BooksForABuck, owned by Rob Preece, a much-valued member of the TeleRead community, has started using nonDRMed ePub by way of BookGlutton's free online converter. Rob's first ePub title is Glass Hours, Cathy Richardson Dodson's a time travel romance, which will also be available in HTML and other common formats. The advantage of ePub is that it's not only nonproprietary but also will be in use as a distribution format by large publishers. And as a consumer format, too, in time---an alternative to the Tower of eBabel. Rob is helping to blaze the way. Congratulations to him...

Moderator: See earlier item on e-book pricing. Unrelated: Rob's test of BookGlutton's ePub conversion. Try it yourself. - D.R. Sometimes you can't win for losing. E-books get dinged for being "too expensive." But offer great books at super-affordable prices instead---and you might get attacked for that. Pricing is one of the most controversial aspects of e-books. When I started BooksForABuck.com, my market research indicated that many e-book publishers had set price points above those charged by traditional publishers for paper books. I love e-books and can understand charging more for the portability, adjustable font, and convenience. The problem is, you have...

Who says Rob Preece, a TeleBlog regular, is just a former FCC economist and publisher of BooksForABuck? He's a novelist, too. And the cover and blurb for his new book show signs of a wicked and quirky imagination that just might appeal to some members of the TeleBlog community. No, I haven't read A Really Bad Hair Day: The Return of Magic Plague, among Rob's more than half a dozen books. But the cover of this one, now on sale at Fictionwise as a multiformat title without DRM, really caught my eye. Without the least prompting from Rob or his...

Moderator's note: Will e-books really help the typical reader save money? Here are some Kindle-related thoughts from Rob Preece, owner of BooksForABuck.com---trained as an economist. - DR First, you've got to assume a useful life---and consider the discount rate. I'm going to assume your e-book reader lasts three years and ignore the discount rate, which is about comparing a buck spent now with a buck saved in a couple of years. For most of us saving a dollar a couple of years from now is not as valuable as saving a dollar now. Let's assume you buy your Kindle...

Moderator's note: Photo is of Maxwell Perkins, who, as an editor for Charles Scribner's Sons, added value to the works of such immortals as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. - DR I'm as fond of free books as anyone. Project Gutenberg is a wonderful service, and I am grateful for all of the volunteers and contributors who've made this resource possible. So many great works of the past were either inaccessible or available only in high-cost collectible books until Gutenberg began its epic construction of the new universal library. The glories of the weed-out That said, I'm also a publisher. It's...

Moderator's note: We're pleased to welcome Rob Preece as a regular TeleBlog contributor. I haven't always agreed with his comments on others' posts, but I've enjoyed them, and as a publisher and bookstore operator, he'll offer his own special perspective. - David Rothman I discovered e-books as the ideal mix of my love for books and my one-time career in technology. Because I read and write science fiction, mystery, fantasy, and romance, I opened the small electronic publisher, BooksForABuck.com, specifically to address these genres of fiction. I believe that e-publishing offers the opportunity to expand the reading audience, so I've made...