UPDATE!
I’m now publishing short stories and other narratives on a regular basis on my new web site, The Narratorium. Free to read, no advertisements. Please visit!
This is the first story I wrote for the first day of a Google+ project as part of National Novel Writing Month during November 2011. I’m not competing in the major event, but this subsidiary event organized by Becky Raymond challenges writers to write a short piece of fiction each day, based on a stimulus photograph or image. It’s called the G+ Flash Fiction Project.
Anyway, this is what I wrote based on this image below. The photo is by Evelyn Lamprey:
This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Read more…
September 3rd, 2011
david
There’s a lot to love about e-books. Lower cost. Portability. Instant availability. No need for physical bookshelves. Easily disposed of.
I celebrate all of these aspects. But in the longer run, I do have some major concerns about a world in which printed books have been almost completely replaced by e-books. My biggest worry is about whether our grandchildren and their children will ever be able to stumble upon treasured books in the way that I, and many generations before me, have always been able to do.
Read more…
After spending quite some time over the last weeks in looking at e-readers, and doing a lot of talking about digital publishing in general, I thought it would be amusing and relevant to reprint this article I originally wrote nearly 20 years ago, talking about my love for hardcopy books and the problems it caused me. Particularly interesting (and in the event, quite wrong) are my speculations about the likelihood of electronic books. Read more…
Just as I’d finished my survey of nine different e-reader apps for the iPad, here comes Amazon with another e-reader – the Kindle Cloud Reader.
Apple has recently been cracking down on iPhone and iPad apps selling content. Basically, Apple wants a 30% cut of any revenue made through in-app purchases, a figure so high as to wipe out all of the profits of companies who are retailing such content, such as e-book retailers. If they refuse to pay Apple that cut, Apple forces those retailers to remove, not only any mechanism for in-app purchases, not only any link to a web site where such purchases could be made, but even any mention of such a web site. Personally, I think this is totally unreasonable. Read more…
