Blaise Lucey
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Keep in Mind: 59% of Readers Don’t Care About eBooks
Ebook sales have slowed down. Flattened. Softened. Whatever word you want to call it. Worldwide sales for the first quarter this year? They declined. Over at Rough Type, Nicholas Carr speculated a little bit about why eBook sales have so abruptly become steady, rather than revolutionary. Specifically, he brought up the iPad. I’ve thought about the indirect…
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Amazon is Not Waging a “War” Against Books
Amazon is waging a war against “bookstores” and “book culture.” According to a new article from Salon, anyway. Well, if Amazon is at war, I guess I’m a soldier. Of the last three books I’ve bought, two have been through Amazon, for my smartphone. Why? Because they’re obscure business books that I was confident I…
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Are Spotify & Pandora Killing Music?
Last week, Thom Yorke of Radiohead caused something of an uproar when he proclaimed that he was pulling his music (or at least the stuff he held the rights to) from the online streaming service, Spotify. He wasn’t worried for himself, really, but for the bands and musicians looking to sell their stuff and promote…
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J.K. Rowling and the New Author’s Discoverability Problem
By now, anyone in the literary world… who reads Internet News… has learned that J.K. Rowling released a novel about four months ago under a man’s name. Robert Galbraith, to be exact. The book, The Cuckoo’s Calling, sold a whopping 1,500 copies in four months. Meanwhile, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by contrast, sold 8.3 million…
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What Amazon’s Win Against Apple (Really) Means for Books
So, recently, the federal court in New York ruled that Apple played a “central role” in fixing eBook prices with publishers. The goal was to keep the cost of an eBook at $12.99, instead of $9.99. This has ushered in a wave of speculation about the future of both pricing and print books and eBooks.…
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Assassins Among the Bookshelves: “Showrooming” is Deadly
If you ask a local business about “showrooming,” they’ll either scowl or, more likely, look befuddled. The practice is booming among consumers, though, and any business owner has probably seen it: a customer walks into the store, browses the shelves, and then whips out her smartphone. A few minutes later, she’s gone. Where’d she go?…
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Publishers Are Actually Getting Excited About eBooks
The general grumbling from book publishers and bookstores alike is that the whole eBook format is going to destroy them. Smart-mouthed, tech savvy people who like Disruption are quick to agree. They call publishers “dinosaurs” who don’t get it, and other mean things. Really, publishers are trying to get quality books into the hands of…
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Is Writing & Music & Art Getting Specialized to Death?
I just watched “Dear Mr. Watterson,” a light-hearted documentary about the impact that Bill Watterson’s ever-famous, ever-persistent comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes, has had on people over the years. The part that gripped me most was when several prominent cartoonists spoke in extremely gloomy terms about new media. Berkeley Breathed, the cartoonist behind Opus, Bloom County, and Outland,…
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The Robots that Write… and Do Everything Else, Too
A while ago, I read the excellent book by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McCafee, Race Against the Machine. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about automation, whether I’m looking at Google’s driverless cars or checking out at CVS through a self-service kiosk. It’s a weird time to be alive and, if the common wisdom about robots these…
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Fitzgerald & Hemmingway Were Bloggers, Too
Sometimes, I feel guilty about blogging. It’s a little pinching sensation, probably a sensation most writers are familiar with – the feeling that you’re wasting time you should be using to work on your novel. That’s why I was reassured when I read a recent interview with a professor about “the Lost Generation” and found…
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