Posts Tagged ‘e-readers’

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.

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!

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

I’ve now handled both an IPad and a Nook as well as my brother-in-law’s Kindle.  The IPad is very attractive, but I’m not sure why it isn’t a computer– my husband’s new big screen is very attractive as well,  The Nook felt very nice in my hand, and I could imagine sinking into the telling of a story on its dull but easy-to-read screen.  I downloaded a free copy of The Eustace Diamonds which turned out to come from Google scans, and while the text was easy to read, there were dumb little page breaks from the old short pages.  Still, the idea of all of Trollope there in my hand when I go on vacation…

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Check out Verlyn Klinkenborg in the NYTimes, analyzing the difference between ereading and book reading:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/opinion/15thu4.html .

Smashed!

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

I’ve got a book uploaded to Smashwords.com!   It cost me some time, but no cash.  Take a look at Trespassers– and tell me what you think!  We’re going to put up more books from Hamilton Stone if this seems worth the trouble.

Smashing a book

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

I’m working on an experiment with a Hamilton Stone Editions version of one of my books.  Using a site called Smashwords , I’m rather painstakingly turning a word processed manuscript (already published in hard copy) into a format that Smashwords will then run through some software called The Meatgrinder, and spew out the other end several versions readable by Kindle, the Nook, and more.  Everything from EPUB to .pdf.

There is no charge upfront, and the service is not exclusive, as best I can read their information.  The publisher/writer gets back a little if anyone buys/downloads a book.  On the other hand, you don’t own the files in the specially formatted versions.

So the experiment is, does this work?  Is it worth the labor  (my favorite phrase:  Is the Game Worth the Candle?), and will anyone conceivably buy the books?

If anyone has any experience with Smashwords, please let me know!  Most of their books appear to be self-published single book deals, lots of science fiction and other genre, but more and more small publishers seem to be using it.  This is, in my mind, a stop gap, something to do while things sort themselves out.

But I want our books available to read once I buy an e-reader!

Niffenegger won’t go electronic!

Friday, March 12th, 2010

I just read Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time-Traveler’s Wife , a really good love story with a two hanky ending.  Of course, it’s also speculative fiction, and clever, and all that, but mainly, it’s love, with the tiniest hint of pedophilia that no one could object to.  Niffenegger herself is an artist and art teacher, and on her web site there are FAQ’s that include a question about why her books aren’t available as e-books, and she explains that as someone who creates books as physical objects as an artist as well as writing them, she on principle insists that her books remain objects.  As an artist, she makes a good point.  For me, it has never been the books, although I’ve always loved illustrations, but rather the trip:  you go in that place and go far, far away.  So I’m anything but  doctrinaire about the object, having always preferred paperbacks, for example, to hardcovers.

My First Electronic Book…

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

I have a new book coming out in the summer from Ohio University Press , and they’ve already got a nice page set up for it, Out of the Mountains, with a link to this blog, and the opportunity to pre-order– and one of the versions to pre-order, along with a hard cover and a soft cover version, is an electronic file!  It’s just a .pdf, at least so far, but that’s a start.

Poetry Books online: The Perfection of Mozart’s Third Eye

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

Chalk Editions is doing poetry online– you download the books of poems that they publish, or read them online.  They have an interesting statement of their reason for doing this here– they aren’t thrilled with the coming crash of physical books, but are determined to move forward.  As an example of what they do, see Halvard Johnson’s latest collection of poems,  The Perfection of Mozart’s Third Eye and Other Sonnets at Scribd.com– we’re considering at our cooperative press Hamilton Stone Editions how to get into the e-book market, so I’m going to look again at Scribd.com.

Hugging Victorians

Monday, February 8th, 2010

My friend and colleague Shelley Ettinger just sent me a link to an article in the Sunday Times (that’s of London, not New York) that tells about how the British Library is making its nineteenth century novels available free through Amazon’s Kindle.

This may come close to sucking me in.  She and I were talking about this last week, about when we were likely to make the move to purchasing an e-reader.  We agreed we were waiting for the prices to come down, and I said I was leaning toward maybe asking my husband and son to go in together to get me a reader  next holiday season, and furthermore that I’d been leaning toward a Sony because it is easier to get the free stuff off the web from Gutenberg and the rest.  I described my dream of walking around with all of George Eliot!  the entire works of Dickens! Trollope’s Palliser novels– all all ALL of them!  in my arms!  It is just mind boggling.

All of  the things that are problematic about technology sort of slide away as I imagine hugging all the Victorian novels at once to my bosom.  Well, read about the British library’s pride in how they are plunging into the future here.