Day of the shred: interactive PC game invites you to destroy a book
In a move that will prompt shocked-face emojis across the publishing world, Bristol-based indie game developer Alistair Aitcheson has released The Book Ritual, an “interactive art-piece played using a real-world book of… Read more »
New Yorkers protest Amazon providing ICE with tech
This past May Day, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), a coalition of low income communities of color, took over Amazon’s corporate offices in midtown to protest the company’s involvement… Read more »
Why are we obsessed with reading books more quickly?
Let’s begin Friday with three questions that look a lot easier to answer than they actually are: How many books do you read in a year? Would you like to… Read more »
Scribd to launch original content series with non-fiction by Garrett Graff
Scribd, an online reading subscription service founded in 2007, announced two months ago that they would begin publishing original content, in addition to providing subscription-based access to ebooks, audiobooks, articles, and other… Read more »
How the publishing business could integrate blockchain technology
Let’s face it, book publishers are not always the first to adapt to new technologies. I mean, how many of our entry level jobs involved taking dictation? Imagine an analogous… Read more »
Robot authors trying to compete with Orwell
A non-profit lab called Open AI has announced that they’ve trained a machine to read, write, translate, and summarize text unsupervised. According to Open AI’s blog post, the objective is… Read more »
HMV rescue marred by widespread store closures
This week HMV, the venerable UK chain record store, was saved from the brink of collapse by a buyout from Canadian entrepreneur and head of Sunrise Records, Doug Putman. The BBC reports… Read more »
The typewriter that kept coming back
Reportedly, Mark Twain claimed to be the first author to use the typewriter, and his entire manuscript for Life on the Mississippi was submitted to the publisher in typeface. But, despite his… Read more »
We will not be rid of fake news until we learn how to detect it
One media professor is taking our country’s reluctance to discern critical information to heart, and teaching students how to detect fake news in social media and more traditional media. For… Read more »
Will a new tech competition solve the adult literacy crisis in the US?
It’s easy enough for those in the publishing industry to focus our efforts on the reading public, furiously vying for their attention. But there is a troublingly large population of… Read more »