Books Without Limits

I love this announcement from Apple that they will open their iBookstore to those who self publish. I can think of a few friends and colleagues that will be able to take advantage of this change and use it to make money for their art and reach a larger audience.  Kudos, Apple!
<blockquote>To take advantage of the service, you must first have an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) for each work you wish to make available for sale. Obtaining an ISBN isn’t as difficult a process you might think; it can take as little as two weeks. Second, you must have a copy of the work in ePUB format. There are a variety of different ways to convert text into ePUB format, many of which are free (a list can be found on the LexCycle website). You must also have a valid iTunes Store account as well as a US tax ID.
The last requirement is that you, as the author, must have access to a modern Mac. In order to participate, you must encode your eBook with Apple’s software, which needs an Intel Mac running at least OS X 10.5. The encoding process most likely adds Apple’s very own brew of DRM to the book, ensuring that your writings won’t be distributed outside of the iPhone or iPad.</blockquote>

<a href=”http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/05/ibooks-opened-to-self-publishers.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss”>Original article from Ars Technica</a>

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In a nod to changing technology, Harper Collins will offer content for the iPhone. Nice!

HarperCollins announced Wednesday that it had set up a special link, http://mobile.harpercollins.com, that will allow browsers to view excerpts from more than a dozen new releases, including Michael C. White’s “Soul Catcher” and Michael Korda’s “Ike,” a biography of President Eisenhower.

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It is impossible not to have heard of the tragic deaths at Virgina Tech last week in a Columbine-style school shooting. As happens with any tragedy in this day of instant media access, the perpetrator of the crime is being analyzed by the general public, as if it would be possible to make sense from the senseless. Theories have run the gamut, from autism and other mental illness to seeing the perpetrator’s college writing as a “flag”.

EW.com had Stephen King, master horror writer, weigh in on the theory that the killer’s writings could have been some kind of flag. King, in short, says there is no evidence that writing is anything more than a safe outlet for these kinds of thoughts. He ventures that we shouldn’t shut down this outlet for the rest of the world out of paranoid from this incident, and cites several examples of authors whose writing is violent or horror-filled that are nothing more than nice people who write.

My favorite quote from the article:

For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do (James Patterson, for instance, a nice man who has all too often worked the street that my old friend George used to work). Cho doesn’t strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ”just mean.” Essentially there’s no story here, except for a paranoid a–hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own.

You can read the full article here.

Tags: stephen king virginia tech

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