Posts Tagged ‘Trespassers’

David’s Kindle

Saturday, July 17th, 2010

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.

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!