Archive for the 'Ebooks' Category
New to ebooks? Try these articles out:
Grand Central Publishing has these November deals. Â If you haven’t tried Elizabeth Hoyt yet, it’s a safe bet at $1.99. Â Even if you don’t like it, you haven’t spent too much money on the try.
I thought about not posting this because I really dislike Macmillan’s ebooks policies. Â Most of the prices for ebooks by St. Martin’s Press are $9.99 and above for mass markets. But alas, it is a deal.
- Marked by PC & Kristin Cast for $2.99
Random House has been releasing freebies for months now. Â This month we have the following:
- A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K Hamilton (Sony is supposed to replace all the files you buy through the Sony eBookstore with epub files so even if you don’t have a Sony, you might want
…
Dear Ms. Townend,
 I’ve enjoyed several of your other books for Harlequin Historicals and was delighted when you contacted me offering a copy of your latest in the “Wessex Weddings” series for possible review. (Note: FTC discloser out of the way!) And the heroine is a Fallen Woman too. Even better. At first I didn’t realize that the hero is the same man used as a decoy in “An Honorable Rogue,” but once I recalled this, it upped the incentive to read the book.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Four years ago, Lady Emma of Fulford would never have thought she’d be sorry to lose her livelihood – washing dirty laundry in an icy cold river – that puts clothes on her back and a roof over her head. But then she also never thought she’d have an illegitimate child or not be living in her father’s noble household. A love affair gone bad has landed her where she is today and that somewhere is desperate to escape the abusive father of her child who has somehow tracked her down.
Her appeal for a job to …
Dear Authors and Readers.
 If you will excuse a personal history, you will see its relevance to my review. I enlisted in the Army National Guard after 9/11. I became a US citizen and commissioned (became an officer) in 2003. I accepted a medical retirement in May of this year, at the rank of Captain, after 7 ½ years of service. I never went overseas, but I served in the Katrina response in Louisiana. I was a soldier and damn proud to be so.
But I am also bisexual (with some extra kinks outside the Kinsey continuum). This is the first time I’ve been able to admit this in public (well, I came out on Twitter on National Coming Out Day) since figuring it out because of the US military’s destructive Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy. My sexuality in no way affected my service. All outward appearances show a happily married, monogamous, heterosexual soldier, which is mostly what I am. But every now and then the issue came up and I had to bite my tongue. I could have been kicked out of the service if anyone had dug too deep, for a reason …
As there are many ways to get romance wrong, there are exponentially more ways to get BDSM romance wrong. BDSM is tricky. If you’re writing it because it’s hot, but you’ve got no experience with it, you’re almost bound to get it wrong. Almost, but not always, I hasten to add. Examples of successful BDSM romances by authors who aren’t BDSM-identified themselves — as far as I know — are Ann Somerville’s Remastering Jerna and Matthew Haldeman-Time’s An Affair in Paradise and Victoria Dahl’s The Wicked West. So the “authenticity” of a writer who is BDSM-identified isn’t necessary, if that author has imagination, empathy, and has done their research. But still, there are many many ways to get BDSM hideously, awfully, horrifically wrong. I’ve written before about how not to write BDSM romance, but I’ve recently had a string of truly scary BDSM romances cross my computer screen, all scary in very different ways, so I thought I’d combine reviews into a discussion of What NOT To Do.
 Thirty Days by Shayla Kersten (Liquid Silver Books)
This book horrified me. So much so that I literally can’t bring myself …
Dear Ms. Justiss,
 You’ve been writing Regency set stories for years now so by now, I’m sure you’re more than familiar with all the conventions, the standard plots, the trope characters, all the things we’re used to seeing in this historical category. Well, I am too so when I come across something different, I’m liable to sit up, smile and say, “Yes!”
I’m sure that Sir Edward Greaves was, even if only briefly, a minor character in your book, “An Unconventional Match.” Alas, I don’t recall him. Shame on me as he’s a nice guy. As he, himself, thinks, he doesn’t have the lofty title of his friend Nicky Stanhope, the Marquess of Englemere, or the money his financial wizard friend Hal Waterman does but he’s not a bad catch on the marriage mart. So far, his attempts to find a wife he can admire as well as love, and who he thinks would enjoy living with him in the country, have not panned out but hope springs eternal.
In the meantime, he’s intrigued by a little property owned by Nicky. It’s far from Nicky’s other holdings and has currently …
From the comments on the thread regarding the copyrights of readers, it appears that some authors believe that they aren’t getting a sufficient forum on Dear Author to air their frustrations and concerns about piracy. The pressing need to talk about piracy whenever the subject of ebooks comes up appears to overwhelm any other thoughts about digital books and readers. This post is a forum for those authors.
