Alan Jacobs

“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling’s new book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, was published yesterday to great fanfare and decidedly mixed reviews. Some ebook readers are holding on off on purchasing the digital edition because it’s priced at $17.99 (here’s why), but e-reader owners who did buy it right away are in for a disappointment: It’s basically unreadable, unless you have a magnifying glass.

A thoughtful reader just forwarded me a link to a fairly fascinating mini-essay by Alan Jacobs; it was posted in the technology department of the The Atlantic‘s website a little earlier today. (Thanks Stephen!) Jacobs’ essay presumes to be something of a progress report insofar as e-reading technology is concerned. But from where I stand, [...]

That’s the title of an article by Alan Jacobs in The Atlantic.  Here’s a bit of it: For instance, consider these facts: (a) Reading is a major part of my job; (b) I annotate quite heavily the books I read for work; (c) I buy a lot of those books from Amazon in Kindle format. [...]

The emergence of search engine optimization (SEO) significantly changed the way that web content is created. Will the digitization of e-books, and the offering of free sample chapters, change the way that books are plotted and written? The Atlantic's Alan Jacobs  finds that in some ways it already is.

Jacobs points out that a number of authors are trying to plot their books so that a major cliffhanger occurs at the end of the 10% that Amazon provides in its sample chapters.

In 2010, I looked at a Princeton study that found using harder-to-read fonts actually improved memory retention. Recently, writer Alan Jacobs at The Atlantic has considered that same study (via the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) in light of what it might mean for e-readers. Jacobs writes that he prefers the slow, [...]