Ok, I admit it:  I’ve drunk the Vook Kool-Aid.  But trust me:  my first sip was bitter.  I love books, I live in a world (and an apartment!) flooded with books.   I like movies, too — but honestly, for me they always have been a completely different experience from reading.  So when I first heard that Bradley Inman was starting Vook — and I like Brad! — I was waaaay skeptical.  Even my fifteen year old son said, “Mom, when   Read more…

The news today that HarperCollins was designating one person as its digital guru brought joy to my heart. . .  Sure Simon & Schuster hired the great Elie Hirschorn eighteen months ago and recently recruited long time book vet Mark Gompertz to the digital fold — and yes, Random House has had a serious group in place for some time — but the idea that in these so-called troubled times that a major publisher would take such a major step.   Read more…

One of the things that scares publishing people most is the breadth and scope of Amazon’s power — and the news the other day that the company had gone “into” people’s Kindles and removed copies of George Orwell’s novels 1984 and Animal Farm.   Say, what?   In the same week that lawyers filed another motion to give a novice writer the opportunity (nay, the right) to publish an homage-or-ripoff, depending whom you ask to another great writer, JD Salinger, the biggest   Read more…

I was just reading a fascinating post on the great e-book blog TeleRead about the real reasons those of us involved with digital publishing should be discussing Henry Louis Gates—forget the political rumpus, in short, and recall that Gates is one of the foremost scholars of the Public Domain. You can read the whole post here. But while reading that post I noticed a link to “Wired for Books”—a site I’d seen before but had never really investigated. “Wired for   Read more…

In the traditional book business, it is generally held that Barnes and Noble — still by far the biggest retailer in the group — is losing out to Amazon, at least when it comes to mindshare.   And people were thinking that even before the introduction of the Kindle.  Indeed, in bookland, “Kindle” was synonymous with “e-book”  So synonymous, in fact, that some of us book-watchers were wondering if B&N was ever going to catch up. A few months ago, the   Read more…

At first, um, blush, the fact that today is the 50th anniversary of the ruling that allowed D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be published in this country has nothing to do with technology, or ebooks or vooks.   But in an excellent op ed in today’s New York Times, the writer Fred Kaplan makes a point about how standards of acceptability always have, have to and always will change with the times.    Yes, a brilliant lawyer named Charles Rembar   Read more…

For most of my twenty five plus years in the media business,  I’ve been privileged to “shape young minds” at two of the most prestigious publishing courses in the country:  the NYU Publishing Institute, and the Columbia (formerly Radcliffe) Publishing Course.   Over the years, I have met and come to know and even some time have come to work for people who were “merely” enterprising students when I met them. Newly back on the circuit this year, I have been   Read more…

As digital publishing sweeps up printed matter of all genres and formats, producers of comic books and graphic novels are making their presence known. Marvel offers a monthly subscription to its digital comics collection: thousands of online versions created from the original files used to print them. Daily Bits did a roundup of graphic novels available free online, from a gritty murder mystery to the whimsical tale of a girl and her salamander spirit friend. At Vook, we’re thrilled that   Read more…

I learned to read by sounding out The Lord of the Rings sentence by sentence, an experience that pretty much set my fantasy genre prejudices in stone : one dimensional villains, orc hewing, hardy little people (obviously Willow was a big hit with me). So when Harry Potter made his debut I shrugged it off: what wizard can compete with Gandalf? And then (only a few weeks ago!) I saw the movies. It was a conversion experience. The first two   Read more…

When I first read the New York Times piece today about how Random House is wrestling with the timing of the release of its ebook version of Dan Brown’s forthcoming novel, I thought:  “how silly of them to worry that e-books would cannibalize sales of the hardcover books, especially a blockbuster like  The Lost Symbol is sure to be.”  Isn’t the idea to create more of a muchness, to blanket the market, cover the waterfront  (and all that) with as many   Read more…