Who doesn’t enjoy sitting down to read a good book? However, have you ever thought about what it takes to make a good book? The length, content, and audience are all important factors when it comes to creating a bestseller. The average length of a best selling book is an average of 375 pages. Although, 87% of people will finish a book that is 300 pages. And only 35% of readers will finish a book that is 700 or more pages. When it comes to content, books with a female protagonist are 40% more likely to become a bestseller, men are ten times as likely to show interest in books that feature a male protagonist….

There’s a lot of hand-wringing over the so-called “dumbing-down” of America. We don’t read, we can’t write except in and LOLcat-speak, we barely know who’s president. Technology often takes the blame for some of this, with video games and the abbreviated speech of texts and Twitter squarely in the sights of our educators. But e-readers are beginning to create new readers and are getting more people than ever to buy books and read them. We’re buying 57 books a second in the United States, between the paper and electronic varieties. And though sales of print books have been declining (not precipitously,…

Barnes & Noble has something new up their sleeve, and it’s in the form of a new six-inch Nook. This isn’t the Nook Color. This is back to basics with the e-ink technology that made e-readers famous in the first place. This time Barnes & Noble has fully embraced touch-screen technology, but there is much more here than meets the eye. The six-inch Nook features a full touch-screen display, which is different from the original Nook in that only the lower portion of it was touch-enabled and had a color display. You lose the color display entirely here, but what you gain is so much more. Six-inch…

There is something different about this; something I can’t quite explain. There is no paper, no page turning, no cover, and no physicality to it at all. It’s confusing, yet it’s intriguing. So what is this thing, exactly? It’s a revolution. It’s the e-reader. I have never owned an e-reader (or e-book reader, as they are commonly referred to). I’m one of those types of people who prefers books: real books — you know, those things with dust covers, paper pages, scribbles in the margins, and the occasional yellow highlight. Sure, the idea of using an e-reader has intrigued me — I had tinkered around…

Mikio Katayama, Sharp’s president, is a man not in the business of making weak-assed claims, touting Sharp’s upcoming e-reader as a rival for the iPad. Considering the iPad is much more than an e-reader (okay, not that much more), such a claim would seem ludicrous. But Katayama’s bold as hell. Katayama likes things extra-spicy. Likes shaking things up. But while we puzzle over Katayama’s confidence, the Sharp e-reader is still turning out to be a pretty interesting device. Out later this year, the device will employ a colour display and utilize the new XMDF file format for e-books, which allows…