Book Notes And Free eBooks

That whole Apple App Store thing is frustrating some developers. This is a lesson for Palm not to do the same with the Palm Pre eStore. Not a tight eBook connection with this item, but I think there might in the future, so I want this link here.

British Publishers Try to Find the Money in E-books

The topic of pricing also drew heated commentary. “We need to adapt our thinking about payment” said Makinson, who is of the mind that publishers are “short-changing authors” if they don’t price e-books the same as physical books. Rebuck, too, called for parity in pricing while e-books are in their infancy in the British market, and said, “as we go on we can adjust.” And Barnsley came out strongly against the practice of “micro pricing” and selling chapters individually, preferring a subscription model. She said e-book reader manufacturers, network providers and others involved in the retail chain would like e-books to be priced as low as possible. But “they see [the book] as the petrol in the car, while we see it as the wine in the bottle.”

I'm not a fan of subscriptions. I can't figure out what's good about that for any writer.


Source: NYPL Digital Gallery, The New York Public Library.

The Humbug: Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror.

An interesting article that casts Poe within his place in time. Yet it misses the point: all of time is the wrong time for certain people.

If Dupin sounds uncannily familiar, that’s because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like every other author of detective fiction, not to mention the creators of a thousand TV crime shows, is incalculably in Poe’s debt. “The children of Poe” is what Stephen King calls the members of his guild, and with good reason. But horror stories predate Poe, and have many other sources. Not so the literary sleuth. All detective stories and police procedurals begin with the intellectually imperious C. Auguste Dupin: methodical, eccentric, calculating — and insulting. We, mere readers, are so many Watsons, Hastingses, and Goodwins. Poe is the only Holmes.

And anyone who asks this:

Between Poe’s lies and Griswold’s forgeries, it can be difficult to take the measure of Edgar A. Poe. Was the man an utter genius or a complete fraud?

Doesn't understand genius or Poe.

Now for a jarring change of topic -- the baddest badass book trailer EVAR: MEEB Like This. Go watch.

Free eBooks!



Someone has taken the second issue of the classic comic book The Blue Beetle and turned it into a free ePub eBook.

Put Your Dreams First is a free PDF for a very short time.



And tomorrow only, Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, will be free.