Before we get to the comments, though, I want to state two things.
First, Dear Author is not a blog devoted to authors or author causes or author issues. We are a reader blog and our focus is for the readers, from the reviews, to the giveaways, to the opinion pieces. We are not author advocates and yes, often our reader interest is at odds with the authors. We do not exist to advance any author position nor any particular author. If it appears that we do, it is because we have an interest in an author topic or a particular author, not because we exist to do service on behalf of authors and their self interests. To state it more bluntly, we at Dear Author owe …
The nook, an electronic reader from Barnes and Noble, was announced on Tuesday. It is not likely another ebook reader will be released before the end of the year. Therefore it is safe to start contemplating whether it is worth buying an ebook reader this year. Author and reader Kay Sisk sent me this awesome comparison chart of current ebook readers.
There are three basic choices for the dedicated reading market:
- Amazon Kindle: Â Kindle 2 and Kindle Dx
- Sony Reader: Pocket, Touch, Daily Edition
- Barnes & Noble: nook & iRex
KINDLE
Pros of the Kindle:
 There are two flavors of the Kindle:
- Kindle 2, available internationally, 6″ screen for $259.00.
- Kindle DX, available in US only, 9.7″ screen for $489.00.
The Kindle allows for continuous access to your ebook purchase and the Amazon digital bookstore via 3G network from AT&T.  You are allowed to hook up to 6 devices to your account.  I have my iPhone and my husband’s iPhone devices registered to my account. If you are particularly trusting, you can share an account with up to  5 other readers. Anyone with a device registered to the account, however, may charge to that account.
Kindle’s refresh …
Dear Ms. Schmidt,
 I am coming to look forward to your many novels set on the Massachusetts coastal islands. Plus you use the turn-of-the-century (turn of the last century I should say) era which is something I’d love to see more of.
Nola Burns initially appears to be an uptight, dried up spinster who’s as rigid as her corset while Harrison Starbuck has been known as a scamp and a carefree rogue since his boyhood. Nola’s hardworking, having taken over the care of her siblings at the death of their parents and since run the teahouse which was her childhood home. Harry is well off due to his instinct for a good business deal. Now they’re about to clash over Harry’s latest venture.
The beachfront teahouse is the perfect location for Harry’s planned luxury hotel to accompany the cabaret he’s building to entertain the locals and summer tourists upon whom they all depend. But it’s all Nola has and she’s not going to sell it or see her business ruined without a fight.
When Nola allows the actors to stay in her house in order to fill in for the summer …
Dear Ms. Michaels,
 If the purpose of the novella “How to Woo a Spinster” was to get me to buy this full length novel, it worked. But as I started to read How to Tempt a Duke, I wondered if I would get through it. Let’s see…Regency era, Duke hero, feisty younger sister, heroine with Dark Secret in her past who starts to bicker with the hero as soon as he shows his face at the old homestead. Hmmmmm, where have I read all this too many times to count?
Rafe Daughtry, son of the younger son, never expected to inherit the Dukedom. After all, his uncle was healthy and the heir and a spare were still up to their wicked, disgusting ways. That is until all three were drowned – along with some barques of frailty – in a yachting accident. Once word finally caught up with him in Paris, Rafe decided to stay and escort Bonaparte to Elba before heading home.
When he arrives in England, it’s to discover that his newly married aunt has left his two much younger sisters in the charge of his old neighborhood friend, Charlie. And hasn’t …
Dear Ms. Sheridan.
 Thank you for sending me your story when I was moaning on Twitter one night about wanting to read a BDSM romance. I hope you don’t regret it.
When I agreed to read the book, I had no idea it was #2 of the Beautiful C*cksucker series. I had no idea that BC *was* a series. I tend to agree with the outrage over the name (Paul Bens’ original reaction, Teddy Pig’s response, Karen Knows Best’s extensive discussion) but I also know that in BDSM play, some epithets that would otherwise be unacceptable (”cunt” comes to mind) are endearments during a scene. Which is not to say that they should be used as titles to the book/series. I will admit, though, that I deliberately avoided most of the debate and arguments because it was too huge and I’ve only got so much mental energy. But if the writing for BC#1 was anything like the writing for BC#2, we should all just have ignored it and let it slip into well-deserved obscurity.
I also had no idea how BC#2 connects with BC#1. And OMFG, doing the …
Dear Ladies,
 It’s taken me far too long to finally review this offering which I got in ::winces:: April. Bad moi. But here it is at last.
