As I continue my series of Honor Harrington reviews, in the hope of eventually reviewing the entire almost-completely-free e-book series from start to finish, I notice some news from David Weber has popped up lately: Weber and an unnamed CGI/3D movie studio are in the process of finalizing negotiations over the movie rights (Baen Bar link; free registration required) to the Honorverse series. Weber is very optimistic over the studio’s intentions to be as faithful to the books as possible (especially since they’re also fans of the series), and has been doing a lot of consultation with them on how best...

I found an interesting piece on BoingBoing the other day by Bill Barol, another one of those authors who had been rejected by traditional publishers and was thinking about self-publishing his caper novel, Thanks for Killing Me. He discussed the matter with a friend who had been a publishing executive, explaining that his real goal was to catch the attention of a traditional publisher and/or the movie business. “Okay,” he said. “First, forget everything you know about traditional media; all your experience is worthless. Take all that time you spend screwing around on Twitter and put...

Previously: Introduction Treecat Trilogy A Beautiful Friendship Young Honor and Elizabeth Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances On Basilisk Station The Honor of the Queen The Short Victorious War Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble Field of Dishonor Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order: Flag in Exile by David...

Often hilarious and usually surreal novelist Daniel Pinkwater is serializing his latest work, Bushman Lives, on the book’s website. The first three chapters are up so far, and they definitely continue the surreal and hilarious trend. New chapters will be added every Monday. The book itself doesn’t appear to be available for purchase yet, but hopefully this experiment in serialization will attract more people to buy it when it is. It’s great to see a wonderful author like Pinkwater joining the free e-books crowd! (Found via BoingBoing.)...

As Hurricane Irene approaches the upper east coast, property damage is of course a key concern—but Hurricane Irene is also, at least temporarily, knocking down some virtual walls—paywalls. Laura Hazard Owen reports on PaidContent that the New York Times and Newsday.com are both making hurricane coverage available to all readers for free. E-magazine service Zinio is also offering free issues of several electronic magazines to travelers stranded by the hurricane. Of course, the usefulness of these free services depends on people being able to keep their connectivity during the storm. USA Today has a guide suggesting ways for...

On PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports on some interesting findings from a Twitter discussion about e-book buyer behavior based on comments from book industry research organization representatives. The research reps suggest that limits on e-book sharing are limiting e-book adoption. The reps point out that consumers really like reading free e-books (about half of e-book buyers read free e-books) and expect e-book prices to stay low or drop lower. Half of all e-readers are given as gifts, but less than 1% of e-books are. Barriers to widespread e-book adoption are limits on sharing,...

The Pathfinder role-playing game was originally developed under the Open Gaming License as a “replacement” for D&D 3.5th edition after Hasbro announced it would no longer be supporting the game. Hasbro was changing over to its new, streamlined D&D 4th Edition rules, which suddenly left all the 3.5th-edition supplements its OGL had fomented without an available master rule set. However, the Open Game License meant that Paizo, Pathfinder’s developer, was free to take the core of the D&D rule set and create a new, compatible game around them. One noteworthy thing about Pathfinder was that the entire full-length version...

Just as Paul has returned from his trip, I have returned from mine. And while traveling by motorcycle is cool, it pales in comparison to traveling by Tardis! Seriously, I’ve come back from GenCon with recordings of several reviews to transcribe and typed notes on a panel to put up. I hope to begin that process this evening. Thanks to the writers’ symposium programming track, there were a number of authors available, and I interviewed Michael Stackpole and Greg Stolze, both of whom have done self-e-publishing work that I have covered here. I also interviewed webcomic artist...

Last year I published on Teleread a lengthy interview with author Jack Matthew as well as a preface to his work. I am happy to announce that since that time I have built an author site about his works and am helping him to digitalize old and new works.  The first major work is A Worker’s Writebook: How Language Makes Stories, a writing guide which he used to hand out to his fiction writing students. Now – until September 4 – this ebook is available free for download and DRM-free. (Normal price is 2.99).   The free download link...

I’ve touched on the “freemium” philosophy of giving some content away for free and charging for extras before, but here’s a post on AllThingsD with some interesting new findings touching on video gaming. It covers a study by Flurry, an analytics provider for mobile games on Apple and Android devices, on the spending habits of freemium gamers. (Found via Slashdot.) Of the people who play freemium games on iOS or Android devices, the study reveals, most will never spend money on the games at all—only 3% are likely to do so—but within that 3%, the average transaction is $14...

My to-be-read pile of ebooks keeps growing. Unfortunately for publishers, however, it keeps growing with free offerings from both publishers and self-publishers. I admit that a lot of the free self-published books should never have seen fingers on a keyboard, but I also have to admit that I am finding a lot of good reads among the free self-published books. Some are very high quality, many are just good reads. But “just good reads” is more than enough. These are books that aren’t of the caliber that one would choose for a book club discussion, but they are decently written and...

The Spanish company, which launched earlier this month, has just announced a free iPad app. The app uses a sliding pane interface similar to Twitter's iPad app, but for now it's pretty bare bones. The same might be said for the company's book selection at the present, at least based on the comment a reader named Michael left on our earlier post. He wrote: Near as I could tell, almost all of their content consists of English-language works in the public domain. Covers for those books cleverly use some sort of random pattern generator. There are a few Spanish-language books with...