On anthropomorphising the book genres… Intimate Partner Violence and the story of Anna Lynn Hurd. I think it’s safe to assume that each and every one of us has been touched by Domestic Violence in one form or another, whether we realise it or not. Even if the experience happens to be “the sister’s boyfriend’s best-friend’s wife’s sister”. At some point, you come face to face with it. As a child, I remember being shielded from people my parents knew who were involved with it, as a teenager, I saw it among my friends, and as an adult I experienced it myself. I may be unfortunate in the frequency with which I came in contact with it, but I don’t think I am alone. Intimate Partner Violence is a widespread and much denied issue. Even if that is not your experience, even if you think you are free from the reach of IPV, I urge you to think again.
In the case of Anna Lynn Hurd, many people stepped up after her death to say they witnessed the toxic relationship between Anna and the boyfriend and were either unsure of what they were seeing, or were just afraid to step in and help. Social reading; sounds like an oxymoron. Credit – fyrfli@Flickr.com When you think of reading, you think of a solitary activity, don’t you? I do. Reading has always been a solo venture for me. Of course, in the beginning, I had to have help with it – my mother would read to me, or help me read for myself by pointing out errors in pronunciation or helping me with context by either explaining words that I didn’t understand, or later on, pointing me towards the massive Concise Oxford that sat on the bookshelf.
Still, none of that was particularly social. Enter the concept of Goodreads.com and it begins to make sense. Recently, a group of Facebook acquaintances of mine and I joined together under a Facebook group (a closed one) for a cyber book club. Goodreads.com is one of the more popular social reading platforms out there. Book clubs are not a new phenomenon; they’ve been around since books were first published. Social reading has its advantages. What do you think of social reading websites? eReading has freed our choices! On occasion, I have chosen to avoid reading a particular book because I was hesitant about what people might think of me for reading it. When I first read Stephen King’s “It”, the cover at the time was a fairly nondescript cover which didn’t give much away: it was simply an image of a storm drain with a distinctly reptilian hand reaching out towards a paper boat bobbing in the gutter.
Ominous, yes; but not as scary as some of the newer covers I’ve seen – especially the one with Tim Curry’s sinister clown-face and shocking red hair. I think my mother would have had all kinds of objections to her 15 year old daughter reading a book with a cover like that. One of the challenges to reading widely with physical books, is the fact that they lend themselves to pre-judgement based on their covers.
This is not true with eBooks – when you’re reading an eBook, no one can see the cover of what you’re reading., just the device you are reading on. The future of e-publishing. In comparison to the film, music and even newspaper industries, the publishing industry is changing rather lethargically. This does not change the inevitable fact that it will face immense changes in the future which have already been apparent for many years. It seems like publishers have been afraid of adapting to a changing market.
By analyzing other content industries they saw the pitfalls of accelerated digitalization. They tried to avoid developments such as lower prices and piracy by delaying digitalization as long as possible. Maybe they deemed the risk of building the required infrastructure for an eBook platform was too great. On the other hand, the publishers’ reactions have opened the door for many new players and entrepreneurs within the publishing industry, and this is probably where the development should come from. Ebooks will not mean the end of print. The digitalization of reading will mean a market that will have no borders in the future. GMail’s “Inbox Categories”
If you use Gmail, you know what I mean when I say “those confounded new Gmail tabs”. In June, Google rolled out Inbox Categories which they tout as organising your inbox so that messages “are classified into categories such as Social, Promotions, and Updates”. They say it’s supposed to help categorise your mail so that you see what you want to see when you want to see it. I say it’s just annoying because after being used to your Inbox looking a particular way for so long, this is just an added annoyance.
It doesn’t really help. Well, here at Free-eBooks.net, the problem is doubled because most of our Newsletter recipients no longer even see our emails because they get shunted to a different tab. If you spend a great deal of time in your Inbox (and I sure hope you don’t), then you’ve probably figured out how to tweak these filters so they work for you. Open your Gmail and notice the new “tabbing” setup.Click the “Promotions” tab. If you ask for my advice, I say disable them. It’s “Banned Books Week 2013″ – what are you reading? I start my days with checking in on Facebook.
This is probably not very wise since Facebook is the epitome of a black hole for time. Nevertheless, I started out this Monday morning with a scan of my news feed and spotted the post which said that Banned Books Week started on Sunday the 22nd. That’s this week! It seems a little sad that I have never heard of this awareness campaign before this year. Imagine my horror, when perusing the list of banned and challenged books, discovering that “Alice in Wonderland” is on the list as having been challenged at one point or another in history.
As a reader, I am appalled that we are still doing this nonsense in this day and age and as a writer, I am incensed. This week in protest to this purely selfish and prohibitive practice, I am picking a book listed on the Banned/Challenged book list to read this week (in spite of having a few other books awaiting my attention) – maybe even specifically one on the list for the year 2012–2013. How to connect with your readers. Credit: ‘Chelmsford Public Library’ on Flickr One of the best (and worst) aspects of self-publishing, is the ability to connect directly to your readers using various social tools. The GoodReads platform is a very good example of this kind of ability. And while there have been a number of horror stories popping out from GoodReads.com, there is no denying the possibility of connecting in very real ways to those who read your books. The primary thing to remember in this task is the fact that your readers are your gold mine.
