John Dishon's Blog (33)

Amazon Encore

"Even great books can be overlooked. And authors with great potential often struggle to connect with the larger audience they deserve to reach. We’re fortunate at Amazon.com to have customers who know a good book when they read one, so we've introduced AmazonEncore to help connect authors and their books with more readers.

AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors… Continue

Added by John Dishon on May 15, 2009 at 7:30am — 2 Comments

Raymond Chandler's Style Analyzed (An essay I found)

http://www.uiowa.edu/~smack/archive/smack1.1/ess3.htm

Added by John Dishon on May 14, 2009 at 9:55am — 2 Comments

Man Writes Bestselling Novel on His Cellphone

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/04/22/2009-04-22_train_of_thought_bklyn_writer_found_muse__wrote_first_novel_while_commuting_on_t.html

Here's a link to the book on Amazon:… Continue

Added by John Dishon on April 30, 2009 at 4:13am — 1 Comment

Amazon Consolidates Its Power, Acquires Stanza Digital Reader App For iPhone

From Galley Cat: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/web_tech/breaking_amazoncom_inc_acquires_stanza_digital_reader_app_115103.asp

Added by John Dishon on April 29, 2009 at 7:47am — 5 Comments

All of Fiction Costs $125 Million

http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=308&mode=one

My favorite parts of the article:

"As we all know, Google recently bought all out-of-print fiction from the "Author's Guild" for $125 million dollars. This laughable, ludicrously small price is the kind of price that somebody would only offer for something that they didn't actually own.

You know, like Napoleon selling Louisiana to America in… Continue

Added by John Dishon on April 29, 2009 at 3:14am — 5 Comments

Disability Access Activists Gather to Protest Kindle DRM

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/protest-kindle-drm

Added by John Dishon on April 11, 2009 at 12:01am — 7 Comments

Authors have lost the plot in Kindle battle

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/31/cory-doctorow-kindle

Added by John Dishon on April 1, 2009 at 10:52pm — 6 Comments

What We Might Gain (Article on the upside of ebooks)

http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=320&mode=one

Added by John Dishon on March 25, 2009 at 1:19am — 5 Comments

Amazon retreats on Kindle's text-to-speech issue

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10184406-93.html

Well, that solves that problem.

Added by John Dishon on March 1, 2009 at 3:20am — 4 Comments

Rumor: Larger, Touchscreen Kindle 3 may be released later this year

http://i.gizmodo.com/5161405/a-larger-touchscreen-kindle-3-coming-this-year

Full text of the article:

"While we first saw the Kindle 2 months ago in a leak, there's been another nagging rumor, one of a Kindle with a full 8.5"x11" display. And according to DigiTimes, that Kindle still exists.

Sneakily tacked on a post about Amazon's e-ink display manufacturer Prime View… Continue

Added by John Dishon on February 28, 2009 at 1:14am — 1 Comment

Cell phone stories writing new chapter in print publishing

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/25/japan.mobilenovels/

From the article:

"A struggling Japanese publishing industry was quick to take notice of the growing popularity of keitai shosetsu, especially early works like Yoshi's "Deep Love." Many of the popular cell phone novels have since been turned into paperbacks, and bookstores across Japan now have entire sections devoted to the digital-age literary… Continue

Added by John Dishon on February 28, 2009 at 12:08am — 4 Comments

Authors´ Guild vs. reality: Kindles and read-aloud

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/25/authors-guild-vs-rea.html

From the article:

"I think there's plenty not to like about the Kindle -- the DRM, the proprietary file format, both imposed on authors and publishers even if they don't want it -- and about Amazon's real audiobook section, Audible (the DRM -- again, imposed on authors and publishers even if they'd prefer not to use it). But if… Continue

Added by John Dishon on February 27, 2009 at 3:44am — 13 Comments