Ohio author Jack Matthew's thoughts about book collecting & Robert Nagle's questions about its relevance to ebooks...

Interview with Jack Matthews, Ohio author of philosophical short stories (Part 2)...

Introduction to the Literary Works of Jack Matthews, Ohio fiction writer, book collector and essayist. By Robert Nagle...

When I was writing my series about “Paleo E-Books”, one of the sites I mentioned was Shifti.org, the wiki successor to the defunct Transfomation Stories Archive. In the course of writing about it, I came to read some of the stories there—and found I enjoyed them enough to contribute a few myself. While independent e-publishing sites such as Smashwords or unfiltered document hosts such as Scribd are what generally come to mind when you think of independent e-publishing, smaller themed fiction sites such as Shifti represent another way—one which does not tend to get as much media coverage....

Smashwords has worked out an affiliate relationship with Wordclay, a print on demand company, to encourage writers to appear on paper as well as in ePub and other electronic formats. Mark Coker briefly discussed this during an audio interview with TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba during Tools of Change. "Authors should publish in print," Mark said---since e-book revenues are just a fraction of those from paper books. Electronically, Smashwords books are available not only directly but also through new arrangements under which you can download them within the Stanza program for the iPhone. In the interview...

What will it take to get e-books off the ground for typical readers? Is the Amazon Kindle launch enough? Not really, if you go by a new report from MarketIntellNow, a TeleBlog advertiser not associated with any hardware or software vendor. The for-sale report, based on a poll of 5,000 Web users, analyzes people's book buying habits and amenability to reading devices like the Kindle, Cybook, iLiad or Sony Reader. See Inside the heads of prospective e-book buyers: A Q & A with Marie Campbell of MarketIntellNow for more details on the report. Right now, as hinted by this photo of a...