David Foster Wallace

Dan Eldridge is a journalist and guidebook author based in Philadelphia's historic Old City district, where he and his partner own and operate Kaya Aerial Yoga, the city's only aerial yoga studio. A longtime cultural reporter, Eldridge also writes about small business and entrepreneurship, travel, and the publishing industry. Follow him on Twitter at @YoungPioneers.

For centuries, biographers have relied on letters to bring historical figures to life, whether Gandhi or Catherine the Great. But as people switch from writing on paper to documenting their lives electronically, biographers are encountering new benefits - and new challenges.

Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is based on dozens of interviews. But one of the book's juiciest episodes comes from a string of emails from 2003. That's when Apple launched the iTunes music store. Right away, the company's rivals at Microsoft understood this could be a game changer.

For 15 years, Dave Eggers' McSweeney's publishing enterprise has helped readers discover all things cool and quirky. On Wednesday, the Harry Ransom Center, the humanities library at the University of Texas, announced that it has acquired the archive of McSweeney's publishing company, which includes McSweeney's books, DVD journal Wholphin, the Believer, the food magazine Lucky Peach and the center's flagship literary journal first published in 1998, Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

We've all no doubt at some point in our reading lives found ourselves at the point where we realise that the book we're reading is not up to scratch.

Maybe there's a part of you that knows within a paragraph (or, worse, a sentence); perhaps it takes 50 pages, or a 100, before you start to ask yourself the question: is this a book that I should abandon?

My Kindle-with-special-offers just informed me that David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is on sale for $1.99 today in Kindle format. I wouldn’t be inclined to report every $1.99 book I came across (unless it was one I really liked), but it was just a couple of weeks ago I had occasion to post about this [...]

The post Infinite Jest, $1.99 on Kindle today only appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Galleycat has a droll image from an anonymous redditor who was apparently getting psyched out by the page numbers in Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, an immense doorstopper of a book. This person found a unique solution to that problem. “Today I broke through the chains of oppression. No longer will page numbers tyrannize [...]

The post Doorstopper page numbers: the Gordian solution appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Right before everyone ran off for the holidays, we asked the Book Business staff and contributors one question: What was the best book you read in 2012. It didn't need to have been published in 2012, just one that they read in the calendar year. These are the results:

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