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New website
[trumpet sounds] [like a fanfare, not a brass band. obviously] [although I do like brass bands]
I am proud to announce... the new Snowbooks website!
[trumpets end]
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As music, so books?
As you know, I'm one of those people who think you can discern occasional omens about the future of books by pawing through the entrails of the music and movie industries. I found this Businessweek article about the rise of Spotify very interesting on that score. Because Spotify (Wikipedia entry) lets people listen to lots of different music, often for free, it was a struggle to get the big music companies on board with it. But one of the juicier carrots the Spotify folks could dangle in front of sceptical music-biz execs was the banquet of data their service could offer about who is listening to which songs, where and when. Moreover, their data allows them to look at what effect promotional efforts are having in real time, while their artist is on that talk show or their Super Bowl ad is running. Imagine the possibilities.
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The Future. Not quite here yet.
Try a quick Google search and it's fairly obvious that the e-book avalanche that has long been predicted is well underway. As you know, Amazon already make more from e-book sales than from paperbacks. And while the billions of paper books in the world aren't suddenly going to go away, there's no denying that a book that's released today or a decade from now will face a very different commercial landscape than it would have a decade in the past.
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Anna's Grammar Pointers #4
Do you know what my problem with misplaced commas is? It’s that, while I’m reading text in my head, I can’t help taking a pause where the comma indicates, yet my brain knows that it’s wrong. Sort of the same way I have to ‘read’ the misspelling definately as def-i-NATE-ly. (English-writing wordsmiths of the world: it is spelled definitely. Definitely. Think of the word finite. De-finite-ly.)
Anyway, two incorrect comma usages which are like nails on a blackboard to me are commas placed before verbs and before the word that.
The former is most often a case, I believe, of sentences getting out of control. I think we would all agree that a sentence should read Subject verb. and not Subject, verb. (Think I ran. versus I, ran.) But when you start loading up that subject with a bunch of extra words, things can get pretty confusing by the time you get around to picking a verb. So it’s a case of comma-as-crutch, really. You’re basically saying, ‘Hey, we’re all confused by this sentence. So here’s a comma -– let’s take a breather and come back when we’re ready to continue.’