DaveEggers
Latest
'The Circle' takes anti-tech paranoia to ludicrous heights
As a book, David Eggers' The Circle was a flimsy attack against modern technology culture with occasional bits of insight. As a film, though, it's so disjointed, ridiculous and dull that even Tom Hanks can't save it. Sure, it didn't really have much of a chance, given its source material. But as a fan of director James Ponsoldt's (The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour) work, I had an inkling of hope that The Circle would translate better to the big screen. Unfortunately, practically nothing about the film works. And that's a shame -- more than ever, there's a desperate need for intelligent criticism of the technology industry today.
McSweeney's revamps iOS app, now universal with a bookstore
I've said before that I'm a huge fan of McSweeney's, the publishing group founded by author Dave Eggers. The company has had an iPhone app for a while, but it recently updated to a universal version, so now all of that great content (from daily posts to various blogs, books, and the eponymous quarterly) is available to read on the iPad any time you want. The app is set up on a subscription basis, so the original purchase of $6.99 gets you access to six months of daily content from the company, plus "semi-eternal delivery" of material from the website (which is publicly available anyway). There's also an ebook store in the new version of the app, where you can buy any books the company has published, at prices from $6 to $15. All together, that may sound like a little much compared to some other apps, but compared to actual print books, that's still cheap, and all of McSweeney's ebooks are manually designed and typeset for the format, which is pretty cool. Good to see that McSweeney's is improving its iOS presence -- the App Store's a great place for smaller publishing houses like this one to find a bigger audience, I think.
