I've mentioned here before my love of Jeanne and Spider's work, and any chance to help out (while getting new stuff to read at the same time) is a Good Thing. You can read about her ongoing battle (and her fight to continue producing a Stardancer movie) at http://stardancemovie.blogspot.com.

What's "Lord Dickens's Declaration" about? Think "steampunk/time travel/alternatehistory" and you won't be too far off. There are gentlemen and ladies and intrigue and SCIENCE and steamships and long discourses on the nature of time itself. Also, cavemen. Santaro usually writes horror fiction but he rises to the challenge here. The book is also beautifully designed and illustrated to look like an old and treasured book, which just adds to the steampunk feel. Nicely done.

While you're in the area, check out the StarShipSofa's podcasts. They're free, professionally done, and a welcome addition to your portable library.

All well and good. But when they updated why did they change the app's icon, which was cool and distinctive (see above left), into something that looks like an "I Can Read!" book? Clipart restrictions? Aiming at the children's iPhone market? Lost a bet? I don't recall offhand if the pro and free versions had different icons before so perhaps this is a way to make the difference more obvious, but jeez.

OK, not all the publishing companies. Baen Books, as always, was ahead of the curve with a sensible and attractive pricing plan from the very beginning. But I almost have to throw them out when complaining about publishers; they keep throwing off the curve. Meanwhile the rest of the publishers priced their ebooks high and huddled together, hoping that it wouldn't catch on.

Then Amazon shook things up with the $9.95 New York Times Bestseller ebook pricing. Suddenly that seemed to be a better deal – it certainly helped drive sales of their otherwise overpriced Kindle – and we saw a chink in the pricing wall.

Now it's spreading, and I hope it continues. eReader.com, one of the oldest ebook retailers, has changed their pricing structure and they're going Amazon one better. Now all new books start at $9.95 or less the first week of their release. After that the books revert to the publisher's list price but will not exceed $12.95. Read that again: will not exceed $12.95. And you can still earn 15% Reader Rewards, rebates which can be applied to future purchases.

This is, frankly, huge. Even Amazon's Kindle store has plenty of books over 20 bucks. But now eReader (recently purchased by Barnes and Noble) has committed to selling every book, no matter the cover price, for under 13 bucks. And New York Times Bestsellers will continue to be $9.95. I'm guessing it's B&N's way of making sure Amazon doesn't become THE ebook retailer, but whatever their reasons are it's much closer to what I'd consider reasonable and I immediately celebrated by buying a book I hadn't planned to pick up until its paperback release (WWW: Wake, by Robert J. Sawyer,$12.95, down from publisher price of $24.95).

Now, the caveats. I don't know if every book you want is available through eReader.com. I'm not sure why similar pricing hasn't been applied over at Fictionwise.com (now also owned by B&N) where WWW:Wake is still full price (minus various rebates). And since being taken over by B&N both companies have started enforcing geographic restrictions on applicable books so that if you're outside the U.S. or Canada, you can't buy many ebooks that you could have bought a few weeks ago. Which, again, is pretty silly. Amazon will ship the physical book to different countries, what makes the ebook different? Publishing companies need to re-evaluate the licensing contracts they've been using since Gutenberg and look at making them more global. But that's another battle.

Updated: looks like pricing on older books is still a bit high compared to Kindle or paperback editions, so this will really show up on new haerdback editions.

Now, things are getting tough again. And we could really use some cheap entertainment again…*

Enter "Steampunk Tales." This collection of 10 stories by award-winning authors takes you back to the days of Victorian inventors who never used muscle when a gear would do, and never met a piston they didn't like. Steam-powered computers, mechanical men, dirigibles and anything that can be thought up by a human mind and realized in brass, iron and leather.

As for the stories themselves – like in the original pulp magazines, some worked for me, some didn't. Some, like  "Project Moebius-5" and "Tempus Fugit," had great promise but ended abruptly and poorly. Some were experimental and had excellent passages, if not plots, like "The Anachronist's Cookbook" and "The Man and the Robot." "Benedice Te" was a rollicking good adventure, "A Grain of Sand" was a decent inventor's tale, and the world of "The Reanimation Emporium" is one I'd like to read more stories about. One or two of the rest I didn't finish, but overall it wasn't a bad evening spent.

