Interview – Steven Pressfield, the bestselling author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and six military history novels, published The War of Art: Break Through Your Blocks & Win Your Creative Inner Battles nine years ago. Since then he has continued to write about overcoming resistance to creativity in the “Writing Wednesdays” column of his blog. I spoke with Steven on April 11, 2011, about his newest book, Do the Work, published by Seth Godin‘s Domino Project and available for free pre-order on Kindle until April 20 thanks to an innovative sponsorship by GE.
News – 1) Amazon announces a WiFi-only Kindle with Special Offers that will cost $25 less than the current WiFi model. It’s a bold test of an advertising-supported e-reader, but the deals and sponsorships show up only on the Kindle SO’s screensaver and home page – never (yet?) in the e-books themselves. Andrys Basten has a good roundup of reaction and quotes here. 2) Someone finally answers the problem of how you can get an author’s autograph on the Kindle copy of his or her book that you bought. My solution for getting Clay Shirky‘s digital autograph, shown here at South by Southwest two years ago, was crude compared with a service being launched by Autography, as described in this article in The New York Times. Click here for the Bay News 9 TV story. 3) Via the Me and My Kindle blog, I just caught the news of another explosion in e-book sales, this time for February as reported by the Association of American Publishers. Publishers Weekly‘s report is here.
Tech Tip – I tried two new ways to transfer content from the web to my Kindle, Kindle This Page and Kindlebility, but ran into problems with each. My favorite method is still Instapaper, which just keeps improving.
Content – After our interview, Steven Pressfield e-mailed me a list of books which would be great to have on the Kindles that Ken Clark and I are shipping to U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq through E-Books for Troops. The ones in the public domain are as follows: Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander; Bhagavad-Gita, numerous translations; Curtius, History of Alexander; Demosthenes, Philippics; Frontinus, Stratagemata; Herodotus, The Histories; Homer, Iliad; Plutarch, Moralia (including Sayings of the Spartans and Sayings of
the Spartan Women); Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus; Plutarch, Life of Alexander; Plutarch, Life of Epaminondas; Polyaenus, Stratagemata; Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War; Vegetius, De Re Militari; Xenophon, Constitution of the Spartans; Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus; Xenophon, Anabasis [“The March Upcountry”]. And here are his suggestions for contemporary titles: E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed; S.L.A. Marshall, The Soldier’s Load and the Mobility of the Nation; Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier; Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories; and Robert Crisp, Brazen Chariots.
Next Week’s Guest: Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review and host of the peerless Book Review podcast.
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