New Year -- New Resources

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Thriller writer of the decade

If you are not already hooked on Steig Larsson's THE GIRL WHO.... series of thrillers, you should be.

I haven't read anything as good as THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO (now in paperback) or THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (just out in hardcover from Knopf) since I discovered Smiley and John Le Carre or Adam Dalgliesh and P.D. James.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Recommended reading

Two of these are new, and one is just one of my favorites:

THE BOOK OF WILLIAM by Paul Collins is a fantastic trip through the almost 500-years of Shakespeare's First Folios from publication, through obscurity, to lasting fame.

AMERICAN-MADE: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor is a survey of the New Deal perfect for anyone who wonders why we need one now.

and the classic is:

The World of Nagaraj by R.K. Narayan, stories set in the mythical Indian village of Malgudi, a kind of South-Asian parallel universe to Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish characters.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Sony E-Reader competiton good for book publishers

Ordering an e-book instantly from Kindle may be fun,

But being able to re-read that e-book on any device is priceless.

Sony’s recent e-book and e-book Reader announcements are the single best news book publishing has had in years. As the NYT article reports below, more books in more formats from more sources is the key to making e-books a viable format in an industry that can still afford to pay writers for writing books:

New York Times 8-13-09
Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books By BRAD STONE
To counter Amazon.com, Sony and other device makers as well as several publishers will use the same technology, called ePub, for digital book sales.

…..
“If the business terms and conditions end up being dictated to publishers by one bookseller who has a chokehold over the value chain, publishers are going to have a hard time staying profitable,” said Bill McCoy, general manager for Adobe’s digital publishing business.