Tom Bissell's new book Extra Lives is a treatise on the cultural significance of video games; though Bissell likens gaming to drug addiction, his cocaine turns out to be reviewer Dwight Garner's Ambien.
The blogging platform WordPress is "the 21st-century equivalent of Gutenberg’s printing press," making media stars out of writers like Justin Halpern, who tweeted and blogged his way to the top of the bestseller list from his parent's home, the latest in a string of blog-to-book deals.
It isn't "the internet that threatens little magazines and journals . . . it's the waning of communities of readers," writes Overland editor Jeff Sparrow. So, what is the future for literary journals in an online world? One person to ask is Clay Shirky, who Publisher's Weekly calls "one of the digital age’s great thinkers."
Online book clubs have been sprouting up all over the place this summer, and now The Rumpus is getting in on the act. The website is offering participants advance reader copies of forthcoming books for a small subscription fee, choosing Doug Dorst's The Surf Guru as their July pick, proving what the sages at the New York Times Business page have pronounced: "Yes, People Still Read, but now It's Social."
“Though the [scholarly] presses admit that many of them don't quite know what they're doing when it comes to e-books,” Jennifer Howard writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "they also know they've got to experiment."
