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...

 Be sure to read the first Kindle 3 Tips and Cautions blog article here. The picture on the left is of my white-bezeled 6" Kindle 3 next to the Graphite 9.7" Kindle DX. The Graphite DX does have a slightly greener tint under certain lighting, but a touch of green can make an image look brighter. Here's the larger image.  Following the larger version is a second, closer shot of the text of both. Further on down the page, I have a tip to get the Kindle text to a closer match with the DX...

While it has been increasingly clear over the past year that Amazon is dominating the market share and price wars among dedicated ebook reader devices, it is now clear that Amazon is also winning its tug of war with traditional book publishers over ebook pricing. Amazon is succeeding dramatically in its efforts to bring an ever increasing number and percentage of all Kindle Store ebooks into its preferred price range between $2.99 and $9.99, inclusive, according to our most recent analysis of the overall pricing composition of the Kindle Store catalog and the "Top 100 Paid" spots on the Kindle Store...

 Yesterday we received an email from the University of Chicago Press alerting us that their free e-book of the month was a replica of the first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style from 1906. TeleRead reported the news. TeleRead Writes: Of course, as with all University of Chicago Press free e-books, this book comes wrapped in Adobe Digital Editions DRM—even though, since it was originally published in 1906, this book is well within the public domain by now. (Oddly, I can’t seem to find any public domain version of it on-line, at least not in...

Imagine only being able to open one window or application at a time on your laptop. Work for a bit in Excel and when you need to switch to Word, you've got to closer the former before you open the latter. Or what if you want to open two spreadsheets at the same time? Imagine you had to close the first before you could open the second. That's silly, right? On a regular computer, yes, it is. So why do we accept those sorts of restrictions on our ereader devices? I can't open two books...

 + Textbooks Up Their Game (by Jeffrey Trachtenberg via Wall Street Journal) Although electronic book sales have exploded, digital college textbooks have been slow to get off the ground, in part because of high prices and hardware concerns. Now, a former Apple Inc. employee, Matt Mac Innis, is trying to shake up the market with a new approach that taps into the iPad’s strengths. His tech start-up, Inkling, is introducing its first four full-length interactive college textbooks using its software platform, which is designed specifically for Apple’s iPad—a marked departure from e-textbooks that are almost...

Editor's Note: I am proud to announce that Australian journalist Jason Davis will be contributing a regular column to TeleRead on the state of "e" in Australia and New Zealand. This content will be exclusive to TeleRead. Jason also runs the BookBee and EbookAnt websites. PB. This is my first official guest post, so I thought I’d start by bringing those who are interested up to speed with the state of play in ebooks in Australia. That Australia is a couple of years behind the rest of the West in ebook uptake is probably not news to many....

 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...

 + The Legendary Ray Bradbury Says No to E-Books, Tells Yahoo to “Go to Hell” (by Susan King, LA Times) + Sony ‘plans two new ebook readers’ (via The Telegraph) See Also: New Sony Reader eBook Devices Coming Soon (via Sony Insider) + E-Readers are Dead. Long Love E-Reading! (by Harry McCracken, Technologizer.com) + A Very Brief Intro: Digital Rights Management (via Computeractive) + Digital books are changing our reading patterns (by Jeremy Wagstaff, Jakarta Post) + eBooks – Year Two (by Kenneth C. Green, Inside Higher Ed) Green identifies three critical issues re: e-books in higher-ed: 1) Price 2) Features and Functions Although they are “Digital...

 The Kindle for PC app has been quietly updated.  Some have chosen the option to have it updated automatically when they open the program and an update is available. I like to choose the time, but then I didn't get a notice that there was an update waiting to be 'noticed.' I read about it when @MikeCane tweeted it the other day in his inimitable way. See below: So, I went to my Kindle for PC program, still showing a bright, plain white background, chose the menu's install-update option, and got what ...

Over the course of this summer I've read a couple of great Yankees books: Munson and The Bronx is Burning.  The former was read on my iPad and the latter, because it's not available digitally, was read from a dead tree.  After seeing countless references in both to another Yankee classic, The Bronx Zoo, I decided that should be on my reading list too.  Unfortunately for me, that's another book that's not available digitally.  I also was unable to find a copy at the local brick-and-mortars or even the second-hand bookstore, which got...