The New York Times looks at new technological efforts to make book signings work in the age of the ebook. One idea is an e-reader add-on that lets the reader snap a photo with the author, which the author can then sign with a “digital stylus.” The photo is meant to make its way to Twitter and Facebook, of course. “Bragging potential? Endless,” says the Times. Authors: get ready to say “cheese”?
Book Signings in the Digital Age
Tuesday New Release Day: Shapiro; Bray; Dainty; Fairchild; Cooley; Euripides
New this week: You're Not Much Use to Anyone by David Shapiro; A Song for Issy Bradley by Carys Bray; After Everything by Suellen Dainty; The Blue Buick by B.H. Fairchild; Ice Shear by M.P. Cooley; and a new translation of The Bacchae by Euripides. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Copterboy
As some of you may have heard, a handful of pioneering companies are trying to use flying robots in place of cars for deliveries. In the Bay Area, the geniuses behind Tacocopter are blazing a new path for restaurants, while in France, the postal service in Auvergne is working on a system for newspapers. (Fingers crossed that somebody will try this with lit mags.)
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New Zadie Smith
Recommended reading: new fiction from Zadie Smith in the New Yorker, "Escape from New York."
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Mocha Dick
The (mostly) true story behind Moby-Dick gets the picture-book treatment in Mocha Dick: The Legend and the Fury.
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R.O.U.S.
Meet the Bosavi woolly rat, a new breed of giant rat recently discovered in the forests of Papua New Guinea. Weighing in at over three pounds and measuring more than three feet long, it's thought to be the largest known species of rat on the planet.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Faulks, Drop Caps
New this week are A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts by Sebastian Faulks and the first six titles (A through F!) in Penguin's snazzy new Penguin Drop Caps series.
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Visiting Main Street
What happens if your town's reputation was made by an author who hated it? Sinclair Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota and scathingly satirized it in Main Street (our Modern Library Revue of it), but it's the town's only claim to fame nearly a century later. At The Morning News, Matt Ray Robison visits.