It's been a little while since we've had any interesting news to share about Unglue.it, the online service provider that uses a crowdfunding method to obtain the copyrights of certain e-books, which are then made freely available to anyone—or any institution, for that matter, including libraries—interested in downloading a copy. (Unglue.it users participate by donating a financial amount of their choosing to a particular title being offered by the Unglue.it platform; if the minimum funding amount is achieved, the publisher releases the book under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.) [caption id="attachment_82693" align="alignright" width="194"] Gluejar CEO Eric Hellman[/caption] * * * Here at TeleRead, we've long...

It can be risky looking for a cheap tablet—as a woman found out when she paid $200 at a gas station for what she thought was an $830 iPad but turned out to be a rewrapped mirror. (Hint: if someone offers to sell you a 75%-off iPad at a gas station, there’s probably something suspicious going on.) But not all cheap tablets are necessarily bogus. Today a coworker told me that she paid $70 each on eBay for two brand new 7” 4-gig capacitive-touchscreen Android 4.0 tablets called ZeePads and was very happy with them. Curious, I went looking...

I got an email this morning indicating that Creative Commons book crowdsourcing site Unglue.it is relaunching with a new payment processor and several new ungluing campaigns. Unglue.it first launched a few months ago with the goal of collecting donations to put toward “ungluing” copyrighted books—that is, buying the right to release them as e-books with permissive CC licenses. The site had one immediate success, which it recently made good on releasing. However, most of its other campaigns barely got off the ground, and more recently Amazon ceased processing its payments due to concerns over the way Unglue.it’s campaigns were structured. Per the email, Unglue.it’s...

  MakeUseOf has a post discussing how to use UK-based crowdfunding site Unbound, which represents itself as a Kickstarter exclusively for books. The site acts as both a fundraider and a publishing house all in one, allowing you to get people to fund your project and then to publish it in one convenient location.  We've mentioned Unbound a few times before, such as here, and we've talked about Kickstarter a lot lately. It's good that there are more funding options for people who want to get their books or e-books published. What this article doesn't make clear is why people would want to...

Seems like everybody’s Kickstarting these days. paidContent has a story on a Kickstarter Seth Godin launched for his latest book, with a goal of $40,000 that it blew past in 3.5 hours. Just goes to show you why Godin is one of the gurus of modern marketing, I suppose. It’s already over $150,000 when I checked it just now, and has 28 days to go. It’ll almost certainly have broken six figures by then. One thing I will point out, though, is that the only e-book edition of the book included is a “digital preview” at the $4 level that you...

On his blog “Get Published Now, David J. Vallieres looks at a Kickstarter-style crowdfunding project based around a small-press-published historical horror novel called The Express Diaries, with a goal of $5,500. The idea was to get paid to create a deluxe edition of the book before it even shipped, and also create some buzz so that their regular self-published edition would get a good sales boost at the outset. It seems to be working well: As of this minute they have raised a total of $7,195 for this project. By my count they have promised delivery...

I found a press release in my mailbox this morning about the launch of Eric Hellman’s crowd-funded Creative Commons republishing initiative for copyrighted works, Unglue.it (which we’ve mentioned a few times already here). The site has officially launched just now, with campaigns for the following five books: Michael Laser, 6-321 Joseph Nassise, Riverwatch Nancy Rawles, Love Like Gumbo Budding Reader, Cat and Rat Open Book Publishers, Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan. The...

Earlier today I mentioned the Evil Hat Productions RPG tie-in book Kickstarter project, which has scored enough pledges to bring it in at second place in the Fiction category, right behind a book of made-up Finnish folklore from Regretsy, and ahead of a project to publish an edition of Huckleberry Finn with the “N-word” changed to “robot” (which is probably poking fun at the edition I talked about here). When I mentioned it to a friend, he pointed out the Kickstarter project that Rich Burlew, webcartoonist behind The Order of The Stick, ran that concluded in February. I...

And speaking of Kickstarter crowd-funded fiction projects, Wired’s GeekDad has a post on a Kickstarter project by Evil Hat Productions, publisher of the Spirit of the Century pulp adventure RPG (which I’ve mentioned before a time or two), to fund a trilogy of novels in the game’s main setting. Started with a goal of $5,000, thus far the project has received almost $37,000 in pledges, making it the second-most-highly-funded fiction Kickstarter ever. As it received more funding, the Evil Hat folks added a series of “stretch goals”—premiums they would kick in if the project hit certain targets—and the donations blasted...

A post on BoingBoing links to a Kickstarter project put together by young-adult novelist Kate Milford, author of a novel The Boneshaker (not to be confused with the steampunk novel Boneshaker by Cherie Priest) to crowdfund a novella tying this novel together with its upcoming sequel, The Broken Lands. Milford has set a goal of $6,500, and with 50 days to go she’s more than 1/3 of the way there. Her plan for the novella is to make it available in three editions: an Espresso Book Machine paperback, a Google Play e-book, and a special-edition pay-what-you-want e-book illustrated by...

From Irish Publishing News: An interesting development this. This article titled “New crowdfunded publishing project signs up major names” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Sunday 29th May 2011 10.30 UTC Bestselling authors including historian and Monty Python writer Terry Jones, Booker-shortlisted novelist Tibor Fischer and the cloud-spotting Gavin Pretor-Pinney have signed up to a new initiative that bypasses traditional publishers to put writers directly in touch with their readers. The Unbound.co.uk publishing platform, dreamed up by QI’s John Mitchinson and Justin Pollard, and Crap Townsauthor Dan Kieran, allows writers...

Five years ago, David Rothman posted a link to Diane Duane’s Storyteller’s Bowl project, The Big Meow—a third book in the trilogy of Feline Wizardry novels whose first two hadn’t sold well enough for a publisher to be interested. The idea was that people would subscribe, and in return for the subscriptions Duane would write the book. In many ways, this was a forerunner of other such projects such as Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Fledgling and Saltation. (I even had all three of them on a podcast talk show together (Part 1, Part 2) to discuss the process of...