Literature and the Web » Hamilton Stone Editions

Higher Ground is Now Available as a Kindle Book!

MSW — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:13:38 +0000

I just checked, and yes! Higher Ground is now available on Kindle! The other Hamilton Stone books are under review, and I have to finish putting up Trespassers, so this is a new day for real. Since I broke down and decided to stop waiting for Smashwords.com, who, terrific as they’ve been, haven’t completed their deal with Amazon. It is a tedious kind of work, preparing books for transfer to electronic reading, but I often do it late at night when my reading attention sags. Repetition is reassuring.
It is a wonderful feeling to know that at this moment one of my novels, as well as books by other Hamilton Stone Writers, is available via all the common electronic media.

David’s Kindle

MSW — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 03:19:43 +0000

We’re at the lake with Andy’s brother David, and David has a Kindle. It’s a first generation Kindle, and David says he uses it primarily for reading fiction– pleasure reading. He says he doesn’t use it for anything that he would take notes on. I fooled around with it for twenty minutes, as I have in the past, but this time more serious about turning it on, reading some pages of Booth Tarkington’s Magnificent Ambersons, turning pages, testing larger font sizes (can I read without my glasses?– yes, but such short pages who wants to?), tried it outside on the hammock, and yes, sun and shade, very readable. He says images and maps, photos of, say, the subject of a biography– all of that is pretty useless, as is the miniature keyboard at the bottom.

And! He has an app for his computer that reads books for Kindle, and he bought a copy of Trespassers (Hamilton Stone Editions) from Smashwords and loaded it, and there it was, my first ebook sale, sort of. Well, well, well.

Wall Street Journal Notices E-Books..

MSW — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 03:49:32 +0000

Here’s a summary of what’s happening in e-books from the Wall Street Journal– discusses Lulu and Smashwords along with others. This article contrasts big presses that do e-books with self-publishing, skipping what interests me more, which is small presses like Hamilton Stone Editions.

Hamilton Stone Editions’ New E-Books

MSW — Sat, 08 May 2010 14:07:30 +0000

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!

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

MSW — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:46:44 +0000

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.