Careless Book Design

Do You Want Your Books in Google's Cloud?

Kindle Errors and Typos

A New ISBN for Every Ebook Format?
There has been a lot of discussion recently as to whether it makes sense (economically or logically) to assign a unique ISBN to every e-book format. The most recent discussion was on Twitter via the #ISBNhour hashtag. The first problem is to determine how many different e-book formats there are. Does anyone actually know the answer? Without doing any research at all, I can think of these: MOBI/PRC, AZW, PDF, RTF, HTML, ePub, LIT, LRF, PDB. Maybe, just maybe, that represents 20 or 25 percent of the possibilities (does the new Vook count?). In reality, as has been pointed out, the answer is prob

The Evolution Conspiracy Virtual Book Tour Commences
Slipdown Mountain Publications LLC author (and my charming daughter) Lisa A. Shiel has kicked off her month-long virtual book tour for her new book The Evolution Conspiracy, Vol I: Exposing Life’s Inexplicable Origins & The Cult of Darwin. Here’s this week’s schedule: Monday, 2 Nov — Home School Buzz (book review) Tuesday, 3 Nov — Book Tours and Mor

E-Books – Formats and Future
To everyone who insists that the future of e-book will be multifunction devices ruled by the ePub standard, I have but one word. Balderdash! But, you say, look at the popularity of the iPhone and other multipurpose devices. Haven’t they fueled the rapid rise of e-books? Aren’t people clamoring for a single format standard? I think most e-book prophets have succumbed to the same shortsightedness that has doomed innumerable technology forecasts in the past. Maybe too many of them are too young to have watched forecast after forecast fail miserably. Real technological progress is not an easily graphed growth function. And that’s the t

Proper Grammar Ain’t Always What You Think
I’ve read numerous, somewhat snobby or even snooty, blog posts that profess to set everyone straight on what is and is not proper use of the English language. Many of the most common examples cause me to wonder if any of the bloggers own a dictionary of the English language. Herewith are a few of the oft-cited examples that illustrate more wishful thinking than facts. Don’t believe me? Go look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls (or your Merriam-Webster Collegiate). Datum/data and agendum/agenda (there are other similar examples). In each of those pairs, the first word is a singular form and the second a plural f

Will E-Books Peak Soon?
Having monitored the genesis and the recent explosion of e-book readers and sales, I can’t help but wonder whether such explosive growth is, in any way, sustainable. Once everyone with an iPod Touch and/or iPhone fiddles around with reading on that tiny screen for a period (weeks, months, years?), I suspect they will either long for, and search out, actual printed books or just give up on reading anything but snippets of news and information. I think even the dedicated e-book reading devices may lose their coolness factor. More and more, I have stumbled upon online comments, blog posts, articles, etc. in which people who have tried one or more of the readin