Here is the first ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the other two parts in days to come. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how...

A couple of weeks ago I covered Autography, a prototype system for autographing digital books involving an iPad 2. Now Barnes & Noble is about to release an upgrade to the Nook reader that will allow Nook owners to have authors sign their e-books using a stylus. (Presumably via the touch-sensitive color LCD screen portion of the reader.) Interestingly, eReader (which Barnes & Noble bought) long allowed authors to do something similar using an Easter Egg function of the Palm PDA reader client. I wonder if that’s what gave B&N the idea? At any rate, for Nook owners...

Gear Diary blogger Douglas Moran has an entertaining and extremely true rant on one of the big problems with the commercial e-book world these days—the proliferation of differing formats, each of which requires its own reader application. On TeleRead, we call this problem the “Tower of E-Babel”, but Moran just calls it extremely irritating. Moran looks at the old Barnes & Noble e-book reader application, based on Fictionwise’s eReader. All in all, he writes, it was a very good application, and did everything he wanted it to. Then B&N essentially abandoned it in favor of their much-less-functional Nook application,...

A shot fired by Apple in the ongoing e-magazine controversy could end up having profound implications for reading non-iBooks e-books on iOS devices. It’s no surprise that speculation has been rife about whether Apple was going to kill other e-book apps on its iOS platform ever since in-app purchases were first made available, and again when Apple launched iBooks. After all, apps like eReader and Kindle and Nook and Kobo allow people to buy and download content completely outside the auspices of its in-app purchase store, without Apple getting its 30% cut of the take. So far all our...

I’ve been distracted for the last few days. A story idea got into my head for one of the Internet fiction series I contribute to occasionally, and it’s been hard to concentrate on anything else until I could get it out of my head. Unfortunately, I’m still not happy with the end results. It’s one of the most frustrating things in the world, as a writer, when the idea that seemed so awesome in your head comes out on the page like, well, a steaming pile of words. Perhaps in a few days I’ll have a better perspective and can...

The Wall Street Journal reports that Ron Burkle has lost his bid to seat himself and his chosen nominees on Barnes & Noble’s board of directors. Barnes & Noble shareholders elected founder Len Riggio and his nominees for the other two available seats to the Board of Directors. Barnes & Noble is proceeding to auction itself off, and has said that Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies is welcome to submit its own bid to be considered alongside all the others. It is unclear what the results of the auction will bode for Barnes & Noble’s Nook (and, for...

In a blog post on its own website, backlist e-publisher E-Reads points out that it is now paying advances for e-book rights (and actually has been for several months). It notes that in a Publishers Weekly article looking at e-book publisher royalties, of all the publishers surveyed only E-Reads was paying advances. The PW article notes that E-Reads founder Richard Curtis found a lot of agents were reluctant to offer rights to backlist titles without any money offered up front—it simply wasn’t a publishing model they were familiar with. Most of Curtis’s advances are fairly small, just in the...

So says an article by Richard Curtis at e-reads. According to Richard: These are store-fronts hosted by Fictionwise enabling customers to view only the publishers’ own titles rather than the comprehensive list of all books retailed by Fictionwise. The dedicated publisher pages will be terminated at the end of September, and publishers have been invited to redirect customer visits and purchases to the main Fictionwise website www.fictionwise.com. Richard says that, other than this, Fictionwise will continue as normal. Thanks to Marilynn Byerly for the link....

Tim Carmody, who I also mentioned earlier today, also has a piece at Wired’s Gadget Lab section on Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader, pointing out that despite the tendency to think of e-books these days as largely a contest between the Kindle and the iPad, the Nook has an estimated 20% of the e-book market—a bigger piece of that market than it has of the printed book market. Carmody notes that B&N is going for a hybrid strategy that ties together its physical stores and e-book offerings, giving consumers reasons to come into Barnes & Noble stores and...

I received the following email from Clytie Siddall, from Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia. Is anyone else having similar problems with Fictionwise? Email begins: My purchasing at Fictionwise has dwindled from a flood to a trickle since the imposition of "geographic limitations", but I still prefer to buy ebooks there if I can. I also signed up last year (before the imposition) for another 5 years of the Buywise club. Under the current publishing conditions, we customers are told that we will still be eligible for Buywise discounts for the life of our already-paid subscription, and that we can...

Shane Richmond, Head of Technology (Editorial) for Telegraph Media Group, has an editorial in the Telegraph about the way that DRM breaks up even the same file format of e-books into a Tower of e-Babel. He tried to open Adobe-DRM EPUB files in iBooks and of course was told that wouldn’t work. Richmond writes: Can we pause for a moment to remind ourselves just how absurd this situation is? It’s been a problem for so long that sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted but we are being sold products that work...

According to iTunes: Wattpad: IOS4, enhanced part navigation, add My Profile tab eReader: fixed a book deletion problem for the on-device bookshelf. Changed the background on the iPad for the Find and Color Picker dialogs so that the controls can be seen easeir Kobo: choose from left or fully justified text layout from reading settings. Enjoy an improved animated page turn effect. Performance and stability improvements....