Occasional TeleRead contributor Robert Nagle passed me a link to a review he lately posted of our founder David Rothman’s small-press-published novel, The Solomon Scandals, which recounts a journalist’s investigation of a scandal in 1970s Washington. Nagle quite liked the book, giving it four stars, though noting that the tone could get a little preachy at times. Ars Technica reports that Google will release the first e-ink reader optimized for Google Books in about a week. The iRiver Story HD, apparently a revision of iRiver’s 2009 Story e-reader, will include wifi and a qwerty keyboard, and cost $139.99 suggested retail when...

Short Story Writer Jack Matthews has traveled over a million miles in his car to collect books. Here he talks more about this crazy preoccupation....

Excerpt from Jack Matthews WORKER'S WRITEBOOK, a writing guide for his creative writing students...

Ohio author Jack Matthew's thoughts about book collecting & Robert Nagle's questions about its relevance to ebooks...

Interview with Jack Matthews, Ohio author of philosophical short stories (Part 2)...

Interview with Jack Matthews, Ohio author of philosophical short stories (Part 1)...

Quick: when you are a teenager, how fantastically awesome was your writing? Imogene Russell Williams cautions young writers who wish to get started too early: In your early teens, you're not necessarily aware of how derivative your literary outpourings are, and the extent to which your reading shapes your writing; and you may not yet be sufficiently master of your own voice to take on high-falutin' genres like fantasy and romance. (I speak from experience. At 13, I was passionately devoted to a high-fantasy epic featuring Dallien the dark prince, a charger...

WordPress forum thread: How to produce an entire book on WordPress blog. Speaking of interesting threads, here's a great mobilethread on obscure novels.  Notable mentions: Codex Seraphinianus, Will Cuppy's How to be a Hermit, and Frigyes Karinthy's Yes Sir. I haven't even discussed this with David Rothman, but I am now removing link condoms from URLs in comments on my idiotprogrammer blog. Link condoms, according to seomoz  are, "any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of endorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link...

In the recent Tools of Change conference Tim Oreilly has been talking about the free economy (aka "other F-word"). Here are other thoughts by Kevin Kelly in his provocative essay Better than Free. The condensed version: In an economy where reproduction is free and easy, there is still profit potential from Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Patronage, Findability. Kelly writes: These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual...