opportunity as any for libraries and publishers to experiment with new models of book rental. Here’s a very intriguing thought – 

“Create Two Plans: One-Off Rentals and Monthly Subscriptions – Students now can rent e-textbooks for a much lower price than the physical textbook or the e-textbook–Amazon should do the same for the Kindle Lending Library. Give consumers the opportunity to rent e-books one at a time–say two weeks for $2–or let them pay a flat fee through Amazon Prime that offers better savings.”

And finally, Wired (“Amazon’s Kindle Gets a Library Card“) sums up reasons to be optimistic about what Kindle library ebooks means for everyone:

” It’s a good thing for readers, because they’ve got access to more free content. It’s a good thing (I hope) for libraries, who can reach or reconnect with a wide range of patrons in different media. (Let’s hope whatever deal they struck with Amazon doesn’t prove ruinous, or gets slashed back by budget-busting administrative and government crusaders.)

It’s also a good thing, I think, for Amazon. When the Kindle was introduced, there were many people who argued that Amazon was only trying to preserve one kind of reading — direct individual purchase of popular new books — and grind every other model to dust.

Now, Amazon’s much more eclectic. Whether it’s book borrowing between users, textbook rentals, libraries lending books to local patrons, or (potentially) subscription content for Amazon Prime customers, they’re experimenting with a wide range of approaches to connecting their customers to books.”

Amazon announced a new Kindle Format 8 this week. From Amazon:

“Kindle Format 8 powers the book reader on Kindle Fire. KF8 replaces the Mobi format and adds over 150 new formatting capabilities including support for HTML5 and CSS3. In the coming months, we will roll out KF8 to our latest generation Kindle e-ink devices as well as our free Kindle reading apps.” 

What does it mean? For those publishing on Kindle, this is quite big news (no more .MOBI format. Hooray.) TechCrunch also shares some additional thoughts: “Amazon Throws A Minor Curveball With HTML5-Powered Kindle Format 8” –

“In a way this makes Kindle formatted books nothing more than extremely long webpages, but that’s really a matter of perspective. Flexible layouts and well-known rules for handling text, fonts, images, and so on mean that the file format is adaptable to many devices, zoom levels, resolutions, and so on.

…  It’s probably a good thing that they’re leaving behind the venerable MOBI format, and their choice upon moving away from it was either to join the enemy ranks (EPUB), build a new format from scratch (tedious), or embrace a buzzword that just happens to fill most of the requirements of an ebook file format. Add a few hooks for Kindle-specific functions, change the extension, and you’ve got yourself a versatile new format for rich bookmaking.”

For the casual Kindle reader, this might not seem like immediately useful news. In theory, this will however mean better, nicer formatting with Kindle ereading, and as the image above suggests, more types of reading material available on Kindle devices, such as the upcoming Kindle Fire.

What is heavy social network use doing to our brains? Some research, link courtesy of BBC, “Internet ‘may be changing our brains‘ –

“Researchers counted the number of Facebook friends each volunteer had, as well as assessing the size of their network of real friends.

A strong link was found between the number of Facebook friends a person had and the amount of grey matter in certain parts of their brain.

The study also showed that the number of Facebook friends a person was in touch with was reflected in the number of “real-world” friends.

“We have found some interesting brain regions that seem to link to the number of friends we have – both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’,” said Dr Ryota Kanai, one of the researchers from University College London.

“The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time. This will help us answer the question of whether the internet is changing our brains.”

So, what is a “friend,” exactly? I prefer Aristotle for such matters. But, his Facebook page kind of sucks, so who really cares about him? (seriously, though: you can find Nicomachean Ethics for free in many places; you’ll like it).

Do we treat Facebook as a vetting process (“hmm, that person is all right, but is she/he Facebook material?”). Or, is the opposite becoming the norm? Some argue that Facebook isn’t for real life friends anymore.

But, we digress. Let’s file all this under the category of “small sample size” and “relationship between causation and correlation unclear.” It’s still fun to think about. For more info on this UK study – Reuters: “More Facebook friends linked to bigger brain areas”

“Scientists have found a direct link between the number of “friends” a person has on Facebook and the size of certain brain regions, raising the possibility that using online social networks might change our brains.

The four brain areas involved are known to play a role in memory, emotional responses and social interactions.

So far, however, it is not possible to say whether having more Facebook connections makes particular parts of the brain larger or whether some people are simply pre-disposed, or “hard-wired,” to have more friends.

… 

The students, on average, had around 300 Facebook friends, with the most connected having up to 1,000.”

And be sure to check out The Atlantic Wire, “The Things That May Shrink Your Brain.” Watch out for back pain, vegetables, and internet addiction. Wait, what was that second one?

(pic above sort of related)

What might a bookcase designed to hold digital books look like? Alternative question: what might a virtual bookcase designed by engineers look like?

From the Official Google Blog: “Designing an infinite digital bookcase“.

