heatherspinebound-->itsheatherbrown

Just fyi, I changed the URL of this blog to itsheatherbrown.blogspot.com, because it's easier to remember and also my Twitter handle (@itsheatherbrown).

Snow day part deux! (Riverside Park)

Manhattan Snow Day

This is the third huge snowstorm to hit the East Coast this year, and this time New York got hit really hard. Pretty much no one went to work because there was just a LOT of snow to deal with--it felt like a holiday! Everything was really,  really pretty. 

Holy Trinity Church

Lots and lots of snow!

A poor VW Bug got plowed over

The Natural History Museum (the gargoyles looked cold)

A snowball fight!

Just adorable. :)

The downside is a lot of slush and mush, too.

Long Lost Links:

What you missed while you were working:

• Writer Lynn Kelly Hoenig's quest for a book agent, told in photographs. (via GalleyCat)
• Amanda Seyfriend to star in a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, aka the best thing to ever come out of the Twlight phenomenon. (Tor.com)
• A former American turned-British schoolboy talks about boarding schools in Harry Potter in "'A Fantasy Matters' Follow Up: How 'Real' is Hogwarts?" (Tor.com)
• Adam Silverman's article about magic and Orientalism in the Middle East (OUPBlog)
• My favorite edition of Alice's Adventures was featured on Lost and the sales skyrocketed. (via GalleyCat)

Happy weekend!

Bookmark and Jacket

This beautiful bookmark and jacket series by Igor "Rogix" Udushlivy has already been all over the place, but it's so neat I can't help but spread it around a bit more. I'll take the Sherlock Holmes and the Alice in Wonderland, please. 

Sadly, they're not for sale yet, but I love the idea of buying book jackets--instead of buying fifty million copies of the same book because I'm a sucker for cover art, I could just update the same one! See the full collection here.

(via DesignSponge)

Cell phones are the new ebooks are the new books

Last night Michael Healy gave a guest lecture for the Pace Publishing students. Healy is the Executive Director of the Books Rights Registry, which basically means he's in the middle of the rights battles between Google Books, publishers, and authors. You can follow him on Twitter here and read some blog posts by him here. He's also British (no, really!). Last year he gave a lecture about the Google Books settlement (something I knew little to nothing about at the time), but this time around his speech, "The Google Book Contact in Context" focused mostly on speculating where the book industry was going...and he had some thought-provoking (and saddening, and frightening, and hopeful...) notions of where we're headed.

1. There's going to be an even bigger shift towards mobile phones: By 2014 there will be 6.5 million mobile connections and 90% of the world's population will have access to a mobile phone (my very nuanced and intellectual reaction: whoa like that's kinda a LOT). Basically Healy thinks that ereaders are going to seem like very silly and useless devices when our cell phone are going to be like the most bad-ass digital Swiss Army knife you can imagine. Considering Apple's awesome iPhone eReader application that lets you flip the pages is pretty much my ideal ereader (being tactile and intuitive), and using the Kindle's navigation was like my worst fears and nightmares realized, this makes complete sense to me. I also really liked the idea of buying books as Apps, but with open-source software this could get very crowded with duplicate books and general junk (like 6 million Pride and Prejudice apps). I wonder what the filtration system, if any, will be?

2. Netflix is the model of the Future!!!: Libraries and bookstores are going to go the way of the video and record store. Healy suggested that Netflix would be a great model for books, and that the future is in paying for subscriptions instead of content (i.e. like how you pay for cable, not for a TV show, you pay for Netflix for a month, not an individual movie...). I'm actually renting some books right now from Chegg, and although it's not quite the same idea (Chegg isn't a subscription service, and it's mostly for saving money on textbooks) I've loved it so far--books came on time and clean. There's already some sites that are trying to be like this: BookSwim and BooksFree both have subscription-based services but haven't really caught on yet (probably because, you know, libraries still exist).

3. Bookstores will be like vinyl record stores: for hipsters and middle aged nostalgic people. Hopefully this will happen way after I become a middle aged nostalgic person and am far away from hipster territory. Since all the books will be digital or print on demand, there won't be any bookstores anymore! There's going to be a shift in the production part of publishing from creating the digital book as the afterthought to creating the digital book as the main product. I would really like for publishers to start treating the digital book as--if not the main product--than an equally important one. One thing that really disappointed me about using ebooks for textbooks last semester was the lack of care and thought put into them, leading to so many missed opportunities. Right now most ebooks are just text copy/pasted into xml programs so that there's very little formatting, making them hard to read (for example, in one of my textbooks all the sidebars just got pasted right into the middle of the text). In the meantime, there were opportunities to link to outside sites and sources but no one had bothered to.

Healy obviously had tons of other stuff to say, but this was what stuck out to me and penetrated my migraine-fog (the same fog that rendered my quick-draw hand-raising skills useless). But! Here was the one worry that I really came away with. It goes like this:

1. If all of the textbooks will be digital
2. And all of the platforms for ebooks will be on mobile devices
3. Seriously, how will anyone ever learn anything ever again?

Our nation is doomed!

Devoted to Romance

Reuters had an article yesterday with the wonderful, hopeful headline “Books a must-have even in sluggish economy—During tough economic times when U.S. consumers are trying to cut back the indulgence they can't seem to live without is books.” Yes! U.S. consumers—they’re just like me! According to the article, three-quarters of Americans would give up restaurants, movies, shopping, even holidays, before sacrificing novels. Awesome, I’m thinking, but maybe they should get a library card before, you know, cutting out Christmas.

I should have suspected something was fishy. 

Turns out the survey was conducted by Harlequin, which means that they were already talking to a group of devoted readers, and more importantly, devoted readers of one of the cheapest genres available. Obviously it would take a lot for them to have to sacrifice buying books when you can buy your favorites for a quarter on Amazon. 

Still—it’s great that fanatic readers still exist, and I actually have gained a lot of respect for the genre ever since once of the most respected literary scholars at my alma mater “came out” as Eloisa James, a bestselling romance writer.  Even though this one survey might not really be representative of the public as a whole, it’s nice to have something cheery, if a little misleading, in between the doomsday headlines. 

(Reuters)