data crunch

Photo: Karlos J. Afonso, DeviantArt

"Amazon is now letting indie bookstores sell its Kindle tablets, and as you might expect, the online giant paints this new program as the best of both worlds: Customers get Kindles, and the stores get a 10 percent cut when customers use the tablet to buy books. […]

     For Becky Anderson, proprietor of Anderson’s Bookshop outside Chicago and immediate past president of the American Booksellers Association, Amazon owes indies much more for what she describes as the retail giant’s 'free-riding' on the marketing and community engagement provided by small brick-and-mortar shops. 'I could not imagine partnering with them on anything. They try to undercut everything we do,' Anderson says. 'To me, this is insulting.'"
— Marcus Wohlson, Wired
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"[…] When I had to read more than a hundred novels for the Man Booker Prize last year, the most obvious thing was to keep them with me on the Kindle 3 that all members of the jury were given for the purpose. But I found myself becoming so impatient with the device that I worried whether it was influencing my view of the writing; the only way to judge the books fairly, I felt, was to read them all on printed pages.
     In my experience, it’s an essential component of reading that one should be able to see around the corner. With a Kindle, Jane Austen would never have been able to make a joke like the one she drops in at the end of Northanger Abbey, nodding to her readers about the novel nearly being at an end: readers, she wrote, 'will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.'
     This is not a technophobe’s problem; it’s one that technology needs to solve. And it is – I would venture – the reason why ebook sales have slowed among those who were the first to catch on."
— Gaby Wood, The Telegraph
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