On his blog, Storyfix.com, self-publishing writer Larry Brooks recently revealed a brush with a rather fancy self-publishing grift. He was approached, Brooks writes, by a Lifetime talk show to appear on the show to discuss his latest small-publisher novel. So Brooks flew down to Florida to shoot the interview—at which point he was informed that to appear on the show, he would have to pony up a $5,900 “licensing fee.” When he ran this by his publisher, his publicist, a number of published authors, and his wife, the consensus was that it was a scam. It seems...

We mentioned the Augen 7" tablet here. Well now there are some reviews - and the reviews are bad. Laptop's review is entitled: Augen GenTouch78 hands-on: Android tablets reach new low. It goes on to say: Android tablets have hit rock bottom. And we’re not just talking about the low, low price of the Augen GenTouch78. This K-Mart special is just that bad. We got our hands on the 7-inch slate this afternoon, and it didn’t take us long to realize that it’s not worth $149. Perhaps not even $49. Liliputing gives it a fairly mediocre review as well. Both...

On May 4 we published an article about myPadMedia.com and how it looked like a scam. The original work on this was done by Carly Z from Gear Diary. Well, Gear Diary and Carly have done some more research and it has turned out that this is definitely a scam operation. They did some investigation, and even purchased a "membership" for $50, and found out that this operation was actually selling a redirect to Feedbooks! There is a long, and very interesting, article about the saga on Gear Diary's site which you should all read. Gear Diary...