Guido Henkel: Amazon Introduced New Kindle eBook Format with a Major Misstep
Guido Henkel points out that Amazon’s new Kindle format isn’t supported on older Kindle devices. Amazon certainly isn’t the first to roll and update like this, but that doesn’t make it ideal. I know it’s not exactly the same situation, but when Sony updated its bookstore so all books came in ePub format, Sony paid for my ereader to be shipped to their shop and given and upgrade so the new format would work on my clunky, archaic device. I really appreciated that. It’s a bit annoying when you pay a company for a piece of their hardware and then that company releases updates that can’t apply to your device.
Christopher Priest: Are You Watching Carefully?
Christopher Priest writes an article about the genesis of The Prestige for Fantasy Magazine. I greatly enjoyed The Prestige, so it was fun to read this bit of background on the novel.
Intelligent Editing: Consistency Mistakes
Intelligent Editing shows the most common consistency mistakes that writers make in their manuscripts. Consistency helps your reader understand you meaning; when you switch between hyphenating or capitalizing a phrase or not, you signal a change in meaning to your reader. If you don’t actually intend a different meaning, you end up confusing your reader. Being aware of common inconsistencies helps you avoid them yourself.
Mike Shatzkin: Can Big Publishers Actually Do Tech and Make Books at the Same Time?
Mike Shatzkin discusses some changes rumbling through the big publishers: they’ve started to get into the tech game. But his article’s title raises an interesting question: can and should publishers be splitting their attention between books and technology? This applies as much to Amazon as it does to traditional publishing houses. Can you have core competencies in both stellar technology and stellar content?
