"Immersion in the life of the world, a willingness to be inhabited by and to speak for others, including those beyond the realm of the human, these are the practices not just of the bodhisattva but of the writer." --Jane Hirshfield

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Amazon planning to stick ads in Kindles

First, let me say I love the Melville House Books site (see sidebar), and many of their titles.

Here they report on Amazon's plan to stick advertising in your Kindle experience -- perhaps on the welcome screen, and perhaps even after you have paid for and been using a non-ad-infiltrated Kindle for years.

Interesting that an ad exec gets it that people won't like that, but I wonder if Bezos knows better. Of course we won't *want* to pay and then have to look at ads. Yet... cable TV gets away with it. At first, "pay TV" promised no ads, too. Now, the no ads channels are premium and even though we pay monthly for cable, we have to watch ads on most channels. Maybe Amazon is onto something akin to the frog in hot water thing -- if they introduce the ads gradually enough, they will slip by us. I don't own a Kindle, but I use the PC app. I'd uninstall it if it came to that, tho.

Men's Fiction=Not About Women?

Esquire plans to publish men's fiction ebooks:

His [David Granger, editor in chief of Esquire] definition of men’s fiction? Work that is “plot-driven and exciting, where one thing happens after another,” he sahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifid. “And also at the same time, dealing with passages in a man’s life that seem common.” At The NY Times blogs.

And scarcely feature real women, or women's lives? Remember the Little Rascals' He-Man Woman Haters Club? Why is it that men will not read fiction by and about women, while women have no such compunction about fiction by/about men? Do men spend their whole lives separating from mom? Defining themselves as "not women"? Curious. Or is most of what we call literature just not interesting to most men for some other reason?