Citações

  “... Não, é impossível; é impossível transmitir a sensação de vida de uma dada época da nossa existência – aquilo de que é feita a verdade, o seu significado, a sua essência subtil e penetrante. Impossível. Vivemos como sonhamos, sozinhos...”

                             Joseph Conrad, O Coração das Trevas

Feira do Livro Manuseado

Entre 19 de Fevereiro e 19 de Março, nas livrarias Assírio & Alvim.

Encontros na Poesia - Instituto Cervantes

  Dois grandes poetas contemporâneos iniciam o ciclo Encontros na Poesia que se prolongará ao longo de todo o ano. Cada poeta recitará uma parte da sua poesia e ambos manterão uma conversa sobre a criação poética. Jaime Siles (Valencia, 1951) é Catedrático em Filologia Latina na Universidade de Valência e Presidente da Sociedade Espanhola de Estudos Clássicos. Nuno Júdice (Mexilhoeira Grande, 1949) é ensaísta, poeta, ficcionista e professor universitário de português.

  Realiza-se dia 15 de Fevereiro, pelas 18h30, no Instituto Cervantes, a primeira sessão do Encontros na Poesia, ciclo que tem como objectivo juntar poetas contemporâneos portugueses e espanhóis. 

Leituras Digitais (6 a 12 de Feveiro)

Rubrica semanal de notícias e artigos relacionados com a edição de livros digitais.

Where have all the book editors gone?

  Along with booming self-publishing services that offer various levels of editing as value-added options, a cottage industry of independent contractors is quickly replacing the fabled tastemakers who once shaped literary destiny, and the effect on its quality is an open question.

Can ads in e-books fight piracy with low prices?

  See, we consumers hate ads. On the web, we block them with ad-blockers, or skip over them entirely with services like Readability or Safari Reader. They’re annoying and distracting, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they can transport malware into your computer. (I had a lot of experience dealing with this sort of malware in my time as a tech support agent in my day job. It’s nasty stuff.) When magazine publishers get ticked over this and rant at their readers for having the temerity to deprive them of revenue in this way, they’re missing the point that earning revenue by annoying your readers probably is not a recipe for long-term success.

Tear down this PDF

  The PDF document format is digital publishing’s worst enemy. For a large part, the news industry still relies on this 18-year-old format to sell its content online. PDF is to e-publishing what the steam locomotive is to the high-speed train. In our business, progress is called XML and HTML5.

Opening the ebook market

  In the ideal open-yet-market-driven eBook environment there won’t be DRM, but regardless of whether DRM lives on, the closed vertically integrated world of eBooks sales to libraries presents a bigger problem; it is that environment that needs to change. For libraries to both offer electronic collections and maintain their role of building collections for the long term we need a layered environment where the purchase of materials is separated from the where those purchased materials are hosted. Further, library patrons deserve distinct choices for the programs and devices they use for readings.

Is the future of physical book publishing the same as the future of reading and writing?

  People continue to mix and conflate the making of a thing called a book–often beautiful, many times endowed with a spiritual aura–with other, entirely separate things called reading and writing.

The Future Of Publishing

  Ebooks and ereaders were hot items this past holiday season, but while this is seen as a good thing by many people there has also been a concomitant rise in piracy of the digital books. Going forward, publisher's will have to find some way of dealing with a host of issues in an increasingly digital world. We asked our panelists this question:

  Q: What will the publishing industry look like after 10 more years of advancing technology?

  Here's what they said...

How the Internet gets inside us

  Hermione, stuck in the nineties, never did get her iPad, and will have to manage in the stacks. But perhaps the instrument of the new connected age was already in place in fantasy. For the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”—the “seeing stone” that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.

Reading in the Age of Screens

  Contemporary life is lived through screens. Initially, it was the TV that invaded our families and took over our free time. Now it’s computers, smartphones, tablets; it’s email, digital files, the cloud. For better or worse, the past quarter-century (or more) has powered a move away from the physical and into cyberspace — especially in terms of our work-life and entertainment options.

