Morning Coffee – 23 July 2018
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning. Who wouldn't love a company that makes you a lot of money? Fonts are not the perfect solution to dyslexia. Did you know you can download the [Read More ...]
Uncategorized
Japanese City Launches Smart Bus Stop Display Pilot Featuring E-ink Screens
Papercast is a startup that specializes in developing smart bus stop displays built around E-ink screens. This is the company that supplied the 32" color E-ink displays used in Singapore's mass [Read More ...]
Hawaii to Establish OER College Textbook Task Force
College textbooks are expensive. Some states and universities are countering the cost by developing archives of OER course material and even degree programs that eschew paid textbooks entirely, and [Read More ...]
Buying Social Media Followers is No Shortcut to Success
Building an audience (or a social media following) is hard work, which is why some try to take a shortcut. They fake an audience by buying followers, or they fake popularity by paying for retweets, [Read More ...]
Internet Archive Responds to Coverage of Its eBook Piracy With “Good Works” Defense
It has been some two weeks since the SFWA identified the Internet Archive's decade-old Open Library as a pirate site, and around a month since the UK Society of Authors and The Authors Guild reached [Read More ...]
NPD Reports US Print Unit Sales Up 1.9% in 2017
Print book sales showed modest growth in the US in 2017, rising almost 2% in terms of unit sales, NPD Bookscan revealed in a press release on Monday. Specific details about the number of units sold, [Read More ...]
HarperCollins Settles Canadian eBook Price-Fixing Dispute, Gets a Slap on the Wrist
Last January the Canadian Competition Bureau announced that it had reached a settlement with Apple and three of the major Canadian publishers for their role in any alleged conspiracy to raise ebook [Read More ...]
Guest Post: Eight Surprising Things it’s Time You Knew About Gulliver’s Travels
Happy 350th birthday, Jonathan Swift. Widely recognised as the leading satirist in the history of the English language, Swift found his way into the world 350 years ago on November 30, 1667. [Read More ...]
Kobo Re-Releases the Aura One With 32GB Storage
Kobo responded today to the launch of the new Kindle Oasis by releasing a new Aura One model. Launched last August, the Aura One had a 7.8" Carta E-ink screen, 8GB of storage, and cost $230. The new [Read More ...]
KDP Jumpstart Guides Authors Through the Steps of Publishing a Book
There are a hundred and one places where authors can learn about publishing a book on KDP, including online forums, webinars, niche websites, Youtube, and conferences, but that's not enough for [Read More ...]
With JK Rowling Reclaiming the Title of Highest-Paid Author, Where Do Indies Fit In?
Forbes has released its annual estimates for the highest-grossing book authors. Their piece is a click-attracting listicle, so I won't link to it here, but The Guardian reported that Rowling passed [Read More ...]
Did Sherlock Holmes Give us the Cliche ‘the Smoking Gun’?
Arthur Conan Doyle is credited by many for sparking the invention of forensic science through his character, Sherlock Holmes. Now the famed author has been falsely credited with giving us the phrase, [Read More ...]
Quartz Has Developed the World’s Worst Website Design
There seems to be an unspoken competition among certain website designers to see who can make the least usable, most bloated, and slowest to load web page. That competition was in part what inspired [Read More ...]
Bertelsmann Will Soon Own 75% of Penguin Random House
The German media conglomerate Bertelsmann announced that it hs increased its share in Penguin Random House. The international media, services and education company is acquiring another 22 percent [Read More ...]
Reading Classic Novels in an Era of Climate Change
There is a strange and troubled kind of intimacy between our own moment of climate change and 19th century Britain. It was there that a global, fossil fuel economy first took shape, through its [Read More ...]