Recently I’ve been working on an ePub reader prototype. Once I’ve created a robust ePub ebook reader, I’m going to move this functionality into my text to speech application, Text2Go. My goal is provide a system that will convert an ebook to speech and transfer it to your iPod in a single click. This will allow any ePub formatted ebook to be turned into an audio book which can then be listened to while driving, walking, working out at the gym or any other activity where reading is impractical.
The focus of my ePub reader is quite different from the norm due to the fact that the recipient is not a human reader but a machine reader or computerized voice. A computerized voice cares nothing for fancy layouts, font selection or images. This makes my job a lot easier in many ways. However a computerized voice lacks one important skill a human reader uses frequently, often at a subconscious level. A computerized voice has no way of skimming over a section of text. For example, human readers will never read the same footer at the bottom of every page or meticulously read every page number. If this text is mixed in with the actual body of the story (usually as a result of some blind conversion process from a different ebook format to ePub), then the computerized voice will read this text in full on every page. This becomes incredibly irritating for the human listener.
The ePub standard provides direct support for structured documents that include footnotes, sidebars, annotations, page numbers, etc. This is achieved using an alternative xml document format know as DTBook. The ePub standard recommends this format be used for educational publications and publications that are highly structured - for example when it’s important that the page layout of the original printed document is maintained. DTBook actually stands for Digital Talking Book and is a standard developed by the Daisy Consortium for blind, visually-impaired, physically handicapped, learning-disabled or otherwise print-disabled readers. Although originally designed for talking books, the extra information (i.e. the metadata) the DTBook format contains about the ebook text makes it a great choice for any ebook and will greatly assist in applications such as my text to speech application.
Which brings me to the fact that not all ePub titles are created equal. Those that have been lovingly hand-crafted by someone who understands the ePub format will never suffer these problems. Those that have been blindly converted using an automated tool from a source document format that doesn’t make any distinction between the various roles of text within a document will be plagued by such problems. This seems similar to differences in quality between different editions of a print title. Unfortunately you can’t heft an ebook, feel the quality of the paper between your fingers, flex the binding or quickly thumb through the pages of an ebook prior to purchase. The ability to view a sample goes a long way to solving this but it would also be worthwhile for reviewers to comment on how well the ePub book has been put together, what underlying format is used to represent the text and does it have a table of contents to make navigation easy.
My ePub reader has three tasks to complete in decreasing order of importance.
Extract the text from document, converting it from html to plain text ready for text to speech conversion.
Organize the content into chapters. Each chapter will become its own audio track. This will make it easier to navigate than a single huge audio track.
Extract the cover image and use it as the album art for each audio track.
Although all ePub documents conform to a standard, there is a lot of variability possible within the standard. In order to make my reader as robust as possible, I’ve been trying to find ePub titles from a wide range of sources. I’m particularly interested in those that have been created with different tools or even hand-crafted.
An edition of White Fang by Jack London illustrates this variability nicely. It had a couple of unique features I needed to handle. Firstly it didn’t have a standard ePub table of contents. All it contained was a single html file. However this html file had its own table of contents embedded at the top of the file. It was implemented as an html table, with each entry containing a link to the relevant section further down in the document. Those familiar with html markup will know that you can use the anchor tag to name a specific point in a document. You can then link to this named anchor so your browser (or reader) will position you at this exact point in the document when the link is clicked. You can use this technique when linking to an external document or within the same document.
I had noticed the ePub authoring tool, Calibre, uses named anchor points when creating links for its table of contents. However because each chapter was stored in a separate file (within the ePub file, which is actually just a zip archive), the anchor points were a bit superfluous - each chapter just had a single anchor point at the top of the page. Although this was how Calibre organised its chapters, I imagined that it was quite possible to store an entire book in a single html file and use named anchor points to link to the relevant sections from the table of contents.
Therefore I added the ability for my ePub reader to split a book into sections based on where the named anchor points lay in the document. This had an unexpected benefit when I came to read the White Fang title. Although it didn’t contain a standard ePub table of contents, my reader was able to find the named anchor points it had used to implement its own in-page table of contents and correctly split it into chapters.
The other interesting feature of the White Fang title also centred around the table of contents. As I said before, this was implemented using an html table. However when my reader extracted the text from the table, all the text was run together. This would have been disastrous when it came time to convert it to speech. Unlike human readers, computerized voices don’t recognise an unusually long word as being a number of words run together.
When extracting text from a table, I needed to understand that a table cell acts as natural boundary for text and should be punctuated accordingly.
What is clear is that it’s really beneficial to gather as many ePub format ebooks from as many varied sources as possible to test my reader with. You can imagine my delight then when the new ePub ebook site, ePubBooks.com was announced recently on Teleread.org. Here is another source of ePub books, generated using their own tool. From the sample of titles I’ve downloaded, these seem to be very well formatted. My young and naive ePub reader had no trouble loading and splitting them into chapters. For interests sake, I downloaded their version of White Fang. This version had an ePub table of contents. The end result was the same the first version I had found. My only complaint with the titles at ePubBooks.org is they have no cover image. This obviously doesn’t detract from the reading experience but it does make organising and browsing through your library of ebooks a lot less fun if they don’t have cover images.
Finally if anyone knows of other ePub sources or have ePub format ebooks that have been hand-crafted or created with other tools, then I’d love the chance to run them through my ePub reader. Please drop me a line at markgladding at ebooks just published dot com.
For a long time I’ve wanted a painless way of converting ebooks to speech in my text to speech application, Text2Go. Up until recently I’ve thought the best way to achieve this would be to support the PDF standard. Although PDF is ubiquitous and a great way to distribute documents that will ultimately be printed, due to its internal structure, it’s actually quite difficult to reliably extract text from a PDF document. There are a number of software libraries that can be purchased to perform this task. However these are either unreliable, overly complex, exorbitantly priced or a combination of all three. This situation has been brought about by a combination of factors, such as PDF being a proprietary format, being binary rather than text based, and being designed primarily to accurately represent a printed document.
These problems have meant that I’ve deferred adding automatic ebook conversion to Text2Go.
The ePub format changes all this as it’s the complete opposite to PDF in a number of important ways.
Firstly, ePub is an open format, not controlled or owned by any one company. This means that anyone can download the ePub specification (actually a series of standards known as OPF and maintained at the IDPF Forums). There are no licensing costs or restrictions associated with the standard.
Secondly, ePub is built on top of existing standards. This is perhaps the most important difference between ePub and PDF and the one most likely to guarantee the ultimate success of ePub.
An ePub file is actually a zip archive, containing multiple files. You can examine the contents of any ePub file simply by renaming it to a .zip file and opening it with any tool or OS that supports the zip archive format (e.g. Windows XP and above, Winzip, gzip, 7-zip, etc).
Inside a typical ePub file, you will find the following types of file.
metadata.opf - An xml file containing information about the ebook, such as the author, publisher, title and a list of all the other files in this ePub file.
toc.ncx - A table of contents for the ebook.
One or more html pages, containing the ebook text.
Any images used in the ebook, such as a cover image, and images that accompany the text. Images are stored in standard formats such as jpeg.
Notice that the standard file formats used to build the web, such as xml, html, jpg are used rather than any new, ePub-specific formats. The benefits of this approach are immeasurable. Support for all these formats is built into every modern operating system and programming language. The technology required to create an ePub reader application is the same as that required to display a web page and just about any modern computing device, be it a PC or more importantly a mobile device ships with this technology.
One of the things I love about ePub is that all text is represented in text files, be it html or xml. There is something incredibly reassuring about being able to open a file in a basic text editor and view or edit it.
Finally, the ePub format is DRM-free. This means that anyone purchasing an ePub file can rest assured that they have full access to the content, and are free to convert it to any other format, transfer and display it on any device, print it and importantly in this case, convert it to speech. Compare this to the sad state of affairs that plagues the Amazon Kindle now that publishers are disabling the TTS feature on more and more of their titles.
