TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics

TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics

News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics

Interview with Jeffery Deaver–Bestselling Thriller Writer
9/24/2013 8:24:55 PM

Jeffery Deaver was the Saturday keynote speaker at the Creatures, Crime and Creativity Conference a couple of weeks ago. His speech was an hilarious “journal of a writer” which slipped some excellent writing advice in between gut-splitting jokes. Wish I had a transcript, but you’ll just have to settle for the interview I had before [...]
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Oxygen and Clean Eating Magazine to Rise Again
9/24/2013 6:15:28 PM

I wrote in June about the closure of CANUSA, the parent company of the magazines  and Clean Eating. At the time, then-owner Tosca Reno attributed the closure to changes in the industry and to the death of her husband, founder Robert Kennedy. She suggested she was looking for other solutions to bring these magazines back, [...]
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Getting back to writing honest — not just good — reviews
9/24/2013 3:55:17 PM

When did we stop writing negative reviews? I am not talking about degrading a writer, but being critical of their work. Again, not to the point of bashing and putting someone down. But reviewing someone's work with truthfulness whether that be good or bad. For the second time in what feels as many weeks, a [...]
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Morning Roundup: Spain's anti-piracy laws, religion publishing; more
9/24/2013 1:52:20 PM

Don’t Price Your eBook at $1.99 (GigaOM) Evidence from Kobo's self-publishing platform, Writing Life, suggests that $1.99 is a bad price for ebooks. That's corroborated by recent data from self-publishing site Smashwords. *** Spain Ratchets Up Anti-Piracy Laws to Even More Ridiculous Levels (Techdirt) If you may recall, for a while, Spain had some of [...]
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Barnes & Noble puts e-readers, Nook HD tablet on sale
9/24/2013 1:15:00 PM

Speaking of Barnes & Noble sales, Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader points out that B&N is running a more general sale on its Nook hardware, this week only. The Nook Simple Touch is $20 off, as I already mentioned, but so is the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight, now $80 instead of $100. And [...]
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Refurbished Nook Simple Touch: $40 on eBay
9/24/2013 8:48:39 AM

If you're looking for a good cheap e-reader, an eBay seller is running a $40 with free shipping special on refurbished Nook Simple Touch units. This is B&N's 2011 model, a 6" 800×600 unlit Pearl e-ink reader that can do EPUB, including Barnes & Noble's and Adobe Digital Editions' DRM. It has 2 GB of [...]
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CILIP, Blackman disgrace Vaizey in UK libraries revolt
9/23/2013 9:15:20 PM

Ed Vaizey, the UK Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, has not had a good weekend.  The Chartered Institute of Library & Information Professionals (CILIP), the British professional body for librarians, voted at its annual general meeting on September 21st in favor of a no confidence motion in his oversight of UK library services, [...]
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Goodreads New Author Protection Policy
9/23/2013 8:15:40 PM

Thanks to Nate at The Digital Reader for his comprehensive write-up of the new Goodreads content policy designed to ‘protect’ authors from cyber-bullying by overly exuberant readers. Goodreads couched the announcement as a friendly ‘note regarding reviews’ and it begins with ‘reviews should be about the book’ and then goes from there. The new measures [...]
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Fake review farmers or witchhunters: Which are worse?
9/23/2013 8:00:58 PM

That favorite urban legend of the modern book world, the paid-for fake review, has surfaced again in a manner that looks likely to discredit the discreditors. One website alleges a certain female author farmed reviews wholesale, then scatters a whole slew of other author names supposedly engaged in the same business. All without substantiating evidence, [...]
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UK library crisis driving some libraries to drink
9/23/2013 7:48:05 PM

The continuing decimation of UK library services under the pressure of government-dictated funding cuts has led to some novel – some would say, outre and outlandish – suggestions and solutions for how to sustain, or repurpose, existing library facilities. And the latest twist in the sorry saga of the cull of Sheffield libraries is that [...]
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App Review: Afterword for Android
9/23/2013 7:32:57 PM

Sometimes I like an app that does one thing and does it well. Someone I know tweeted about Afterword, and I decided to give it a try. If you are an author on Kindle, the app allows you to look at your sales data. You can select which country to view, or the app can [...]
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Ballmer balks at the Google monopoly bogey
9/23/2013 6:45:51 PM

Steve Ballmer, the soon-to-be-ex Microsoft CEO, has been garnering quite a bit of press from his declaration before an audience of analysts that Google is a monopoly and that Microsoft is the only David left standing up to this Goliath. ‘”They have this incredible, amazing, dare I say monopoly that we are the only person [...]
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Reuters and the Paid News/Free News Debate
9/23/2013 6:30:10 PM

From Matthew Ingram comes this write-up about Reuters and their decision to shut down their ambitious ‘Reuters Next’ online service. As the article explains, the decision “stems from an ongoing conflict between the money-making subscription business and the money-losing consumer web operation.” In other words, Reuters makes its money not by a showrooom-esque web service [...]
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One author goes from self-publishing to the traditional route
9/23/2013 4:45:24 PM

We have read many stories about authors jumping to the self-publishing world or becoming hybrid authors by self-publishing backlists or short stories that don’t fit into their traditionally published works. Author Peter David is going in the opposite direction, he wrote on a blog. He’s decided to publish his next novel ARTFUL: Being the Heretofore [...]
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Is something horribly wrong with modern horror?
9/23/2013 3:36:43 PM

Currently I’m enjoying the pleasure of reading  from Prime Books, prior to reviewing it (of which more anon). And coincidentally, it comes concurrently with an article that delves into what’s wrong with the genre, courtesy of its eminence noir, Stephen King, who just happens to have been born on September 21st, 1947. And King is [...]
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