2010 seems destined to be the year of the book. There is only time today to collect a handful of links to pieces that have caught my eye recently as I’ve been hopping around the country. That time exists because my university has declared a snow day – for the second day in a row. With another big storm arriving later today, we may lose a full week here in Pittsburgh. To keep me company, I’ve got a stack of … books.
- Publishers Win a Bout in E-Book Price Fight (NYTimes) (Apple’s negotiating strategy for iPad content is giving publishers leverage in negotiations with Google over Google Editions)
- James Patterson Inc. (NYTimes Magazine) (a long account of how James Patterson mass produces phenomenally successful commodities called books)
- The Book Club With Just One Member (NYTimes, published in the same edition as the Patterson story) (an elegy for intimate one-to-one relationships between readers and texts)
- Neither Luddite nor Biltonite (George Packer’s New Yorker blog, Interesting Times) (a Postman-esque rant against information technologies that disrupt long-form reading; follow the links to Packer’s original post, and to a reaction from Nick Bilton at the NYTimes Bits blog. Packer’s position seems of a piece with Nick Carr’s argument that Google is making us stupid.)