Sammy and Beckett’s Book Blog

I’ve often lamented the publishing industry’s inability to use its huge reserve of creative individuals to do anything interesting on the internet to promote their books. FSG’s just launched Work In Progress bucks that trend. Self described as “a shifting space—an exhibition, a meet-and-greet, a freak show—curated by our editors and writers, delivered here and to your inbox.” It falls somewhere in between a blog, newsletter and an online journal.

A great list of lists of travel books from WorldHum.

The Millions interviews Melissa Klug with the Permanence Matters Initiative.

Levi Asher gets to the heart of why it’s impossible to read more than a thousand words on a screen.

Boldtype, Flavorwire’s book newsletter ran an excellent feature about the success of serial publishing. The paperback series they feature have successfully garnered a devoted following by building a brand around their works. There’s a lot of insight here for publishers, who are so unfamiliar with their audiences that the majority of books they put out fail to make a profit. It’s also great resource for overloading your reading list with.

Over at The Millions Bill Morris lays out the sites and books that hilariously chronicle the hipster scene — the links in this article kept me laughing all afternoon.

The fight between Macmillan and Amazon over the price of ebooks illustrates some of the problems that publishers, and indirectly authors have with Amazon’s current business model — authors Tobias Buckell and Charles Stross weigh in.

Library Thing gives you listings of local bookstores and events, as well as the closest library.

I found it impossible to slowly read this article on the importance of slowness, I had to keep coming back to it because I would start skimming after a few sentences — I still haven’t finished.

Jesse Pearson recently interviewed our most infamous professor of college English in Vice. In the interview Bloom identified the internet as having the potential to both enhance and degrade one’s reading experience:

If, in fact, you have an impulse to become and maintain yourself as a deep reader, then the internet is very good for you. It gives you an endless resource. But if, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how to read, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in which you simply drown.

Such simply put statements are what has left Bloom’s supporters and detractors hanging on to his every utterance for nearly half a century.