TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Our e-book news podcasts’ Category

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti shared with us a moving remembrance of Steven T. Florio, ex-CEO of Condé Naste, who mentored her. Both were the first in their families to reach college, and among other things, Sadi benefited from his book recommendations. Here’s an MP3 of Sadi’s podcast of “Losing Steve”—well worth your time even if you earlier read the essay.

If you haven’t already, why not subscribe to our podcasts, mostly from Sadi?

By David Rothman

You never know who’s reading the TeleBlog.

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti recently told of the horrors of copyright law when she was getting permissions for her new book on Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Well, who should write in but an old net.friend of ours, Nicholas Bentley, a copyright reformer, who, ironically, appears to be a very distant relative of—yes, Carroll (albeit not directly by blood).

Nicholas tells Sadi: “As far as I know, we have absolutely no contact with the Dodgson estate but as I said before, I have to check with my mother because she is the one who tracks all the family history and contacts. If anything comes up, I will get back to you.”

Meanwhile you can enjoy Sadi’s just-posted podcast of her essay (MP3).

Related: Earlier TeleBlog podcasts, mostly by Sadi. Subscribe here.

Technorati Tags: Lewis Carroll,Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,Charles Dodgson,Nicholas Bentley,Commonrights.org

By David Rothman

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti now has a MP3 online of her warning to aspiring editors to familiarize themselves with subrights, including the electronic variety. A text version is here. This is “must” information for students in publishing courses. Sadi teaches at an institution well regarded within the publishing trade, and her students are bright. But when she polled about 30, she found that not one owned a handheld or had even downloaded an e-book.

By Chris Meadows

As part of my on-line talk show, The Biblio File. I recently recorded a 3 hour 46 minute interview with Hugo-winning novelist Peter S. Beagle and publisher Connor Cochran, joined partway through by novelist Diane Duane. At one point, the conversation turned to e-books. Here is an excerpt of part of that conversation.

To listen to the interview in its entirety, please visit The Biblio File.

By Chris Meadows

My interview—with authors Steve Miller, Sharon Lee and Diane Duane—went very well. This exploration of new business models for e-books, along with other topics, lasted more than an hour. Here is a five-minute audio excerpt. If you find it interesting, please listen to the entire show at The Biblio File.

By Chris Meadows

On Saturday, December 16th at 12 p.m. Pacific/3 p.m. Eastern/8 p.m. Universal, I will be hosting a special edition of my literary panel show “The Biblio File” on TalkShoe, looking at the Storyteller’s Bowl model of serializing works via the Internet in return for donations. I will be joined for this discussion by authors Diane Duane, Sharon Lee, and Steve Miller. Callers will be welcome, and will be able to submit questions of their own later in the show. After it airs, the show will become available for download as an MP3 podcast.

See also: this mp3 file.

For instructions on connecting to TalkShoe, see my guide.

By David Rothman

With a new podcast, TeleRead book editor Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti continues her coverage of Gather, the literate community site in Boston. Among the pros: a wonderful site design and a real community. Among the cons: Major Google-related questions about the privacy of users. At some future time Sadi may return to Gather and the e-book angle, but those are the issues on her mind right now.

Related: Earlier podcast about Gather and parts I and II of the text versions. You can subscribe to Sadi’s podcasts.

By David Rothman

In an MP3 of “Gathering steam in Boston, Part I,” TeleRead book editor Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti discusses Gather, one of the more literate of the community sites. The forthcoming podcast of Part II will be about synergies that could happen between Gather and e-books.

Gather trivia not mentioned here earlier: Among the Gather board members are author and ex-U.S. Senator Bill Bradley and ex-Lotus CEO Jim Manzi.

Related: Parts I and II of the text versions. You can subscribe to Sadi’s podcasts. A poet and novelist, Sadi formerly was an editor and publicity manager at David R. Godine.