The ePub format doesn’t preclude the use of DRM but fortunately to date no one has come up with a DRM scheme for ePub. Personally I hope this never happens and all titles released as ePub remain completely open. At the moment buying an ebook in ePub format is a guaranteed way of knowing the title is completely DRM-free.
Unfortunately, the above two paragraphs are just my wishful thinking. There are already at least 2 DRM’ed ePub formats in existence, as pointed out by Keith Fahlgren in the comments below
So far I’ve found developing a reader for the ePub format a relatively painless process. This is primarily due to the fact ePub uses existing standards. I’ve got a complete toolbox of software libraries I can use to read images, html, xml and zip archives. This lets me concentrate on building the text to speech conversion process. The nice thing about xml and html is that my reader can easily ignore information that’s not needed by my application. This makes for a more robust reader. Superfluous or unexpected information is simply skipped over.
I’m very excited about adding ePub support to Text2Go and can’t wait to release it. I have my eye on the ever growing collection of ebooks published on Smashwords.com, all available in ePub format.
I believe the openness of ePub coupled with the ease of implementing an ePub reader makes for a very bright future. I can only see more and more companies, organisations and individuals embracing ePub, in the same way people embraced html on the web.
Please, please, publishers, choose DRM-free and choose ePub!
Sidenote: The ePub logo used above is not an official logo. Instead it’s one of a series of free public domain logos provide by Threepress Consulting. The sad fact is that ePub still doesn’t have an official logo. David Rothman of Teleread.org lamented this fact almost two years ago.
Since starting this site my goal has been to announce one new ebook every day. I’ve managed to achieve this since the site began in early November, over 210 announcements ago. However of late I feel like things have become a little too mechanical. I’ve decided to relax my policy of announcing an ebook every day. Instead I’m going to be a little more discerning in what appears on the site and aim for a more reasonable two announcements per week.
Preference will still be given to authors or publishers who create their own announcements.
Less announcements will have a couple of benefits I can see.
More time to search out interesting ebooks.
Announced ebooks will appear the the top of the site for longer.
Less likely to induce RSS fatigue in those that subscribe to the eBooks Just Published theme.
I’m going to trial this new approach for a few weeks. I’d love to hear what you think.
Amazon’s extraordinary cave in to the Authors Guild over the Kindle 2’s text to speech feature says more about the importance Amazon places on ebooks and its own Kindle Reader than anything else.
For those who haven’t been following the story, Amazon recently introduced an “experimental” text to speech feature with its new Kindle 2. This allowed any book to be read aloud using a built in computer voice. Computerized speech is nowhere near as good as a real human narrator but it’s quite understandable and great for listening to ebooks while driving, doing manual work and of course a lifesaver for the visually impaired. Why they labeled it “experimental” is any one’s guess but here are a few reasons that come to mind.
Development wasn’t sure they could complete it by the Kindle shipping date and it only made it in at the last minute.
Product management wasn’t sure a computerized voice would be well received by readers.
Not enough real world testing had been done prior to shipping to know with confidence that it would work well in practice.
Perhaps they had an inkling there could be some legal fuss.
Well it turns out the text to speech did work, certain readers found it especially useful, some going so far as to buy a Kindle just for this feature. Even the press were kind. I doubt there was a single article on the Kindle 2 that didn’t mention the new text to speech functionality. Amazon seemed to be gathering some renewed interest in its Kindle Reader.
And then it all turned to shit. The Author’s Guild got wind of it and decided the Kindle’s ability to read a book aloud was infringing on the audio rights of publishers and authors. They demanded Amazon remove the text to speech feature, effectively gagging the Kindle. Now as a layperson this claim seems absurd - how is this any different from a parent reading a print book to a child or a sighted person reading aloud to the visually impaired.
Amazon’s initial response was the same. `Kindle 2’s experimental text to speech feature is legal.’ - CNET News.
Great! Reason prevails. Case closed. Lets move on. This is the 21st century.
Not so fast. A few days later came Amazon’s back-down. Publishers will now be able to decide whether their ebooks have text to speech enabled or not. This means a publisher can prevent readers from listening to their ebooks on the Kindle. Time will tell how many publishers turn on this restriction, but given they were the ones lobbying Amazon for this control in the first place, its a safe bet that most will disable text to speech for their titles.
This decision by Amazon to introduce yet more DRM can only harm their Kindle platform and once again leave readers looking around for alternatives.
The Kindle brand may have been irreparably damaged. Up until this point almost all talk surrounding the Kindle 2 had been positive. Now the talk is about nothing but Amazon’s shameful cave in to publishers or worse, siding with publishers.
To me this says the powers that be within Amazon don’t place much importance on ebooks or their own Kindle. Why else would they back down so easily. The claim by the Author’s Guild that the Kindle’s text to speech infringes publishers’ audio rights seems tenuous at best. Why not put up a fight. Let the Author’s guild take them to court and fight out a test case. Of all companies, Amazon has the resources to fund such a fight. Not only that they’d get plenty of public support and flow on publicity for such a stand.
The problem I believe is they’re still primarily wedded to the old world of print. They don’t want to jeopardize their relationships with the major print publishers. No one can accuse Amazon of not being innovative. The problem is they’ve innovated around a publishing industry that is fast becoming obsolete. Their online store is just as relevant for ebooks as for print. But order fulfillment and shipping is not longer needed. What value do existing publishers bring to the table for ebooks? Why does Amazon need to deal with them at all?
Unless Amazon can fully embrace the future of ebooks, more forward thinking companies will put them out of the book business. You only have to look at companies such as Smashwords to see the future. It won’t be too long before print becomes the exception rather than the rule. Almost all books will be purchased in electronic form. Most readers will choose to read them using an ereader. Some will prefer a printed copy and take their ebook to a local print on demand service.
This is similar to the switch to digital photography. Today everything is shot digitally, most photos are viewed on the screen and a cherished few are printed.
Amazon leaves me with mixed feelings these days. On the one hand I love the way I can order almost any book over the Internet and have it arrive at my doorstep in Australia a couple of weeks later for less than the cost of purchasing it locally. With ebooks the feelings are opposite. Instead of providing great value and service, they’re trying to lock customers into proprietary DRM-laden formats and charge them a premium for the privilege - ebooks should be a fraction of the cost of a printed book.
CompletelyNovel.com is a new site that provides publishing services and an associated reader community for Indie authors. Authors can upload their book for free. Readers can read it online for free, leave a review, suggest it to a friend, and buy a print version. It’s a bit like lulu.com + a reader community.
What caught my eye was the video review used to promote the ebook. Despite the terrible production values, it proved to be very entertaining and a great way of promoting the ebook. Here are the things they did well.
Short - 3 minutes
Two reviewers make it a conversation rather than a boring monologue
Quotes from other readers are displayed on cheezy hand-written cards, adding to the charm
No script or post production editing gives it a genuine, off the cuff feel
Light and humorous, with real interest and enthusiam shown by the reviewers
As a reader trying to decide whether to read or purchase a book, I’d much rather watch an entertaining and informative video review over some of the cringe-worthy book trailers current doing the rounds.
Read an E-Book Week is well underway and there’s a huge selection of top quality free ebooks just begging to be downloaded. Most are only free during ebook week, so it’s best to download now and store them away for later reading.
In order to make locating and downloading books that interest you as quick as possible, I’ve organized this guide by Genre and provided direct links where possible.
iPhone and iPod touch users can access many of the titles directly using the Stanza Reader App. There is a special ‘Read an E-Book Week’ online catalogue. Detailed instructions on how to access this are on the Lexcycle blog.
Some of the technology around ebooks can be a bit confusing at best. If you have trouble downloading and reading any of the ebooks available, please leave a question in the comments. I’ll try and help out where I can. Failing that there are many experts who are only too willing to help.
Finally if you’d like to help promote ebooks, please tell your friends via Twitter, a blog post, Facebook or good old fashioned email. The more popular ebooks become the better it will be for both readers and authors.
