Books of Interest for April 2013

The weather is getting quite nice down here and although I enjoy sitting out on my lanai reading and watching the alligators, books are getting more and more challenging for my eyesight. You will notice that I am attempting to gather and read digital editions of my books, even the ones I already own in ink and paper form. I really must have the ability to increase the font size to make them readable so my trusty iPad gets quite a workout.

04-01-13 – North and South — Elizabeth Gaskell
04-02-13 – Gravity’s Rainbow— Thomas Pynchon
04-03-13 – Le rouge et noir — Renate Stendhal
04-04-13 – Heat and Dust — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
04-05-13 – Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens
04-06-13 – Hotel Iris — Yukio Ogawa
04-07-13 – Steppenwolf — Hermann Hesse
04-08-13 – A Death In the Family — James Agee
04-09-13 – As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner
04-10-13 – The Blood Oranges — John Hawkes
04-11-13 – The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann
04-12-13 – Burmese Days — George Orwell
04-13-13 – Tortilla Flat — John Steinbeck
04-14-13 – Washington Square — Henry James
04-15-13 – Man’s Fate — Andre Malraux
04-16-13 – The Seamstress and the Wind – César Aira
04-17-13 – The Ravishing of Lol Stein – Marguerite Duras
04-18-13 – Two Years Before the Mast – Richard Henry Dana
04-19-13 – Dream of Scipio – Iain Pears
04-20-13 – Captain Blood — Raphael Sabatini
04-21-13 – Not Quite One of the Boys — Vincent W. Sakowski
04-22-13 – L. A. Confidential — James Ellroy
04-23-13 – Middle C — William H. Gass
04-24-13 – The Foundation Pit – Andrey Platonov
04-25-13 – Elective Affinities — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
04-26-13 – The Hive — Camilo José Cela
04-27-13 – The Forty-Five — Alexander Dumas
04-28-13 – The Garden of Departed Cats — Bilge Karasu
04-29-13 – Out — Natsuo Kirino
04-30-13 – La Vita Nuova — Dante Alighieri

EBook vs. Democracy?

Re-posted from The Daily Beast. Commentary by Andrew Sullivan in his weblog.

Don’t Burn Your Books

Nicolas Carr writes in the WSJ,

Don’t Burn Your Books—Print Is Here to Stay
The e-book had its moment, but sales are slowing. Readers still want to turn those crisp, bound pages.

Lovers of ink and paper, take heart. Reports of the death of the printed book may be exaggerated.

Ever since Amazon introduced its popular Kindle e-reader five years ago, pundits have assumed that the future of book publishing is digital. Opinions about the speed of the shift from page to screen have varied. But the consensus has been that digitization, having had its way with music and photographs and maps, would in due course have its way with books as well. By 2015, one media maven predicted a few years back, traditional books would be gone.

Half a decade into the e-book revolution, though, the prognosis for traditional books is suddenly looking brighter. Hardcover books are displaying surprising resiliency. The growth in e-book sales is slowing markedly. And purchases of e-readers are actually shrinking, as consumers opt instead for multipurpose tablets. It may be that e-books, rather than replacing printed books, will ultimately serve a role more like that of audio books—a complement to traditional reading, not a substitute.