Posts Tagged ‘ebooks’

One thing about the Internet: the shelf space is endless. And authors are starting to take note. The e-book site Fictionwise has long been bringing out older and out-of-print works by popular authors and releasing them as ebooks, and now Book View Cafe is expanding that idea into an entire Web site.

Book View Cafe is a consortium of over twenty professional authors with extensive publishing credits in the print world. The Internet is giving us an opportunity to make our out-of-print, experimental, or otherwise unavailable work available to you. Every day, new content available nowhere else will be served up on Book View Cafe: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, episodes of serialized novels, and maybe even a podcast now and then. The content will be archived and available after the posting date by visiting the author's bookshelf.

Authors so far include: Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Brenda Clough, Kate Daniel, Laura Anne Gilman, Christie Golden, Anne Harris, Sylvia Kelso, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Sue Lange, Ursula K. Le Guin, Rebecca Lickiss, Vonda N. McIntyre, Nancy Jane Moore, Pati Nagle, Darcy Pattison, Irene Radford, Madeleine Robins, Amy Sterling, Jennifer Stevenson, Susan Wright and Sarah Zettel.

It's not my preferred way to read a book, granted. Each chapter has its own page so you have to keep scrolling and clicking, a method usually performed to increase page and advertising views but as there is no advertising on the site (yet?) it seems needlessly annoying. Still, it's a great way to get more material from favorite authors or browse through the works of authors you've always wanted to try. Most everything there is free, although there will be expanded or limited edition works available shortly for a fee.

Tor recently launched their brand new website, and it was worth the wait. Not only does it have regular updates on science fiction as an industry, funky science-y things in the news, and posts from writers such as John Scalzi, Steven Gould,  and Emma Bull, they also give away free ebooks every month with no DRM or copy protection  at all. They even provide a variety of formats: HTML, PDF, Mobipocket, and Sony.

This month's offering is "Spaceman Blues" by Brian Francis Slattery. You'll need to register at Tor.com but that's free and quick and doesn't commit you to anything.

If you like reading science fiction, Tor.com is a great place to visit, browse through, or lose entire hours of your life.

M.J. Rose, who first became famous for self-promoting her book "Lip Service" into bestselling success in 1998 (it became the first self-published book to be selected by the Doubleday Book Club), is now offering her new book "The Reincarnationalist" as a free download until October 30. From the synopsis:

A bomb in Rome, a flash of bluish-white and photojournalist Josh Ryder's world exploded.
Nothing would ever be the same.
As Josh recovers, his mind is invaded with thoughts that have the emotion, the intensity, the intimacy of memories.
But these are not his memories. They are ancient… and violent. There's an urgency to them he can't ignore–pulling him to save a woman named Sabina… and the treasures she protects.

But why offer it for free? "It's because trying something for free is the best way of discovering it. And free doesn't mean sampling a quarter of a cookie – it means the whole cookie. It doesn't mean someone spraying my wrist with perfume – it means them putting a small bottle of the fragrance in my shopping bag," she said in an essay at The Huffington Post.

"The Reincarnationlist" is available for Adobe Reader, Microsoft Reader, or Mobipocket.

As they have for the last few years, e-Reader.com is offering free e-books at the rate of one a day for your joyeous season's glee. Just head to their site, click on the big banner at the top, and download away for your reading pleasure.

But they're only doing it for four days this year, the 18th to the 21st. I seem to remember their December giveaways lasted 12 days last year, and the entire month of December in 2004. What happened? Publishers uncooperative? Run out of public domain works? A friend of mine referred me to "gift horse, not looking into the mouth of," but I'm curious. eReader.com, where's the love?

Fortunately plenty of e-books are freely available elsewhere, from Project Gutenberg and Baen Books' Free Library to the Web sites of the authors themselves. You may, of course, wonder why anyone would bother. I pity you.

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Dunno if you've looked around lately, but there seems to be a lot of good science fiction popping up on this Interweb thing. And, as I frantically search for more things to distract me from NaNoWriMo, I shall point at a few of my favorite time-sinks to distract you from my shameful word count.

Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show – Stories, articles, essays, and reviews, updated weekly. 'Taint free, there's a small monthly fee, but you get some of the best-written stuff out there right now including backstories about Card's characters from his Ender series, available as text or as downloadable MP3s. He reads his work well, and that happens with few writers.

Jim Baen's Universe – Stories and columns from Baen Books favorite writers, including Mike Resnick, Eric Flint, Gene Wolf, Wen Spencer, and more. This is a subscription service — you can read the first chunk of each story for free but it costs to get the rest — and different levels of subscriptions can also net you access to writers at cons, free e-books, autographed copies, and even Tuckerization (getting your name used as a character). Baen Books is probably the longest-running science fiction e-book promoter, with a huge library of completely DRM-free e-books available for free download, and this is their next step in making web publishing work.

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