Book Country is a website from Penguin Random House that enables thousands of amateur writers to exchange manuscripts and notes. Some even go on to get their work published. It's like an online MFA program from the comfort of your laptop. Bob speaks to Molly Barton the Global Digital Director for Penguin at Penguin Random House, and Carl E. Reed, an active Book Country user, about the site.
Wednesday 11 September 2013
The Netflix for books is here, it’s mobile, and it makes Amazon look old
As of now, the world has a platform that brings the power of Netflix-style recommendations and all-you-can-eat buffets to bear on one of the world’s oldest and greatest products: books.
Today, New York-based startup Oyster is launching the beta version of its iPhone app. (You can request an invite at Oyster’s website). For $9.95 a month, you get unlimited access to the 100,000 titles from a range of publishers, including HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan are so far notably absent from the list of announced partners.) You also see what your friends are reading, get recommendations and staff picks, and find books sorted by curated categories, such as “Sports Stories,” “Business Essentials,” and “Popular Science.” All of this is packed into a highly usable mobile experience.
Amazon launches Kindle Matchbook: discounted e-books for those who own the hard copy
When Amazon launched AutoRip, we looked at our bookshelves and wished that us readers would get something similar. Fortunately, the company had the same idea, and is now announcing Kindle Matchbook. In short, if you've bought one of 10,000 selected titles from Amazon, you'll be entitled to snag a digital copy for between $2.99 and nothing. The service launches in October and there's no limit on when the purchases were made -- meaning that you could be offered an awkward reminder of the literature you were gorging back in 1995.
At Library of Congress, changes are afoot in technology as well as in physical space
The Library of Congress no longer needs the computer room that visitors once used to search its electronic card catalogue. These days the entire library has a wireless Internet connection, so workers this summer put a collection of old microfilm machines in that room instead.
Meanwhile, the library’s old-school physical catalogues, the kind filled with carefully penned index cards, have long since been relegated to cool basement hallways where schoolchildren marvel at their obscurity.
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