News & Notes -- 3/03/13

Worth reading:   

•  "The Death of Publishing," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  Rusch explains why predictions of the death of publishing were wrong, and how traditional publishers are now making more money while their authors are making less.

Cool Stuff:

•   Check out the 3Doodler, a pen that lets you draw in 3D!

Giveaways on this and other blogs: 

• Starting Now, by Debbie Macomber, right here on The Bookwyrm's Hoard!
• Knot What It Seams, by Elizabeth Craig, on Escape with Dollycas Into A Good Book
• Unravel Me, by Tarereh Mafi, on Kimba the Caffeinated Reviewer

Books & Ebooks in the News:

• "Building 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'" (Beat Schwendimann, Proto-Knowledge blog)
• TeleRead is producing a Calibre user guide as a series of blog posts.  So far only one is up, but it should prove useful for those of us non-techies who want to use Calibre (or get the most out of it.)
• "10 Proofreading Tips for Self-Publishers" (Anna Lewis, MediaShift)
•  The Express has a profile of prolific author James Patterson.  (Hint: He's able to write so many books because he's not the one actually writing them.)

 And on the Barnes & Noble front, things keep going from bad to worse:

• "Barnes & Noble Weighs Its E-Reader Investment" after third-quarter losses.  (Leslie Kaufman, The New York Times).  
• Laura Hazard Owen of Paid Content reports on Thursday's "contentious investor call" with Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch.  I found it particularly interesting that B&N's founder and chairman wants to buy and privatize the company's brick-and-mortar retail stores while leaving shareholders with the bleeding Nook business.
• You can also peruse Barnes & Noble's 3Q earnings report at BusinessWire.  It does not make for encouraging reading.

Just for fun:

• "7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)"  (David Dietle, Cracked.com, Aug. 2010)

Photo by Ridete on DeviantArt.  CC 3.0 license.