New Kindle Singles-like publishing house, launching with an investigative piece by Jon Krakauer. Looks great.
Craig Mod:
Bibliotype is a (very) simple HTML, CSS and JS based library for rapid prototyping long-form typography and reading on tablets.
Launched in conjunction with his thoughtful A List Apart article.
Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.
Love it. Great opportunities here, especially for long-form journalism. With digital text, there’s no need to shoehorn stories into legacy categories. That’s no excuse to eschew editing—a tighter story is always a better one, in ink or pixels—but it does allow for richer pieces: what would have been a stretched-thin book condenses into a powerful long read; a magazine narrative, begging for twice the words, develops fully.
I haven’t read The Accidental Billionaires, but Orson Scott Card did:
Mezrich faced a nearly insurmountable difficulty in writing the story of the founding of Facebook. After all his research, he had about fifty pages worth of story, and that’s not long enough for a book.
But it is long enough for a Single.
In short, he loves it, even post-iPad.
With the new models priced so aggressively, I’ll probably pick one up myself.
Joe Clark, writing for A List Apart:
People are finally noticing what was staring them in the face all along—HTML is great for expressing words. The web is mostly about expressing words, and HTML works well for it. The same holds true for electronic books.
Nicholson Baker doesn’t much like the Kindle:
Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things.
Instead, he prefers an iPhone or iPod Touch for his e-book reading.
I’ve never used a Kindle, but I have read a book on an iPod Touch. I found the reading experience good but not great, and the small pages forced more page turning than I’d have liked. I’d wait until I had something larger, like Apple’s rumored tablet, before again reading in e-book form anything longer than a short story or novella.
The Wall Street Journal:
At first, Mr. Finney worried about dropping the glass and metal device as he read. But eventually, the sophomore came to like the Reader. Its keyword search function, he says, was “easier than flipping through the pages of a regular book.” Dozens of other participants, however, dropped out of the program, complaining that the e-texts were awkward and inconvenient.
I think the problem, though, has more to do with the devices and pricing available today than with the concept itself. Wait a few years for the technology to improve and prices on content and devices to drop, and I doubt many students will complain.