From Rita Toews: Read an E-Book Week is gearing up for the 2010 event - March 7 - 13th. An impressive list of participants includes Kobo, PocketBook E-Reader and BookGlutton. Also joining in the celebration of e-books is Smashwords, as well as Badosa.com, with a selection of e-books in Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The Wright State University Libraries of Ohio will also recognize the week. They have created a special template that librarians can download from the Read an E-Book Week website to produce lapel buttons for library staff. This year a section containing resource articles has been added to the site....

Prior columns in this series: The Superguy Mailing List The Legion of Net.Heroes & rec.arts.comics.creative The Legion of Net.Heroes might be the oldest Usenet-based shared-world fiction setting still alive and kicking—but there are some defunct settings that pre-date it. Identifying them by the names of their newsgroups, these are mainly alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo, alt.pub.dragons-inn, and alt.pub.havens-rest. Today we will look briefly at these groups where people were writing “e-books” before anybody ever knew what an “e-book” was. The Chatsubo and the Pubs When these groups are mentioned, they are often mentioned together, because they share more similarities than differences. Though they are based in different genres,...

This is the second in my “Paleo E-books” series looking at Internet writing communities that were producing electronic literature well before “e-books” were first popularized in the late 1990s. In this entry, I will look at the Legion of Net.Heroes (and, to a lesser extent, rec.arts.comics.creative). Like Superguy, the LNH is a shared universe centering on comic book superhero parody. However, perhaps owing to its different origin, the approach it takes is very different. The Legion of Net.Heroes The LNH had its genesis in April, 1992, in one of the free-wheeling discussions that took place on Usenet newsgroups (forums) at the height...