Amazon Kindle: It Isn't the Future of Reading, Yet
If electronic books are the future—literary volumes optimized for the Kindle, the Sony Reader, the iPhone—how come two of this fall's hottest books won't be available in digital form anytime soon? Sen. Ted Kennedy's memoir, True Compass, had a dead-tree print run of 1.5 million but a pixel-version print run of zero. (It's currently No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.) Now comes word that Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, which will debut in November with a print run of 1.5 million copies, will not be available as an e-book until Dec. 26.
What gives? After all, other blockbusters, such as Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol or Mitch Albom's Have a Little Faith (or, as I refer to it, Sundays with Schmaltzie) don't discriminate among readers. Jonathan Karp, editor of the Kennedy memoir, cited the difficulty of translating photos into the new format as a reason not to do an e-version. But such concerns didn't stand in the way of publishing an audio version of True Compass. Why shut out a group of buyers from purchasing the product? And why isn't Amazon.com, which possesses immense leverage over publishers as a big purveyor of plain old books and the dominant seller of e-books, making more of a stink?
[read more]Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.
Daniel Gross is one of the most widely read financial and economic writers working today. He is a senior editor at Newsweek, where he writes the "Contrary Indicator" column. He writes the twice-weekly "Moneybox" column for Slate, which also appears on Newsweek.com.
Before joining Newsweek in the spring of 2007, Mr. Gross wrote the "Economic View" column in the New York Times, was a contributing writer to New York, and contributed regularly to magazines such as Fortune and Wired. From 1998-2007, Gross served as the editor of STERNBusiness, a semi-annual academic magazine on economics and management published by the New York University Stern School of Business.
A native of East Lansing, Michigan, Mr. Gross graduated from Cornell University in 1989, with degrees in government and history, and holds an A.M. in American history from Harvard University (1991). He worked as a reporter at The New Republic and Bloomberg News, and has contributed hundreds of features, news articles, book reviews and opinion pieces to over 60 magazines and newspapers. Areas of expertise include: economic and tax policy, the links between business and politics, the rise of the investor class, the culture of Wall Street, and business history.
He is the author of four books: "Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time" (Wiley, 1996), which was a New York Times Business bestseller and a finalist for the Financial Times "Lex" award, given to the best business history book of 1996. Translations have been published in Spanish, German, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Turkish, and Japanese; "Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance" (PublicAffairs, 2000); "The Generations of Corning: The Life and Times of an American Company," co-authored with Davis Dyer, (Oxford University Press, 20010; and "Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy," (HarperCollins, May 2007).
Mr. Gross appears frequently in the media. A regular guest on CNBC, MSNBC, and National Public Radio, he has also appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Bloomberg Television, C-SPAN, BBC, and Reuters TV, and on more than 50 radio programs and talk shows.
Mr. Gross lives in Westport, Conn., with his wife and two children.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Comments