That sounds like a recipe for a bunch of crap, for the crowdsourced Frankenstein's monster novel of the future, for bad writing and bad storytelling. But the opposite has somehow happened. The site has in fact attracted extremely talented writers, illustrators, musicians, animators, photographers, and video editors, all of whom are collaborating online -- and getting paid for it. In the case of hitRECord, incredibly, the cream really is rising to the top.

Self-publishing won't replace traditional publishing, but it might supplement and influence it.

In April 1951, when Jack Kerouac fed the first pieces of what would become a 120-foot scroll of paper into his Underwood portable to write the first draft of his novel, On the Road, he was, in one sense, blowing up the typewriter to make his own primitive homemade word processor. Sixty years later, Kerouac’s publisher is, in its own quiet way, blowing up the book to make – what, exactly?

I find that when someone asserts that a thing (the story), or an idea (God), is not dead, they usually mean that a nostalgic version of the thing has lapsed and not been replaced by something comparably satisfying.

A decade after Nicholson Baker’s provocative book, are American libraries still trashing perfectly collectible books?

Digital readers and paper books have little in common. But both objects have considerable merit, and this is why I think we should combine the two.

You love your books, with their meaning and their warmth, but you’re not some weepy sap.

Flavorwire’s list of the Top Ten Bookstores in the US was not supposed to piss me off, but that’s exactly what it did. It was supposed to be the sort of article you read and then forget about until someone else runs it again next year. Instead, being the disagreeable sort, I found myself dwelling on the thing and, well, getting pissed off.

I decided to look for another book, but each one I settled on was wrong for Goodreads: too fancy, too populist, too hip, too square, too predictable, too self-consciously curve bally. I would have to give up Goodreads or give up reading.

A new Kaiser Family Foundation study indicates a roughly 25% drop in print newspaper and magazine readership among kids ages 8-18 since 1999. Why? The answer lies in the Internet-saturated, online-only culture in which I have grown up.