Previously requiring an invitation, subscription based e-book service Oyster has today gone live to all and brings a universal iPhone and iPad app to the App Store to make full use of it. If you read a lot of e-books, Oyster's $9.95 monthly subscription fee could be right up your street, with a library of over 100,000 books.
The app is free to download, and many of the books within the Oyster library are from HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and all kinds of smaller publishers. The choice isn't going to come close to something like the Kindle store at this point, but for the price of a book a month you're opened up to as many pages as you can turn. Grab the iOS app from the App Store link below, or head on over to the Oyster homepage to sign up. The first month is free, so take a look and let us know what you think of it.
Free (monthly subscription applies) - Download Now
NEW YORK (AP) — A book deal, tabloid attention and now a new television show — it's a busy time in the public eye for 25-year-old Ronan Farrow.
MSNBC announced Wednesday that it had hired Mia Farrow's son, a human rights activist and former Rhodes scholar, to host a weekday program on the left-leaning cable television network starting sometime next year.
MSNBC chief executive Phil Griffin said that Farrow's show "will be a game changer for MSNBC, representing a fresh approach to how we deliver news." He didn't specify what he meant. MSNBC has struggled in the ratings in the post-election period.
Farrow, in a statement, said he was excited to shake up people's expectations for cable news.
"This is a new generation of news show for a new, more engaged generation of viewers," he said. "It's a show about why the news matters to you — and what you can do to be part of the story."
Farrow, a Yale Law School graduate, founded the U.S. State Department's Office of Global Youth Issues during President Barack Obama's first term. On Tuesday, the Penguin Press announced that it would publish a book by Farrow, "Pandora's Box: How American Military Aid Creates America's Enemies," in 2015.
Farrow also made headlines recently when his mother suggested in an interview with Vanity Fair that he could be the son of Frank Sinatra, not Woody Allen, as was long assumed. Allen has called the claim absurd.
Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for The New Yorker
To many devoted readers, bookstores, and collectors, a book is good, but a signed book is best—and the absence of a title page to autograph is just another reason for purists to eschew those newfangled e-readers. A signed copy of a favorite book can be intensely meaningful to an avid fan. And in the world of rare-book collecting, something inscribed by the author can catapult a book’s price into the stratosphere.
But apparently Apple hopes that this charm of print publishing may have a digital equivalent after all.
The website Patently Apple recently posted the details of a proposed Apple e-book patent. The method would allow two e-readers to communicate, so that the publisher or the owner of the content could create a special autograph page in the reader’s device, ready to accept an image of the author’s autograph. The inscription could be transmitted when in the vicinity of an author at a book event or in a special online forum. Apple’s patent would also offer a certificate of authenticity and give readers the chance to add a photo or video of themselves with the author to the page.
There aren’t too many sacred cows left in publishing, and it’s unlikely that the industry will go to battle with Apple in defense of the real-world author autograph. Nevertheless, the commodification of this one tradition seems like it won’t offer Apple many rewards. Although the e-book market in the United States is showing signs of maturity, digital migration has leveled off, and it’s doubtful that e-book signing capabilities will be the carrot that attracts the last remaining print loyalists. That’s because an inky signature has a certain personal quality that won’t translate easily to digital.
And naturally, for Apple to roll out this new capability, they’d need to have authors on board.
David Rees, a comedian and the author of How to Sharpen Pencils, says that he’d sign a reader’s e-book to be polite. But he thinks Apple’s patent sounded like a debasement of what an author’s signature is meant to be—the meeting of a reader and author in real space. “It sounds so sad,” he said “because they’re trying to figure out how to reproduce the physical authority that real books have. Next there will be a button for that musty old book smell.”
And how eager will bookstore proprietors—who usually host signings—be to accommodate the bells and whistles of a medium that has played a part in undermining their business?
According to Lacey Dunham, marketing director at Washington, D.C.’s Politics and Prose, it might depend on the retailer. If Amazon’s Kindle e-books were to take on this capability, the bookstore would have to have an internal conversation about whether they would allow Kindle e-books to be signed in their stores, she said. That’s because of the uniquely fraught relationship Amazon has with brick-and-mortar bookstores. But bookstores may be amenable to working with Apple, which has 20 percent of the U.S. e-book market.