By David Rothman

Sci-fi novelist Ben Bova, whose 1989 novel Cyberbooks predicted electronic books, weighs in on real life e-books in his article in the Naples News today.

Bova says: “Sony has just announced a new ‘Sony Reader’ that they’ve developed in league with E Ink, a technology firm in Cambridge, Mass. It is the size and heft of a paperback book, and its screen is bright, clear, and high-definition.” Bova goes on:

It sounds exactly like my Cyberbook. And a good thing, too.

One of the reasons I’m in favor of true electronic book publishing is that electronic books should become very inexpensive. For years, I’ve watched the price of books rise almost out of sight, as costs of paper and ink escalate steadily.

Electrons are cheaper. At least seventy-five percent of a publisher’s costs arise from schlepping tons of paper from paper mills to printing presses to distributors’ warehouses to bookstores. Moving electrons instead of paper should bring down the price of books to the point where anyone can afford them.

I look forward to that day.

I’m always happy when a well-known author praises e-books, and now I hope that Bova will go on to consider such issues as the DRM mess and the Tower of eBabel. Maybe he can even write a sequel where all the world’s knowledge is lost due to complications archivist-hostile DRM and ephemeral, proprietary formats.

Related: Amos Bokros’ TeleBlog review of Cyberbooks.

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Note: We’ve just posted an MP3 of the essay below from Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti–TeleRead’s e-book reviewer.

A highly disturbing experiment: go to virtually any search engine and type in “e-books pornography,” and you’ll get a plethora of results offering “Child Pornography” downloadable to Microsoft Reader with “direct links to downloading and free samples.”

I toured “porn” sites recently. Some pages offered simply “debates” about the use of pornography (here in context as an e-book phenomenon). Other sites offered more information on said debates. (Who knew the e-book community had been debating this matter? Should we have known?) Another site listed an offering about “the reality behind the ‘often hysterical media coverage of child pornography available via the Internet.’”

But then there were those downloadable samples that one just could not get away from. It all contrived to make me feel like just hysterical Puritan who has no sense of fun and who pines away her days wishing and hoping that grown men will start wanting women of normal age. I don’t ask for much; let’s say over 16, at the high end of the scale. (more…)

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Note: You can enjoy an MP3 of the essay below from Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, TeleRead’s e-book reviewer.

Editors don’t make editorial decisions any more–sales and marketing people do. An old friend said that recently, and I couldn’t disagree about the obvious.

I remember a time when editors decided if a book would be published; and these days, it’s even worse than that–as I discussed on a national public radio program. You have agents who take on the books of good authors, and no matter who or what the writers have been, as is the case of a friend, published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly–nothing to scoff at–the agents say: “You won’t make it in those places any more. You need to aim lower and be more realistic.”

They took the road less traveled

Listen, I adore my agent and she’s one of the best, but doesn’t it make sense to aim high before aiming for the second tier presses? Haven’t we enough empirical evidence that the “small” book or the “quiet” book can be the next big bestseller? (more…)

By Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Note: You can enjoy an MP3 of the essay below from Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, TeleRead’s e-book reviewer.

As a poet myself, it is only natural that I am often moved to read other poets–either for inspiration or for the sheer pleasure of simply reading without any work objective in mind. Until recently I had always taken my Tennyson and my Yeats off the top of my bookshelf, dusted off the thin, worn pages and carefully turned, reading each poem in turn. The same has been true of my Book of Nonsense with illustrations by Edward Lear and poems from diverse writers and anonymous poets and nonsense writers of all kind, including Lewis Carroll who included the poem Jabberwocky, my favorite and the first poem I ever memorized at age nine.

A Eureka moment about e-books and poetry

But the pages wear thin, the books begin to fall apart, and we wrap them in acetate and acid free paper; but it seems to make little difference now. The damage has been done. And so it was that the other night I had a Eureka moment. If I could read fiction and nonfiction on my borrowed Dell Axim, then why not download to Mobipocket reader on my Tungsten E? (more…)