Joyce Carol Oates on Her Writing Life

I was charmed by this short video of Joyce Carol Oates from the New Yorker. It shows her in her home in Princeton, NJ. She briefly discusses her daily routines of writing.

"Anything I’ve encountered in the world is never as interesting as a novel… What you find out there is never as exciting as your own creation." --Joyce Carol Oates

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Oyster - A Rental Service for e-Books

If you've been waiting to rent, rather than buy, books in electronic format, here's your first opportunity:  Oyster.  The company claims that "Readers can access and read over 100,000 titles across every genre—from international bestsellers and celebrated classics, to cult sci-fi and seminal biographies."  The service costs $9.95 per month.

Access to this service is by invitation only.  If you're interested, click over and give them your email address. But be aware:  They are only offering books from HarperCollins at this time and it's only available for the iPhone.

If you'd lke to learn more about it before you sign on, you can read a more in-depth review on the Book Riot blog. Blog post author Jeff O'Neal is pretty excited about it, but I have to say that the concept excites me, yet the limitation to a single publisher isn't such an exciting idea.  Still, for the price of a single book, you have access to thousands.

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Amazon’s New Kindle Paperwhite e-Reader

Having a dedicated e-reader keeps me focused; it's a distraction-free reading experience. My main complaint about e-readers has always been the problem with flipping back and forth through a book, when that's necessary. Apparently this version of the Kindle has a new navigational feature that holds your place while you move around the book (such as referring to a previous chapter while reading the current one). While I have a second-generation Kindle, which has served my needs for vacation reading, outdoor reading, and the like for years, this review makes me wonder if I ought to upgrade. It uses the new Carta e-ink display technology.

For some people the fact that this version will have Goodreads built into the software would be a bonus as well.

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Kindle Matchbook - Amazon Pairs Physical and Electronic Books

Today Amazon announced that it will pair purchases of physical books with a low-priced Kindle ebook, a practice they are calling Kindle Matchbook. As the press release noted,

"Bundling print and digital has been one of the most requested features from customers. With Kindle MatchBook, they can keep their favorite book on their shelf, and have a copy in their digital library for reading, perhaps re-reading it with features like X-Ray and Popular Highlights."

 As the New York Times noted, the success of the program depends on whether authors, readers, and publishers embrace it, since it has not announced the Matchbook idea to publishers at the time of the press release.

But such a pairing simply makes sense to many readers who love to have physical books on their shelves but don't care much for toting a dozen books in their carry-on luggage when they vacation.  I have long wondered when a major distributor would begin a program like Kindle Matchbook, and  now that litigation over Apple's collusion with publishers is over, the time may be right for distributors to take control over book format marketing and sales, and promote them to determine what the market wants. Amazon has long favored loss-leaders to capture market share. That it might lead on this idea made sense to me.

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