You can find more about this book at PaulCarr.com and the story behind this e-release on TechCrunch.
Archive for the Category »ebooks «
Category: drm, ebooks
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Category: ebooks, horror
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Nicholson Baker on The Kindle & eBooks
29
Jul 2009
“Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon.”
“Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks.”
Read the full article in The New Yorker.
Category: ebooks
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The return of free TOR ebooks
17
Sep 2008
Free Ebooks from World Fantasy Award Finalists
Last week we announced the return of free ebooks from Tor.com. We’re kicking things off this week with backlist titles from two of the authors who are finalists for this year’s World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. To download these and upcoming freebies, all you have to do is register at Tor.com.
Will Shetterly and Emma Bull are the first married couple to each simultaneously have a novel among the finalists for the World Fantasy Award—Emma’s Territory and Will’s The Gospel of the Knife. In commemoration of this, we’re offering registered Tor.com users free e-book editions of a pair of classics from the Bull and Shetterly backlists—Emma’s War for the Oaks and Will’s Dogland. Check them out here!
Each title in our giveaway program will be available for A Limited Time Only, so don’t delay. The books will be offered in a variety of formats, with no DRM. After this month’s pair of books, we’ll be putting up a new title every month, so make sure you register—and tell your friends about the great books (and blogs, and art, and conversation) that are free at Tor.com every day.
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Category: ebooks, science fiction, tor
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Great Sony Reader news!
24
Jul 2008
For those of us lowly early-adopters who have a Sony Reader and not the OMFGBBQ Kindle, here’s some wonderful news via Engadget:
Sony will be shooting out an update on Thursday to allow the Reader to use purchased books in the protected EPUB format from whoever is peddling them, instead of being tied to the Sony’s e-book store, or just DRM-free text and PDF documents.
The content will still be DRM’d but at least we can buy content from someone other than Sony. (Not that I’ve ever bought more than a dozen eBooks for my reader.)
Category: ebooks, sony
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Been sitting on this one for a while so I’m just finally going to dump it here and let you investigate further on your own. Me? I say it sounds and looks interesting.
A new service from HP’s IdeaLab is HP BookPrep, a print-on-demand service. With BookPrep, consumers can order any book, whether current or out-of-print, and have it prepared for them as a print-ready PDF eMaster file. What’s more, the HP technologies used in the imaging process can restore older, damaged copies of books back to their original form.
Category: books, ebooks
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According to the New York Times Penguin Group is the next published (after Random House) to announce the end of DRM on their audio books. "HarperCollins said the publisher was watching these developments closely but was not yet ready to end D.R.M." I’m not holding my breath on HC because of their recent "protected" releases of free e-books.
Category: drm, ebooks
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First there was Lawrence Lessig, then Cory Doctorow (or was it the other way around?) who offered the complete texts of their books online, for free. You could read them on the Web site, download them, read them on your computer in Word, put them on your phone, iPod and/or eBook. Finally, you could print your own copy. Many readers ended up buying the publisher-printed copy anyway. Those who didn’t make the purchase probably wouldn’t have regardless of the availability of the free version. Other authors have started to follow.
And all was good.
But where were the publishers in all of this?
Then came the Baen Free Library. Long-time publisher of science fiction and fantasy, Baen offers more than 100 complete titles in formats from HTML to Rocket eBook (there’s a dead format) to RTF. Just read online or download it to go. 4.6 million visits later, they’re periodically adding new titles.
Neil Gaiman’s publisher, HarperCollins, has started offering complete book for free online. Neil recently asked his readers to pick which of his books would be offered up. Much to his surprise, his largest book, American Gods was chosen and will be made available in the near future. I was excited. I’m not any longer. The problem is that in order to read the book you must do so on their site, in their reader. The books are not portable in any way, shape, or form. Sure, you can search the contents (nice) and you can embed the book into your site (a la YouTube) but how does that help me read it on my device, when I want, when I don’t have a WiFi connection?
Close, but no soup for you!
Next on deck, TOR books. Publisher of Cory Doctorow and many, many other authors I love to read. (L.E. Modesitt, Jr., Brian Lumley, and Brian Herbert, just to name a few.) They’re about to launch their new site "Watch the Skies" and if you sign up, they’ll e-mail you the link to a free eBook every week. No word on the level of control that they’ll give you over said books but with Cory Involved and the word "download" being bandied about, I have all sorts of hope.
So publisher’s, who’s next?
Category: L.E. Modesitt Jr, corydoctorow, creativecommons, ebooks
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E-books will never be our friends
15
Feb 2008
Here’s a great article from the Times Online about eBooks. Considering I gave a presentation on the Sony Reader and the Kindle earlier this week (video available on the NLC blog), I’m glad to hear that I’m not the only one who still thinks that they have their place, but won’t ever replace printed books. Here’s a sample:
None of this, however, spells doom to the physical book. A reader who falls in love with a book, even if first read in electronic form, will still want to own it. Books do more than furnish a room: they are our intellectual companions.
Some books are worth sacrificing a tree to make; others are not, and that is the distinction that the electronic book offers. Ruskin once observed that literature is “divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time”. The books of all time will remain on paper, but those of the hour will increasingly be digital: the airport novel, the reference book, the celebrity memoir. A personal library will no longer be the repository of unread paperbacks, but a genuine index to individuality, as it was in the days when books were rare and precious.
Category: ebooks
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Established and popular science fiction author Steven Brust has written My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel and released it under CreativeCommons on his Web site. (.doc & .pdf) I’ve also uploaded the PDF version to my Scribd account. I’ve not started reading it yet but I’ve got it loaded on my Sony Reader so I’ll be getting to it soon.
Category: creativecommons, ebooks, science fiction
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