CNet reports that cartoonist Richard Stevens III has released a free, DRM-free PDF of the first physical book collection of his webcomic Diesel Sweeties. Although the entire strip is archived for free on-line, the e-book represents a PDF conversion of a printed collection which includes a foreword, character information, and edited and recolored artwork taking into account the lessons Stevens learned through experience. The giveaway is, of course, meant to promote Stevens’s web store where he sells merchandise related to the strip (including printed strip collections). But that’s to be expected; Baen’s DRM-free digital giveaways work the same way....

This past week, the Kindle iOS app received an update. We did mention it when it happened, but I think a couple of the features in that update are important enough to go into in detail. First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari...

Google has just added offline reading to its Google Books app for the Chrome web browser. They tout this as offering the ability to read e-books on a plane, or when the Internet has gone down for some reason. To read your Google eBooks offline, you’ll need to install the Google Books app from our Chrome Web Store and ensure your Google eBooks are available to read offline. Please see this article in our Help Center and follow the simple step-by-step process to enable offline reading for your ebooks. Of course, it only takes...

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...

During GenCon, I had the opportunity for a brief interview with Phil Reed, Chief Operating Officer at Steve Jackson Games, in which we discussed e23, Steve Jackson Games’s PDF e-book store. We’ve mentioned the store a time or two in the past, as when “Reverend Pee Kitty” talked about how the program had expanded beyond its original intended goals. I took the chance to find out from Mr. Reed some more about how this program was working. Me: What gave you the idea to do e23? Phil: When I joined the company in '99 it was already in...

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...

I am now at GenCon, the original gaming convention and now a huge event attended by dozens of gaming and media companies with an attendance in excess of 30,000 people. I’ve spent the last couple of hours mostly wandering around the dealer room, though I did get in a 30 minute interview with self-publishing writer Michael Stackpole that I will post when I have time to transcribe. It is still an impressive event. The game industry was one of the first sectors of publishing to embrace e-publishing fully. As Stackpole pointed out during our interview, game companies...

Today Wolfram launched CDF, a new document format that incorporates interactive charts, infographics, tables, and anything else that you can produce in the company's own Mathematica (or that you can import as MathML expressions from Excel and Word). Conrad Wolfram writes, "The idea is to provide a knowledge container that’s as easy to author as documents, but with the interactivity of apps—for CDFs to make live interactivity as everyday a way to communicate as spreadsheets made charts." Although Wolfram is positioning this as an open document format, the readers over at Slashdot are skeptical about the EULA and potential issues down...

One of my earliest blog posts about e-books, back in 2002 when I was writing for Jeff Kirvin’s “Writing on Your Palm,” was called “Whither the PDA D&D?”. I pointed out that, whereas fiction e-books had made the transition to portable e-format, role-playing games had yet to do so. Possibly one of the biggest obstacles was the way that so many of them depend on tables, which don’t tend to translate well to small screens. Given how big and thick role-playing game books tend to be, they would seem tailor-made for such a conversion—if someone could get around the...

Marie Lebert's review of the past forty years of ebooks continues over at Project Gutenberg News with eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present. Lebert's post focuses mainly on the timeline of the format's evolution, so I heartily recommend you supplement it with Nate Hoffelder's OMG PDF WTF at The Digital Reader, which highlights some of the format's huge security issues....

The 2011 edition of this annual anthology of essays and reports on (U.S.) government libraries is now available from LexisNexis' Government Info Pro website. It's described on the site as "a collaborative document... put out annually on a specific topic of interest to government libraries." The second section may be of particular interest to the Teleread audience. Titled "Adapting to New and Evolving Technologies", it contains reports from librarians and consultants over topics like the Kindle Lending Program, e-accessibility issues, and SLA 2010. Via Resource Shelf...

The National Academies—consisting of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council—recently announced that all PDF versions of books published by its members will be available for free download, starting immediately. This includes more than 4000 existing books, plus any published in the future. These PDFs can be accessed from the National Academies Press web store, from which print versions can also be purchased. They can also be read online for free. Although the e-books will be available for free, they will still be copyrighted. The National Academies...