A few months ago, John Scalzi complained vociferously about the e-ARCs that some publishers try to send him. Frequently these ARCs would require him to jump through hoops—something that you really don’t want to do to the person you’re hoping will give a good review to your book. But it turns out that Scalzi is a good deal warmer to the idea of e-reading in general. He posted recently to his blog about his experiences reading with the Nook that a friend gave him as a gift, and also with his iPad, iPod Touch, and Droid X smartphone....

A couple of months ago, John Scalzi held a contest on his blog, taking entries for stories, plays, or other creative content based upon a thoroughly ridiculous painting depicting Wil Wheaton in a clown-face sweater riding a unicorn pegasus kitten attacking an ogre John Scalzi. The winners of the contest are now being offered as a freely-downloadable, DRM-free e-book in a variety of formats. It is not necessary to pay to download it; however, Scalzi and the others involved in its creation are requesting that downloaders donate $5 to help fight lupus. All proceeds from this chapbook will...

Tor.com has a couple of e-reading-related posts up today, as it nears its two-year anniversary on July 20th. First, Tor.com is joining the throng of other websites and news sources that are developing apps for the iPad, and has posted a call for iPad developers. If you would like to try out, email them your résumé. Hopefully Tor will remember that their app experience has to beat not other blogs’ or magazines’ experience, but the experience of browsing their blog via the web. Commenters are questioning the decision given that the iPad’s web browser is quite...

I’m about a week and a half behind the curve on this, but I’ve just noticed that John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton are putting on a fanfic contest. Write a 400-to-2000-word story based on a rather…remarkable painting featuring Scalzi and Wheaton by the end of the month, and you could win 10-cents-a-word payment for and publication of the story, plus a collection of books from Subterranean Press. Winning stories will be sold in chapbook form to benefit the Lupus Alliance of America. The entry deadline is 11:59 p.m. Eastern, June 30th 2010, with one entry allowed per...

In observance of the announced-for-summer Kindle Reader for Android, CNet’s Josh Lowensohn takes a look at the existing Kindle Reader versions for other platforms and compares how well they come off. My own review only compared the PC, iPhone, and iPad versions; it is interesting to learn more about the Blackberry and Macintosh versions. Gizmodo has spotted the Kindle in a slightly unusual place—being used by the evil lizard-aliens on the V revival. Amusingly, the Kindle in question is very blatantly displaying an “empty battery” screen. Gizmodo makes much of the fact that a Kindle, not...

Update, 5/10: One of the commenters points out that, since I originally posted this, Diana Gabaldon deleted first all comments on her two blog posts on fanfic, then the posts themselves. I suppose she was unprepared to handle the level of controversy she inadvertently generated. Perhaps fanfic fans can feel at least partially vindicated that Ms. Gabaldon realized she'd made an error (though it would have been better if she had posted something more on the order of an apology for her intemperate words), but it's also sad that the posts vanish from the historical record. (Though I suppose they may...

The iPad 3G comes out this afternoon, and CNet reports that Apple Stores are actually closing for an hour from 4 to 5 p.m. to prepare for the launch. If anyone picks one up, we’d like to hear from you! PC World has a 6-page article comparing the iPad to “everything else”. E-book and magazine reading makes up a considerable part of that comparison. The article says that the iPad definitely has the advantage as an e-reader, but that magazine publishers have yet to “create products that take full advantage of the iPad's display and interface.” Remember...

As a renowned blogger, author John Scalzi receives many advance reader copies (ARCs) of books to review—more, in fact, than he can actually read. Today, Scalzi writes of HarperCollins imprint Eos sending him a couple of e-ARC cards—cards with a scratch-off field containing an access code to download the electronic version of an advance reader copy from HarperCollins’s website. Scalzi remarks that this is an excellent way to get him not to read the books—he has plenty of other physical ARCs he could read, has no desire to read a whole book on his computer or...

What piece of technology most makes you feel like you’re “living in the future”? Laptop Magazine asked a number of speculative-fiction writers that question, including Jeffrey A. Carver, John Scalzi, Charlie Stross, and Tobias Buckell. Interestingly, most of them responded the iPhone (or in Scalzi’s case, the iPod Touch). Jeffrey Carver said, after the Star Trek-inspired nature of his flip-to-open cellphone: My second thought was eBook reader. I love reading on my Sony Reader and also on my Dell PDA, which I keep almost for the sole purpose of using as...

The New York Times has an article covering the implications of the impending agency pricing model for book sales. It mentions the one-star ratings that have shown up when e-book editions have been delayed or perceived as too expensive, and warns that publishers may be in for more than they bargain for with the increase in price. Many of the arguments that we have covered in detail over the last couple of weeks make their appearance here: the cost of printing and shipping a paper book versus price of e-book, the sense of “entitlement” displayed by consumers, and the...

Update: Tobias Buckell has linked to this piece, too. Thanks for the follow-up and the kind words, Tobias! And welcome to all the readers who come here from there! Over the last few days, the angry Amazon/Macmillan rhetoric has been flying fast and furious from several positions. Recently, we posted an impassioned piece by Ficbot with the attention-grabbing headline, “Maybe we should be hurting the authors,” which was linked in a post on author Tobias Buckell’s blog and has brought us a great deal of traffic today (not to mention the liveliest comment thread we’ve seen in...

David Pakman brings an economics perspective to the Amazon/Macmillan dispute, complete with a “price elasticity of demand” chart right out of a textbook. He explains the idea of finding the profit-maximizing price—the price at which the amount of profit times number of units sold is highest—and emphasizes that Amazon has access to the economic data from its millions upon millions of transactions to let them do just that, while publishers do not. So, why would publishers NOT want Amazon to find the optimal profit-maximizing price? Because, like many entrenched media companies, they have massive...