A Year of Mornings

How the Role of Book Cover Design Has Changed in the Age of Social Media by Madelyn Johnson

In the before times, a cover served primarily as an interpretation of the text: a visual invitation intended to both entice readers and help them understand the book’s content. When working on a new cover, designers would ask themselves: What is this novel? What emotional experience does it promise? These were the questions they attempted to answer though their work.

Today, another question has quietly entered the designer’s studio: How does the reader of this book want to be perceived? Or more bluntly: Who do they want to be?

These questions do not replace the original brief, but they do increasingly compete with it, in a shift that has placed a new but largely unspoken pressure on book cover designers. A cover no longer simply needs to communicate genre or tone. It must also construct an identity that a reader of that book can inhabit. If book covers once translated text for their readers, they now operate in reverse: translating readers for their audiences. In this context, the old adage has been inverted from don’t judge a book by its cover to judge a reader by the covers on their books.

This is an interesting note.

The AI giants’ new problem: open AI by Robert Hart

“The question for American firms may increasingly become: How much capability do we need to release openly to prevent Chinese models from becoming the default platform for the open ecosystem?” Sharma said. A more plausible outcome could be a “portfolio strategy,” she said, with companies keeping “their very best model proprietary while releasing increasingly capable open-weight models to maintain developer adoption and ecosystem influence.”

I wonder why can’t Europe do this? They clearly need models of their own. And there is a lot of talk about sovereignty. If you’re using Chinese models you’re not really sovereign.

RSS in 2026 — the best distribution channel nobody uses · intrepidkarthi by Karthikeyan NG

Creators want analytics. Email gives you opens and clicks. RSS gives you nothing — you cannot see who is reading. For creators who measure success in dashboards, RSS feels like flying blind. For creators who measure success in actual reading, RSS is fine.

I agree. I use RSS feeds primarily to track and read things on the web. My website promotes and has a feeds page.

Boox is taking on Xteink with its own tiny e-reader by Stevie Bonifield

Boox’s new Tile lineup will take on Xteink’s popular e-readers that are small enough to stick on the back of an iPhone with MagSafe. As spotted by Good E-Reader, the first one is the Picco, which will feature a 3.97-inch front-lit, black-and-white e-paper display and expandable storage with an SD card slot. Boox confirmed to The Verge that the Picco is in the works, noting that it’s part of a new Tile lineup and will have an “accessible price point,” but without any other details about its plans, like specs, the specific price, or a release date.

I linked to a X3 review recently. After reading the review, I looked at and asked Claude if it would work for my use-cases. Spoiler: it won’t. So this news does not really concern me.

But I love e-readers though. I love the idea of using a e-reader to read.

I have smartened up a little now though, thanks to the two Kindles I have somewhere around the house.

Boox of course is the company that makes the Palma. It is costlier than what I’m willing to pay for a device such as this though. I was interested in Xteink because of its price.

Nobody is making the device of my dreams, for the price I want.

Review: Xteink X3 is the little e-reader the world’s not quite ready for

If there’s one thing that’s holding back the X3 and the X4 and, frankly, all the other wacky readers out there, it’s the market. The e-reader space is still unquestionably dominated by Amazon purveying its razors-and-blades strategy: buy the Kindle for cheap5 and the company earns it all back when you buy your books or sign up for Kindle Unlimited’s all-you-can-eat plan. Kobo, who makes the hardware that I prefer, is a distant second, and has some advantages, but operates on roughly a similar scheme.

What I want, is to be able to run NetNewsWire on this. Or something similar that pulls new articles from RSS feeds to it. That’s my use case, in addition to reading books.

But it’s cheap, I’m tempted to just buy it.