Once Burned by Emery Sanborne
Dear Ms Sanborne,
Hot firefighters, hot attraction, hot sex. “Once Burned” has all three. Plus lots of local Philadelphia color. Andreas Sullivan has tried to date a fellow firefighter before and all it got him was trouble and heartache. Will this time be any different?
Andreas and Bobby seem to have had some problems with being accepted as gay both by their families and by society. Andreas has been in more than one fight though he’s decided to try and shrug off antigay comments. One of his brothers wasn’t totally accepting of his lifestyle though now it appears that the brother is trying. Bobby’s father, a former Army man, only came to accept Bobby’s sexual orientation when faced with the greater disappointment of his son joining the Marines. Both are experienced and have had long and short relationships though there’s not as much about Bobby’s backstory and history as Andreas’s.
The firefighter stuff adds some color and shading to the story and serves as the …
Over the past year, as more and more readers have become interested in ebooks, we’ve begun to realize one of the biggest problems is the mess of territorial rights. We had Fictionwise and BooksonBoard removing books from its bookstore. Fictionwise went so far as removing access to books that people had already purchased.
This past week, Amazon announced that it would sell its Amazon Kindle to 100+ countries and those Kindles would have cellular access so you could take advantage of the on Kindle book purchasing. Â (which is really the only advantage of the Kindle at this point). Â Two problems emerged from this announcement. Â First, the release of the Kindle didn’t do anything to make more books available to international readers. Â Amazon confirmed that it would be observing all territorial rights agreements. Â Second, Amazon will actually be charging more for books sold outside the U.S.
Territorial Agreements
As I discussed in this article published in May of 2009, rights have traditionally been sold with translation and territory rights sold as one bundle known as “foreign rights”. Â I argued that rights should be decoupled. Â World digital rights could be granted while reserving translation rights. Â One of the drawbacks of this is that …
Dear Ms. Thomas,
 This is the last book in a trilogy that doesn’t read that way. Which is a relief to me as I hate jumping into a series and feeling over my head with past characters and situations. After reading the middle book, The Cowboy’s Promise, I knew the book on the hero’s brain damaged sister would be up next and I knew I didn’t want to miss how you would handle this. As with the other books of yours I’ve read, it is with tact and believability.
Samantha Cartwright was once a no-nonsense tomboy who loved horses and wasn’t afraid of anything. Then she was kicked in the head by a rescue horse, spent time in a coma and then more time fighting her way back to as close to normal as she’ll ever get. Physically she looks fine but she copes by taking notes, making lists and trying to stay calm in the face of trying situations. Since the accident, her overprotective father, wealthy oil baron Dominick Cartwright, has tried to smooth her path but Sam knows she if she wants to obtain her dream, she’ll need …
Dear Ms. Roux.
 I opened this file when I got it because it wasn’t paranormal (no world building…I’m so sick of world building) and because you wrote it and I adore your Caught Running with Madeleine Urban. That said…meh. So many holes, such annoying characters, unbelievable timeline, so much potential angst wasted, wasted I tell you!
Vic the lawyer loves Owen the sheriff and part-time bailiff. Owen uses Vic as a fuck buddy and has done so for five years, which is tearing Vic apart. Or at least, so I’m told. Shane the judge is Vic’s best friend and convinces Vic, on 12 hours’ notice, to go on a month’s vacation. Apparently, public prosecutors in North Carolina don’t have to clear their schedule to go on a MONTH’S LONG vacation. I think I need to go to law school. As we learn…eventually…Shane loves Vic and has done so for…yes, you guessed it, five years. But as the entire story is told from Vic’s not-quite-first-person perspective, Shane’s emotions pretty much get lost and ignored in Vic’s angst and general cluelessness. Which is a shame. Vic, of course, comes to realize the relationship potential in …
  
These images are the covers to ebooks from Random House, Pocket, and Berkley.
I’m a big champion of ebooks, obviously, but there are all kinds of problems with ebooks from the expensive hardware to the ridiculous number of formats and DRM encryption schemes. Â Those are issues that publishers may not be willing to address right now because of certain business decisions but there are quality issues with the books themselves that publishers should start addressing.
For some reason, many print publishers have this belief that readers of ebooks don’t want the color cover that print readers get. Â Not only do readers of ebooks get shafted on the color cover, they don’t get back cover copy or a stepback picture. Â Digital consumers like pictures too.
I’ve heard that the reason that publishers aren’t including the color cover copy is because the digital readers are black and white. Given that 50% of consumers of digital books are reading from a laptop and a significant portion are using the iPhone or iTouch, that excuse simply doesn’t fly. Â When I first started buying ebooks, there were no commercial readers …
Dear Ms. Smith,
 Your regencies novels have been among my favorites for years. I’d heard conflicting things about your contemporary mysteries but decided to take the plunge and try one that seemed, from the blurb, to also include some regency stuff.
