To celebrate and honor our friend, indie author, L.C. Evans, and her contribution to the Indie eBook revolution, we’re giving away a whole bunch of free books. Linda lost her fight with cancer earlier this month. We lost a friend and a compatriot. We’d like you to buy her books, read her books, and make her words live. In Linda’s own words, from her indieview a year ago… “ I want my books to appeal to everyone, though I understand that men in general aren’t fond of reading chick lit or romantic comedy.” If chick lit or romantic comedy is not your thing, authors who have been...

When people think about ebooks, they think about mostly text-based reading of straight, narrative work. But here are some off-the-beaten-track book replacements you can make yourself that save time and money and provide an enhanced experience. 1) Art books. Delphi Classics, a favourite vendor of mine who sells DRM-free bundles of 'complete works' by authors in the public domain, has an inspired new series focused on masters of art. The first book, at a budget-friendly $2.50, features the complete works of Leonardo Da Vinci, with bonus biographical content and other goodies. The iPad is a perfect medium for this type of...

Some interesting threads on here these last few days about the price of content. Are publishers gouging customers with prices that are unfairly high? Are customers bringing about the ruination of the media industry by demanding prices that are too low? Is there a halfway point at which these two conflicting groups can meet? I think there is. I would like to introduce the concept of pricing relativity. That is, a price should be considered not so much as an entity unto itself, but an entity in relation to what other choices a customer who may be in the target market...

I was thinking today about how ebooks have changed my reading habits in the last few years. I had flirted with them as early as 2005, when I experimented with Project Gutenberg freebies on a Palm Pilot while living in smalltown New Zealand. There was only one local bookstore, and its selection was lacking. At the time, Project Gutenberg was a revelation. In the years since, I have gone through 5 main readers and nearly as many preferred bookstores, and spent over $500 a year on books and content. So, how has my reading changed? There are some special points I'll...

I have been a Kindle user for its last three incarnations: I bought a K2 to replace my Sony reader because I wanted to use the text to speech feature and I wanted support for multilingual dictionaries, then when my visiting aunt expressed interest, I sold it to her bought the K3. I was happy with it, and when the K4 came out, I was only mildly tempted---until this same dear aunt visited again and told the sordid tale of a husband who stole the K3 out from under her, registered it to his own account and left her reader-less...

So, until this weekend, my tally of relatives converted over to e-reading was as follows: Dad, gifted a Kobo and happily downloading his obscure boyhood favourites off Manybooks.net; Mom with a Kobo still registered to my account, and to which I do all the book loading; Stepmom, also with a gifted Kobo, happily downloading public library books; and an aunt who had bought my old Kindle off of me when I upgraded during one of her visits. So far, so good, right?Well, it turns out that last one hasn't quite gone as planned. The aunt was in town for a...

I'm sure you've read the same headlines I have: ebooks are cannibalizing print sales! They are driving people to pirate their media instead of purchase it! They are threatening local bookstores and small presses as Amazon/Apple/Google set out to rule us all! Or...are they? Might there be a simpler explanation for what's going on in the book marketplace today? Might it simply be that publisher indecision---on now to market, how to price and so on---is translating into customer indecision? Might a less confused customer be a better one?Consider the following case study. I...

I did an e-purge this weekend, deleting some 50-odd titles from my bloated Kindle, and what I have learned from the experience is this: on the blessing side, the e-universe makes getting your book into a reader's hand easier than ever. But the downside? The reader knows that there's always something else around the corner. If you don't win them over, and fast, they'll bail on you and your book forever, and in less time than you might think.When I started this little spring cleaning, I had 800 books to choose from, right on my Kindle, before I even went...

When David Rothman started Teleread, he had a dream of establishing a national digital library. Today, I wished that dream was a reality---I spent most of my morning in Librarian Hell, as part of the annual school clean-up now that classes are done for the year!Here was the problem: children had brought back library books they had signed out during the year, and teachers had also brought back all the books they had been hoarding in their classrooms. But since classes are done, we did not have any parent volunteers around on whom we could pawn off the shelving! We...

In my initial review of the very first Kobo, I concluded that it was a very nice little entry-level reader that, while it fell perhaps a little short for power users, was a great ebook experience for the newbie. Well, we're now two versions later---has Kobo learned their lessons and made enough changes to win over the power user? Yes, and no. The Kobo Touch is a slick little device, and a much improved experience for the average reader. It's slick and adorable. But for the power user, it continues to fall just a little short of must-buy status.SETTING UP...

There was a recent discussion at Mobile Read on the concept of 'eminent domain' as it may or may not apply to copyright. Eminent domain is a legal loophole whereby the government can appropriate something that belongs to you if their having it is somehow part of the greater good. For example, there was a recent case in my area where a subway station had to be upgraded with a wheelchair-accessible exit. There was only one area where the exit could safely be built, and unfortunately three homes were in the way. The government was allowed to appropriate these houses...

I've fielded some questions lately on the options people have for an ebook reader intended for children. Now that they have come down in price so much, many people seem to be contemplating rounding out the family library with an ebook reader or two for the kids. But nobody has made this easy for them! Why do none of the major ebook vendors have special kid accounts? I think they would be so useful because parents want their kids reading, and they want their kids reading independently, but they also want to control (to an extent) what they read and...