Book 1 of the hugely popular Hal Spacejock series has been available as a free ebook for a while now. For Read an E-Book Week, author Simon Haynes has made it available in ePub format for reading on the iPhone / iPod touch. It’s included in the Stanza catalogue and available in other formats here. Having thoroughly enjoyed this book, I can personally recommend it.
THE FIRST VOYAGE: Carolyn Kestral, discharged Galarchy Ranger, begins her new life as a freighter captain and collects a small crew. But there is a question of whether the Berserker virus that forced her Ranger discharge is still capable of being activated and turning her into a deadly human weapon. If it is merely dormant, will it be set off by a clandestine first run and a dangerous run-in with the Spiders in deep space? Will her crew stick around long enough to find out?
Noah Dane is a mid-21st Century San Francisco police inspector who, while hunting his partner’s killer and investigating a pair of seemingly unrelated murders, stumbles onto a conspiracy that threatens all humanity. Noah is driven by guilt over his partner’s death (guilt related to his highly-sexual nature). This guilt begins to eat at him, eventually rendering him impotent. Along the way, he must deal with his runaway daughter, his childhood fear of lightning, and a gang of bikeroos determined to exact revenge.
Much to his dismay, someone in the city’s bureaucracy has a warped sense of humor. Noah’s new crime-fighting partner is a celebudroid created to look and act like Marilyn Monroe. Comic juxtaposition ensues when her original programming seeps into her police work. Their relationship evolves as the clues begin to mount in their investigation.
Chastity Blume, meanwhile, is a celebrated talk show host known as “America’s Favorite Virgin.” Her father forced a sheltered childhood on her, and now she’s a vocal opponent of what she refers to as society’s “rampant sexuality.” Her quest to find the mother she’s never known uncovers incestuous family secrets, along with a sinister plot that involves her father.
She’s uncomfortable with her mounting libidinous feelings, as well as her growing celebrity. She would rather be a “serious” journalist than a pop culture talk show host.
Together, Chastity, Noah, and Marilyn lead a cast of quirky characters through this science fiction mystery towards a climax of comically sexy proportions that’s Better Than Chocolate.
Every instinct Jack Meter has tells him his clients, the Thrittene, are hiding something. So when his dead girlfriend pops up in every world he visits, Jack knows the case was personal from the outset. Now he must avenge her death and save the universe from utter destruction.
The past is a refuge for retired exotic meat collector Caffrey Quark, a place and time where he can lose himself in the one thing that gave his life meaning: Rock&Roll.
But a blue android, a purple-eyed woman and a dog who is more than he appears are just a few of the interruptions to Caffrey’s idyllic life that send him on a quest to save the Wisest Substance in the Universe, the all but mythical L’Orange–not to mention life as we know it.
It’s a Corps truism that no one survives a Coalition POW camp. Jeena Garza is the exception. Freed during a sudden attack by Union forces, she steals a cargo ship and heads home to Earth.
But the ship isn’t just a cargo ship. It’s a smuggling vessel, and Jeena ends up marooned on the desert planet Ararat, far from home and all alone. That is, until she adopts a tiny tigra cub despite her best intentions. Samson keeps her company, although he can be a serious pest. Still, it’s better than being alone.
Then Samson shocks her by displaying something that has never before been seen in the galaxy–sentience in a non-human species. Is he just an aberration, or is there a darker reason than ridding the planet of a pest why the Judaslam Rosh-dan are conducting an erradication campaign against the tigras.
For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny. John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic “alchemists, ” Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life…and death. Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in human evolution and creating a world in its entirety. Red Mars shows us a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision.
Marina Martino is a bright, young woman who has a talent for counting cards. Miguel Rodriguez is a charming Las Vegas casino dealer. Sparks fly when they meet during a serendipitous game of blackjack. But as they become entangled in a dizzying romance through Sin City, details about Miguel’s dark past surface and Marina begins to doubt his intentions as the stakes rise and danger unfolds. In the city of illusion, the normally calculating Marina has to make a decision to trust her brains or her heart—to bet on her skill or push her luck.
Your best friend’s in love with a lying, scumbag thief. How do you tell her? Because what she doesn’t know could kill her.
This is photographer Lisa Watson’s dilemma. Lisa has always relied on her plain, overweight friend Debbie to cheer her up when she’s down on her luck (which is most of the time). When Debbie falls hard for a handsome stranger named Derek. Lisa is skeptical, believing Prince Charming is more interested in Debbie’s money than her kind nature.
Derek may be a small-time hustler, but he has big-time plans. He intends to blackmail his wealthy lover, Robert Helton, a conservative industrialist desperate to hide his secret gay life. However, Derek’s plan takes a fatal turn when Debbie is found dead in her apartment.
Two years after the death of his lover, Garrett Davidson sits in a Hawaiian beach shack, gazing out over the vast, empty Pacific. He has nothing left. Despair has robbed him of his elegant home, his lucrative job and his sanity. The single thread holding him to reality is the story he has come to this shack to write: Marc’s story, the story of his lost love.
Then Songoree breezes into his life.
Songoree, a Hawaiian surfer and Garrett’s new cook, is not gay, but he can’t help being captivated by Garrett. He has always been attracted to broken things, like the crane with a broken wing he once mended and cared for. He is drawn to anything that reminds him of the broken image he has of himself. When he attempts to heal Garrett’s spirit they become entwined in an extraordinary relationship.
Insurance Claims Adjuster Chris Lovell is a career woman with her feet solidly on the ground—until she runs into the gorgeous dark-haired man in the cereal aisle and makes a fool of herself gawking at him. And then, despite her best efforts, she keeps running into him, much to the amusement of her friends and colleagues.
The Keystone Kops pursuit comes to a crashing halt when Chris goes to investigate a claim and discovers her mystery man is her client—and he’s not going to let her keep eluding him forever. But Chris doesn’t trust love; she’s been burned too many times. Can Duff persuade her it’s time to stop running?
She’s the Girl by Susan M. Brooks beautifully illustrates the trap of crafting our own expectations of Love. As the main character Natalie discovers, the ideal of True Love is as believable as the Beauty of Menstruation and as tangible as the image of the Blessed Virgin on a garage door.
Melissa Miller thinks her life is going along just fine. She’s a respected young architect who is in partnership with her fiancé, Jackson Tobin, in the plum real estate development, Fox Hollow. She enjoys her work and is content with her life.
Until Jackson, and all the company’s money, disappears…and Melissa discovers she’s in debt for four million dollars to loan shark, John Axelson. She hires sexy PI Rees McAllister and the two of them come up with a plan to let Jackson pay his own dues.
With Keeshond hero, Augie, the final showdown pits Melissa against her ex-fiancé and his new wife.
They met at the funeral of one of the most prestigious men in the country, Dean Lawson, their father. Abbie Lawson, the dutiful genteel daughter breed in the lap of luxury and, Rachel Farr, a mistake born of a passionate love affair, are almost identical in appearance but are worlds apart. Only one daughter can be the heir to the endless oil fields and magnificent thoroughbreds. A fierce competition has arisen between the women, not only for the inheritance but also for the proof of a father’s love. They should have been devoted to each other as friends and sisters, but they have become the most embittered of enemies. The Texas men they love watch as they tear themselves apart to become the HEIRESS.
When Candice’s in-laws were killed eight months ago buying a huge faux polar bear rug for her Christmas present, she lost more than just two of her favorite people: she lost her husband Ian as well. After only two years of marriage, their guilt and pain have left them living together but apart, unable to really talk for fear of what they’ll say to each other.
Ian leaves for a month-long contract overseas, and Candice plans to use the time apart to decide whether her marriage can be saved. When her ex walks back into her life as the new client at work, ten years more attractive yet saddened by his own recent loss, she’s left wondering what she really wants from life and love.
Art Reyes, a young Marine, suffers eerie visions of dying with a lance in his chest—as none other than King Arthur. Had it only been a legend—Arthur’s promise to return when the world needs him?
