Category: News: Arts & Entertainment (Page 11 of 25)

Slate.com has an interesting piece on Amazon’s top reviewers. (Reviewers are the regular joes who post customer reviews on Amazon.) It seems that the top reviewers, who do get a certain amount of perks (in particular free books), are perhaps more influenced by those perks than by the actual value or literary merit of what they are reading.

There are two ways to spin this story.

1) The top reviewers are all hard working, random people, who love to read books and have figured out how to make the system work for them. Who doesn’t want more free stuff?

2) The top reviewers are all hard working, random people, who propel themselves to the top using any means possible so that they can gain fame, small fortune (in the form of free stuff) and Amazon status.

Brilliant or dodgey?

Quote: From Slate: This is not to say that a Top 10 ranking doesn’t come with some sub rosa incentives for the reviewer. Free books, first and foremost; in an e-mail, Grady Harp told me he was “inundated with books from new writers and from publishers who know I love to read first works.” This fall, when it invited select Top Reviewers to join its Vine program, an initiative, still in beta-testing, to generate content about new and prerelease products, Amazon extended the range of perks. “Vine Voices” like Mitchell and Harp can elect to receive items ranging from electronics to appliances to laundry soap. As long as they keep reviewing the products, Amazon’s suppliers will keep sending them.

Why does any of this matter? Because this breaks the illusion that the reviewers are impartial customers who review a book because they liked/disliked it.

This is the thing: books on tables in a store; book at the end of an aisle; books reviewed in newspapers, magazines and blogs; books tagged in Shelfari; books “recommended” in any form are open to placement (i.e., someone has paid or done something in exchange for that book to be there).

I’m a top 500 reviewer on Amazon.ca and I review books on my site. But I only review books that I have actually read. I only review books that I think are worth talking about. And apparently, I’ve only reviewed 24 books on Amazon.ca. I’ve certainly read and reviewed more than 24 books here so I could add some type of review to Amazon, bump up my rank and perhaps establish greater credibility for myself, thereby gaining the interest of more publishers and more reviewers so that I could get more speaking engagements and more books and maybe more business helping publishers promote their books.

So where’s the line between building your credibility as a reviewer and saying “this space is for sale”?

What do you think?

(Source: Thanks to Darren Barefoot for sending this over the Slate article.)

The Annick Press house is a very cute house in Toronto. And in that house are two very smart women named Lisa and Alicia. In fact, there are many smart people in that house. And every day around 3:30 in the afternoon they get together and have tea and talk about their books and the interesting things that are going on with their authors, friends and other animals in the publishing world.

On what was surely a bright and sunny day in December, Lisa and Alicia launched a blog.

A blog!

It’s true. A very fine blog indeed.

The end.

(But not really the end because you can keep up with the story on the Tea Time at Annick Press blog.)

annickpressblog.blogspot.com

I heard very sad news yesterday. Raincoast Books, a Canadian publisher here in Vancouver, has closed its publishing department and laid off several staff members. Raincoast is continuing its distribution and wholesale services.

For a small industry, it is really disappointing to lose a Canadian-owned and operated program and my heart goes out to the staff laid off and to those still working in the company.

I wish Raincoast better finances for 2008, and I wish personal happiness and good fortunes to those incredible people let go.

JK Rowling’s handwritten book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, sold at Sotheby’s for £1,950,000 ($4,062,930 CDN) to …

AMAZON.COM

Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children’s Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten–all 157 pages of it–and it looks gorgeous. It’s bound in brown leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.

Amazon.com posted a review of the book and some incredible photos. There’s also a short video clip:
http://decenturl.com/amazon/jk-rowling-book

I’m giddy just thinking about what it would be like to hold that book. Here’s what the reviewer had to say:

Quote: So how do you review one of the most remarkable tomes you’ve ever had the pleasure of opening? You just turn each page and allow yourself to be swept away by each story. You soak up the simple tales that read like Aesop’s fables and echo the themes of the series; you follow every dip and curve of Rowling’s handwriting and revel in every detail that makes the book unique–a slight darkening of a letter here, a place where the writing nearly runs off the page there. You take all that and you try and bring it to life, knowing that you will never be able to do it justice. With that, let’s dig in and begin at the beginning, shall we? –Daphne Durham

Read the full review on Amazon.com

(Source: Tip from Siobhan)

There’s some debate about whether book trailers are a good idea, whether they help to sell books.

These are a couple that have been voted as favourites. To some extent, they do what they are supposed to do–they make me interested in the book.

Book trailers on The Book Standard.

Anyone got PictBridge working on their Brother printer?
I keep getting the Needs More Memory error when I connect directly to the printer with a cable or with my USB card reader.

Any tips?

Anyone try printing on photo paper? How did it work?
Printing on paper is ok but there’s a screen (dot pattern that is visible)

Anyone get the wireless working? Is there some trick?

