Why do e-book outfits love the letter 'K'? (Part 3)

"[…] People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

     E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.
     That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. And some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading."
— Julie Bosman and Matt Richtel, The New York Times
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"[…] This post is just one of those random things that occurred to me while I was doing the laundry and feeding the fish (full disclosure: I do not have fish, because I find their calmness infuriating). It’s just a theoretical post on how to write a good ebook. I have no recent experience in writing good ebooks whatsoever. It is all lies, what you have been hearing.
     Now, let’s just focus on the matter at hand, shall we? Picking a Good Topic for Your Ebook.
     Incidentally, 'ebook' begins to look like Wookie language if you write it often enough. I should write an ebook about English words that sound like Wookie words.
     Except no, no I shouldn’t. Because there is no market for such an ebook. This is the most important thing to consider. Before you waste any time setting pen to paper, is there any point in finishing (or starting) the project? The only way to answer that is to figure out how many people out there need to know about the subject on which you’re writing.
     Then you need to figure out how many of those people care that they need to know about it. This number will be much smaller.
     For example, many people out there need to know how to not be jerks while driving. How many of those people do you imagine would actually buy an ebook called, How to Not Be a Jerk While Driving? You see my point."
— Taylor Lindstrom, Men With Pens
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"The shift towards ebooks is having a significant influence on every part of the book industry, from publishers working to reinvent their value proposition to brick and mortar bookstores fighting for their future.
     But what about the carbon footprint of the book industry? Does this shift represent an opportunity for the industry given the growing number of books sold without even one tree falling down? Or, maybe it is also a potential risk as ebooks can actually hurt the efforts of the industry to reduce its footprint? Well, apparently it can be both."
—Raz Godelnik, TriplePundit
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Be. Quiet.

From: One Good Eye Antiques

"In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading — Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating — but then, a few years ago, he 'became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read.' [...]
The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I've learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I've learned to limit my exposure to the web [...]
And here's the function that the book — the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once — does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: 'Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.'"
— Johann Hari, Huffington Post
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