Then bio-terrorists unleash a plague that ravages the population and crumbles civilization. With marauding gangs vying for power, Art is launched into a leadership position as the one man with the charisma to unify citizens to fight back. Miles away, a girl named Shanna struggles to survive the chaos of the new Dark Age. But fate inexorably draws the two together, the reincarnated King Arthur and Lady Guinevere. Their task: to restore order, rediscover their lost love and this time to get it right.
Randrik alt Harbinnen isn’t above seducing a reluctant woman, but he never thought he’d be doing it for his aunt. He didn’t know that the forest-wandering race called the Drevnya drew their powers from sexual magic, nor that suppressing their emotions and sensuality could be fatal for them.
But Perian, the Drevnya Adept raised by abusive human parents who tried to destroy her magical heritage, is more than he bargained for. Her dreams of a voice calling her from the darkness of the void lead both of them into danger they never imagined and a future they don’t want. In the distant east, a towering evil has escaped imprisonment in the eternal void of the Everdark, and it is their destiny to seek it out and destroy it before it destroys their world.
The samurai smelled of the sea, dripping on the ground, algae strung from his armor and an eerie green light glowing from the eye slits of his demon-mask. For the first time in his life, Toshi discovers that monsters do roam the earth. And this one has come for him.
Dragged from his home and into the company of the undead, Toshi must use his skills to help the creatures holding him hostage. The alternative is to fail and become one of them. But those who do not wish his new master’s quest to succeed may make Toshi one of the truly dead before they will allow him to do what only he can to help.
After eight years in a Mexican prison, Jess is attempting to readjust to normal life. Then he inherits a mysterious box from his murdered uncle–a box that will grant his every wish. Jess soon realizes that ownership of the box comes with a terrible price tag–possibly the life of the woman he loves, and his own.
Kaylee was on her own long before the magical nonsense of the Knights of the Living Five deprived her of a family. Careworn and alone, she survives on the skill of her hands and the grace of her rundown farm until a greedy developer, a string of bad luck and an overly bright star seduce her into wishing for something more.
One unforgettable knight.
Malcolm finds justice, peace and acceptance as a Knight of the Living Five. As the only Knight from the twelfth century, he will claim the deposed tyrant’s empire as his own. On the eve of the final battle, Malcolm and his children are hurtled into a world embodying his every nightmare. As he looks for a way to return to the past, though Malcolm begins to wonder if Kaylee holds instead the key to his future.
The children of the town of Asidelene are stricken with a bizarre sleeping sickness, save for one boy, Jarred, who does not easily succumb to the malady–for he knows its cause. It is the Pretending Tribe: Long Nails, the gentle giant with the bejewelled nails; Lord Fritter, the rascally speedster; Withershins the pickpocket; Batik, the dark lady; and their regal master Flicker, whose power alone holds sway over the minds and dreams of all the children.
Jarred is pursued by the Tribe, but is eventually, and safely companioned by several otherworldly individuals: The Lady Celeste Regent, a kindly practitioner of magic more than witch; the empathically gifted Abigail Ahern; the learned Noto Patria, and the mystical entity Mr. Home, a denizen from an eldritch and beneficial realm called Amodie Caboe, The Common Wheel.
Meet Marla Mason-smart, saucy, slightly wicked witch of the East Coast….Sorcerer Marla Mason, small-time guardian of the city of Felport, has a big problem. A rival is preparing a powerful spell that could end Marla’s life-and, even worse, wreck her city. Marla’s only chance of survival is to boost her powers with the Cornerstone, a magical artifact hidden somewhere in San Francisco. With her partner-in-crime, Rondeau, Marla is soon racing against time through San Francisco’s alien streets, dodging poisonous frogs, murderous hummingbirds, cannibals, and a nasty vibe from the local witchery, who suspect that Marla herself may be behind the recent murders. And if Marla doesn’t figure out who is killing the city’s finest in time, she’ll be in danger of becoming a magical statistic herself….
Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise to Britain’s defense by taking to the skies . . . not aboard aircraft but atop the mighty backs of fighting dragons. When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes its precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Capt. Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future-and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France’s own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte’s boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire.
Young Fitz is the bastard son of the noble Prince Chivalry, raised in the shadow of the royal court by his father’s gruff stableman. He is treated like an outcast by all the royalty except the devious King Shrewd, who has him sectetly tutored in the arts of the assassin. For in Fitz’s blood runs the magic Skill–and the darker knowledge of a child raised with the stable hounds and rejected by his family. As barbarous raiders ravage the coasts, Fitz is growing to manhood. Soon he will face his first dangerous, soul-shattering mission. And though some regard him as a threat to the throne, he may just be the key to the survival of the kingdom.
The Westward Sagas tell the stories of the lives of Scots-Irish families struggling to find happiness on the new frontier. Spring House, the first book of the series, begins in North Carolina in 1762 and paints a vivid picture of colonial life in the backwoods of the North State. Adam Mitchell fought to protect his family and save his farm, but his home was destroyed by British troops in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, and his corn fields were turned into fields of death.
In April 2007, National Indie Excellence 2007 Book Awards announced that Spring House was a finalist in the Historical Fiction category.
Harry Turtledove’s remarkable alternative history novels brilliantly remind us of how fragile the thread of time can be, and offer us a world of “what if.” Drawing on a magnificent cast of characters that includes soldiers, generals, lovers, spies, and demagogues, Turtledove returns to an epic tale that only he could tell-the story of a North American continent, separated into two bitterly opposed nations, that stands on the verge of exploding once again. In 1914 they called it The Great War, and few could imagine anything worse. For nearly three decades a peace forged in blood and fatigue has held sway in North America. Now, Japan dominates the Pacific, the Russian Tsar rules Alaska, and England, under Winston Churchill, chafes for a return to its former glory. But behind the facade of world order, America is a bomb waiting to go off. Jake Featherston, the megalomaniacal leader of the Confederate States of America, is just the man to light the fuse.
The Children of the Roses in typical Adler black comedy fashion deals with the impact of the Rose’s horrific demise as described in The War of the Roses on their children and their grandchildren. The Roses children, Josh who is now married to Victoria and his hugely overweight happy-go-lucky sister Evie, who has not married but finds pleasure at the trough and through a series of live-in lovers. Considering the experience of Josh Rose and his bride, Victoria, also the victim of parental mayhem, theirs should be a perfect marriage. Instead, they find themselves in a different kind of shattering warfare. The overstuffed and ever-sympathetic Evie and Victoria’s demonic and ever-sympathetic, male hating mother are their constant counterfoils. Throw in a suave headmaster who turns out to be a relentless sexual predator and blackmailing mobster-type husband and the stage is set for a rollicking nasty fun little tale.
Though the ominous dark clouds and thunder of the early days of the AIDS epidemic gather over Dick and his partner Jonathan’s comfortable world, they are not directly affected until lightning begins to strike frighteningly close to home.
Rumors have spread through the gay community that one of their own is deliberately spreading the disease. When the target of the rumors is killed, Dick’s concern with who killed him is not as important as sharing the collective relief of the community. But when two of his closest friends are implicated in the murder that Dick steps in.
The murdered man’s still-living victims and the friends and partners of those who have died of a result of his incomprehensible cruelty provide Dick with more suspects than he can handl. His search takes him into the unfamiliar world of bikers and leathermen, and the situation is compounded by the intense rivalry of the owners of the city’s two primary leather bars and their respective supporters. One mystery becomes two as old flames, a missing rifle, long-held grudges, and a bright blue motorcycle all contribute pieces of the puzzle that finally allow Dick to see the whole picture and solve the case.
It is DI Andy Horton’s second day back in Portsmouth CID after being suspended for eight months. Whilst out running in the early morning he trips over the naked battered body of a man on the beach. PC Evans has been stabbed the night before, the DCI is up before a promotion board and Sergeant Cantelli is having trouble with his fifteen-year-old daughter. But Horton’s mind is on other things not least of which is trying to prove his innocence after being accused of rape.
