I’ve been reading a couple of things lately that could restore, if you were in need of such a thing, your faith in print, and in the vitality of scholarship and publishing in the digital age. The publishing industry is in crisis—well, nearly everything these days seems to be in crisis—but you would hardly realize [...]

A few days ago I was riding home on my Xootr push scooter—yes, it’s a tough commute—when an old Ford Falcon pulled up next to me at the light. I noticed the undercarriage splotched with rust, the tires baring their sole, but what struck me most was the backseat, brimming with books, magazines, and yellowed [...]

In a publishing listserv discussion, triggered by the planned shutdown of Washington Post’s BookWorld, I contributed to a discussion about how the franchise in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (TBR) could be preserved. One suggestion was that the section be spun out of the paper as a separate business which, it was hoped, [...]

Now that both the Kindle and the iPhone are out, it’s interesting to look at the very similar business strategy behind the two products. I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up on [...]

I’ve been pondering the ebook situation with respect to the upcoming (Friday) launch of the iPhone App Store. One of the problems hardware devices like the Sony Reader and the Kindle have to contend with is competition with other reading platforms like the paperback book, or the library book. It’s hard to spend $300 on [...]

Technology Review asked for my thoughts on Kindle. Here they are, slightly emended. No one can doubt that digitization and the Internet together with various factors intrinsic to the publishing industry will radically transform the distribution of books: books can now be transmitted like e-mail directly from writer to reader eliminating nearly the entire traditional [...]

I got my Kindle at the beginning of Christmas week. The holidays gave me a chance to show it to a number of friends and relatives who don’t read ebooks, don’t know about ebooks, and have never tried reading on a screen. Several of them had heard about the Kindle and were primed to see [...]