A Cartoonist Wonders About the Fuss Over Digital Books

OptimismCartoonist Lucy Knisley has a comic online called ‘Downloading Optimism: Pessimism Virus Detected.’ It’s a funny but very direct assault on the tendency in some quarters to fret and worry about the emergence of digital books and online reading as the driving force behind the new world of publishing.  She doesn’t understand why some of our most creative writers and artists are feeling so gloomy about their prospects in a digital publishing world.

She’s been reading enormous amounts of online text since she was a little girl.  Her point of view is dead on the money.  One little thing I know is that I began publishing for kids online back in 1995.  The kids came and were reading lots of stories.  Let’s say a bunch of them were only 5.  Well, they’re 20 now, and they are making it plain that they want their books on screens just as often as they might want them on paper.  You ignore them at your peril.

I found this comic via Boing Boing

‘Pirate Jack’ Novel on Scribd.com for Download

Pirate Jack

I just went and uploaded the print version of the Pirate Jack adventure novel to Scribd.com.  That’s the embedded preview of the book in their viewer above.  You can read about 53 pages of the book for free and then pay $1.99 to get the entire thing.  It’s the book version of our Pirate Jack podcast that you can find in our audio section.  We’re putting new chapters of the audio up each week.  I think $1.99 is a pretty good price for the whole book in downloadable Adobe PDF format.  If you buy it have a great read!