Farhad Manjoo, Amazon, and Independent Bookstores [Controversies]
Following on my post from yesterday, which was following on Richard Russo’s op-ed piece, which was following on Amazon’s “Price Check special,” today Slate’s tech guy, Farhad Manjoo, has his own piece about Amazon and indie bookstores—one that has seemingly pissed off everyone I know. If ...
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E-Book Prices and the Possibility of Piracy
I’ve written in the past about the $9.99 ebook and my belief that supply and demand is the most important factor in arriving at this price point. Over in Slate, Jack Schafer argues that a side-effect of publishers trying to increase ebook prices (because they’re afraid that a cheap ebook will cannibalize the ...
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Scandinavian Crime Novels
Although I’m personally not a reader of Scandinavian crime fiction (unless you can somehow count Jan Kjaerstad’s trilogy in that group, which is closer to a leap than a stretch), I find the debate between Nathaniel Rich and Larissa Kyzer about why these books are so popular pretty fascinating. First off, ...
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Design, the Kindle, and Reading Newspapers
Farhad Manjoo’s recent piece in Slate offers a unique take on one of the advantages newspapers have over the Kindle—the ability to convey information through design elements: Every newspaper you’ve ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day’s stories was most ...
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Here Comes the Backlash
Last week, I worried that Horace Engdahl’s comments about American literature and the Nobel Prize would result in a bit of an anti-foreign literature backlash. And as Edward Gauvin pointed out in the comments, it’s starting . . . From Adam Kirsch’s article at Slate: All of these criticisms are, of ...
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The Original of Laura
More on Nabokov’s last and maybe-about-to-be-destroyed novel/novel-fragment, The Original of Laura, from Slate: But the essence is this: Dmitri says he reached a decision after an imagined ghostly conversation with his dead father—one in a far different key from Hamlet’s talk with his dead ...
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