“A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online—many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books.

The books are organized into 28 subjects. To choose a subject, click the subject button near the top of your screen when viewing the bookcase. The camera then flies to that subject. Clicking on a book pulls it off the shelf and brings it to the front and center of the screen. Click on the high-resolution cover and the book will open to a page with title and author information as well as a short synopsis, provided by the Google Books API. All of the visuals are rendered with WebGL, a technology in Google Chrome and other modern browsers that enables fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics right in the browser, without the need for a plug-in.”

For TechCrunch (“Google’s Infinite Bookcase: An Abstract Browser For Limitless Libraries“) the double helix corkscrew structure conjures up Tower of Babel suspicions. But, here’s a real Tower of Babel made of books.

Either way, it’s a fun thing to play with. Check it out yourself (best used with the Google Chrome web browser): Google Infinite Bookcase.

And here’s a video demo of the Google Bookcase:

With the recent National Book Award nominations announced,  it’s as good an opportunity as any to think about the meaning of that distinction. As NPR (“What Does the National Book Award Stand For? What Should It Stand For?“) notes: “This year’s National Book Award will be announced November 16. The nominations have been unveiled, and sleeper hits abound.” Yet, “sleeper hits” is to put the matter somewhat mildly for most people. If the general response to the National Book Award Fiction list is something along the lines of “what? never heard of it”, then it is fair to at least ask the question: What is the point of the National Book Award? What should it be?

(you can see the full list of 2011 Finalists here)

“Does winning mean you wrote the best book of the year? Or just the best book most people haven’t read?” – I had to give this question some thought. Inevitably, anytime we talk about literary quality, “popular” and “best” become muddled. They are not always necessarily opposing claims, nor are they by any means inclusive of each other. How does one go about selecting “the best book”, and what could that possibly even mean? For those that are curious, the “who” part of the question is at least easy enough to figure out at least (link: 2011 National Book Award Judges).

This prompts an interesting discussion about the purpose of the award — is it an acknowledgement of literary excellence? a public service announcement about the best books nobody is reading? a means of boosting the profile of good books that simply are not getting public recognition? (the latter a position the NPR article suggests). All are possible good answers, none will please everyone.

“So, the crossroads: Do we want the National Book Award to be more like the Oscars of the book world, or more like the Independent Spirit Awards? Is the silver sticker meant to push an under-the-radar title forward, or should it simply be a beacon to readers regardless of the attention a book has already received?

Of course, there’s also an argument that the idea isn’t merely to help lesser-known books, but books whose paths run unfairly uphill. This is the argument that would point out how many amazing books are written and passed over in this country every year due to the pandering tastes of big houses and structural discrimination” 

For me, personally, a National Book Award is a nice-to-have. If I’m on the fence about a book, there is a possibility that distinction could tip the decision in favor of the book. Maybe, not always, or even necessarily often. But I’m not one who follows award lists all that closely in the first place. For the casual reader then, if awards continually produce “meh”-type reactions, is there the risk of the National Book Award becoming a non-distinction for the reading public at large?

“But focusing recognition on lesser-known titles can isolate fiction even further.

There’s no doubt that small, independent books need recognition, but that’s a change of mission for awards originally devoted to simply choosing the most accomplished American title of the year — which, after all, might be a best-seller. Obscurity and greatness don’t have to be the same thing. There are always gems that fall through cracks, but there are also plenty of truly brilliant books that readers find on their own.”

Laura Miller at Salon (“How the National Book Awards made themselves irrelevant“) takes a more pointed approach towards the National Book Awards. It’s impossible to know the motives of selections from the outside looking in, but is there the possibility of an elitism that is producing the opposite of its intended effects?

“While it’s certainly true that celebrated novels are not necessarily good, it’s also true that they aren’t necessarily bad,either. Whatever policy each panel of judges embraces, over the years, the impression has arisen that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention. The NBA for fiction often comes across as a Hail Mary pass on behalf of “writer’s writers,” authors respected within a small community of literary devotees but largely unknown outside.”

I actually found myself persuaded by parts of Miller’s argument. No, “popular” does not automatically mean “unliterary.” The National Book Award nominating body could  be seen as serving a certain public service function — experts whose task it is to find the books that will speak to the general reading public and not just the literati — but, is that its function? Or, failing that, where should the public turn to for reading recommendations? Amazon recommendations are an always-present alternative. But there’s something unfulfilling about getting book recommendations from an algorithm based upon your purchase history instead of the learned opinions of bookish type people. Isn’t there …?

“However, the larger reading public has also proven recalcitrant. If you categorically rule out books that a lot of people like, you shouldn’t be surprised when a lot of people don’t like the books you end up with. This is especially common when the nominated books exhibit qualities — a poetic prose style, elliptical or fragmented storytelling — that either don’t matter much to nonprofessional readers, or even put them off.