Brother Canada has a new line of colour laser printers and I am a lucky guinea pig who is testing the Brother HL-4070CDW colour laser printer.

#1 Tip: Word of Mouth marketing works if you have a product name that is easy to remember and easy to share.
HL-4070CDW.

Oh well, I can’t change the name. I can tell you about the experience.

According to Brother Canada, the HL-4070CDW is a colour laser printer for business use.

True. The HL-4070CDW is a good business printer.

It’s perfect at what it does:

* Prints documents quickly
* Prints in colour beautifully
* Prints double sided

This is definitely a business printer. If you have a home office and do a lot of printing, this is the printer for you.

It’s quite a bit larger than a standard personal printer, but it’s much smaller than a standard business printer. (Here it is next to my HP psc 1200 series inkjet printer.)

Is it the HL-4070CDW a good printer for me?

* This is a big printer. It’s heavy and takes up a fair share of desk space (like half the desk, it needs its own table)
* You need to install the driver, this is not plug and play, it’s plug, read the instructions, try once, read the instructions more carefully, try again.

What’s the promise of the Brother HL-4070CDW colour laser printer?

This is what the Brother Canada website says (I’ll bold the key features):

Quote: The fast, compact and Wi-Fi certified HL-4070CDW is designed for outstanding business performance. It produces brilliant business colour documents at up to 21 pages per minute. With up to 2400×600 dpi print quality, you can produce bold, eye-catching reports, brochures, and presentations right from your desktop. The HL-4070CDW naturally makes your work more effective. Its automatic two-sided printing saves paper and reduces costs. A USB direct interface allows direct PictBridge and USB flash memory drive printing. A unique front-loading consumable system makes replacing consumables a breeze. Powerful, user-friendly software and connectivity including USB, parallel, Ethernet (cables not included) and an 802.11 b/g wireless connection provide a seamless printing experience for your business.
$629.99

For $629.99, this is a great printer.

* It’s fast.
* It does colour.
* It prints nicely.
* It’s quiet.

So one more time, is it a good printer for me? I have a home office and I run my own company out of shared office space. I need to do high-quality printing on occasion. I print agendas for clients, I print project reports for people I need to impress, I print presentation handouts, I like printing photos. I work in a wireless environment. I work on a Mac. I hate reading instructions, I want things to be intuitive.

These were my pitfalls:

* I couldn’t get the wireless working and that was a big selling feature for me.
* The printer is cumbersome.
* Unpacking this printer took much longer than I hoped. Lots of packaging, lots of tabs to pull and set-up steps that seemed stupid. I had to pull out all these little tabs and pieces of paper–why were they there in the first place?
* The setup was no “Mac” experience–the packaging is not sexy, the set up required carefully reading of the manual. On a positive note, there were instructions for Mac and for PC. THANK YOU!
* The USB connection works great, but I would have been pissed if I didn’t have the appropriate cables already. This is a batteries-not-included experience.
* It only prints.
* It’s not clear how many prints you get on the toner cartridges. Toner cartridges cost $74.99 to $159.99.

Again, this is a business printer. In retrospect, I need a printer, fax, scanner, and copier so this printer might not be the perfect choice for me. Thankfully Brother also offers Multi-function Centres, multi-function printer, scanner, copiers.

Overall, good experience. Thank you Brother Canada.

JK Rowling is 41 years old and worth $1 billion.

She’s the only woman and author on Forbes ‘U.K.’s Billionaires’ list.

This seems like an extraordinary amount of money.

On the one hand it’s fantastic that a book author has such fame. It’s sad that she’s the only woman. What’s with all the rich dudes?

On the other hand there appears to be weird human nature that takes over when someone gets that rich.

I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell has written about the tipping point for wealth and fandom support? Is there a point where fans start to negatively react to the wealth they’ve amassed for someone else? Is this what happened to Microsoft?

Author Michael Ondaatje won the Governor General’s Literary Award today for his novel Divisadero.

CBC has a brief report on the award and Ondaatje’s previous wins and nominations.

In June, I reviewed Divisadero by Michael Ondattje. I liked the book, but I was more enthralled by the second half of the story than the first. The first is a modern-day love story and the second is a historical love story. The historical one is written with the same magic that he brought to The English Patient. My full review is here.

And if you want sound instead of text, publisher McClelland & Stewart has a podcast of Ondaatje on BookLounge.ca.

The full list of the Governor General’s award winners for all 14 categories are available on the Canada Council website but I have a short call out to Iain Lawrence of Gabriola Island, BC, who won the English-language children’s literature award for his book Gemini Summer. A local hat’s off.

In response to the frenzied activities of those participating in the US National Novel Writing competition, where contestants endeavour to write a book in a month, Peter L. Winkler has launched National No Writing Month.

What do you have to do?

Nothing.

Well, at least no writing. In particular, avoid any fiction writing.

To help you, Winkler is going to blog about not writing. Enlighten Yourself Here.