Wednesday, February 8, 12:00 noon
Frist Multipurpose Room B
Frist Multipurpose Room B
Kindle on Fire: Big Changes in the Book World
William Howarth, Janet Temos
William Howarth, Janet Temos
With the release of a new Kindle Fire in November 2011, Amazon.com has won a four-year race to the top of publishing. Sales of print books have dropped by one-third, while e-books have grown hugely among readers 50 and older. The entire book industry now comes in a box, built and serviced by Amazon.
Writers may sell directly to Amazon and earn 70% royalties, cutting out agents and publicists. Amazon then edits, prints, and sells e-books directly, all steps that builds relationships with readers, an advantage that traditional publishers never enjoyed.
This talk will survey these trends and examine the new Kindle Fire, a device that serves text, music, videos, games, and the Web in a small and attractive package costing $200, or 40% of the $500 entry-level iPad. We’ll look at the pros and cons of the Kindle Fire, compare it to the iPad and Nook, and try to speculate on future developments in the rapidly changing book world.
About the speakers:
William Howarth is Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton. A popular lecturer and innovative teacher, in over forty years he taught courses ranging from Shakespeare to Joyce, pre-colonial America to postmodern fiction. He also pioneered in bringing educational technology to teaching, research, and writing in the humanities.
Writing on a wide variety of topics, he has published thirteen books and over ninety articles for the New York Times, Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and American Scholar. Writing as “Dana Hand,” he now collaborates on films and novels with Anne Matthews, and they are the publishers of Scarlet Oak Press, which produces e-book texts of classic fiction that inspires today’s major films.
Janet Temos is the Director of the Educational Technologies Center at Princeton. She is a member of the Princeton class of 1982, and received her PhD at Princeton in 2001. The ETC helps faculty use technology in teaching and research, and includes Blackboard, the New Media Center, the Humanities Resource Center. We also offer consulting, training and outreach in educational technologies.
