What e-reading really, really needs right now, what would give it a major boost, is a Web site dedicated to book reviews. As far as I know, there is no central, obvious place where readers can go for recommendations. My first thought is that this should be based on Joomla! or something similar. Most of the reviews, especially in the beginning, would need to be written and uploaded by account-holding readers. Other readers would then vote, in two ways: on the quality of the book, and on the quality of the review. Reviews should be sorted in order of their ratings,...

I'm re-reading Walden on paper, in the OUP "World's Classics" edition. The editor, Stephen Fender, has provided copious notes, tagged in the text with scores of asterisks. Some of these notes are very interesting; others less so. A few are even, to an experienced reader, a bit insulting. I don't need to be told: "Spartan-like: the ancient Spartans were noted for their simplicity, frugality, and self-discipline". Nor do I need alerting to the fact that Hercules was set twelve labors to perform, nor am I ignorant of the meaning of the word "slough": and I had already twigged that...

[Editors note:  any mistakes in this post are the editor's, not the contributor's.  PB]  On 29 September I published my newest novel, and have been both surprised and gratified by the number of downloads. The book is a thriller with a post-apocalyptic setting, and – unlike my others – has been tagged as "science fiction" at manybooks.net and Feedbooks. I have been getting plentiful hits from SF sites. The penny then dropped, and I posted the following poll at MobileRead: Many members of the MobileRead forums seem to be sci-fi fans, which may not be surprising, since nearly everyone here can be...

Microsoft's killing Live Search Books. But could its book search have been hurting publishers? And what about online freebies of books---complete or excepts? The help-or-hurt question was among the topics of a panel at BookExpo America, where, by the way, Jeff Bezos will be speaking (ugh, about those K-numbers, Jeff?). PW mentions cases from Harlequin and HarperCollins. At HC Barbara Lilly warns not to extrapolate too much, but says 1,177 people out of 83,000 visitors decided to buy a Neil Gaiman book after seeing it online. What do you think of that ratio, gang? The book---not offered as...

Who doesn't like the idea of shareware books? Download 'em for free. Pay up only if a writer gives you a good read. A gifted U.K. novelist named Richard Herley---and, yes I've read The Penal Colony and can vouch for his talent---bravely tried such an experiment. You bet I cheered him on. I wanted my skepticism toward shareware books to be wrong, and I gave Richard ample exposure. Manybooks.net and Feedbooks did the same. 11K downloads but just 25 payers So what are the results of the experiment after three months? Despite 11,000 downloads of The Penal Colony and...

Windows Live Writer is a great way to create and edit blog entries, but at least for WordPress, authors' bylines don't show up except in a menu item you need to look for. The default byline is mine. Just now, alas, to my horror, I noticed that my byline rather than Richard Herley's was on the stellar Q&A with Matt McClintock of Manybooks.net. Was mine there from the start, or did the software burp later on? At any rate, without any prompting from Richard, whom I mentioned in the tags, I've fixed the glitch, and I'm posting this notice here...

Today TeleRead talks to Matthew McClintock, the spirit behind manybooks.net. Matt is the Director of Web Services for Columbia College, Chicago, the largest arts and media college in the U.S.; manybooks is one of his private interests. Q. Can you please tell us about the genesis of manybooks.net? Does it have anything to do with "satisfying both my nostalgia and my burning desire to become a total geek," to cut 'n' paste a line from your personal Web site? Loves gizmos, e-reading---and well-organized collections A. My reasons for starting may be different from the various reasons I have for continuing, but the...

  Will Kevin Kelly's "1,000 true fans" strategy work for writers and others? I'm skeptical, and so is John Scalzi (photo). Condensed and in Scalzi's words, the counter-arguments are: 1. "Gathering a thousand true fans is harder than it looks. 2. "The available universe of 'true fans' is not the entire US (or the entire Internet), but the subset of those who are willing/able to spend a significant sum of money on a single creative person. 3. "Artists are likely competing for 'true fans.' 4 . "'True Fans' may not stay true fans. 5. "Just...

David has invited me to highlight some of the freely available files at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere. May I kick off with a work I have contributed myself, under my given rather than my fiction-writing name? It is an electronic edition of the first three books of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, an epic poem first published in 1590-6 and one of the chief glories of the English language. The painting shown here is "Una and the Lion" by Briton Rivière; Lady Una, representing Truth, is among Spenser's main characters in this allegory, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth 1. You can download...

Oh how I'd hate it if TeleRead weren't a global e-book blog. Where would we be without posts from Branko Collin in Amsterdam or others such as Carol Jurd in Adelaide or Ficbot in Toronto---or, now, Richard Herley, the prize-winning novelist whose essays reach us from a village in the Hampshire Downs in the U.K., an area shown in the photo? But no course requirements, no academic details, bedevil us. What about institutions? How can degrees be more similar in a number of places---not just Europe or the United States but also cash-strapped developing countries? And can open source...

"Recently, I learned about a new e-book program dedicated to kids called kidthing.com. Kidthing is a digital media platform that is designed to bring interactive books, movies, and games to children. Kidthing, in conjunction with Dr. Seuss Enterprises and NEA's Read Across America, is giving away an animated version of Horton Hears a Who, one of my daughter's favorite stories. I downloaded the program and the free ebook. It was a great experience." - Jane, at DearAuthor,  writing on the glories of freebies and suggesting that romance publishers experiment with them. The TeleRead take: Speaking of trying and buying, later...

Richard Herley, the author of The Penal Colony and other novels, including The Stone Arrow, which won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, will contribute to the TeleBlog from time to time. Welcome, Richard! For the benefit of latecomers, let it be known Richard is generously making his books available as shareware under a Creative Commons license. Pay him if you enjoy the reads! Sony Reader owner Meanwhile Sony Reader owners will be pleased to learn that Richard is among them--he reads off a PRS-500 that a friend got him in the States. Richard's...