"Steampunk Tales" will be published monthly, and will only be available for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Once the 3.0 OS comes out, you'll be able to order new issues from within the app. Just $1.99.

* OK, yes, "cheap" doesn't include the pricve of the iPhone/iPod Touch itself, but work with me, here.

Give everybody the first script for free.

Right now, and until August 31, you can download the script to the pilot episode of their new show "Nurse Jackie," starring former "Sopranos" star Edie Falco, to your Kindle e-book reader. You'll also get (free!) schedule information and nags to watch the show when it premieres on Monday, June 8th.

It's not a bad way to build some buzz, and I'd love to get scripts for other shows the same way (Dr. Horrible? The Guild? Are you listening?) Look for more Kindle-based promotions to come along, as long as its still the latest sexy thing.

In the beginning, there was Peanut Press. One of the oldest e-book publishers and sellers (and by oldest, I mean almost 10 years old, ancient by e-publishing clocks), they built up a good rep, got bought by Palm to become Palm Reader and then eReader, and then finally getting bought by Fictionwise (which just got bought by Barnes and Noble!). eReader has been around forever, is what I'm saying, and they've built up a solid and dependable program that works on possibly more hardware than any other. eReader is available for Palm, Pocket PCs, Symbian phones, your Windows, Mac or OQO desktop, the iPhone and iPod Touch (shown), and as of this week, the Blackberry, all for free.

Pros:

The experience. eReader has had a lot of time to get it right,
and they're just about there. Books load quickly, paginate easily to
your specifications, and look good on the screen (assuming, of course,
that you can read comfortably from a small electronic screen without
your eyeballs melting). If your device can handle such things, you can change the orientation from portrait to landscape for easier reading.
eReader also has an AutoScroll feature that
allows you to let the words scroll past you at your desired speed if
you wish (AutoScroll isn't available on the iPhone version. but they make up for it with a handy piechart graphic next to the books in your library to let you know at a glance how far along you are in each one). While you're reading you have the full screen, but a single touch brings up a variety of options.
The convenience. eReader allows you to personalize just about
everything, from the colors and font to the line spacing and margins
and page turn animations. If you prefer tapping to turn pages it can,
and if you prefer a gentle swipe it'll do that, too. Place bookmarks,
make notes, search for words throughout the entire text, use the
built-in dictionary, switch from black-on-white to yellow-on-black with
a single touch, and enjoy yourself.
The content. eReader reads eReader books, readily available by the thousands from eReader's own bookseller site, ereader.com, and from Fictionwise.com as well as from other sites such as Baen Books. Right now eReader is having a $9.99 sale on all New York Times bestsellers. There are also plenty of free programs to help you turn your own unsecure content into eReader docs.
And eReader has the least annoying DRM of any e-book retailer I've ever
seen. When you buy a book, it (securely) encodes your name and the
credit card number you've assigned into your hardware so that to open
the e-book you've purchased, you have to enter that information. Just
once, and then it remembers for future books (so future DRm is still
there but you don't have to deal with it) but people are less likely to
send copies around the Intenet if they have to include their own credit
card info along with them.

The cons:

I've been using eReader as my e-book reader of choice for almost a
decade, on a variety of handheld devices up to and including my current
iPod Touch, and there are still a few drawbacks. The biggest one is
that eReader reads only eReader files, so no TXT, HTML, PDFs or other popular
formats (although I understand it will soon support ePub files). If you
want to read something you have to convert it to an eReader file first,
and that can be annoying.

