Actually, more like 18 now, since I only just found out about it myself. But until Friday, February 26, 2010, at 3:08 p.m. CST, author and occasional TeleRead contributor Moriah Jovan is giving away the first two books in her series, The Proviso and Stay, for free. They are available for download as two zipped files, 10.6 and 13.5 megabytes respectively, each containing the book in question in HTML, ePub, imp, LIT, PDB, PDF, and PRC formats. I haven’t read these yet myself, but am always on the lookout for good reading material. Give them a...

We are aware that many of you are getting security warnings about the site. We have both the NAPCO IT team and our friends at WPUgrade.com looking at it and hope to have the glitch fixed soon....

The British Library has launched the UK Web Archive offering access to thousands of UK websites. You can find it here. From the press release Currently home to roughly 8 million sites, the UK web domain is a rapidly expanding and constantly changing record of social and cultural issues in 21st century Britain. Despite common misperceptions, material that is freely available on the web is still subject to copyright and cannot be archived without permission - a time consuming, expensive, and often impossible task. Worryingly, recent research estimates the average life expectancy of a website is just...

Earlier today, I touched on mobile device demographics showing that Apple by and large rules the mobile device roost (the iPod Touch more so than the iPhone). Here’s some more interesting stats from Gizmodo, sourced from AdMob’s January mobile metrics report. Fully 65% of the iPod Touch’s owners are 17 or younger, versus only 13% for the iPhone. This is only natural, of course; non-wealthy parents are going to be somewhat reluctant to foot the $70/mo smartphone service plan bill for an iPhone when an iPod Touch does most of the same things. (In fact, one...

I'm back from an exhausting time of trying to cover TOC for you guys and here are a few thoughts about my overall impression of the conference. TOC is a rather odd duck in that I don't think it quite knows who is eating its eggs. It is a mixture of low level, in the trenches, stuff and very high level thought pieces. This makes many of the sessions suitable for the worker bees and mid-level managers (for example those on copyright, the workshops on the first day). The dichotomy comes in when TOC goes with its keynotes....

Publishing Perspectives reports that French readers seem to think that brick and mortar bookstores are more expensive than on-line purchasing "when, in reality, book prices are supposed to be the same across all channels.” (Is that true in France? It definitely is not in the USA, but I seem to recall hearing somewhere about European regulation of pricing.) Ars Technica reports that at a conference on Tuesday, Apple COO Tim Cook said that, since the majority of Apple’s revenue now comes from the iPhone family of devices, Apple now considers itself a “mobile device business” and the iPad...

BlackBerry is coming up in the world. OverDrive has just announced the release of a public beta of an audiobook app that can download audiobooks from libraries and major online retailers such as Barnes & Noble. The app can be downloaded here. Previously OverDrive released audiobook apps for Windows Mobile and Android, and they say that an iPhone app is planned for the near future....

This is a piece of news that can have a pretty wide impact in publishing. From the press release: Lulu, the open publishing pioneer, today announced that it has opened its platform to developers, giving them direct access to its publishing engine and creating new opportunity for publishing innovation. The Lulu Publication API lets individuals, publishers, businesses and other organizations create a new breed of Web application enabling on-demand publishing through Lulu, marketed under their own brand names. Using the API, a software company, for example, could instantly publish hundreds of manuals and gain worldwide distribution. Or a publisher could...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting story about a book assembled to raise money for Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake. The idea behind 100 Stories for Haiti was to assemble 100 stories from all over the Internet, and then publish them as a book and e-book. Author Greg McQueen says that the book would not have been possible five years ago, before the dawn of social networking: As it happened, I posted [to social networks] an appeal for stories on the morning of Tuesday, January, 19. Just one week after the earthquake...

I’m a big magazine reader. In addition to the many books I buy each year (I have more books in my to-read pile than I can read within the next few years), I subscribe to a lot of magazines. My subscriptions include Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The Week, The Economist, American Heritage, New York Review of Books, Business Week, PC World, U.S. News & World Report, The Scientist, Discover, and several more. I begin my day, every day, with a pot of tea and the day’s New York Times and my local newspaper. Between the books I buy and the magazines...

Michael Serbinis is CEO of Kobo, and as such his prognostications are of more than a little interest. The following is reprinted, with permission, from his blog: 1. A $99 eReader. Controversial I know, but device makers are pouring into the space and while $99 may not come until 2011, I would not be surprised at all to see it this year. If you are selling an eReader north of $249, it had better sing and dance, clean the house… and make a mean soufflé. 2. The $4.99 Bestseller. Yes, eBook prices are going up, but what happens when some pubs...

Last week, Publishing Perspectives covered the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One of the facts that came out was that smartphone use had more than quintupled from 2.4% of the mobile market to 15.4% in 2008. Publishing Perspectives reporter Hannah Johnson noted: If book publishers add one thing to their to-do lists this year, it should be to develop and execute a mobile content strategy to take advantage of this growth. The article goes into detail about how the market for media content on these phones is growing by leaps and bounds, but...