Without them, you’re simply writing for yourself – which can’t be very satisfying now, can it? On Free-eBooks.net, we’ve just recently switched our commenting system to Disqus.com which incorporates a wide community of people who interact with one another on a variety of things. By settling your mouse pointer over the icon on a comment, you get to see a little bit about the person making the comment. Your back-story is intriguing to your readers. How to Take Charge of Your Reading Fears. As an avid horror reader in my teenaged years, my mother would often caution me about how much of “that trash” I read, to be careful I didn’t fill my head with horrors so terrible that it tainted my soul.
My mother is quite religious and thus the “taint your soul” aspect of her cautions were almost inevitable. Her argument was that we become what we fill our hearts and minds with. Thus if I read too much horror stories, I would become horrible myself. I guess there might be a certain amount of logic in that. Still, I have been reading Stephen King-esque stories since I was 16 years old and I don’t believe that there is anything horrible about me. You are in the ultimate control seat for yourself and your mind and what you think about. Always been skeptical about romances? Help! Technology is leeching the life out of reading! Endless books, by Su Ai Einstein is quoted as saying, “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal” and considering the way some people see indie publishing today, Einstein may not have been far wrong.
When Amazon introduced their Kindle and the 99c eBook, reading material was suddenly, seemingly endless. I could buy 10 books where before I could only get 1. It felt like a windfall. For many years, I would finish a book and twiddle my thumbs until the next one would fall into my hands. This sounds like it would be a good thing, no? It has become more of a distraction now though. Technology has helped give us more reading freedom, sure. How about you? Favorite Fonts: One of the underappreciated advantages of e-books. A friend of mine who works as a graphic designer pointed out that the font she selects has a huge influence upon the visual and emotional impact of her designs.
Although most of us are more or less oblivious to it, font plays a powerful role in the lives of readers and can make a real difference. Size Matters and So Does Presentation “When it comes to typeface size matters, and so does style,” she said. “That’s why I almost exclusively use Verdana on all of the marketing materials and websites that I create.” I found that interesting since I am also a fan of Verdana as a reader – particularly when I have to proofread a document. Ongoing Research Research conducted at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1999 compared Georgia, Verdana, Times, and Arial fonts to find out which was best for reading on an electronic screen.
Then colleagues at Wichita State University conducted a series of studies on font sizes and styles. The Times are a Changing What it Means to You and Me. E-Books Help Cure Prohibitive Cost of College Textbooks. Source: Getty Images According to a June 2013 Government Accountability Office report, textbook prices rose more than 80% between 2002 and 2012. That was approximately three times the rate of inflation, and is one of the reasons that college education has become too expensive for many young people.
That’s why many students, educators, and educational industry observers believe that the future of academic textbooks must involve an innovative shift into digital media versus conventional printed texts. The change was predicted by an article that appeared in Cornell’s own student newspaper in 2011, where spokespersons for the campus book store explained that sales of conventional textbooks had plummeted by more than 20% over the prior four years. A year later, as reported by the New York Times, five major universities implemented a pilot program that involved purchasing electronic textbooks.
Reading at the Speed of Light: Can our eyes evolve with e-books? Tech companies are rolling out speed-reading aids and software apps including “Acceleread” and “Velocity” that push the envelope considerably. Want to be able to zip through 500 words per minute? The engineers behind the product “Speed Read Trainer” believe they can get the typical reader to that level in about two weeks. Flipping pages at that clip you could read a standard-sized novel in about the same amount of time it would take to watch the movie version. Or you could sit down and polish off Moby Dick in one day.
Read 150 Pages Per Hour But the product really grabbing headlines this month is “Spritz,” an app that recently debuted at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The makers of Spritz – which supports languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Korean – have clocked readers at triple their regular speed. Just imagine what can happen at the intersection of e-book development and the introduction of these new speed-reading programs. Behind the Magical Technology of e-Books. Do you recall the most surprising and rewarding thing that you experienced when trying out the popular e-book format for the first time on an e-reader device such as a Kindle or Nook?
For most people it is the astonishingly realistic quality. They are intrigued and somewhat mystified by how much the paper and ink resembles what they see on a traditional printed page. Even the visual color and texture of the paper is crisp, clear, and comfortably viewed despite challenges like bright light that can make reading text on a computer or smart phone screen very difficult. The contrast between the ink and paper is remarkable, and the process of flipping the pages is even much like that of a “real” book. Most good quality e-readers are so seamlessly designed, in fact, that it is easy to forget that you are actually just looking at pixels of light bouncing around beneath a plate of glass.
You’ll see the page blink momentarily as all of that technological work happens in the wink of an eye.