I make no secret about how much I love my iPhone, and how that love has only grown since I loaded it with the eReader application from Fictionwise (which I reviewed in detail here). But last night I decided to give the Stanza ebook reader a try as well. I have read a lot of good things about Stanza, so I thought, why not see what all the excitement is about?

While I haven’t read any ebooks using Stanza yet (I have read several on eReader, however), I’m already seeing just how powerful an application Stanza is. Here are a few things that really stand out for me:

1. Stanza allows you to download ebooks directly on the iPhone, without using a computer.

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While ebooks are starting to increase in popularity and garner more mainstream attention in the US, youngsters in Japan have no problem reading novels on their cell phones. I have blogged about this once before in this post and it still remains an interesting topic.

Today I came across a very interesting article on a website called JapanToday about the trend of reading and writing novels on cell phones:

With cell phone sites buzzing with talented amateur writers such as kiki, the publishing industry is heralding the coming of a new demographic of young authors and readers who might change the industry the way kiki challenges the conventional novel.

The process of writing, posting and reading these novels is pretty simple:

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Last week the United States got a new president, and this week Illinois got a new governor. That’s right, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was officially impeached by the state senate yesterday (Thursday). First time in state history! Now that Gov. Pat Quinn is our new fearless leader, I hope we can put this debacle aside and get the state cleaned up.

Politics aside, it has been a sad week in the literary world with the passing of John Updike. I’m still reading about his legacy all over the web, but I doubt we’ll know the scope of the impact he had for generations to come.

Now that the weekend is here, I’m going to try and get some reading done – my stack of books to read keeps getting bigger and bigger! I hope all of you out there in internetland can get some good reading done as well – especially if you live in an area with cold, snowy weather (perfect for reading).

And like always, have a safe and happy weekend!

Collaboration and Co-Writing

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When I first started Brad’s Reader many moons ago, I would fire up my blogging program, pound out a post and click the "publish" button without giving it a second thought. Then as time went on I began to notice typos, embarrassing spelling errors, and sentences that were just plain awkward.

Nowadays, before I even write the first sentence of a post, I set the status to "draft" so when I save the post it won’t go "live" on the blog. When the post is complete, I save it, and then I carefully read through each word. I’m often surprised at how much I end up editing. I usually delete a lot of awkward sentences and phrases, and even a few bad paragraphs.

Hopefully taking the extra time to edit my posts have made them better, easier to read and maybe even more entertaining for you.

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Self-publishing has long been the bastard child of the publishing industry. That could be changing now. More and more authors who self-publish are finding success after traditional publishing houses offer lucrative contracts for their self-published books. And most of these cases, the manuscript in question was rejected over and over before the author took matters into his/her own hands.

That is the story of Lisa Genova, who tried to get her book Still Alice (aff link) into the hands of agents and publishers before turning to self-publishing. Her story, in part, is featured in this article from the New York Times about the world of self-publishing:

When Lisa Genova, a former consultant to pharmaceutical companies, wrote her first novel, "Still Alice," a story about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, she was turned down or ignored by 100 literary agents.

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In the few short hours since the very sad news of John Updike’s death, the news has spread around the blogosphere like wildfire. I’m sure there will be a lot of attention given to Updike’s passing over the next few days, considering how prolific a writer he was.

I always find it interesting to read other blogger’s reactions to sad news like this. So I gathered up some related blog posts from my Google Reader page and decided to link to them here as a way of paying homage to John Updike:

John Updike, 1932 – 2009 (from Writing Fiction)

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I just happened to be surfing the net reading the daily news and I came across this sad story that John Updike has died! Here’s a quote from the story I read:

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.

The news comes from this brief article on Fox News (yeah, I know). This is a sad day for the literary world, as Updike was a prolific writer. I read his Rabbit series when I first started studying literature in college and really enjoyed the books – maybe I’ll have to revisit them. The most recent Updike book I read was Terrorist. Not my favorite, but this isn’t the time or place for critiquing his work.

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Online retailing giant Amazon.com will stop selling ebooks in PDF and Microsoft Reader formats, according to this article from Publishers Weekly. This means that all ebooks sold by Amazon will be either in its proprietary Kindle format, or the Mobipocket format.

Amazon.com has notified its publisher and author clients that it plans to cease offering e-books in the Microsoft Reader and Adobe e-book formats. In the future, the online retailer says it plans to offer only e-books in the Kindle format (for wireless download to its Kindle reading device) and the Mobipocket format, both of which are owned by Amazon.

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Now that President Obama is in office, maybe we’ll see the government finally take steps to promote, cultivate and nurture the arts (including literature) in the U.S., at least according to this article from the New York Times. The article notes that the various arts groups and non-profits contribute an estimated $167 billion to the economy each year – so even during this economic crisis, the arts remain important.

Even more exciting, however, is what President Obama campaigned to do for the arts once in office:

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It has been widely proclaimed that we now have a literary president. Is it because President Obama has written books, and he reads a lot(he is considered well read)? According to this article from the Chicago Tribune website, it appears there are several reasons for President Obama being more literary than others:

It is also true that writers themselves dig Obama. Many scribes elbowed one another out of the way to praise him, even before his election; the fealty came from the likes of Toni Morrison, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rick Moody and Jane Smiley. They regard him as one of their own, as a man who knows his way around a metaphor.

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