In the world of rare and antiquarian book-selling, the question goes beyond the author-fan relationship: A signed book can be immensely valuable. Yet according to Allan Stypek, rare-book appraiser and owner of Second Story Books in Washington, D.C, the idea of a signed e-book is artificial—nothing more than a facsimile. It just won’t have the historical or literary value that a physical signature has and would appeal only to those seeking to be completest about a particular author.
“I wouldn’t categorically refuse to handle an exclusive, signed e-book,” he said, “but it’s unlikely, unless I found it was a justifiable commodity in the market place.”
E-book retailers are exploring ways to let readers sell “used” e-books. But the truth is that you never really own a digital title—you’re more or less leasing it. These blurred lines have produced some horror stories, like Amazon disappearing an e-book copy of Orwell’s 1984 or when Apple was uncomfortable with the male nudity in a graphic novel of Ulysses. And in its patent description, Apple doesn’t detail a means of transferring ownership of the autograph, ensuring that any attempt to resell an autographed e-book, in a market that barely exists anyway, will be doubly difficult.
But if you wait for hours to have Jhumpa Lahiri sign your copy of The Lowland, wouldn’t you want your rights to her personal inscription to be a little more permanent? And what happens if you decide to dump your e-reader and change to a new device—does the autograph move with you? Or when Amazon “bricks” your Kindle for transgressing their terms and conditions, will you lose that meaningful signature, too?
By all means, e-retailers are free to experiment with additions to their still fledgling medium. As Dunham said, “A signed book is not a concept that [a bookstore] owns. There are lots of things that an e-retailer can do, but they cannot replicate everything that a bricks and mortar store does, it’s just not possible.”
And should e-retailers even want to?
Apple’s patent illustrate just how surprisingly unimaginative e-book and e-reader retailers have been over the past few years—attempting to replicate nearly every feature of a book’s physical incarnation, just a little more portably and with a little less permanence. There have been some strong examples of enhanced e-books, like Mark Z. Danielewski’s The 50-Year Sword, and there’s talk of creating what could be a new and unique form of storytelling. So far, though, e-retailers have displayed a strong inclination toward copying publishing’s more dusty traditions, but without the charm.
Most people that come in to have a book signed seek that brief relationship with the author, Dunham told me. "The decision readers will have to make in the end is what they will connect to the most—something signed, visible on their shelf or a signed copy they cannot see on their e-reader."
Of course, Apple may never use its patent, but it might be better off if it left this one thing to the world of pen and paper. The future of digital publishing would be more exciting if they didn’t simply take all the traditions of print as their template, and tried something slightly more innovative. After all, if you really want his autograph, you can always just get Jonathan Franzen to sign the cold, hard plastic of your e-reader for posterity.
This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.
Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.
Columbia Pictures
Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdirahman share close quarters in Captain Phillips.
Columbia Pictures
Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass' tense movie about the April 2009 hijacking of the freighter Maersk Alabama by four Somali pirates, is a love song to the patience-through-overwhelming-fire-superiority of the U.S. military.
Unless, of course, it's a Dog Day Afternoon-style chronicle of the final days of a few sympathetically inept criminals who want money, not blood, but who end up dead anyway. What's empirical is that the film spends more screen time on the hapless, teenage pirates than on any of its other characters, save for Richard Phillips himself — played by America's everydad, Tom Hanks, whose next role will be that of Walt Disney.
Like last year's Zero Dark Thirty, Greengrass' new movie is Based On A True Story and climaxes with a successful operation by Navy SEALs, those precision instruments that we rightly revere. And while Captain Phillips tells a far simpler story, covering days rather than years, both films strike me as Rorschach blots onto which anyone can project individual beliefs about how and when America swings its big stick.
Except — and I'll label this paragraph as a spoiler, mostly because Dana Stevens considered it as such in her Slate review — Captain Phillips doesn't quite end with the SEALs grimly/awesomely taking care of business. It takes an extra few minutes, after the Navy has rescued Phillips from his captors, to show us see how exhausted, frightened, and sickened he is by the ordeal — and no one is likely to mistake that response for ingratitude. Maybe those tears Jessica Chastain shed in the last shot of Zero Dark Thirty were for our national soul (I doubt it), but I don't think this pair of scenes, wherein Phillips is too drained to speak, walk unassisted or do anything other than howl and weep is intended as a metaphor for anything.
