01:30 PM by NatCh in E-Book General | Reading Recommendations

Many will recognize Michael Stackpole's name, he's written pretty broadly and eclectically, stretching from Battletech, through the Star Wars universe and into several flavors of epic fantasy.

Some of his writings have been available as e-versions from various controlled stores such as Amazon and Sony's ebookstore, however he's recently dipped his toe into the waters of self-published e-books, with a bit of a twist.

The toe-dipping part is that he's offering his backlist novels Once A Hero, and Talion: Revenant as unrestricted e-books from his website store (which takes PayPal) for $5. You read that correctly, five American Dollars.

In the case of Talion, Mr. Stackpole has issued a challenge to his readers: if he can sell 10,000 e-copies of Talion: Revenant (the same number that the paper version sold) he will write and publish its sequel, Talion: Nemesis.

Apparently he's had notes for the sequel for quite some time, and even part of it written, and is using the e-sales as sort of a replacement for the Advance for writing the sequel which a publisher would offer if he were following the "traditional" route.

I'm particularly intrigued and impressed by some of the comments he's made about this experiment, for example:

What I’m really enthused about is the number of folks who actually get it. This whole challenge isn’t just about getting enough money to write a sequel. It’s about making a fundamental change in the way publishing is done. Instead of getting paid by publishers for what they guess I might sell in the future, I can work on the basis of being paid for work I’ve already done. The advantage there is incredible because it buys me the freedom to turn out the kind of work that I want to write and which, rather obviously, my patrons (that would be you) want to read. With this cycle ramping up, I’d be in a position to ask you what you want to see next from me, be it more DragonCrown War material, more stories in the Age of Discovery world, long work, short work, new and experimental work.

I strongly encourage you to have a look at his full comments on the Talion experiment, here and here, and also his comments on Once A Hero, located here. Not only are they interesting for their perspective on e-publishing, but they offer some interesting tidbits on the histories of the books in question.

For those interested, I encourage you to consider purchasing one or both of these books. I haven't read Once a Hero (yet!) but everything else I've read by Mr. Stackpole I've greatly enjoyed, so I have no reservations about commending his works to you. For those who would specifically like to see a Talion sequel, here's something you can do to make that more likely.

For everyone, what do you think of Mr. Stackpole's perspective on e-publishing? He seems to be viewing it from a slightly different direction than I'd ever considered before, and one I think will be particularly appealing to other Authors.

02:07 PM by dougf4 in E-Book General | News

Press release; Rodney Chan, DIGITIMES [Friday 2 July 2010]

E Ink Corporation, the leading developer and marketer of electronic paper display technology, has announced the release of its next generation display technology, Pearl. With Pearl, E Ink expands the capabilities of reflective displays. With the whitest reflective displays in the industry, and a contrast ratio now approximately 50% greater than today's products, text on Pearl "pops" from the page, enabling a reading experience most similar to reading text on printed paper, the company claimed.

"As the electronic reading market continues to expand, there are more opportunities for expansion not only in the e-book space, but also for e-newspapers, e-magazines and e-textbooks," according to Felix Ho, chairman of E Ink. "E Ink Pearl enables further adoption with a next generation product that is a more lightweight and eco-friendly product than ordinary paper, with less eye strain and longer battery life than an LCD."

The E Ink Pearl design builds on the current generation of Vizplex designs, which is used in millions of e-book reader devices today. Due to a two-pigment system, the current E Ink products in the market have demonstrated long life and high reliability, enabling a whole new class of consumer products.

Entire article here: http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100702PR206.html

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Gosh we've talked a lot this week. Here's your weekly round up of MobileRead's events.

E-Book General - News

• Toshiba will launch ebook store powered by blio.
• SONY Drops Price on all its readers 300/600/900

E-Book General - Writers' Corner

• Amazon 70% royalty option now live.

E-Book Readers - Amazon Kindle

• New Graphite Kindle DX on July 7th!

E-Book Readers - Android Devices

• Kindle for Android is OUT!

Miscellaneous - Announcements

• Mobileread moderation team grows again...

01:07 AM by =X= in E-Book General | News

Okay I don't know if this is news or not, but with B&N starting the price war and dropping their Nook to $199 in addition to pricing their new model aggressively at only $149. Amazon did not skip a beat and quickly followed suit by dropping their model to $189.

So I was curios would SONY join the price war and drop their prices? It looks the the answer is yes.

I visited their Sonystyle store they have new prices

300 dropped from $169-> $149
600 dropped from $199 -> $169
900 dropped from $349 -> $299

So here I was eying a kindle for wife with it's lower price point. With the new lower price she might just receive a cherry red Sony-600

Decision, decisions....

=X=

12:46 AM by pilotbob in Miscellaneous | Announcements

I am happy to announce our newest moderator PoohBear_nc.

Even after being told the hours and the pay he has accepted a position as a moderator. His initiative to help us with the Kindle forum and his great attitude on the forums got him quickly invited to join the team.

So, please join us in welcoming him to the team. I know he will make a great addition and the green hat matches his specks.

BOb

04:16 AM by darthjoey in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

So I was just staying awake rehacking my Kindle when I see a new tweet about a new DX! Hopefully Kindle 3 is on the way.

Link: Kindle DX Graphite Pre-order

08:45 PM by pdurrant in E-Book General | Writers' Corner

For non-public-domain ebooks, for sale between $2.99 and $9.99 inclusive, that are at least 20% cheaper than the cheapest new paper version, Amazon are now offering a 70% of (price less delivery charge) option for US sales.

But it's not automatic! You have to go to you bookshelf at http://dtp.amazon.com/ and manually edit the book details to specify that it's not public domain, change it to the 70% option, and agree to the new terms.

So - if you have books for sale in the Amazon Kindle store for between $2.99 and $9.99 and that meet the other criteria, get over there now and change! You'll be almost doubling your income from sales without costing your customers a penny more!

07:52 AM by Charbax in E-Book General | News

Here's a video interview with Sriram Peruvemba at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando. He shows off the plastic unbreakable and bendable e-ink screen and talks about the status of e-ink technology in the market.

Source: ARMdevices.net

The plastic screen, integration with the Freescale i.MX508, all that means lower cost sub-$100 e-readers, some that are basically unbreakable, that you can drop on the floor safely, that can be put in the bag without leather case, the e-ink based screens can then also more likely be used by children in school.