Saturday, May 19, 2012

True Confessions Of A Book Lover

Huffpost reporting:
Here's a dirty secret: I like books.
And I mean books, with pages made of real paper. In fact, I like them so much that I used to consider digital publishing a personal threat. I was such a loyal foot soldier in the war of paper vs. platform, that when the Kindle came out, I spent hours researching its burning point to demonstrate the absurdity of Fahrenheit 451 in a world of eReaders. (The "correct" title should be Fahrenheit 361.)
So imagine my surprise when three years later, I, a professed book lover, found myself presenting Tumblr, the microblogging service, as an ideal distribution channel and reading platform for a new fiction magazine.
I overcame my radical devotion to the printed word when I started working at Electric Literature, an indie publisher perhaps best known for being the first fiction magazine to the iPhone and also for tweeting an entire story by Rick Moody.
The fiction in Electric Literature's recently retired quarterly journal was extraordinary on any platform--including paper, though we didn't publish online. I'm now co-editor of our new magazine: Recommended Reading, which is an exclusively digital publication (online and Kindle to start). Why the drastic change to our publishing model? By publishing online, Recommended Reading is easy to share between friends, can be accessed directly through social media, and read on any smartphone. It means we can publish weekly, charge nothing, and more people will read the fiction we believe in.
We live in a culture of distraction: there's TV, Hulu, and Netflix; there's Facebook, Twitter, and OK Cupid; there are all the books you've been planning to read, the stack of New Yorkers on your coffee table, and (hopefully) some fiction journals you've been meaning to get to. Not to mention, if you have an iPhone, just like 100 million other people, all these services are always available and competing for your attention. With the world's largest library at your fingertips, how do you know which page to turn to? Here's where we step into the fray.
Recommended Reading will publish one piece of fiction a week, each curated by the best writers and editors working today...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/benjamin-samuel/true-confessions-of-a-boo_1_b_1467482.html?ref=books

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