Author Richard Herley has started a new blog which aims to bring worthy ebooks to people's attention. Here is what he says: The hegemony of the traditional publishing industry is crumbling, and not before time. Who knows how many wonderful books have fallen victim to the faulty opinion of overworked and underqualified publishers’ readers? Who knows how many talented authors, worn down by unjust rejection, have simply given up? Smashwords is central to the coming revolution in self-publishing: anyone can publish there. This is to be celebrated, but it raises a problem for readers in finding new authors producing work of...

I have just ended a two-year experiment. Readers were invited to download six of my novels and send me a fee if they enjoyed any of them. You can see the original proposition here. The experience bears out much of what I have read about online content. Of more interest, it also got me thinking about the practice of authorship in the Information Age. Downloads and payments At least 36,568 ebooks were downloaded from external, authorized sites, and well over 100,000 from my own. Some titles were posted on torrents. Originally the requested payment varied with the title (85p and up), but PayPal...

Richard Herley, an English author whose books are great, has a wonderful blog in which he often discusses the natural history of the English countryside. I follow him with relish. Now he discusses Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, and he says: While not going so far as one author, who declared that no one who does not own and appreciate a copy of White’s Selborne has no claim to call himself an English naturalist, I would nonetheless hold it up as indispensable to the library of anyone who loves our countryside, or who loves our language properly used, or both....