Beset by personal problems and aided by Cantelli, Horton sets out to find a killer who will stop at nothing to cover his tracks. As he gets closer to the truth, and his personal investigations start to uncover dark secrets that someone would rather not have exposed, he risks not only his career but also his life…
So Dark the Night is a supernatural mystery, an homage to film noir, cult TV and pulp fiction. Imagine a weird hybrid of Raymond Chandler, the films of Val Lewton and “The X Files”.
Cassandra Zinnea and Evgeny Nightstalk are operatives employed by After Hours Investigations, a detective agency open from dusk ’til dawn. Their odd hours attract a mixed and eccentric clientele and, inevitably, they find themselves involved in cases that have paranormal and occult overtones. Zinnea’s the brains and Nightstalk supplies the brawn and as a team they’re practically unbeatable. Their relationship is fractious, bittersweet, and together they make up the most attractive and likable tandem since Holmes and Watson trod the mean streets of Victorian London.
But this time they might be in over their heads as an evil group of occultists plot to bring about the end of the world.
Of the Night is a shorter effort, a thriller set in the same universe as So Dark the Night, but taking place two years later, with a different cast of characters.
A series of events lead to a breach in the continuum, allowing fearsome creatures to break through and terrorize the citizens of Ilium. Police detective Gus Novak soon realizes that the mutilated bodies popping up all over the city are not the handiwork of your garden variety psychopath and he enlists the aid of fellow denizens of the night in order to thwart a cruel and inhuman foe.
Upon his wife’s death, a lonely old man’s memory is stirred and a past he had forgotten spurs him to action. A dead man tells tales and he listens closely.
He begins a hunt to unravel a mystery that involves his own past.
With the intensity born of ‘that need to know’ he pursues the trail of a criminal who is involved with spies, and in the process identifies a network of trained killers. Who were they after, and why? And what world power was behind it all?
An old friend urges him on with a motive of his own: to find a ghostly figure from their past - an OSS operative, the man they call ‘the Prince’ - who may have the answers to their questions. An old killer becomes the key.
As the hero realizes there is more to the game then he thought, he carries out one last act…and does something he swore never to do again.
A series of brutal rapes strikes a tiny Jesuit-run college, and award-winning college journalist Eve Gallagher is shocked to discover the administration is determined to keep the matter buried in silence. As she fights to bring the crimes into the open and the perpetrator to justice, Eve is driven to solve another riddle that was buried in silence years before: the truth about what happened to her sweet, disabled sister Tessa, a secret that has haunted her for most of her life.
Making it a as a private investigator isn’t easy–especially when your parents have been on the run since they were involved in the Weather Underground during the 1960s. But Heather Webb thinks she finally has her life under control–until Jack Eastland walks into her office with a proposition she really doesn’t want to accept.
CIA Agent Jack Eastland has tracked down clues to a major terrorist incident and the signs point straight toward pretty P.I. Heather Webb. She’s definitely keeping secrets and she has the computer skills to unravel his agency-supplied cover in record time. But Jack didn’t become a top agent by taking things for granted and his instincts tell him that Heather isn’t at the bottom of the problem. Flipping her, using her to help him track down the threat to the U.S. becomes his goal.
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
When ex-New Jersey cop Remo Williams is electrocuted for the murder of a dope-dealing goon, CURE, a super-secret government agency that doesn’t really exist, schemes to resurrect Remo as the ultimate killing machine that will carry out most of its dirty plans. Under the direction of expert assassin Master Chiun, Remo is transformed into the Destroyer and launches a series of secret plots to dissolve the underworld.
Brakes squealed in protest as the old truck shuddered to a halt. Sealed in the cramped smuggler’s hole surrounded by packing crates in the back of the vehicle, Sonja Sepsik crouched on a folded blanket. Fear squeezed the air from her lungs and fed her growing claustrophobia. Fists clenched tight, she fought the tremors of rising panic that flowed through her body. I’ll be okay, I’ll be okay, she repeated to herself as she fought the urge to beat on the sides of the compartment.
Above the wheeze and cough of the truck engine, Sonja heard the muffled voices of the driver and border guards as they haggled over the bribe required to allow the vehicle into Hungary without inspection. Bowing her dark head, she made the sign of the cross and whispered a quick plea for protection. Hospody pomozhy menee. God help me. While she didn’t consider herself religious, she instinctively turned to her orthodox upbringing as a source of comfort in an effort to fight back her panic.
– Excerpt
A teenage junkie who gets a second chance–if she’ll take it. A coffee shop uprising. A grieving father who will go to any lengths to catch a man who brutally murdered his only daughter.
Come travel down Short Street, an anthology of 28 stories, where junkies, drunks and losers live next door to unsung heroes and stubborn survivors. Timothy Gager explores the bright rooms and the dark corners of human existence, where the one who next steps around the corner could be YOU…
Smashwords.com is a wonderful site with a huge collection of DRM-free ebooks in a range of ebook reading formats. If you’re a fan of Erotica or think you might be, eXcessica Publishinghave made a number of their hot and steamy short stories available for free download. Start here and work your way back through the catalogue.
This list is by no means exhaustive. You should check the Read an E-Book Week site for a full list of supporters. Many sites are offering a different free ebook on each day of the week. I have not listed these sites.
Finally if you’re offering a free ebook and would like to be on this list, please drop me an email or leave a comment and I’ll add your ebook.
The only thing worse than a horrible ebook cover is no cover at all. Despite what people like to believe, books are always judged by their cover and ebooks are no exception. You only have to look as far as Apple’s iPods and iTunes to realize that people like to use images to identify their digital media. Apple even went so far as to buy the company that developed the CoverFlow technology. They then built functionality into iTunes that allows you to download Album art for any track in your iTunes library, not just those you’ve purchased through the iTunes store. Apple understand people like visuals even when dealing with audio.
A good cover makes it very easy to identify your ebook at a glance. It can also convey a lot of information to the reader. As a minimum it should identify the genre but can also set the tone of the novel and pique the reader’s interest.
Some lucky authors have the artistic talent to create their own book cover. However I suspect these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
One approach is to commission an artist to create a cover for you. The cheapest solution would be to have a couple of stock images photoshopped together by a professional. You could probably get this done for around $100. If you want original graphics created, then the cost would be significantly higher.
If your ebook is free or you’re not confident it will be a bestseller, then you’re probably reluctant to spend several hundred dollars to have a cover designed.
The answer is to create your own. It’s not that hard and you don’t need to be an artist. I have zero artistic talent and yet was able to create a passable cover as you’ll see below.
The best approach is to keep it really simple. All a cover needs is a single image, and some text for the title and author byline.
You may be tempted to grab your digital camera and try and create your own image. Don’t, unless you’re a great photographer.
Instead, head over to one of the online stock photo libraries, such as iStockPhoto.com or BigStockPhoto.com. These libraries have an enormous collection of professional photos that you can purchase for a few dollars.
These sites all show you a small preview of each image in their library. The image will have a watermark stamped over the top. When you purchase an image, you can choose from a range of sizes and the watermark will be removed. The larger the image the more you pay.
One tip I have is to use the watermarked preview images while you’re experimenting with different designs. Once you’ve settled on a design you can then purchase the image(s) you’ve selected. This saves you from purchasing images that you end up not using.
When purchasing an image, you should always purchase one of the larger sizes, at least greater than screen size. The reason is you can easily scale an image down without a loss of quality but you can’t do the reverse. Scaling a small image up will result in a very blocky, unprofessional look. The other reason to purchase a larger image is it allows you to choose just a subsection of the original image (i.e. crop) for your cover and still maintain a reasonable image size.
If you don’t want to spend anything at all, you can also go to flickr.com. Most photos cannot be used without permission of the photographer. However if you go to the Advanced Search, you can choose to only search for Creative Commons licensed images that are free for commercial use.
You can find suitable images for your cover by doing a keyword search. For example if your novel is set in Hawaii, you can use the keywords ‘diamond head’ to bring up images of it’s most famous landmark. Another approach is to use a keyword describing the predominant tone of you novel - e.g dark, sinister. Another option is to choose something completely abstract.
Once you’ve selected one or more likely images, the next step is to use a basic photo editing tool that is capable of doing simple image adjustments and overlaying text on the image. Most digital cameras come with such software. For example I use Photoshop Elements which is a cut down version of Photoshop and is available for Mac and PC. Another good option for Windows users is Paint.Net. For Mac users there is the free Seashore which is based on GIMP.
The first operation you will want to perform when you load your image into the editor is to crop it to the right proportions. A traditional cover image’s width is 2/3rds its height. For example the images used on this site are 160 pixels wide x 240 pixels high. You want to keep your image as large as possible, so you might elect to crop your cover image to 1600 x 2400 pixels. It’s very easy to scale this down to a smaller size later on - just remember that you always want to keep the original at its full size.
Given that ebook covers are not constrained by the dimensions of the physical page, you may be tempted to create a cover image with different proportions. However I would recommend sticking with the standard 2/3rds ratio unless you’ve got a really good reason. This is because when your book is placed in a catalogue it’s cover needs to be the same proportions as all the others. This is particularly important for CoverFlow type displays that let you visually flip through a collection of ebooks. If your cover is different proportions, you risk having it squashed (changing the aspect ration) to fit the standard.
Cropping an image to standard dimensions
There are a few basic image processing operations you can use to change to mood of your image. These are colour and lighting adjustments such as contrast, brightness, and hue. For example, you could darken an image to create a more sinister tone.
The same image with adjusted brightness & contrast
Finally most photo editing applications provide a number of effects (often called filters) you can apply to an image. Like video transitions, these can easily be abused, especially by the novice who discovers them for the first time. They are however very effective at turning a photograph into a more artistic, abstract image. Covers often work better if you can remove the fine detail and these effects are great for doing this.
Here is a small selection of effects provided by Photoshop Elements.
Photoshop Elements effects
I used the Paint Daubs effect to transform the original image for Tourist into something that looks more like a painting.
Cropped with Paint Daubs effect applied
The final step is to overlay the title and author text onto your image. There are a huge variety of fonts available. You can choose a font that adds to the tone of your novel or just stick with one of the classic fonts. There are no rules as to how the title and author text should be laid out. However unless you’re a bestselling author I would resist the temptation to fill the cover with your own name. The title should have more emphasis than the author byline and hence should be in a larger font. Make sure you use a colour for the title that ensures it doesn’t get lost in the background image. For layout inspiration, have a look at other book covers.
Final cover image
When you come to save your image there are a multitude of image formats you can use. The most important thing is to save the original image in the native format used by your image editing software at full size. This will ensure no image quality will be lost and any layers used (e.g. when overlaying the text) will be preserved. This allows you to go back at any time and make further adjustments. It also means you can use the original to create smaller images of various sizes.
When you come to save your cover for use on the web or for use as a cover in one of the various ebook formats, then the jpeg (.jpg) image format is your best choice. Every application supports jpeg and it provides a good tradeoff between file size and image quality. You can adjust the quality used when saving your image. Higher quality will produce larger image files whereas lower quality will produce smaller files. Photoshop Elements has a neat ‘Export to the Web’ command that shows a preview of the resulting image as you adjust the image quality.
That’s it. You’ve spend months to years writing your novel. Now it’s worth spending a little extra effort designing a cover before publication. All you need is a few basic computer skills. If you don’t feel up to the task and don’t want to pay a professional, see if you can find a computer-literate friend to help out.
As you may have heard on the news, the state of Victoria, Australia was ravaged by the worst bushfires in recorded history last Saturday. SitePoint, a Melbourne-based company are holding a 3 day sale, offering any 5 of their ebooks for just $29.95 (normal retail $149.75). All proceeds, yes the entire $29.95 from each sale is being donated to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal. The sale will finish this Friday, so you don’t have much time to take advantage of this offer and donate to a worthy cause.
They’ve already raised over $75,000USD, which is a staggering result.
SitePoint publish ebooks on web design and development, covering topics such as CSS & HTML design, javascript, Ruby, PHP and ASP.Net. If you’ve done any CSS or Javascript, you’ll know you can never have enough books on these topics.
The ebooks are all DRM-free PDFs. I’ve actually been looking for a Javascript reference that I can read on my laptop while commuting to and from work. Print books are fine when you’re sitting at your desk but not something you can easily refer to while programming on your laptop in the cramped confines of a train. There’s barely enough room to sit comfortable on Melbourne’s train system - most passengers are thankful they even get a seat these days.
On a personal note, I’m also based in Melbourne with my wife and children. Luckily we happen to be living in a suburb that was nowhere near the fires. The destruction wrecked by these bushfires seems similar to that of tornadoes - some towns have been completely wiped out while other neighbouring towns remain unscathed. A couple of houses in a street are untouched and the rest are obliterated.
I would like to extend my deepest sympathies to all those who have lost loved ones and homes in the fires.
Burnt out letterboxes at Hazlewood North. Photo: Wayne Taylor, The Age
Ricardo from AmigoAudio sent me a bilingual English-Spanish ebook of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe the other day. This is just one of many bilingual ebooks that are freely available on his site. He also has an extensive collection of audiobooks, podcasts and glossaries in MP3 format. This site has a wealth of resources for people learning Spanish.
After discovering the wonderful collection of children’s illustrated ebooks over at sharing-books.com I started to think about how I could read these books to my children. Unfortunately I don’t think a suitable reader currently exists for children’s illustrated books. Today’s ebook reader screens are too small. This is especially true of the iPhone/iPod touch but also of dedicated readers such as the Kindle or Sony Reader. The latter two also have the disadvantage of being black and white. Laptop screens come closest but they are far too bulky. I want a device I can comfortably hold over my head while lying down in bed. The closest device I can think of is a tablet PC but these are too expensive and too heavy.
Looking at today’s crop of ebook readers, it would be easy to conclude that children’s books will never make the transition to ebook format. I don’t believe this is the case. The problem is that today’s devices are designed to replace the paperback. Their main requirements are portability and a comfortable reading experience for sustained periods of time.
An ebook reader for a children’s illustrated book has a completely different set of requirements. What’s needed is a dedicated illustrated ebook reader. Here are the requirements of such a device.
Large colour display, preferably with a touchscreen. I would see A4 as being the minimum size, but ideally something a little larger.
Lightweight. I’d be prepared to trade off some battery life for a lighter device. I imagine this device would spend most of its time in the home, near a ready power source.
Spill resistant with an easy wipe down surface.
Simple controls for easy page navigation. As children’s books don’t tend to have many pages, sophisticated navigation and bookmarking functionality is not required. Instead simple Next/Prev page buttons would suffice.
Reasonably priced - at least comparable to other ebook readers.
Linked to a library or subscription based model. It’s too expensive to buy every book you read to your children.
What advantages would an illustrated ebook reader provide over print?
Instant download of new books. No more running out of reading material between library visits.
As long as your ebook reader is reasonably rugged, your books will always remain in pristine condition - no more ripped pages, stains and missing flaps.
Less bedroom clutter and no more tedious putting of books away and tidying the bookshelf.
No more lost book searches on library day.
Better interactivity. Illustrated children’s books have been crying out for increased interactivity. Just look at all the lift the flap books available. A touchscreen ebook reader would provide the ultimate in interactivity. Touch the bush to see what’s behind. Touch the main character to see him dance. Touch an instrument to hear it play. Touch a door to see what’s behind.
Non-linear stories. Remember the old twist-a-plot stories. Imagine being able to let your child decide where the main character goes next, simply by tapping on the screen.
What dangers would an ebook reader introduce to early childhood reading?
The top on my list would be ebooks that come with built-in narration. It’s bound to happen. Imagine having the author able to read their story to your child. Now you don’t even have to sit down with your child and read to them. That’s the problem. Regularly reading aloud to your child is probably one of the most satisfying and beneficial activities you can do. However, given the choice of being able to outsource this, many tired and busy parents will.
