From the Announcement: Project MUSE, a leading provider of humanities and social science periodical content for libraries, is very pleased to announce a new initiative to incorporate scholarly book content into its research platform and product offerings. Beginning next year, e-book collections will be available for purchase alongside MUSE journal collections, with an integrated discovery environment that allows for browsing and searching journal and book content side-by-side. [Clip] The e-books program, called Project MUSE Editions, has to date signed contracts with the following publishers to include in the new offering books...

I posted some earlier comments from Patricia Ryan (pictured at the left), who is part of a wave of emerging self-publishers who are releasing not new books, but rather, their own print backlists. Patricia was kind enough to answer some further questions on how she went from published category romance author to self-publishing indie e-author. Enjoy! THE EXPERIENCE OF PRINT PUBLISHING Patricia began writing category romances in the early 90's. As she explains: "I had read a bunch of category romances that didn't do much for me, a few that were really pretty good, and one--The Black Sheep, a Silhouette Desire...

 I’m chairing an absolutely amazing panel of speakers this weekend at the Mountains To Sea book festival. The discussion is about books, readers and writers in the digital age. I’m including the description below and tickets can be booked HERE Readers, Writers and the Digital Revolution Recently, Jeff Bezos reported that Amazon now sells more e-books than new hardbacks. What does this portend for the future of reading? Are traditional bookshops, the paperback, the novel itself facing extinction? A stellar panel of experts debates the question – how will we be reading in the year 2020? Tim...

 I’ve spent too many days this summer visiting this page on Amazon’s Kindle store, waiting for the price of the latest book from Charles Stross to drop to $9.99 (as of the date of this post, it’s $11.99). Clearly, it’s not going to happen until the publisher feels it’s notched as many $12 purchases as it can from eager fans who aren’t as price-conscious as I am. But wait a minute! I too am an eager fan, and because of this pricing issue, I ended up reading the book for free. I’m still a fan but now...

From the Original Announcement from the Tennessee Secretary of State The State Library and Archives, which is part of the Tennessee Department of State, has been preserving newspapers on microfilm since 1957. The two-year process of converting those microfilmed documents into digital records will be managed by the University of Tennessee. Eventually, the digital images of Tennessee newspapers will be part of the Chronicling of America [from the Library of Congress] website: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Newspapers from 15 other states are already available for use on the site. “We are delighted to be a part of this project,” Secretary of State ...

Cory Doctorow and Joe Konrath are not the only e-pushing authors with already-planted stakes in the dead tree world! A growing cohort of Smashwords authors established writers who have regained rights to some or all of their backlist titles and have chosen to e-issue it themselves. A recent encounter I had with Patricia Ryan, who is one of them, first alerted me to this growing trend. THE BEAUTY OF THE INTERNET, PART 1: AS A MATCHMAKER Ryan found her way to me through a recommendation a Mobile Read user made to me when I was looking for some new titles. I had...

 With Andrew Wylie “threatening” (via FT.com, Registration Required) to expand his exclusive book deal with Amazon.com (OdysseyEditions) we thought some of you might find it both useful and interesting to review the Wylie Agency client list. The only thing we don’t know is how current this list is. It’s long, contains the names of MANY well-known authors, or their estates. Access the Complete List From the Financial Times: Wylie theatens broad digital expansion (Registration Required for Full Text, Free) Andrew Wylie, the literary agent whose exclusive deal with Amazon.com last week stunned the publishing world, has threatened a broad...

Every week it seems something new is happening in eBookland to set the ebook cause back a decade or two. Always at the forefront of the reversal of fortune is greed. This week’s menace to eBookland is literary agent Andrew Wylie and his new publishing venture Odyssey. Wylie could have summed up his actions in simple terms: to disserve both his clients and the ebook-buying public. What, you ask, did he do? He agreed to give Amazon exclusive rights for 2 years to his authors’ backlist titles; Wylie will publish the books and exclusively sell them through Amazon. The backlist includes...

The big news this week in eBookland was Amazon’s announcement that ebooks outsold hardcovers 1.8:1 in the last quarter. That set tongues awaggin’ and has prompted hundreds of articles, blog posts, and comments, now including this one. So that raises the question: Who’s on first? One of the best comedy routines of all-time was Bud Abbott and Lou Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine and Amazon’s announcement brought the routine to mind after many years of having been forgotten. For those of you unfamiliar with the routine, here it is: Isn’t this really the story — and value — of Amazon’s announcement? As many...

Nick Spalding, author of the experimental written-all-in-one-sitting novel Life…With No Breaks (readers on Amazon seem to either love it or hate it), announced yesterday that he’s launched a new indie author blog called Spalding’s Racket: I’ve created [it] to promote books written by independent authors. It’s a place for you to find out about new books you might like to read. I’m making sure that only professionally laid out books make it on the blog. It’s not a review site per se, but I won’t be posting just anything up and...

A reader named Will posted a link in the Screens page to a handful of DX-friendly screensavers hosted over at Picasa. If you’ve read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, played Portal, or watched Futurama, you will likely be interested. If not, carry on. Kindle Screensavers by William [Picasa Web Albums] Via Chris Walters' Kindlerama...

Donna Fasano’s first novel was published by Harlequin Silhouette in 1990, and it was chosen by the Romance Writers of America as a finalist for its Golden Hearts Award. In the twenty years that followed, Fasano–sometimes using the pen name Donna Clayton–published over 30 novels via the traditional publishing route, won the HOLT Medallion three times, and sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide. In December 2009, however, she tried something different: she self-published her new book The Merry-Go-Round, which had at one time been in the hands of a large publisher (more on that below), through Amazon’s Kindle Store. Now it’s...