I’ve always thought that Japanese was one of the harder foreign languages (I struggled through basic Spanish in high school and college). But when I read this article on Yahoo!, I have a new-found respect for those who can read, write and speak Japanese.

Why is Japanese such a hard language? This gives you a good idea:

Just reading the newspaper requires knowledge of about 2,000 characters. Another 50,000 are less common but useful to recognize.

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The largest retail bookseller in the US acquired Fictionwise, the largest indie outlet for ebooks, this according to this article at Publishers Weekly. This move effectively throws B&N into the ebook game and probably into direct competition with Amazon and its Kindle 2.

However, beyond the news of this transaction is both praise and criticism. Critics say that they admired Fictionwise for being an independent force in ebook retailing. According to one post on the Teleread blog, Fictionwise was also admired for being more willing to work with small publishers:

Not everyone sees full positives here. "Fictionwise was the big independent in the industry, and also the company most willing to work with small publishers and non-DRM," Rob Preece of BooksForABuck.com, a small e-publisher, said in a TeleRead comment. "I’m sorry to see them go as an independent force, and not especially happy that BN made the purchase as they haven’t traditionally been especially friendly to small publishing.

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When I first read about Amazon’s new app for the iPhone, I was reminded of the saying, "If you can’t beat ‘em, then join ‘em!" Or something like that. For me, this story broke when I read this Publishers Weekly article that detailed Amazon’s new app:

The company launched its Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch app this morning, making it available for free from Apple’s App Store. By downloading the software, iPhone and iPod users will get access to the 240,000 e-books now available through Kindle. Amazon’s Whispersync technology will let users switch back and forth between the iPhone and Kindle and pick up reading a book or publication where they left off. The iPhone app will not include Amazon’s text-to-speech function.

I love that last sentence. The line makes an ominous reference the trouble Amazon found itself in for including text-to-speech capability in their new Kindle 2. Amazon recently caved to pressure from groups like the Authors Guild and will let publishers decide whether to allow their books to have that functionality.

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Are you bored writing the same old linear story lines, predictable characters, and mundane settings? If you answered "Yes!" than you might need to shake up your writing life a little. I’m almost getting to that point in my own writing, where I want to do something innovative and different (doesn’t every writer?).

Experimental fiction just might be the way to go! By it’s very definition, experimental fiction is hard to peg down as a series of "how to" articles, or a step-by-step process for writing something that would be considered "experimental."

The best definition I have found for experimental fiction comes from this website I came across. The article says experimental fiction…

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Online retailer Amazon.com has decided to let authors decide if they want the text-to-speech feature to be a part of their ebooks on Amazon’s new Kindle 2. This comes after the Authors Guild raised a ruckus and even threatened legal action, arguing that the text-to-speech feature infringed on the rights of audiobooks.

According to this article from Yahoo!, Amazon is already working on the changes:

Amazon said it is making modifications to allow those holding rights to written works to decide on a title-by-title basis whether to allow Kindle 2 devices to read passages aloud using text recognition software.

This comes after whining from the Authors Guild:

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