Chronicle Books has promised to make gift-giving even more meaningful this year. For every #GiveBooks tweet, pin, and online pledge, they will donate a book to a child in need. Please go to their web site and take the pledge.
Help others discover the pleasure we know every day.
To find out more about Dewey’s Read-a-Thon and how you can participate, visit the web site and read the FAQs. You don’t have to spend all 24 hours reading, but it’s fun to try.
My list so far:
One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde
The Tale of Hawthorn House by Susan Wittig Albert
Murder on Sister’s Row by Victoria Thompson
A few stories from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine thrown in
© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves
I felt I had to reply to a comment I saw on Amazon.com recently. The situation was this: a new, non-fiction book was being “reviewed” and one of the commenters gave it one star. It’s impossible to give anything lower on Amazon.com. The reasoning was that the price of the Kindle version of the book was too high.
Most commenters probably agreed that it was overpriced. However, the commenter hadn’t even purchased the book, and it was agreed that it was poor form to slight the price in that case, as the bad rating went against the overall quality of the book using Amazon’s rating system. The star rating — as it applies to books — is usually reserved for rating the contents and whether the reader liked or disliked the publication.
One commenter wrote the following while discussing this issue: “It costs very little to make an ebook. For amazon’s Kindle, one need only to upload the book in Microsoft Word format and upload a picture of the cover of the book, and perform a few odds and ends and you are set to go – no production costs after that, no worry about printing too many copies, etc.”
My answer to at least this statement follows:
“In reply to [reviewer’s name], it’s not as easy as “perform(ing) a few odds and ends” to prepare a book to be published in the correct format for the Kindle — or any other ebook. I’m an editor and I create ebooks for clients, so I know of what I speak.
If you are a regular reader of ebooks, you’ve seen books which have poor ‘translation’ from the original version, or perhaps were done without proper preparation. Those ebooks have strange paragraph returns, unexplained spacing, remaining page numbers, and countless other anomalies. (That doesn’t count the poor editing that many exhibit!)
Each major distributor of ebooks demands a different format, as well. If ebooks were offered in a standard format across the board, it would be much easier (and less expensive) to publish them. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen, as we know in the computer world.
I do agree that prices of ebooks should be lower than that of print books. However, major publishers like Harper still need to make a profit, as do the many, many entities down the line who get a cut of the price, including Amazon and of course, the author (who makes very little from this, I’m sure). BTW, authors have little to do with setting the price if a publisher is distributing the book.
Big publishers are in trouble because of the self-publishing industry, no doubt about it. If buyers — that’s YOU — insist on quality and agree to pay a fair price, then the market will follow, however slowly that happens.”
© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves
From the great post “Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story” by Maria Popova on Brain Pickings, here is the list:
© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves
“Our annual Read an Ebook Week sale is now underway. The sale ends Saturday.
Access over 20,000 free and deep-discounted ebooks.
Simply click to http://www.smashwords.com then click to the Read an Ebook promotion catalog.
Here’s the direct link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/category/1/newest/1
There are four coupon codes you can use for participating books:
25% off: REW25 – 2,300+ ebooks
50% off: REW50 – 5,700+ ebooks
75% off: REW75 – 900+ ebooks
100% off: RE100 – 2,800+ ebooks
In addition to the limited-time deals above, Smashwords offers over 100,000 original ebooks at everyday low prices. Over 13,000 Smashwords ebooks are regularly priced at FREE. The average price of a Smashwords ebook is under $5.00.
Why are our prices so low? It’s because you’re purchasing direct from the author. When you purchase a Smashwords book, the author earns 85% of the net proceeds from the sale. Thank you for supporting our authors!
Smashwords ebooks are multi-format and DRM-free, so you can read them on virtually an e-reading device, including the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple iPad/iPhone/Touch, Sony Reader, Kobo Reader, personal computers and most smart phones and tablets.
You can also purchase most Smashwords ebooks at your favorite ebook retailers, including the Apple iBookstore, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store. The codes above are only available for books purchased at the Smashwords store. In the future, we hope to expand this annual promotion to our retail partners.”
© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves
© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves
“Pretty please – Your blog should have content related to books, including, but not limited to book reviews.”
© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves
Alyce at At Home With Books is running a great giveway right now for two copies of this book that is already on my TBR stack. Publisher’s Weekly says “this clear and smoothly written look at the mind-boggling history of everything is both informative and provocative.
You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publication Date: February 2, 2010
ISBN: 9780061137877
304 Pages (Paperback)
Nonfiction
© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves
