Revista Bang! n.º 11

O novo número da revista Bang! começa a ser distribuído já a partir do próximo dia 4 de Novembro nas lojas Fnac. Entre o conteúdo habitual, é merecedor de destaque o conto O Chapéu do Especialista (World Fantasy Award 1999) de Kelly Link, a entrevista a Luís Filipe Silva, sobre a antologia Pulp Fiction Portuguesa, e as crónicas de David Soares, Afonso Cruz e Fernando Ribeiro.

Prémio José Saramago 2011 para Andréa del Fuego

Andréa del Fuego foi hoje anunciada como vencedora da 7.ª edição do Prémio José Saramago, pelo seu romance Os Malaquias. Torna-se assim na segunda brasileira a receber este prémio, que em 2003 foi atribuído a Adriana Lisboa.

As declarações do júri, e o texto lido por Pilar del Rio durante a cerimónia de entrega do prémio, podem ser consultados na página da Fundação José Saramago. Adicionalmente, o primeiro capítulo de Os Malaquias encontra-se também disponível online.

Literatura Gótica: Caderno de anotações de Bram Stoker

Foi recentemente encontrado um caderno de anotações de Bram Stoker, que revela uma faceta mais íntima do autoor, descrevendo a sua vivência em Dublin, entre 1871 e 1878, e em Londres, entre 1879 e 1881. O caderno será publicado pela Robson Press em 2012, ano em que se comemora o centenário da morte do criador de Dracula, com o título The Lost Journals of Bram Stoker. Ler mais no The Independent, The Bookseller e The Guardian.

Vencer a inércia: NaNoWriMo 2011

É esmagador o peso de uma folha em branco; uma infinidade de caminhos que podemos percorrer, um sem fim de possibilidades limitadas apenas pela imaginação. Não é, portanto, de admirar que aqueles que aspiram a escrever acabem por adiar indeterminadamente o início desse processo, preferindo a ilusória fantasia de um possível sucesso, à certeza de um fracasso. Neste sentido, o NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) é uma excelente oportunidade para quebrar esse ciclo vicioso. Criado em 1999 por Chris Baty, o NaNoWriMo visa incentivar a escrita, desafiando os participantes a escrever um romance de pelo menos 50.000 palavras ao longo do mês de Novembro. A inscrição é feita no website oficial, onde poderão também encontrar os fórums onde se reúne a comunidade do NaNoWriMo, um centro de partilha de ideias e recursos.

Para além desta iniciativa, o jornal The Guardian tendo vindo a publicar diversos artigos da série “How to Write Fiction” (também disponíveis como eBook), entre os quais:

Geoff Dyer on freedom

Jill Dawson on getting started

Andrew Miller on creating characters

Rachel Cusk on point of view

Meg Rosoff on finding your voice

DBC Pierre on convincing dialogue

Adam Foulds on description with meaning

Kate Mosse on the importance of plot

Mark Billingham on creating suspense

MJ Hyland on revising and rewriting

Estas são apenas algumas das razões para embarcar na fantástica aventura que é a escrita já a partir do próximo mês.

Leituras Digitais (16 a 22 de Outubro)

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

Digital to dominate by 2020

More than half of people working in the industry think sales of e-books will overtake those of their printed counterparts by the end of this decade.

That is among the early findings from The Digital Census 2011, The Bookseller’s annual survey of digital trends and opinions. Responses are still being collected, but provisional figures from the survey show around a quarter (25.8%) forecast that a ‘tipping point’ of sales from print to digital will occur between 2015 and 2019, with smaller numbers predicting it will happen in 2012 (4.9%), 2013 (8.6%) or 2014 (16.4%). The balance of sales will tip sooner in the US but later in other regions of the world, survey respondents suggested.

Absent players: libraries and ebook platforms

The lack of diversity in the library ebook marketplace demonstrates an immaturity in how we envision providing access to ebook services.  For libraries, it gives us an opportunity to try to craft our own future.  COSLA, the consortium of State Librarians, has argued for an ebook lending platform [pdf] that offered ebook access via a national library collective; the Internet Archive has been attempting to buy (not lease) ebooks directly from publishers to support digital lending in a manner analogous to print practice.  While neither have taken full wing, both efforts suggest that libraries have the ability to articulate digital futures before they succumb to the entry of ebook retailers that have no history of serving our communities.

Cold facts: E-book sales are accelerating while print sales are plunging

Twenty years of the World Wide Web only increased the sale of books. Just a few years after the Kindle was launched e-book sales are accelerating and print sales are plunging. Here are the facts that interest the numbers nerds who follow these things.

What Will It Take For International E-Book Markets To Take Off?

Big U.S. publishers are now reporting that e-books now make up between 15 and 20 percent of their sales—a dramatic and quick rise since 2010. But in the rest of the world, it’s a very different story. In the UK, e-books make up about six percent of sales, but that’s as close it gets to U.S. levels. In Germany, Spain, France, and Sweden, e-books account for only 1 percent of book sales; e-book sales in most of Latin America, Asia and Africa are negligible.

European e-book markets are still nascent for several reasons, including a lack of affordable e-readers, high e-book prices, and a scarcity of books in digital formats. Some say it’s just a matter of time before other countries catch up to the U.S. But a new report from O’Reilly Media, “The Global eBook Market: Current Conditions & Future Projections” and discussions at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week suggest that foreign countries won’t necessarily follow an identical but delayed path to widespread e-book adoption.

How Amazon Makes Money From The Kindle

If one thing is true about Amazon, it's that it thinks long-term. The company's core commerce business wasn't profitable for seven years. Now it's wildly profitable. Amazon began offering cloud services in 2002. Now it's one of the leaders in the sector.

Kindle is a decade-long investment in a media consumption and distribution ecosystem. It's something Amazon can't afford not to do because it needs to disrupt itself. And it's something that can pay off hugely down the road.

Digital textbooks open a new chapter

South Korea, one of the world's highest-rated education systems, aims to consolidate its position by digitising its entire curriculum.

By 2015, it wants to be able to deliver all its curriculum materials in a digital form through computers. The information that would once have been in paper textbooks will be delivered on screen.

Where Will Digitization Take Us? We Don’t Know for Sure, But We’re Heading There Fast

According to the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, by 2010, ebooks represented 6.2% of the total unit market share with nearly 112 million units sold, compared to only nine million units sold in 2008. The dramatic growth in digital products is even more impressive when you look at the revenue figures, which grew from $1.88 billion in 2008 to $3.38 billion in 2010, which means that people are increasingly willing to pay for electronic content. Meanwhile, according to the same source, sales of printed books have been declining every year. In the education market, for example, there is steady and growing adoption of all digital formats, including digital databases, e-books, digital curriculum supplements, and mobile applications. This is coming at the expense of printed publications. In the K-12 segment, from 2008 to 2010, printed book revenue was down 13.7%, while revenue from digital formats was up 45%.

This trend represents a true paradigm shift in how we generate and consume information, and it means a significant change in the kinds of tools that we have available for learning and teaching.

14,000 DRM-Free Project MUSE Ebooks To Go Live in January

Johns Hopkins University Press’s Project MUSE recently announced details about its new ebook collections, including more than 14,000 titles from 66 university presses and scholarly publishers, which are available to order now but won’t be made accessible until January 1, 2012.

The titles are available exclusively as part of 26 separate collections, by subject or by publication year; titles will not be sold individually. Each ebook will be a searchable PDF file, without digital rights management (DRM) or restrictions on simultaneous use, printing, or downloading.

Kobo Unveils Kobo Vox, $200 Color Tablet e-Reader

Responding quickly to Amazon’s Kindle Fire e-reading tablet, e-book retailer Kobo is releasing Kobo Vox, a seven inch, full-color, multimedia digital reading device for $200. Reminiscent of both the Kindle Fire and B&N’s NookColor, the new device runs the Android 2.3 OS and offers access to 15,000 free apps.

The new Kobo Vox is available for pre-order and offers all the functionality—read books, magazines and newspapers, play games and use apps, listen to music, watch videos and movies—consumers expect from tablet devices. It also looks like B&N’s NookColor has really set the standard for competing in a tablet marketplace utterly dominated by the iPad. B&N’s notion that a seven inch, reasonably priced tablet (half the price of an iPad) with full multimedia functionality; designed for a targeted range of media consumption, seems to have hit a sweet point in the digital marketplace and is driving the development of these new reading/media devices.

The last of Britain's independent bookshops

Independent bookshops are disappearing fast from Britain's High Streets and in the past five years alone, their numbers have fallen by a quarter.

They are facing an uphill struggle as supermarkets undercut them on best-seller prices and as an increasing number of customers shop online or cut back their book buying altogether.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

A version of this list appears in the October 30, 2011 issue of The New York Times Book Review. Rankings reflect sales for the week ending October 15, 2011.

E-Book Fiction

1.                      THE BEST OF ME, by Nicholas Sparks

2.                      THE MILL RIVER RECLUSE, by Darcie Chan

3.                      THE AFFAIR, by Lee Child

4.                      THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett

5.                      THE MARRIAGE PLOT, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Complete List »

E-Book Nonfiction

1.                      KILLING LINCOLN, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard

2.                      KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL, by Anthony Bourdain

3.                      BOOMERANG, by Michael Lewis

4.                      HEAVEN IS FOR REAL, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent

5.                      UNBROKEN, by Laura Hillenbrand

Complete List »

Infográficos

Vídeos

Max Franke of epubli sheds light on the German ebook market

Chrome Experiment - WebGL Bookcase

Feiras e Leilões - Outubro 2011

Feira do Livro LGBT 2011

Data: 22 a 30 de Outubro de 2011, das 18h00 às 23h00

Local: Centro LGBT

  Organizada pelo Centro de Documentação da Associação ILGA Portugal com o intuito de promover a literatura e autores/as LGBT no mercado editorial português junto do público, a Feira do Livro LGBT 2011 continua a ter espaço para a divulgação de outros géneros e autoras/es, sempre que partilhem os mesmos objetivos de igualdade e de respeito por todas as pessoas.

A edição deste ano conta com uma programação diversificada, que inclui Conversas e Sessões de Autógrafos com escritoras/es bem conhecidas/os - Ana Zanatti, João Tordo, João Firmino e Marisa Medeiros – e a conhecer melhor - Cris Henriques, Fábio Lima, Felipe Neves e Francesca White.

Feira do Livro Bertrand Colombo

Data: 23 de Outubro até 4 de Novembro de 2011

Local: Centro Comercial Colombo, Praça Central, piso 0

Leilão de Livros, Manuscritos, Fotografia, Pintura, Gravura, Desenho, Acções

Organização: José Vicente (livraria Olisipo)

Data: 24, 25 e 26 de Outubro de 2011, pelas 21h00

Local: Palácio da Independência

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