Origami Unicorn

A Peek at Pottermore

They're letting people peek at the beta version of Pottermore. Here's Publishers Weekly's take on it.

Bookish

I looked at the announcement for Bookish, via Galley Cat. It's a new website for content providers, but I didn't see much worth talking about. Over at the Huffington Post, they did some thinking about how it could be done wrong.

When Amazon's Cloud Goes Dark

A lot of sites go down and stay down. The WSJ reports and do does the NYT, both sites updating as the situation changes. A practical lesson in why concentration also demands backup.

Realms of Fantasy Relaunch Begins

The magazine is beginning its relaunch, with its former editors back in place. Their website tells what's going on, and they start the machinery back up.

That Intellectual Property Thing Again

It seems that this editor believed that anything posted on the web was free content. It is the case that the unwitting content providers had other ideas. NPR reports. You will remember the controversy over on Smart Bitches, where they review romance novels. They had a few comments about this, too, and a page of definitions.

New Editors

Strange Horizons has a new editor and Fantasy Magazine is to become a companion to Lightspeed. The first seems to be a natural progression. The second it's not so clear that the same editor for two magazines, albeit with different foci, is a good thing. Time will tell.

Talking About Ereading

It talks about ereading and making ebooks: Teleread. everything from ereaders reviewed to queries about how and with what to do conversions.

The Reading Experience

So what do the different ereaders look like close up, closer up, and at high magnification? All that, and several printed products too compared at BIT-10.

Commanding the Eyeballs

Delayed because of the ash cloud's shadow over the London Book Fair, some comments on the future of publishing in a world where content is delivered in other ways than print. The Bookseller.com: "....US digital guru Mike Shatzkin has warned publishers that 'content is being devalued by technology' and that the succesful publishers of the future will be those which 'command the eyeballs.'"

A Brief History of eBook Wars

The in-progress change-over to more ebooks than paper ones has been nothing if not contentious. The New Yorker summarizes the most recent round of skirmishes, and mentions most of the other encounters at least in passing.