TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘April Hamilton’ Category

By April Hamilton

The slick little Nintendo DS Lite has snared plenty of adult fans with games like Brain Age and New York Times Crosswords.

But this device has much more to offer than just game play.

You may already be aware of the Nintendo DS Browser, which brings textual web-surfing to the DS anywhere a WiFi connection is detected. But you can also listen to music, watch videos and read e-books on your DS Lite.

Enjoy thousands of literary classics and Creative Commons titles from sites such as Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net.

From Charles Dickens to Cory Doctorow to science fiction writers, the works of famous authors are online for you—and your children. Kids can read on the same machines they play games with. Via a Kindle or your favorite PDA, you might even read some books at the same time as your children do, then discuss them. One way to encourage literacy! Wikipedia teems with items about specific books and authors, as well as links to specialized sites—some with colorful pictures that can help draw in young students.

(more…)

By April Hamilton

E-books are of interest to self-publishers because of low production costs and distribution efficiencies, particularly at the global level. Below are April’s opinions on DIY. Others’ welcome! - D.R.

You’ve been honing your craft for years, you’ve placed in some contests, and maybe you’ve even managed to land an agent.

New York editors say they love your work, yet they’re not offering to buy any of it.  Which of these wives’ tales, half-truths or outright lies is keeping you from self-publishing?

#10 - The only author who resorts to self-publication is one whose writing isn’t good enough to get a “real” publisher.

Once upon a time this was probably true, but these days more manuscripts are rejected due to commercial concerns than due to quality concerns. In much the same way movie studios aren’t interested in producing "small" films, publishers aren’t interested in producing ‘small’ books.

(more…)

By April Hamilton

Moderator: April Hamilton self-published two novels as Kindle e-books recently. The views here are her own, and we’ll welcome other perspectives. - D.R.

Read many good books lately? Me neither, and as both a reader and novelist, I wanted to know why. What I’ve learned is by turns shocking and troubling.

Thanks to over two decades of consolidation, the U.S. publishing industry is now lorded over by just six media megaconglomerates, Viacom, Time Warner and News Corp. among them. If these names sound familiar, it’s because they belong to the artistic visionaries who brought us The Moment of Truth TV show, virtually every Adam Sandler movie ever made, People magazine and much more of the same. They’ve made a lucrative science of cranking out the media equivalent of junk food: overpackaged, overhyped, disposable distractions that never turn out to be quite as satisfying as they looked in the ad, and sometimes even leave you feeling a little guilty. To the media megas, the decision of whether or not to acquire any property, be it a manuscript, screenplay, or video of the starlet du jour going commando, hinges on just one question: how much money do we stand to make on this?

Greedy and blockbuster-centric

Media megas have a right to make a buck just like any other business, but the greedy, blockbuster-centric mentality they’ve used to bring the mainstream film and TV industries to heel is now being forcibly applied to book publishing. In a 2006 Wall Street Journal piece entitled The Hot New Advance: $0, Vanguard Press publisher Roger Cooper said, “Publishing is now very much like opening weekend grosses in the movie business, it’s about exploding out of the box and selling as many copies as possible.” The article spoke of the casino-like environment of the new publishing world, in which newly-released books have only a week or two to hit big before being relegated to the back of the store. As National Writers Union VP Phil Mattera said in his eye-opening 1998 article ‘Crisis of the Midlist Author in American Book Publishing,’ “Hardcover publishers lose money on most of their titles and depend greatly on a few bestsellers…the large publishers are increasingly inclined to concentrate their resources on books that have the greatest potential to become bestsellers. Like Hollywood, book publishing has become a business driven by the quest for blockbusters.”

(more…)