Wuthering Heights
Mere Christianity
Madame Bovary
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Crime and Punishment
Hamlet
The Forgotten Garden
These Is My Words
The Help
Ella Enchanted
Princess Academy
The Goose Girl
The Kite Runner
The Great Gatsby
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
The Giver
A Wrinkle in Time
Lord of the Flies
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Ender's Game
}

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

ebooks. what kind of content?

I should have thought about what I was getting myself into when I signed up to do this research. Very little straightforward information has been given on the internet [at least where I'm looking] about what is produced specifically to be an eBook or literary works that have been reformatted so they can be read on a Kindle, iPad, etc. 

As you can see, our class finally decided on a final project. We're still working on unified content between all of us, but it's been decided that an eBook is the answer. Each of us was assigned to do some research about eBooks-- publishing [like on Goodreads-- a great idea by Ashley Lewis], formats [by Bri and Nyssa], length [by Taylor], use in education [by Amy and Carlie], consumption [by Rachael], . My assignment-- types of content. 

Because there was so little research already, I did some analysis of my own. I went to  Amazon.com Bestsellers in Kindle Store to see what audiences have been choosing. Of the top 20 paid bestsellers, one is a game, two are autobiographies, and the rest [17] are popular novels. Of the top 20 free bestsellers, one is a collection of biographical short stories, one is a cookbook, one is an iPad how-to, four are games, and 13 are novels. A good number of these novels [both in the paid and free bestsellers] look like trashy romances.

Obviously, our class is not going for a game, a cookbook, or a trashy romance novel, but a good number of the popular eBook buys are autobiographical. Especially as a child I would go through LDS magazines to get straight to the stories sent in by every day people. And even today those autobiographical stories are the most engaging. I don't know how we as a class could make our literary works relate to our own lives, but I feel that for many audiences, including autobiographical information in relation to whatever we're writing would be much more exciting than plain literary criticism. [This may go against my hope for "legitimate literary criticism" the last paragraph of this post, which I never thanked Dr. Burton for so completely addressing.]

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