Turning every book into a video game. The most important part of a book is the story. In a children’s book this is told using both words and illustrations, both being equally important. As ebooks offer endless possibilities for interaction there is the temptation to turn every book into a game. While some interaction can be great, the story needs to remain central.
The technology exists today to create an effective illustrated ebook reader. It will be interesting to see when this happens and who is the first to take the lead.
Today I stumbled upon Sharing-Books.com a wonderful site that publishes childrens illustrated ebooks. All books are DRM-free and also free to download and sample. If you enjoy a book, you’re asked to make a donation.
Sharing-books.com has an interesting business model, best described by founder Pierre Lapointe in the Sharing Books Story.
Actually in early 2007, our friend Andrea Azevedo shared with us a brief children’s book, called The Little Suitcase, written as a eulogy for a young friend, Dylan Oser, who had passed away due to a rare disease. My wife, Bonnie, asked me to help Andrea get the story published as Andrea wanted the proceeds to go to Sunny Hill Health Centre.
To a technophile like me, traditional publishing was not an option. It is expensive and the margins are paper thin. It had to be on the web. As I researched how to get the maximum visibility for Andrea’s book, I found out that there were a lot of children’s book creators hoping to be published. Many books had been lovingly crafted but had been abandoned because publishers rejected them.
I also learned that most children’s book creators are purpose driven people. They want to share their creation first and money and fame are secondary motivators. In fact most related to the idea that Andrea wanted to give away all her profits. They felt the same way about causes they believe in. This revelation helped advance our thinking. What if we could provide a web venue where children’s book creators could share their work and help charities at the same time? What if we could concentrate a lot of new children books in one site? I saw the need for a new web business model.
What if we created a “charitable” company? We mean by that not a charity but a business that by design would really impact an important cause. We decided that our business model would split all revenues: 1/3 to a cause, 1/3 to the book creators and 1/3 to the company itself. That’s not only one third of our profits but one third of our revenues!
Today’s announcement Scatsby the Bear is an example of a book published on the Sharing-Books.com.
Self-Publishing Review has a great interview with Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, a digital publishing platform and online bookstore for self-published authors and their readers. Regular readers will know that we often announce ebooks that appear on Smashwords.com.
In the interview Mark explains why he started Smashwords.
A few years ago, my wife and I wrote a novel, a satire on Hollywood celebrity, and we signed on with one of the most respected literary agencies in New York City. We and our agent had high hopes for selling the book, but in the end, publishers told our agent they questioned whether our target audience, daytime television soap opera fans, read books.
As you might imagine, after spending thousands of hours on our novel, it was quite frustrating to have a publisher deny us the opportunity to reach our audience. In the end, I decided that in today’s Internet age, every author should be allowed to publish, and it should be up to readers to decide what’s worth reading and what’s not. I envisioned a social publishing platform for books, similar to how YouTube is a publishing platform for video.
Mark also talks about the benefits of ebooks, the Kindle, why Smashwords is strictly DRM-free, recommendations for ebook authors and what’s in the pipeline for Smashwords.
Today seemed a great opportunity to announce Mark and wife Lesleyann’s novel Boob Tube (Smashwords ID of 3).
It’s a little over a month until this year’s Read an E-Book Week kicks off. The main aim is to introduce as many new people as possible to ebooks and hope they have a really positive experience. One of the keys to this is to make it as easy as possible to download and view an ebook.
The two most confusing aspects to ebooks are:
DRM restrictions and the arcane techniques used to enforce them. Good luck explaining this without putting your listener to sleep or evoking the response ‘So why would I want to put up with all that when I can just go and buy a paperback or borrow a book from the library?’
The multitude of formats. Although I’m not a big fan of PDF when it comes to ebooks, PDF does have the advantages of being ubiquitous (just about everyone has Adobe Reader installed) and providing great screen rendering of text. The other format that also works well is good old HTML.
If you’re looking to promote ebooks friends, especially those who are not particularly technically literate, make sure you take some time to show them how to download and read an ebook on their device of choice.
For existing ebook converts, Read an E-Book Week provides a great opportunity to pick up some excellent freebies. To get an idea of what’s in store, have a look at the partners page.
When I first started hunting for DRM-free ebooks to announce on this site a few months ago, I stumbled upon last year’s Read an E-Book Week site. This provided a number of free ebooks and links to independent authors who publish their works DRM-free.
This year’s site looks really professional and is well laid out and easy to navigate. The only ambiguity I noticed was the Readers menu - is that readers as in people who read or as in ebook reading devices (the latter it turns out). Steve Jordan, an independent author who’s published numerous DRM-free ebooks put the together site and deserves congratulations for a great job.
Rita Y. Toews is the other partner behind Read an E-Book Week. Rita is the co-author of 3 award winning ebooks, including The Centurion announced here on eBooks Just Published.
If you want to help out and promote Read an E-Book Week, then there are a number of great banners you can use on your site.
I’m looking forward to the week of March 8-14th. It’s going to be an exciting week for the ebook community!
Finding Free eBooks is a site similar to eBooks Just Published, except that it announces complete free (free as in beer) ebooks. A few are limited time offers so you need to check the site regularly. Most of the ebooks listed are DRM-free but not all.
Finding Free eBooks has been running since November 2008 and has already built up a good collection of free ebooks. Well worth a visit and a useful addition to your RSS feed.
Hal Spacejock books 2, 3, & 4 will be released as low cost, DRM-free ebooks in February 2009! This is wonderful news for fans who’ve read the ebook version of book 1 (which is a completely free download) and wish to continue reading the series in ebook format.
I read book one last year and found it such an enjoyable read I ran a competition and gave away the entire print edition. Winner, Shane Hockings had this to say
I’m sorry to say that they didn’t last two days before I finished them and now I’ve got to wait for number 5. *sigh*
Author Simon Haynes announced the good news on the Spacejock blog.
Hal Spacejock ebooks ahoy
I had a meeting with my publisher just before Christmas, where we discussed a few things about the Hal Spacejock series. The main topic was ebooks.
I’m a strong believer in DRM-free ebooks, and I also believe the price point should reflect the fact there’s zero cost required to pump out each copy of an ebook. I put this to my publisher, and they were happy to go along.
You may not be aware that the first book in the Hal Spacejock series is available as a free download. It was released as a freebie when book 4 (Hal Spacejock No Free Lunch) hit the shops, and to date it’s been downloaded over 40,000 times.
However, there are two questions which land in my inbox again and again:
1. When can I buy the Hal Spacejock books in (insert country here)?
2. Can I buy the rest of the series as ebooks?
The answer to question one is … no idea. Sorry.
The answer to question two is … next month.
Yes, Hal Spacejock books 2, 3 and 4 will be released as low-cost, DRM-free ebooks in February 2009, barring any last-minute hitches.
Text, RTF and HTML files will be included, and most likely a Mobireader PDB as well.
As for the price, the target is A$5 or so, which translates to US$3.50 at the current exchange rate. (Don’t hold me to that - it might be a little bit more depending on payment processing costs.)
So there you go - both of my ebook goals met. Now I just have to pray people buy the things so my publisher doesn’t see me as a deluded idiot with the business sense of a certain inept freighter pilot.
However, with all three books selling for less than the cost of one paperback, anyone with more business sense than an inept freighter pilot will see that it’s going to be a pretty good deal.
Today I have great pleasure in bringing you an interview with Neelan Choksi, co-founder of Lexcycle, developers of Stanza, the most popular ebook reader for the iPhone and iPod touch. Stanza has been downloaded from the iTunes store over 500,000 1 million times in the last 6 months.
Mark: Stanza and Lexcycle seem to have appeared almost overnight. Can you tell me a little of the history of Lexcycle and the people behind it?
Neelan: Appearances can be deceiving. Marc Prud’hommeaux, our Principal Developer, has been thinking and experimenting with eBooks and eBook technologies for over 5 years. It was often personal side projects here and there but there is a lot of R&D and thought leadership that went around the technology of Stanza long before Lexcycle was even formed. As such, there are features in Stanza and in prototypes of Stanza that I often don’t even know about e.g. text to speech using the Mac text to speech conversion tools in the Mac Desktop version of Stanza or a prototype of horizontal auto-scrolling in one of our desktop versions of Stanza (apparently, you can read faster and retain more with horizontal auto-scrolling than a regular book / current ebook paradigm).
