Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘eBooks’

Dec 22

pirates
19 Comments

The Perfidy of Piracy?

This week, award-winning Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria announced she will quit writing since more copies of her book have been downloaded illegally than sold. She said she could no longer justify devoting three years of her working life to producing a book. Agreed, she may have a point. Agreed, after China and Russia, Spain has the highest number of per capita illegal downloads in the world. Agreed, loss from illegal downloads and e-book piracy costs writers and publishers close to $3 billion in the US alone. But what if the writers themselves advocate file sharing?

Many authors claim making their work available online increases book sales…

Read more

Dec 15

black and white writer
14 Comments

9 Gifts for the Struggling Writer

The struggling writer is the worst off of all. He stares at a dark future, fumbling for a sliver of light in a dark tunnel of words, and not sure of what the uncertain future held for him. He is alone in his struggle, writing from his heart, not knowing whether his work will be appreciated one day, or whether he will be stuck in the doldrums forever. In this holiday season, what could be the best gift for him? Here is my list.

1. A critique of his work, preferably free (for they are expensive), which tells him what he is doing right, and where he needs to park his words or where his plot is going all awry. It will push him in the right direction…

Read more

Dec 10

download (2)
1 Comment

Book Drum & the World’s First Literary Map

Book Drum is a web community for book lovers, which combining images, background information, maps, videos and music to bring alive the books we love. It calls itself the ‘the perfect companion to book, bringing them to life with immersive pictures, videos, maps and music.’ Anyone can join to build a profile on a book they know well. All you need is spare time, some enthusiasm, reasonable writing skills and an internet connection. While a book is being profiled, it cannot be worked on by anyone else. Once the profile is complete, other registered contributors will be able to add to it.

According to author Hector Macdonald who is Editor at Book Drum, what makes…

Read more

Dec 31

Plot away on the Google Books Ngram Viewer

GoogleLabs recently released a tool that searches across millions of books to graph a word or phrase’s popularity over time. So when you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the selected years.

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is based on a database of nearly 5.2 million digitized books (5,195,769 to be exact), totaling over 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and July 2009 (to be continuously updated as book scanning continues) in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian…

Read more

Nov 26

booki
3 Comments

The Rise and Rise of eBooks

The publishing world is changing and how. The rise of eBooks in the digital publishing world has forever changed the landscape of publishing. The world has come a long way since the launch of the first eBook reader way back in 1998. So what’s new? The Association of American Publishers (AAP) reported that sales were down 21% over the same period 2009, which is, well, old hat. But, surprise, surprise, sale of eBooks was up 158% for the same period and 188% over last year. The impressive growth stats stem from a combination of lower prices for eBook reading devices, as well as an increase in publicity around these devices. Think Apple iPad. The stats are…

Read more