Unlike the concurrent Gravity, which brilliantly sustains tension by never cutting away from its protagonist, Captain Phillips lets us in on the turning of wheels to which neither Phillips nor his opponent/captor, the pirate leader Abdulwali Abdukhad Muse (Barkhad Abdi, giving a performance at least as persuasive as Hanks'), are privy. That lower left-hand corner of the screen keeps flashing datelines. Interchangeable Naval personnel give and receive orders via radio. We see the SEALs board their plane in Virginia to fly halfway around the world and skydive into the Indian Ocean, where three naval warships have converged to block the pirates from escaping to Somalia with Phillips as their hostage. (The SEAL team leader is played by Max Martini, whose freakishly right-angular jaw has damned him to be cast only as soldiers or cops. It's a weird problem for a guy whose name literally means "peak capacity fancy cocktails" to have.)
The SEALs' arrival by parachute is as it happened in real life. Still, it must be expensive to film a parachuting sequence, and this one is brief and unspectacular — so why is it in the movie? Is Greengrass trying to underline the vast expense the U.S. will accept to send the message that if you mess with one 55-year-old Merchant Marine seaman from Vermont, you mess with us all? Or, more likely, that disruption of the shipping lanes will not be tolerated? This incident was the first (briefly) successful hijacking of an American ship in 200 years. Few that get taken have the benefit of such a response, a fact the film seems to acknowledge with a single line, conveyed via radio from an Admiral whose face we never see.
When the eroding hostage negotiation is suddenly resolved by three snipers' bullets in three pirates' heads, Greengrass presents it as a moment of horror, not of triumph. It plays like a moral counterweight to news reports like this one, which celebrated the SEALs' marksmanship as a feat of athleticism — which, let's not kid ourselves, it was. (The lifeboat Phillips was taken captive in is on display at the Navy SEAL museum in Fort Pierce, Florida.)
Nothing about Captain Phillips smacks of exploitation. By casting Hanks as the curt but honorable captain, Greengrass has spared us any further intervention to make the "character" more "likeable." Still, I'm never sure how much I'm supposed to enjoy depictions of recent tragedies, even ones as seriously and well-made as this.
Greengrass has earned the freedom to do more or less what he wants, having made the second and third films in the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too Bourne series — high-end popcorn movies that at once condemn and delight in mayhem. (As the soulfully amnesiac super-assassin Jason Bourne, Matt Damon never looks like he's enjoying all that kneecap shattering and windpipe punching, which makes us feel better about enjoying it.) He started his career as a documentarian, and he continues to make documentary-ish films like this one.
I doubt this can be said of Greengrass' United 93 — despite its sterling critical reputation, I've never been able to bring myself to watch it — but Captain Phillips offers substantial entertainment value. I don't recall any jokes, but there are a couple of expertly staged action scenes. A sequence wherein the crew of the Maersk Alabama uses fire hoses and evasive maneuvers to try to prevent the pirates from affixing a ladder to the hull and climbing aboard, is, with apologies to John Woo and my beloved James Bond franchise, the only exciting boat chase in any movie, ever. Surely it's okay to feel caught up in moments like these.
Ridley Scott's film Black Hawk Down was the first film I can recall to trigger this queasiness. Based on Mark Bowden's superb nonfiction book about the a botched 1993 attempt to capture a Somali warlord—resulting in an all-night firefight that left 18 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Somalis dead — the movie was made before, but released soon after, 9/11. Like the book, the film expresses awe at the talents of U.S. Special Forces operators (the Army's Delta Force in this case, not the SEALs), even as it depicts a failed mission. The film retains some of Bowden's observations about the workplace culture of the elite sections of the Army, and a little bit of his geopolitical analysis. But it's overwhelmingly a war movie, an action movie. In translating Bowden's 486-page prose account to the most visceral story medium, Scott can't help but trivialize the event somehow.
Captain Phillips doesn't do that. There's something appealingly 1970s-like in its refusal to editorialize. It can afford its humanism because Phillips lived to write a book. It has patience, albeit through overwhelming fire superiority.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/RvSdX1tr-xg/story01.htm
