Melville House Books

Technology

• ‘Just a joke’: Amazon gets more money from UK government grants than it pays in tax

  In the continuing saga of Amazon’s tax dodging (see here and here for just a couple of our reports on this), it was revealed this week that the company’s UK operation made £4.2bn in sales… Read more »

• Amazon launches “Kindle Love Stories” podcast and Goodreads book club, eats itself

  You didn’t think that Amazon would just leave Goodreads alone did you, after subsuming it into its gaping maw earlier this year? No, rather than maintaining Goodreads as the user-generated… Read more »

• South Korean bookseller sets new standard for rock-bottom ebook prices

  The U.S. isn’t the only place where corporations are dropping ebook prices below levels the industry can support. South Korea’s largest bookstore, Kyobo (not to be confused with Canada’s lovely Kobo),… Read more »

• Magazine and newspaper apps proliferate, but risks still loom

  It still remains to be seen whether readers will warm to the idea of paying for digital content… Read more »

• The future of book scanning

  It turns out that when robots aren’t trying to kill all humans in a grim sci-fi dystopia, they can actually be pretty neat. To wit, the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at… Read more »

• The efficient new way to pay Margaret Atwood to sketch your dog

  Margaret Atwood, beloved writer, and self-appointed high priestess of the science fictional, has just launched a campaign on crowd-funding site Indiegogo to help fund a new venture called Fanado. Fanado… Read more »

• The killer of killer apps

  They’re here. Apps that undo all the hard work of the internet—aptly called “productivity apps.” They are apps to keep your mind on work and off the distractions of the… Read more »

• NEA funds effort to turn Thoreau’s Walden into a game

  This article in the Guardian points to an interesting list of recent grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts—one of which is $40,000 and going to the University of… Read more »

• Encyclopaedia Britannica – there’s an app for that

  Last month, Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that its most recent edition, published in 2010, would be the final print edition of the iconic reference books. Now, as part of its move to focus… Read more »

• Are you a victim of the QWERTY effect?

  Life may be just a little easier for John than for Dexter or Xavier. New research from cognitive scientists suggests that the ease with which words can be typed on… 1 / Read more »