MPD Enforcer 2.0 is a blog about the Memphis Police Department and run by an anonymous blogger. The blog has been critical of the MPD, citing examples of sexual harassment and prisoners’ rights violations. The MPD would like to shut down the blog and has filed a lawsuit and subpoenaed the information from [...]

All of Amazon’s activities in the last few months have resulted in nothing negative despite the bad press. Total revenue was up 41% in the second quarter. Total media sales rose 32% and net income rose 102%.
Read more at PW.

This is really, really good news for ebook readers. The Sony Reader will now accept and read encrypted PDFs and the new ePub format. I believe that you should be able to access prior purchased Adobe PDFs and future purchases of Adobe PDF on the Sony Reader. Opening up the reader to accept [...]

Sony Reader has released a cover for the Sony Reader that contains an integrated light. It’s like the Light Wedge and runs off two AA batteries. It’s a beautifully elegant solution and I would love to see one of these suckers in person. Click on the MobileRead link to see the picture.
One thing [...]

Tor started a promotion to advertise it’s new blog or website (or both) a few months ago by giving away a free eBook every week. In an increased effort to draw traffic, Tor has decided to put up download links for every book in its promotion which are good until Sunday.
That’s alot of free [...]

Publishers’ Weekly is reporting that the Los Angeles Times is laying off two book editors and ceasing to print its Sunday book review section. If I recall correctly, LA Times started a book reviewing blog and excluded romance but included mystery, science fiction and fantasy so my feeling toward this is total apathy.

Symtio is a new “digital merchandising solution” for retailers. Essentially there are gift cards that you buy in the store which entitle you to a download of an ebook or audiobook. I’m not sure why you just don’t buy online, but it does make a decent gift idea.
Here’s a Youtube video of how [...]

While the jury is still out on the efficacy of book trailers, publishers, authors, agents and the like still crank them out like they are the best promo thing since well, blogs, I guess. The latest entry into the grab the attention of the reader and shake them down for money is the Dorchester Shomi [...]

Over at the Smart Bitches, SB Sarah blogged about the workshop that Courtney Milan is doing about wills. The workshop will take place on July 30 as part of the Beau Monde conference. This conference is in San Francisco so it fits neatly into the RWA conference schedule.
Among other things, [...]

Sure hope everyone’s not tired of urban fantasy yet, because there’s going to be a lot of it coming up in the next year or two.
Hannah Howell hits the lists with every release.
USA Today and NYT bestselling author Hannah Howell’s newest novel in her HIGHLAND series, as well as a new historical romance trilogy, [...]

Jonathan Karp’s* piece in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday confirms many of the feelings I have about the state of publishing today. It’s overcrowded and publishers are driven to almost gimmick like lengths to make money. (No. 5 on his list of ways to produce growth was “Cut costs, pray to the gods [...]

Simon & Schuster has sent out an amendment to authors which purports to add a provision setting the standard royalty rate at 15% of the catalog retail price for e-books. The Author’s Guild sent out an alert to instruct authors of three things:
members should discuss the amendment with their attorney or agent; warns that, [...]

Samhain Publishing isn’t the only publisher offering Kindle only exclusives. Through the publishing arm of Amazon, Mitch Albom is selling his “Commencement Speech To His Nephew’s Graduating Class: May 30, 2008, Nice France” for 99 cents. The profits are being donated to a Detroit-based charity for the homeless. Amazon expects more of [...]

According to CrunchGear, Amazon is supposedly releasing two new Kindle models in the fall, a smaller one with a slimmer form factor and a larger one about the size of a piece of paper. The rumor also says that the new Kindles would come in a number of colors. It’s hard to say [...]

The current copyright protection allows for libraries to copy “a work in their collections that is damaged, deteriorating, lost or stolen or whose format has become obsolete” three times. As Ars Technica notes, this means that no copying can be done until destruction or damage is actually underway. The Library of Congress [...]

Samhain is hosting a Kindle ebook giveaway. The first book is Nate from Beth Williamson. You can download the ebook for FREE from Monday July 14th through Sunday July 20th.
Book Details:
Kindle ASIN: B000W5MIOE
Paperback ISBN: 978-1599986593
Cover Blurb:
Amidst the post-war chaos that rains down around them, a controlling man and a desperate woman must [...]

Books on Board is discounting all the romance titles in its catalog than were released since May 2008 and of all thrillers. Some recommended titles would be Susan Mallery’s Sweet Talk and Kresley Cole’s Dark Desires After Dark (Lick My Horns as I like to call it) or Suzanne Enoch’s After the Kiss.

The New Yorker’s cover this month features about every Obama slur possible on its cover. It’s obviously meant to be satiric but is it? My thinking is that if you put McCain on there as a Manchurian candidate, while ironic and satirical, it would also be offensive. Of course, media shouldn’t shy [...]

Joy Nash has 50 advanced copies of her October release, Immortals: The Crossing to give away during the 50 days preceding my release date of September 30. She’s looking for 50 websites to participate in the “50 Days 50 Books Giveaway” by featuring The Crossing on your site for an online giveaway between August 12 [...]

According to the American Association of Publishers, 79 publishers have reported $670 million in sales for the month of May. This is a 1.8% decrease from last year and 0.7 % decrease for the year.
Adult hardcovers and ebooks increased and Childrens’s/YA Paperback had a slight increase while every other category suffered a decline.
You can [...]

Bookshelf is the pro creation of Zac Bedell who developed the very first ebook reader for the iPhone. It costs $9.99 and comes with a java based shelfserver which provides a fairly easy way to load ebooks onto your iPhone. There were two things missing from the old Books.app and one was [...]

No particular standouts (funny, frightening, or otherwise) this week.
Russell Galen is consider to be the biggest agent in SFF, so his deals tend to catch the eye.
Whitley Strieber’s THE WHITE SHAMAN, in 2014, mankind deals with the aftermath of the catastrophe predicted by ancient peoples for the year 2012, to Bob Gleason at Tor, [...]

Apple’s AppStore is live and there are a couple of free ebook readers including Fictionwise’s eReader. According to the description, eReader allows for “direct wireless transfers of your content to the device’s internal storage for offline reading.” This says to me that you’ll be able to buy from Fictionwise directly from the [...]

Simon at Bloggasm sent me an email about his interview with a few Tor authors who had participated in the Tor eBook giveaway. One author, Tobias Buckell, saw an increase in paper sales of his book that was given away and of its sequel, which was not given away. John Scalzi saw an [...]

According to an Amazon insider, of the books that are available in eform, 12% of those sales at Amazon are Kindle sales. On an industry wide scale, ebook sales make up only a single digit market share so Amazon would be exceeding the industry scale if the insider’s tip is true.
It’s difficult [...]