James Allen Willis

Nicholas Negroponte, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and also the founder of the One Laptop per Child Association made a rather bold prediction at the Techonomy conference in in Lake Tahoe, CA last week. His prediction? Printed books are “dead” within five years. Here’s a summary of his comments [...]

Multiple news sources are reporting that Barnes & Noble, the bookseller with 720 stores and the recent Nook e-reader, is thinking about putting itself up for sale. (Full disclosure: B&N is my favorite book or any other kind of store. I’m a fan.) Being a publicly traded company, B&N is constantly under pressure to try [...]

Contemporary and historical romance novelist Patricia Ryan recently had an online “chat” with TeleRead where she offered her insights and predictions about established authors turning to self-publishing via e-books. Since 1995, Ryan has authored 27 novels and novellas for the likes of Bantam, Berkley Prime Crime, Signet, NAL, Harlequin and and St. Martin’s. It’s a [...]

CNET recently interviewed Ian Freed, Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle. Among the interesting things he said was that Amazon sells 70-80 percent of all e-books sold. When asked about claims by Apple and Barnes & Noble that they have something like 20 percent of the market each, Freed said Amazon’s pretty sure [...]

It seems a trend at some coffee and sandwich shops in New York City is to ban computer use, at least for a few hours each day. In a New York Times article on August 2, author Nick Bilton relates his experience with “please put down the Kindle sir.” The interesting bit of news from [...]

The following quote from Jason Epstein is from an article he published in the The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010: “The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly [...]

Before departing on a recent business trip to London, I purchased an Amazon Kindle 2 (Global version) ebook reader for the trip. The trip was my shameless justification for buying. You see, I’m a hopelessly, forever-comitted reading addict. I’ve been a regular reader since my youth, and my reading habit seems to have progressed from [...]