The company is about a year old and we view ourselves as a media application company. We’ve started with eBooks and have a relatively strong focus on the iPhone and iPod Touch but we truly view ourselves as much more than that.
The founding team of Lexcycle have been working together on and off for nearly a decade. We all met in Washington, DC in 1999 at a company called TechTrader. TechTrader was a startup trying to address the B2B net market business. Like many bubble companies, we raised a lot of venture capital and spent a lot of money and eventually filed bankruptcy. From the ashes of TechTrader, we started SolarMetric with a fourth co-founder. SolarMetric created a product called Kodo, which basically was an object / relational mapping tool (in non-geek speak, a product that made databases interact more efficiently with Java). In 2005, BEA Systems acquired SolarMetric. At BEA, we open sourced Kodo as the Apache project Open JPA. After the acquisition and the transition, I worked for SpringSource, an enterprise Java open source company. With Marc, leading the charge, we came back together to work on Lexcycle. I think the enterprise Java experience and the open source experience all plays a major role in the way we do things at Lexcycle.
Mark: How many people do you have working at Lexcycle?
Neelan: 4 employees and a few contractors on an as-needed basis.
Mark: Is Lexcycle a VC funded startup?
Neelan: No. We are self-funding Lexcycle at this time.
Mark: Your Stanza reader application is free. The desktop application is also free, although there has been some talk there may be a small charge for this in the future. What is Lexcycle’s business model?
Neelan: We also provide access to 50,000 free ebooks through a variety of sources. This is an example of where our open source experience play a role in what we do. Part of our business model is based on referral or affiliate fees around the sale of pay books. Part of it is making books into standalone apps like we did with the iPhone: The Missing Manual application for O’Reilly. We also envision licensing our reader technology as well as the Lexcycle Atom Distribution System (LADS) which is our catalog services to various hardware manufacturers over time.
Mark: You have a number of partnerships with established ebook stores such as Fictionwise and BooksOnBoard. How easy were these partnerships to set up and do you think they’ve play a big part in the popularity of Stanza?
Neelan: The biggest complaint about Stanza from July to November was the fact that users could only get free books (mostly classics like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, “The Taming of the Shrew”, and “Huckleberry Finn”) and they wanted to be able to read more popular contemporary titles. The relationships we’ve established with Fictionwise, BooksOnBoard, All Romance eBooks, and Smashwords are part of the popularity of Stanza. Working with third parties is always fraught with challenges but in each case there were significant joint benefits to making things work and that always helps in getting over any hurdles. There are still things we can do to improve the user experience in each of these cases and that is one of our major thrusts for this quarter.
Stanza Reader for the iPhone & iPod touch
Mark: Some ebooks for the iPhone are being sold through the iTunes store as applications. The iPhone Missing Manual is perhaps the highest profile of these. I believe it’s actually the Stanza Reader that’s used to display this app-book. This approach seem wrong on a number of levels - the equivalent on the desktop would be to fuse Acrobat Reader into every PDF document. How can readers read these app-books on other devices, search across multiple books and how do they manage a large library of app-books? Is this a stop-gap solution or something we’re likely to see more of in the future?
Neelan: The user is always right so I have a hard time judging what clearly is a popular route to go in having a application for each title or in some cases an application than bundle a variety of titles. I currently have 64 books in my Stanza Library including the iPhone: The Missing Manual. Would I want 64 icons cluttering my iPhone? Probably not. But I am probably part of a different segment than the one that chooses to pay $0.99 or $1.99 for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” when you can get a standalone app for free or get it via Stanza through the Feedbooks catalog. I actually wrote a blog about paying for things that could be received for free because that never made any sense to me especially in this economy.
All of that said, the audience who wants a separate app actually comprises of a variety of segments that are valuable and there are reasons they may want to have an “app-book”. I can envision a photographer wanting her 3 most important reference guides available as icons on her home page. I can envision a writer wanting his grammar reference guide available to him with just 1 tap. I can envision someone new to the iPhone wanting Pogue’s guide right there. Also, I bet there is a segment of the population who once they read “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” will just delete the application with no desire to ever read it again. There is a clearly a market for “app-books” and just because you and I don’t believe it makes sense for us, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t make sense for another segment of iPhone and iPod Touch users.
The Apple SDK agreement also plays a role in this in that every application has to be a standalone application. As such “app-books” are a very real part of the eco-system and I think we are going to see a lot more of this in the future.
Mark: What is your position on DRM protected ebooks? Do you believe it helps or harms the ebook industry?
Neelan: Personally, I think proprietary DRM systems (and proprietary formats) hurt eBook users dramatically. The bottom line is that when a user upgrades their phone or moves to one of the new dedicated readers, they shouldn’t have to lose their entire library of content and right now, proprietary DRM and proprietary formats often result in that exact problem. I believe vendors are using the non-portable nature of proprietary formats and proprietary DRM to create switching costs and I truly believe that is a bad thing for eBooks across the board. I know that publishers don’t like to here the argument that they should look at music but I do think that music is a valuable thing to look at regardless… yesterday’s announcement that iTunes tracks are going to be DRM free is very telling. We are trying to encourage publishers to go DRM free but don’t always have success.
I understand why publishers and authors and agents want DRM and given that is one of the constituencies we have to work with, we do support DRM as a necessary evil to do business currently. To be honest, we considered creating our own proprietary DRM system but have chosen to wait to see if a defacto standard emerges. That said, we hope publishers follow their brethren at O’Reilly and Samhain and Pan Macmillan into being more supportive of DRM-free and being more supportive of the ePub standard.
We are huge proponents of the ePub standard and want to see it be very successful so that our users know that there is a future for the books they purchase to read on Stanza today. A big reason I ran for the open board seat on the IDPF (the organization behind ePub) is because we believe in the ePub standard and think its success if very important to the overall success of eBooks. We are huge proponents of DRM-free because we believe that 99% of readers will pay for books if given the opportunity to do so.
If given our druthers (and ignoring a variety of limitations that would prevent us from doing so), Stanza iPhone would read every format and be able to decrypt every DRM system out there until a standard truly took hold and was supported by all elements of the industry (publishers, distributors, retailers, etc). We obviously read a lot of DRM-free formats via Stanza Desktop. At the end of the day, the simple fact that user is aware of format issues and DRM issues is a sad, sad statement. A user simply wants to read the book. The more vendors get in the way of that simple goal, the harder it will be for eBooks to be successful.
All of that said, my open source background is probably showing through this answer. As a business, we will make decisions to help our business like we did to support the eReader proprietary format and the eReader proprietary DRM system all the while working very had to help promote ePub. It seems schizophrenic but certain decisions are made as the right thing for the business as a stop-gap while hopefully the industry as whole comes to the eventual right conclusions.
Mark: Can you tell us a little about your vision for Stanza and what we’re likely to see in the near future?
Neelan: Our vision for Stanza is very simple. User experience. We believe our success is tied to 1 thing and that is making the user experience the most efficient and best user experience possible in every aspect of electronic reading (including finding the content the user wants, downloading the content, providing an immersive experience when reading the content, discovering new content, learning more about the content interacting with the community, etc). So, I think you will see us improving every one of these things. We provide a variety of mechanisms for users to interact with us and give us feedback including Twitter, Facebook, our forums, email, phone calls, etc. We always want to hear from users and love constructive criticism.
Mark: There’s been a lot of talk that Apple should release a dedicated iPhone-style ebook reader with a larger touch screen. Have you heard anything to substantiate this speculation? Perhaps Apple have slipped you a prototype or two?
Neelan: As far as we know, this is still speculation.
Mark: Oh, you’re good. I’m taking that as a yes;)
Thank you so much for your time today Neelan. I look forward to seeing where Lexcycle take Stanza in the future.