And the eReader on my iPod Touch is even trickier as I can't just move
files over to it the way I could with my Palm. This isn't specifically
an eReader problem since Apple won't let anyone just move files
over willy-nilly — it would somehow bring about the premature
destruction of the Earth, I understand — but troublesome nonetheless.
You can easily connect to eReader and Fictionwise to download books
from your online bookshelves, and both of them offer free sonline
storage for any of your personal books you want to be able to get. You
can manually enter any URL where downloadable books are available, and
you can grab them from your personal home Web server or other location. 
But you'll have this problem with almost any iPhone e-book reader.

After all these years I find I still prefer it to the iPhone Kindle or Stanza apps,
and I didn't buy my iPod Touch until I made sure that this single program was
available for it. Stanza comes close, but the insistence on chapters bugs me, I prefer swiping the screen to tapping, and many of the preferences I've gotten used to in eReader require more hunting and tweaking in Stanza. 

That may not last. Stanza offers more options for downloading books and reads more formats (including the eReader one), and that's darned attractive. Can't I just shmoosh them together and get the e-book reader I want?

Check out eReader for just about any handheld device you own, and see what you think.

Before the Kindle app came along, Stanza was the big dog in iPhone e-book reading. And with good reason.

It's free. It does what it does with minimum fuss, with easy-to-understand menus and directions. Once you use it once you've pretty well got it figured out. And getting books from the Web, from a variety of places, is quick and easy. And it's free.

Pros:

The convenience. Download Stanza from the iTunes store and most of your e-book reading is now covered. Stanza can read DRM-free Amazon Kindle files, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT,  PalmDoc, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, HTML, and PDF, as well as eReader files in both secure and unsecure formats.  Tap the screen to turn a page and you're off and reading.
The experience. Once you're actually in the book, it's pretty much the same as every other e-book reader. The font is crisp, the page-turning animation can be changed to a sliding effect or turned off completely, it saves your place and lets you add bookmarks, and you can search for words.
The customization. Don't like something about Stanza, you can probably change it. You can change text size through the settings or on the fly with the iPhone's pinch and unpinch gesture. You can change the background color, line spacing, margin widths, alignment, you can even change the cover of the book you're reading if you prefer a different one.
The content. Stanza allows you to connect easily to several major e-books sites such as Fictionwise.com, ereader.com, Manybooks.net, and more. Best might be Project Gutenberg, which has thousands of public domain books ready for you to nab for free, and Stanza handles searching and downloading from Project Gutenberg with ease.

The cons:

Not a lot, really. Stanza is a well-designed program.

I do have a few gripes, though. Stanza breaks books into chapters (presumably for faster loading) but that means you can't easily jump around or search inside the entire book, and the scroll bar isn't always very responsive even within the chapter. Getting your personal content into Stanza on your iPhone is a pain, but that's the case with every iPhone e-reader app (Stanza offers a free desktop app that works as a server for you to download from, or you can upload your content to a personal space at Fictionwise.com). And I prefer swiping to tapping for my page-turning, not an option here.

But other than that, I like Stanza. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, so will you.

Since then the convenience and savings in both money and shelf space has converted me to the point where I prefer to buy e-book versions wherever possible, saving the print version for gifts, special editions, or books that won't translate well to a small screen (say, pop-up books; pop-up technology is woefully behind the times).

For many people, reading on a small screen simply doesn't compare to a printed book, and that's fine. And enjoying e-books doesn't mean you have to abandon the printed word forever. But if you like the idea of being able to knock off a chapter or two in line at Publix or on the bus, I highly recommend them, and now's a good time to give it a try.

March 8-14 is "Read an E-Book Week." Check out the list of sponsors, most of which are offering free e-books for download for a variety of e-book readers.

And to help you make sense of this, starting tomorrow I'll post reviews of popular e-book sites as well as the various e-book reader applications that are available. Get reading!

It doesn't get much better than free.

For the rest of us, they're available in various combinations of Microsoft Reader, Adobe, MobiPocket, and eReader over at Books on Board. All but the eReader versions are free; the eReader editions are 10% off.

You can also get 25% off any other books by those authors at Books on Board by using this promo code: RandomHouseOnBoard .

UPDATED: Dec. 15 was the last day for the 25% off coupon, but the free ebooks will be available until Feb. 28.