Hugh Howey was a self-published novelist of no real success. Until
WOOL, that is - a 15,000 word "little throwaway story" he uploaded to Amazon's Kindle Marketplace one day and promptly forget about. The story he didn't blog, didn't tweet, and didn't even sell on his site hit #2 on the Kindle SciFi Bestseller list and "
changed the course of e-books."
[more inside]
posted by DarlingBri
on Jan 15, 2012 -
140 comments
Despite the popularity of long-arc, serialized TV shows,
no one really wants to read serialized fiction, apparently. That's not stopped anyone from trying, though, like say Stephen King with
The Green Mile and
The Plant, semi-successful efforts from
a mega-successful author. That was before the current rise of the ebook, though, and a few
authors (also
here and
here and
here) are betting technology will turn serialized novels into
the next big thing, that we're in "
the perfect environment for a resurgence."
posted by nospecialfx
on Dec 7, 2011 -
44 comments
"Skyrim is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Skyrim. [...] Lately, one of my favorite parts of Skyrim are the in-game books. At any time, you can pull a book off the shelf, and get a nice fresh slice of lore to go along with your hearty adventures. I’ve even gone so far as to break into houses in the middle of the night just to read their books." — So says the blogger who decided to extract all 1000+ pages of text contained in the books of Skyrim and format them for
EPUB and
Kindle.
(Skyrim previously)
posted by 256
on Nov 29, 2011 -
95 comments
Most of us know and love
Dailylit. But, if you want to have more current book snippets emailed to you every day, you can upload your own ebooks to
Dripread.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Jul 3, 2011 -
8 comments
Do you want some Spam with your Kindle? Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray.
posted by Fizz
on Jun 17, 2011 -
95 comments
A new kind of book has been created in Holland, where its sold over 1m copies since it came out in 2009. Now finding its way to England, called the "flipback", the pages are super thin Bible paper with a special lay-flat spine and small format, making it suitable for reading with one hand, thumb page-flips, and shirt pocket storage.
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 21, 2011 -
63 comments
Amanda Hocking is 26 years old. She has 9 self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published. ... And it’s no stretch to say – at $3 per book/70% per sale for the Kindle store... there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own. (related)
posted by Joe Beese
on Mar 1, 2011 -
244 comments
Harper Collins is putting a cap on the number of times their books can be loaned out from libraries. From a letter to customers from
Overdrive CEO, Steve Potash:
[W]e have been required to accept and accommodate new terms for eBook lending as established by certain publishers. Next week, OverDrive will communicate a licensing change from a publisher that, while still operating under the one-copy/one-user model, will include a checkout limit for each eBook licensed. Under this publisher's requirement, for every new eBook licensed, the library (and the OverDrive platform) will make the eBook available to one customer at a time until the total number of permitted checkouts is reached.
posted by snwod
on Feb 26, 2011 -
143 comments
Still clinging desperately to those reading-things of yours made from dead trees? While you're at it,
scan the damn thing and make your own e-book. (My prediction is that there are copyright issues here that the manufacturer is ignoring, but that will come back to haunt them.)
posted by anothermug
on Jan 13, 2011 -
48 comments
Google eBooks, the new Google eBooks store that will compete with Amazon on price and selection.
Introducing Google eBooks (video). Launch USA only.
NPR: "..independent booksellers will get a cut of the revenue when people buy e-books on their local seller's website instead of directly from Google."
posted by stbalbach
on Dec 6, 2010 -
85 comments
Stanford's library was running out of space for printed books and journals, so they've built a new space ... with even less room for printed titles and issues. It's hastening the move to a digital library.
NPR reports.
posted by anothermug
on Jul 8, 2010 -
75 comments
The announcement of the
iPad earlier this week has prompted a lot of discussion about ebook prices among publishers and their sales partners. That discussion took a major turn yesterday when
Amazon pulled the buy buttons for Macmillan's books off their site. Many of Macmillan's titles are still available through Amazon, but only through third parties. Right now, one of the largest publishers in America is no longer available from Amazon because they can not agree on ebook prices.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on Jan 30, 2010 -
306 comments
From the U.S. National Academies Press: 3,000 Science, Technology, Medical, and Social Science Books Available Free, Online. The interface is clunky - you can only see one page at a time, can't download PDFs (except paid) and image view is via TIFF -
but! the content is all there, and free. Some is quite technical, but much is readily accessible. Some idea of the breadth:
A Doctor's Memoirs of Treating AIDS in Haiti,
The "Drama of the Commons",
The 1872 Research Voyage of HMS Challenger,
Biography of Stephen Hawking,
Biotechnology Research in the Age of Terrorism,
Risk Reduction Strategies for Human Exploration of Space,
Forensic Lead Bullet Analysis,
50 Short Essays on How Mathematicians Think,
Recent Research on Non-Lethal Weapons, and
Introduction to Tough Topics in Contemporary Science.
