Melville House Books

Literature & technology

• A perspective on the future of the book

  Travis Alber and Aaron Miller both have undergraduate degrees in English, and Aaron also has a MFA in creative writing from Irvine. One might expect them to have typical literary… Read more »

• An unwritten masterpiece

  MobyLives recently reported on the new espionage in literature: Amazon and other ebook-sellers harvesting information about our reading habits and passing it to publishers, some of whom use it to… Read more »

• Your reading behaviour is being monitored

  The Wall Street Journal reported last week on the extent to which big corporations are looking over our shoulders when we read: The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple… 2 / Read more »

• Darwin in motion

  One of the cooler applications of new technologies to understanding the history of ideas I’ve run across lately is Ben Fry’s The Preservation of Favored Traces, which shows the changes… Read more »

• Mapping the Oz genome

  Earlier this week, Slate’s Lexicon Valley podcast examined the question of writers’ individual style and whether they are distinctive enough to be recognized. Intuition tells us that they should be, at… 2 / Read more »

• Enter the Storyverse

  Most avid readers would readily admit to having an obsessive side. A tech startup, Small Demons, aims to appeal to, nay manipulate, those literary obsessions, and the idea behind it… 1 / Read more »

• Discovering books on Goodreads

  Last week Goodreads’ Otis Chandler wrote an article describing various ways in which books are discovered, both online and off. For anyone unfamiliar with Goodreads, the site is a socially-oriented online… Read more »

• New censorship is about money, not ethics

    As is regularly discussed on MobyLives, publishing is awash with instances of arbitrary censorship.  For example, here by Apple and here by Paypal.  It’s apparent that journalists and editors are no longer afraid of… 2 / Read more »

• Internet Archive to archive all books

  As detailed in this New York Times report by David Streitfeld, the 15-year-old non-profit Internet Archive has started a hugely ambitious project to assemble and scan all of the world’s… Read more »

• Pulitzer-winning poet Louise Glück posts 5-star Yelp review of cleaning service

  Or actually, to be more exact, her assistant posted the review for her. (Via The Poetry Foundation) Here it is: Assuming these are actually her words, Glück’s Yelp shares with her poetry… Read more »