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Back from India. It was amazing, as ever. Couple of things to talk about. First:

If we’ve ever talked about India and books, you’ll know I’m slightly obsessed with One Night @ The Call Center by Chetan Bhagat. I first read it and wrote about it when I was in India last year, and it’s stayed in my head ever since.

One Night @ The Call Center is about a bunch of young, over-educated kids working in a call center in Gurgaon (which is, trying desperately not to deviate, the new Chiba). Over the course of a…

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Tomorrow is T-day. Or iDay. Or whatever. It’ll be fun. Nobody knows *anything* yet. Well, apart from the folks at McGraw-Hill and Hachette, probably Kobo, and a whole host of others. But for the purposes of this discussion: nobody *knows* *anything*.

About the Tablet, that is. Because, actually, we know quite a lot. We know about authors and writing, and editing and publishing, and bookselling and reading. We know and understand the long-form narrative and its place between people, and in society. And I’m more comfortable with Apple getting in on the act than I am about…

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O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog has a nice series of posts on books as ebooks as applications:

• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• A Big Boost to Books as Apps?

I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some current projects, may come back to bite me):

Books are not applications, or software. They are words.

I think there’s a danger inherent in regarding books as something to be run rather than something to be read. This argument is a bit hazy…

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So the iPhone 2.0 is here, and with it a slew of reading apps. There are two approaches here: create a standalone ereader that can be used to read ebook files, or create standalone apps for each book.

The former is definitely better, and the reader of choice so far appears to be Lexcycle’s Stanza, an open epub reader that’s loosely tied to FeedBooks, enabling you to pull down a bunch of free ebooks directly, or search for a whole lot more. Getting ebooks (or any other files) onto your iPhone/iPod Touch is not easy however, which is…

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