The Pitfalls of E-Book Buying: What to Look Out for Before You Purchase

  Easy downloads and convenient storage are the chief lures of a virtual library, but ownership has some irritating downsides that require your attention before you hit the e-book purchase button.

My experience with the Espresso Book Machine

  I’ve wanted to see one of these machines up close for a while now, but I had no idea that a local indie bookstore had one. So I finished my coffee, hopped on the subway, and went to buy myself a print-on-demand book.

  There’s not much I can write about the inner workings of the “big fancy robot,” as one of McNally Jackson’s employees calls it in the NPR video. It’s essentially three machines stacked together: a Xerox copier to handle the initial paper management; the custom plexiglass, steel, and blade contraption that handles the collating, binding and cutting; and a small color printer to handle the covers. (The interior pages are black and white only.)

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers -  11 Fevereiro

  This week’s Book Review introduces revamped best-seller lists, the result of many months of planning, research and design.

 On the Web, there are three entirely new lists. One consists of rankings for fiction and nonfiction that combine print and e-book sales; one is limited exclusively to e-book sales for fiction and nonfiction; and the third, Web-only list tracks combined print sales — of both hardcover and paperback editions — for fiction and nonfiction.

E-Book Fiction

1.                      TICK TOCK, by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

2.                      THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson

3.                      THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson

4.                      THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson

5.                      WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen

E-Book Nonfiction

1.                      UNBROKEN, by Laura Hillenbrand

2.                      HEAVEN IS FOR REAL, by Lynn Vincent

3.                      DECISION POINTS, by George W. Bush

4.                      BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER, by Amy Chua

5.                      THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, by Rebecca Skloot

Vídeos

Alan Moore on Libraries

Entrevista com David Steinberger (Perseus Book Group)

Neil Gaiman on Piracy

Bookeen E-ink Demo

Revista Literária Macondo

  Macondo desponta como uma publicação on-line que pretende explorar um espaço até então pouco habitado na cultura nacional: o da arte literária. Por meio da difusão de textos verbais e não-verbais, nos mais variados gêneros e formatos, o nosso objetivo é justamente a divulgação da boa literatura que, muitas vezes, não encontra seu devido lugar de promoção e, tampouco, recebe o valor que lhe é de direito.

Estando a primeira edição prevista para dia 22 de Abril, a revista Macondo publica resenhas, contos, poemas e fotografias. A revista terá periodicidade trimestral, sendo distribuída gratuitamente em formato digital.

via Blogtailors

Prémio Autores 2011 - Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores

  A II Gala do Prémio Autor 2011 realiza-se no próximo dia 21 de Fevereiro, no Centro Cultural de Belém, numa parceria da SPA com a RTP, que a transmitirá em directo, como já aconteceu em 2010, para Portugal e para o mundo.

Durante a Gala serão entregues os Prémios Autor aos criadores que mais se destacaram no ano passado nas diversas disciplinas de criação que a SPA abarca. Pela primeira vez serão atribuídos prémios ao melhor argumento original de cinema e ao melhor texto teatral de autor português representado e levado à cena no ano transacto.

No que diz respeito à literatura, os Prémios Autor apresentam três categorias, cujos nomeados pode ser consultados abaixo:

Melhor Livro de Ficção Narrativa

• “Uma Viagem à Índia” de Gonçalo M. Tavares
• “Adoecer” de Hélia Correia
• “O Bom Inverno” de João Tordo

Melhor Livro de Poesia

• “Depois de Dezembro” de António Carlos Cortez
• “Se as Coisas Não Fossem o que São” de Helder Moura Pereira
• “Escarpas” de Gastão Cruz

Melhor Livro de Literatura Infanto-Juvenil

• “A Contradição Humana” de Afonso Cruz
• “O Livro dos Quintais” de Isabel Minhós Martins
• “Pinguim” de António Mota

Para a consulta dos nomeados para as restantes áreas, consultar este link.