Melville House Books

Technology

• Overanalyzing Neil Gaiman’s Digital Minds Conference keynote address

  Yesterday, we reported on Neil Gaiman’s recent keynote address at the London Book Fair’s Digital Minds Conference.  In that speech, Gaiman told his audience that “Amazon, Google and all of those… Read more »

• New e-textbooks tell your teacher when you haven’t done your homework

  Every student’s worst nightmare is nearly a reality—textbooks that tell your professor when you haven’t done your course reading. According to David Streitfeld in The New York Times, a number of… Read more »

• Inventor of the Kindle: Amazon is the “mean stepmother in a fairy tale”

  On Monday, The New York Times’ Bits blog had an illuminating insight into one of the minds that created the Amazon Kindle. Indeed, the fate of the book was a common… Read more »

• “The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly.”

  The latest issue of The Baffler contains an article by Evgeny Morozov, “The Meme Hustler”, on Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, which goes a long way in tracing the potentially dangerous semantics… Read more »

• Scrying the future in the screen of a free Nook

  Barnes & Noble announced Friday that it would be giving away Nook e-readers beginning on Sunday and lasting until the end of March. They’re offering a free Nook Simple e-ink… Read more »

• Tweaking titles on Twitter

  My inbox is 97 percent full. My goal these days is to keep it from reaching 98 percent. Now and then I delete a slew of messages, sometimes entire folders,… Read more »

• Book as startup and other dangerous idiocies

  Okay. Enough. Enough of this. New models of publishing are being opened up by technology every day. That is a good thing. The thoughts and jargon behind tech startups are… Read more »

• The changing of the pens

  In England, where they like to do things ceremonially, one pen has been retired and another is about to be inaugurated. These are, mind you, no ordinary Pilot Precise V5… Read more »

• Google Docs lets you collaborate with dead writers

  In order to show off its collaborative capabilities, Google Documents has created a demonstration where you can collaborate with famous (and long-dead) authors on a story. It’s actually a pretty… Read more »

• Lots of men get together and make really cool tablet for ladies that’s pink and stuff

  The newest author on the Melville House list, Mary MacLane, would well understand the limitations of the ePad Femme, a tablet designed for women by the Saudi company Eurostar Group. Running… Read more »