Archive for May, 2010

A Perfect Novel for the E-Reader?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Well, I just read a book that seemed like perfect e-reader fare: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.  This is super popular, and I liked it, will probably read the follow-up novels, but I’m not quite sure what the great brouhaha is all about.  It is, au fond a thriller/mystery with an unusual (to me) setting, Sweden, and one really good character, the dragon tattoo girl.  It was entertaining, but no better written than a lot of thrillers, and you could sense him sort of feeling his way in the beginning.

Bottom line is that I liked it and thought it would be perfect e-reader reading– the book copy we have is already a book club edition with cheap paper, fragile and brittle, developing tiny tears.  Who needs this kind of physical object?  Better to have the flow of the story electronically?

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Ebook on BarnesandNoble.com

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Well, my experiment with ebooks is moving forward:  the Hamilton Stone Editions edition of my novel Trespassers about the Columbia University 1968 sit-ins is now available as an ebook on  Barnesandnoble.com (just click there and search for “Trespassers by Meredith Sue Willis”).  My book, and Carole Rosenthal’s It Doesn’t Have to Be Me, have both been available on Smashwords.com for a while, but this is the first appearance on another site, which Smashwords has been promising.

I am still looking into ereaders.  Does anyone out there have one?  What do you recommend?  I’m thinking seriously about the soon-to-be-released Kobo, which is a hundred dollars cheaper than Nook and Kindle.   The disadvantage, if it is one, is you generally have to download books via your computer.  This means you can’t be sitting in an airport and download the latest best seller out of the ether I mean 3G network.  But since I’m picturing myself rereading Trollope’s Palliser novels on a device,  I  don’t really care so much if I can’t get Dan Brown’s latest contraption two minutes after it’s released.

Meanwhile, we’re still watching Phoebe Allen’s webcam with her two ugly little naked blue-black balls of baby bird with yellow beaks, not hummingbird beak shaped at all, and a few yellowish pinfeathers on their blue-black body balls. Phoebe looks happy as a clam when she sits on them.

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Hamilton Stone Editions’ New E-Books

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

The cooperative literary press I work with, Hamilton Stone Editions, has begun putting up versions of our books as ebooks– even though most of the authors do not yet use the devices!  Note I say “do not yet,” as I hope before the year is out to try it out.  The problem is choosing which device, as the costs are high enough that it seems like a serious expense to me.

To prepare the books has been a hassle:  we have to take digital versions of books (no surprise there) and strip out most of the formatting, because each ereader’s software does different weird things, and about the only things that translate are italics and capital letters.

If you get a chance, take a look at our first two books:  Carole Rosenthal’s It Doesn’t Have to Be Me, and the final book of my Blair Morgan triology, Trespassers.  You do not, by the way, have to have an ereader to read these:  one version is a regular old .pdf that anyone with a late model computer can read, if you can stand prose on a computer screen.  The advantage of the dedicated ereaders (for thos who don’t know) is that the actual reading experience is far more like book reading than staring at a tv screen.

I would be thrilled and delighted if you’d take a look at smashwords and tell me what you think!

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