Also, see their
rather spiffy site on the cosmos.
posted by Rumple
on Jun 12, 2006 -
13 comments
Nearly half of the world's population cannot read. Many people live in remote areas without electricity. But that's no excuse for being non-Christian, right? What would Jesus' marketing department do?
Introducing the
GodPod.
(Who knows... if it's successful, maybe Apple will make that Billy Graham iPod after all!)
posted by miss lynnster
on Feb 2, 2005 -
33 comments
eScholarship Editions. Like ebooks? Want something free, nonfiction,"scholarly", publicly accessible, and more recent than
Gutenberg ? (Lately I'm on an Ancient History kick.) My problem with this "eScholarship" site is they try to make it hard to download a whole ebook to read offline. For one of those, for people who are interested in 20th-century political history-cum-theory that's never had much to do with any U.S. election, today I'm recommending
the Platform.
posted by davy
on Dec 27, 2004 -
12 comments
"This site contains more than 10,000 eBooks formatted for reading on your Palm, PocketPC, Zaurus, Rocketbook, eBookWise-1150, or Symbian cellphone." So if you have a PDA and especially if you're into
the classics, you no longer have to settle for lame
video games on your cell phone or inconvenient newspapers for your
downtime entertainment.
posted by Doohickie
on Dec 20, 2004 -
19 comments
The Ladder is a website devoted to the writer
Henry James (1843-1916). It comprises
electronic editions of a selection of James’s works and also
* a textual note
on the source and any amendments required during editing
* annotations of the text explaining such things as references to real persons and places, references to other fiction by James, or in
in his notebboks
* a summary and a detailed (chapter by chapter) synopsis of the plot, so you can easily find passages you remember, by what happens
* a bibliography including original publications, subsequent reprints
Interestingly enough, lately more than a few writers seem to have
a bit of James-mania: in June,
Colm Tóibín published "
The Master", a portrait of James recovering from his humiliating failure as a playwright. Now comes "
Author, Author", by
David Lodge, which is about James' humiliating failure as a playwright as well. These in turn arrive on the heels of
Emma Tennant's "
Felony", a novel about James' near-romance with
Constance Fenimore
Woolson, and
Alan Hollinghurst's "
The Line of Beauty", a
BookerPrize-winning novel in which James plays an important off-the-stage role.
posted by matteo
on Nov 1, 2004 -
12 comments
netLibrary. "We offer the only comprehensive approach to eBooks that integrates with the time-honored missions and methods of libraries and librarians."
Want an account? If your library system is a participant, go to the site from on a library computer, create an account, and you can then log in remotely too. Interesting! [via
soup du jour of the day.]
posted by mwhybark
on Oct 6, 2004 -
12 comments
Interesting Column by Tim Whitaker, editor at
Philadelphia Weekly, who "
kind of jests" someone should order the main branch of the Free Library at 19th and Vine streets gutted, all the passé books written by the long since dead and decayed--books that nobody looks at anyway, thrown out, and replaced with computers.
This could be done over a long weekend, and the new Free Workstation Center of Philadelphia would open. Thousands of city residents who'd been priced out of the Information Revolution for well over a decade would rush to the free computers to experience the online rush that comes with access to the WWW.
He says Amazon's new service "search inside the book" is the first glimpse of a full-bore revolution in the way research will be conducted and books will be distributed in the future that spells the death of libraries.
He bounced this idea off of Steven Levy, a Philadelphia native who writes about technology for Newsweek, and he says "It's not that crazy, The future of libraries is a hot topic with librarians all over the country."
"Once the Web has become a full-service digital archive of the whole wide written word, it'll only be a quick innovation or two before we'll have the technology to order and bind books on our own home book-printing systems. Ebooks will finally become reality. Libraries will become mini-museums, where old books are kept under glass, relics of the pre-"inside the book" revolutionary age."
posted by Blake
on Nov 20, 2003 -
22 comments
