It's a snowy day in our nation's capital, and watching the flakes fall has made me contemplative. I've been reading a number of historical and fantasy books in worlds and times where books were rare, precious and valued. I can't help but contrast that to today, when people can download thousands of free books to their e-reader of choice. What impact does that have on our perceived value of a book? I thought back and compared my reading habits now to when I was a child (and books were relatively rare—I had to wait for Christmas or birthdays, and use my scant...

Looking for free e-books for your e-reader? Books on the Knob is a great resource. I'm subscribed to the blog in Google Reader, and every day I receive at least five to 10 posts about free or bargain books. Books on the Knob covers lots of different sites—not just Amazon—so whatever your reader of choice happens to be, you'll be clued in on books with which to fill it. The woman who runs the site has three main blogs: Books on the Knob, Christian Books on the Knob and Erotica & Hot Romance Books on the Knob. She split them out last year into separate...

We've written about the Unglue.it project a few times in the past, but here's a brief explanation for anyone who may not be familiar with the site: It's essentially a crowdsource-funded campaign that attempts to purchase the copyrights to various books, which it then releases free-of-charge—and DRM-free—to literally anyone on earth who wants a copy. (You can read the project's FAQ section by clicking here.) It's been a little while since the site "unglued" its first title, Ruth H. Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa, but word came my way this morning that the team had finally succeeded in releasing two new books:...

Do you like to "buy" lots of free books, but you don't want them all downloaded to your Kindle? Not a problem. Try this. 1. Install Kindle for PC (or Mac) on your computer. 2. When you "buy" a free book, have it sent to your Kindle desktop app instead of your Kindle 3. Select a Collection category for your new book You can import all your collections from your Kindle, just like in the screenshot below, so you won't lose any of your organization.  When you're ready for a new book, browse your collections on your computer, select a new book and go to...

Last year I published on Teleread a lengthy interview with author Jack Matthew as well as a preface to his work. I am happy to announce that since that time I have built an author site about his works and am helping him to digitalize old and new works.  The first major work is A Worker’s Writebook: How Language Makes Stories, a writing guide which he used to hand out to his fiction writing students. Now – until September 4 – this ebook is available free for download and DRM-free. (Normal price is 2.99).   The free download link...

There have been a couple of interesting discussions over the last couple of days on articles pertaining to piracy of e-books. (A lot of piracy-related articles here tend to grow interesting, long discussions—take this one, for instance.) They have brought in a lot of new readers—at least, we hope they’ll become new regular readers—who have raised a number of interesting points. The City of Lost Wages One common theme seems to be feeling deprived of income by pirates. Celine Chatillon wrote: Every pirated book is a royalty (about 50 cents in most cases) that I do NOT earn. I’m unemployed and in poor...

BusinessWeek reports on the current popularity of iPhone e-book apps, which now outstrip the number of game apps on the app store by over 1,600 titles. The article mentions appbook creator Michel Kripalani of Oceanhouse Media, who switched over from games to e-books back when there were only 700 book-related titles in the app store. Now his company sells three of the top-ten most-purchased appbooks in the Apple Store. By and large, the piece mainly talks about appbooks, with a mention or two of other programs such as the Free Books app from Spreadhouse that provides...