Taipei

It's midnight in the capital of Taiwan.

While some people are slowly walking home through the neon-lit streets, or getting ready to hit the club scene, others are on their way to a more unusual nocturnal hangout -- a bookstore.

The Eslite store in central Taipei opens 24 hours and has more night owl visitors than most Western bookstores could dream of during their daytime hours.

Here, young and old sit side-by-side on small steps or around reading tables, deeply engrossed in literary worlds.

With more and more Western publishers (and writers) looking forward to doing business in China and Taiwan, a special Chinese-language term, “sa ching,” might be useful for folks in New York and London to know. Of course, in the West, we speak of a “wrap party” for movies when they wrap up principal shooting. When writers [...]

The post In Taipei or Beijing, a book launch is often a “sa ching” affair appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Taiwanese nature writer Wu Ming-yi’s (吳明益) eco-fantasy is being hailed as the next ‘Life of Pi’, with translations set already for the U.S. and Britain this fall TAIPEI, TAIWAN — Not many local Taiwanese novels become big books overseas. But a 2011 cli-fi, or “climate fiction” novel written in Chinese and titled “The Man with Compound [...]

The post Taiwanese eco-fantasy novel goes for global readership appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

By Dan Bloom TAIPEI — In a recent Guardian commentary published in late May, British writer Rodge Glass issued a “global warning” about what he termed “the rise of ’cli-fi’” — noting that ”unlike most science fiction, novels about climate change focus on an immediate and intense threat rather than discovery.” His piece about the rise of cli-fi as [...]

The post ‘Cli-fi’ takes international role as climate fiction term appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Call it phablet, phonelet, tweener or super smartphone, but the clunky mobile phone - closer in size to a tablet than the smartphone of a couple of years back - is here to stay.

A surprise hit of 2012, it is drawing in more users, more handset makers and is shaping the way we consume content.

"We expect 2013 to be the Year of the Phablet," said Neil Mawston, UK-based executive director of Strategy Analytics' global wireless practice.

Google Inc will soon unveil a tablet co-branded with Taiwan's Asustek Computer Inc and priced to compete with Amazon's Kindle Fire device, an Asustek executive said on Wednesday. Amazon's Kindle Fire, which runs a version of Google's Android operating system, sells for $199. Through it users can access Amazon content including books, music and video. "It's targeting Amazon. The Kindle is based on Google's platform but with its own service, so Google has to launch its own service, too," said the executive of the device. Google has its own store for apps called Google Play, but does not

More Blogs