If outsiders fail to sympathize with the judges’ perspective, the judges often have a distorted sense of the role literature plays in the lives of ordinary readers. People who can find time for only two or three new novels per year (if that) want to make sure that they’re reading something significant. Chances are they barely notice media coverage of books — certainly not enough to see some titles as “overexposed” — and instead rely on personal recommendations, bookstore browsing and Amazon rankings.

Prizes are one part of this mix, if an influential one, and the public mostly wants the major awards to help them sort out the most important books of the year, not to point them toward overlooked gems with a specialized appeal.”

Is there a cultural gap? Of course there is. Were it up to me, the discussion of the National Book Award’s relevance or irrelevance shouldn’t be entirely contained within the somewhat closed ecosystem consisting of bookish sorts who take the time to write about books on blogs and etc. Why not ask the average reader, who might have time for only two or three books a year, what they think?

For some helpful historical context, here’s a list of previous National Book Award Winners, “60 Years of the National Book Awards- 79 Fiction Winners“. Just at a glance, it seems to me there is quite a distribution of well-known works as well as works which may have sunk into oblivion over the decades. That’s just how it is with books or anything produced at a certain time within a certain cultural zeitgeist. So it’s hard to be entirely certain if this seemingly esoteric trend of National Book Award nominations is a normal fluctuation or an actual trend (my hunch is the former):

“For these reasons, the National Book Award in fiction, more than any other American literary prize, illustrates the ever-broadening cultural gap between the literary community and the reading public. The former believes that everyone reads as much as they do and that they still have the authority to shape readers’ tastes, while the latter increasingly suspects that it’s being served the literary equivalent of spinach. Like the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, awarded by librarians, the NBA has come to indicate a book that somebody else thinks you ought to read, whether you like it or not.?”

Very interesting news today from the New York Times: “Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal” –

“Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.”

Amazon has been testing the waters (Gizmodo: “Amazon Is a Book Publisher for Reals Now“) but this would seem to be the boldest move yet by Amazon to make a serious effort into the publishing world — a big step from a book seller/book distributor, to book publisher. Alarmists will immediately wonder aloud: are book publishers nervous? Should they be?

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.”

For writers trying to get their foot in the door without any luck from traditional publishers, it is pretty great news. I wonder what this means for Kindle Direct Publishing?

“Amazon has started giving all authors, whether it publishes them or not, direct access to highly coveted Nielsen BookScan sales data, which records how many physical books they are selling in individual markets like Milwaukee or New Orleans. It is introducing the sort of one-on-one communication between authors and their fans that used to happen only on book tours. It made an obscure German historical novel a runaway best seller without a single professional reviewer weighing in.”

Too early to tell where this goes, and it remains to be seen what kinds of resources Amazon is devoting to this publishing effort, but the company certainly has the resources to make some waves in the publishing world with this, especially if mainstream authors are lured away from traditional publishing houses, others may quickly and invariably follow suit. If this is any indication, here were some pretty strong words from an Amazon executive: “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”

At least from one example, we know that the possibility of an Amazon-created bestseller book is much more reality than fiction –

“Can Amazon secretly create its own best sellers? “The Hangman’s Daughter” was an e-book hit. Amazon bought the rights to the historical novel by a first-time writer, Oliver Pötzsch, and had it translated from German. It has now sold 250,000 digital copies.”

In case you’re curious (like me), here’s a link the The Hangman’s Daughter (Kindle Edition).

Since I just happened to start reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle over the weekend, I thought I’d write a quick post in honor of the UK-release of Haruki Murakami’s new novel, 1Q84. (The U.S. release is scheduled for October 25).

And what a release it is, apparently (The Guardian: “Murakami’s 1Q84 launches with midnight openings“). Regardless of if you’re a fan or not, it’s cool to see people excited enough about a literary work to line up at bookstores at midnight –

“It’s not quite on a Harry Potter scale, but bookshops are gearing up to mark the publication of Haruki Murakami’s long-anticipated new novel 1Q84 with midnight openings.”

Here’s a nice article from the BBC (“Haruki Murakami: How a Japanese writer conquered the world“), which chronicles the novelist’s impressive run of success, an overview of Japanese literary culture, Murakami’s reclusiveness, as well as some insights from the English translators on Murakami’s international appeal. Favorite part for me: some of the Murakami on Murakami quotes:

I’ve gotten into the habit of avoiding book reviews of books I intend to read as much as possible. But, The Guardian also has a review (“1Q84 by Haruki Murakami – review“) for those who are interested. Briefly noted –

“Reality, blurred by myth ancient and urban, refuses to be quite a process of cause and effect; identity is always threatening to dissolve. We may be in a parallel world; it may be just that all our individual worlds are parallel. This solipsism is both prized and the cause of much of the unease.” 

Sounds about right.

For a great sneak preview, check out The New Yorker with an excerpt of the novel: “Town of Cats”

And, the opening lines of the novel: