The rise of the internet and the e-book has made reading a far more dynamic experience for me. Looking at author's websites and blogs provide a glimpse at the person behind the name, and in some cases some really interesting background on their books. Forums (or should that be fora, never sure!) and social networking sites frequented by authors provide a way to get even more interactive. I certainly have a few authors I now correspond with online having got chatting via some site or another.
As Amazon is positioning itself at the forefront of e-publishing it's not a big surprise that they have just started a limited beta release of a new feature called @Author. You can read more about it here. For now 12 authors are on-board. The basic premise is that you can ask these authors questions directly from your Kindle or via the Amazon author pages. It's an interesting new development, and I'll be keeping an eye on the pages to see how sucessful it is. No doubt some people will be put off by the syncing with Twitter bit. I imagine it will either work really well, starting some interesting dialogue, or the poor authors will be deluged, and with so many other pulls on their time questions will go unanswered or not be answered quickly enough to keep readers engaged. It looks like some of the authors have been busy already, but no questions from me until I come up with one suitably sensible!
Has anyone tried it out yet, and what do you think? Flash in the pan or the next big thing?
2 comments:
I think it is great that authors are getting more buzz than what they have in the past few years!
I'm a few days behind on my blog reading, so I hadn't heard about this program. It sounds like a neat idea. Thanks for letting folks know about it.
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