Oh dear. I’m really not an Amazon-hater. But this morning I inadvisedly took Fast Company magazine to task on Twitter for only writing book industry stories about Amazon and the Kindle.
In their response, Fast Company rightly pointed out that the Fast Talk section of the April edition of the magazine featured technology — aside from the Kindle — that is changing book publishing. It included (short) interviews with Josh Hug, CEO and co-founder of Shelfari (which is in fact owned by Amazon), Julia Cheiffetz, Senior Editor at HarperStudio, the team behind Scholastic’s 39 Clues, Steve Haber developer of the Sony e-reader, and Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb.
Funnily enough, I had actually bought April issue of Fast Company and completely forgotten about this (admittedly somewhat forgettable) feature. Suitably chastened, I apologised for my sweeping generalization.
I am grateful (and slightly amazed) that Fast Company took the time to reply to my glib missive and put me straight. However, I do think there is a tendency — not just isolated to Fast Company — to use Amazon as the only frame of reference in stories about the book trade.
With this in mind, I challenged myself to pull together a quick list of current book-related things that I think are exciting that don’t (as far as know) have anything to do with Amazon (yet).
So here is a completely personal, off-the-cuff list of 26 book companies, ideas, projects, blogs, websites and trends that I think are inspiring, interesting, exciting, or worth watching (and are unconnected to Amazon):
(And yes, I realise there is a certain irony in writing a list that’s not about Amazon just to prove not everything has to do with Amazon)
- The Afterword
- Authonomy
- BookArmy
- BookCamp
- The Book Cover Archive
- The Book Depository
- Bookkake
- BookNet Canada
- Cell phone novels
- Drawn & Quarterly*
- Faber Finds
- FaceOut Books
- Gollancz’s collaboration with the D&AD Global Student Awards
- Google Books
- Gutenberg Rally beta
- Harlequin
- iPhones
- McNally Robinson
- Shortcovers
- Unbooks
- Twelve
- VANTAP
- Vromans
- We Tell Stories
- WW Norton’s Book Design Archive
Who or what would be on your list?
*Full disclosure: D+Q are distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books.
Enjoyed this! Thanks for posting. I’m glad that you felt compelled to come up with this list.
Thanks Dan – great list, and pleased that Bookkake made it on there!
Thanks James. I’m a fan of booktwo.org, bookkake, bkkeepr, and the work you did at Apt. All great stuff. And The Bookseer is brilliant — it would definitely have been on this list if it didn’t use the Amazon API!