Will Amazon Rule the eVerse (of books)?

GreenPorch Winter of eReadingProbably, but only in the same way that the Alliance rules the Verse in Firefly. There will always be Independent browncoats and fringe planets. Currently these confederates are as motley as you would expect: Barnes and Noble, Apple, Google and Kobo being the rowdiest.

Barnes and Noble knows how to sell books. They are and have been primarily a bookstore. Having survived the economic downturn and the rise of the e-book, they have advantages over Amazon when it comes to relationships with libraries and book distributors. Plus they have brick and mortar stores, which I hear some people still go to. B&N also makes a mean eReading device, that along with Kobo and Sony will read .epub format (the universal format that Amazon is doing its best to bury like they did to .mobi a while back). The Nook, by most measures, is as good or better than the Kindle. (Their actual eReader software is better, so thhppp!)

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3 Worst Things about the Apocalypse

Dr. Pepper MuseumWhile I expect a few good things to happen via apocalypse (ie. a flourishing of “buy local first” and “slow foods” campaigns), I also suspect lots of crappy things could happen as result of global, wholesale Armageddon. In the comments below I’ll want to hear your list for the top three things that will suck the most, but to get the old zombie fodder cranked up, I’ll share mine.

3.) Looting of the Dr. Pepper Museum:

As we all witnessed in Bagdad, then New Orleans, apocalyptic levels of looting inevitably leads to the wanton destruction of anything even remotely valuable. But the priceless relics and preserved history of our great species and the civilizations we’ve built are at highest risk.

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Googling onto the FBI Watch List

FBIAs a writer I’m on-line more than I’m asleep. Heck, sometimes I use the internet while I’m asleep. My internet time is like dust particles in the air I breath. Without it there wouldn’t be any creative mucous buildup, and therefore nothing spectacular to blow out on the page.

I can’t imagine turning back the clock to a time where I’d have to travel far and wide, accessing specialized libraries, to find the minutia I need to make my fictional worlds pop with that certain air of better-than-real-reality. And I’m immensely grateful for the wonder of the world wide web.

But there is a dark side to being a Google-dependent writer. Namely, the FBI watch list.

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