Watching Gideon — A nice new cover design with some great typography from Nate Salciccioli. Read my Q & A with Nate here.
A Manifesto for Slow Communication — An excerpt from The Tyranny of E-Mail by John Freeman, AKA acting editor of Granta, in the Wall Street Journal:
Slow communication will preserve these threads and our ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships and our ability to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.
And on the topic of slow communication…
On Feeding — an older, but lovely, post from A Working Library on the difference between unread books and an unread RSS reader (via booktwo.org):
those two sights—the stack of books and the unread count in my feed reader—evoke dramatically different responses. To the books, I feel excitement, eagerness… The act of reading is always unfinished…
Yet my feed reader—also always unfinished—evokes within me a dread… I grow weary as the unread count increases, as it fills up with new articles before I can skim the old ones. In it’s timeliness—most blog posts have short half-lives and so must be read now—and the mathematical precision with which the reader measures its contents, I am stripped of my eagerness to read and filled, instead, with despair. Instead of a thing to enjoy, it makes reading a thing to get done with… It’s reading made efficient.
The minimal design of the A Working Library site is really nice too by the way.
Book Cover Design in India 1964-1984 at A Journey Round My Skull.
Prix Fixe — Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette Livre, makes some interesting comments on e-book pricing in the Financial Times, notably that publishers are “very hostile” to Amazon’s pricing strategy:
“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said…
There was a “muscular” debate in the industry in the US, he added. Retailers were paying publishers more than $9.99 for each e-book, so were selling them at a loss: “That cannot last . . . Amazon is not in the business of losing money. So, one day, they are going to come to the publishers and say: ‘by the way, we are cutting the price we pay’. If that happens, after paying the authors, there will be nothing left for the publishers.”
Mike Shatzkin has written an interesting follow-up piece about pricing.
Noury also makes more interesting observations about consolidation in the industry in a separate article in the FT, which seem very prescient in light of Disney’s acquisition of Marvel this week.
And finally…
46 Essential Rock Reads — A list to argue over on the LA Times‘ Jacket Copy blog.
Thanks for the post Dan! Although I like this comp, the publisher chose to go another excellent direction designed by Jeff Miller. Hopefully he’ll post it soon, but I wanted to give the shout out.
Thanks Nate. I had a feeling you’d said this wasn’t the final cover, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen your comment (twitter?). The type is just so nice though! And Jeff Miller’s work looks great as well. I’ll look out for his version!