Belle Savage, American romance writer, rents a cottage in England for inspiration. And she finds her Regency hero. Only he’s a ghost, who entangles her in the past, where Arabella Comstock’s tragic story pours from Belle’s pen. When the Lord Raventhorpe of Regency days finally learns the truth, will the contemporary lord also find his destiny?
I’m going to attempt to avoid spoilers but honestly I think my chances of doing this are piss poor.
There are two sides to the book – the modern part wherein Belle goes to England, settles into her cottage, learns about the tragic past of Alexander and Arabella and decides to write about this. And the part during which Belle seems to be possessed by Arabella who tells her story through Belle’s writing. It has a very gothic feel – especially towards end when All is Revealed and Belle tries to join Alexander. …
Dear Ms. Daniels,
 I haven’t read a book from the “Intrigue” line in a long time and decided to check out the latest offerings. While I usually try to avoid stepping into a series midway through, this time it didn’t affect my overall enjoyment of the book. Plus the mention in the blurb about the hero on something other than a horse was too good to pass up.
Russell Corbett was all cowboy and wasn’t about to let a lady lasso him! But Dulcie Hughes had him tied up in knots from the moment she nearly collided with his combine. She rode into town with her fancy rental car and city clothes to claim her secret inheritance. And neither tall tale nor handsome rancher would deter her from exposing a years-old cover-up at the Beaumont property. She expected to find answers, not fall in love. But like the threatening thunderhead on the horizon, the truth would come fast and fierce, and there would be no escaping the consequences.
You toss the reader straight into the mystery. Why has Dulcie inherited this piece of land in rural Montana and why did …
Dear Authors:
 I opened THIS anthology because I liked Sindustry I. But this volume is so obviously all the leftover stories from the Sindustry I anthology that didn’t quite make it into the first volume. And most of these stories should NOT have been included. This anthology had very few redeeming stories and some that make me want to puke, which kinda dampens any enthusiasm I might have for the whole. Mostly it’s filled with stories with awful, weak, boring, TSTL characters who couldn’t characterize their way out of a paper bag, and their ridiculously over-protective and unrealistic saviors. I have never really understood what m/m readers are complaining about when they say that that one of the characters doesn’t have to be the woman, but I do now. In this volume, one half of the relationship was invariably the damsel in distress who needed saving, the other the knight in shining armor who knew just how to take care of things, pretty lady…uh, I mean lad. Yech.
As in Sindustry I, the premise is that these are all stories about people in the sex industry, either strippers, prostitutes, or porn actors. This volume does a …
Dear Authors:
 I only opened this volume when Dreamspinner sent it to us because Madeleine Urban had a co-written story in it. I adore her longer co-written stories with Abigail Roux, and the volume started off with “Reluctant,” so I thought I’d have a great little story and then skim through the rest. Instead, “Reluctant” was truly awful and the rest of the stories saved me from chucking the volume off my computer.
At 332 pages, this is a seriously hefty volume (electronic, of course). And with only 12 stories, that’s between 25-30 pages a story, much longer than the usual short stories crammed into an anthology. This gives enough time to actually flesh out the characters, plots, and themes. Or time for the story to move from blah to boring and awful.
The theme for the volume is sex industry workers: both low- and high-end prostitutes and strippers, mainly. What was fascinating to me more than anything was how each story used the sex industry angle—as a meet-cute, as conflict, as a moral failing, as a perfectly legitimate profession, with or without comment. I’m strangely fascinated by this particular profession and by how …
Dear Ms. McAllister,
Click here to go to eHarlequin.com
 Recently a friend of mine recommended you as a “Presents” author whose heroes aren’t assholes. She said something like, “They don’t suck.” Telling me something is different from the normal is like baiting a juicy worm on a hook for a hungry fish. So yeah, I bit. And guess what? She’s right. Flynn doesn’t suck.
What Flynn does, actually, is try and take the entire weight of the Earldom of Dunmorey on his shoulders after his disapproving father, the eighth Earl, drops from a heart attack. Flynn was never supposed to be the next in line, that would have been his brother Will who died coming to fetch Flynn at the airport from one of Flynn’s many overseas adventures as a journalist.
And one of those adventures was a brief stay in a small town in Montana. Almost six years later, a beat up letter finally catches up with Flynn in Ireland and informs him that the woman he flung with for three days got preggers. Knowing his son is almost six now and frantic for having missed this much of his life, Flynn heads across …
The laments I hear about ebooks is the loss of the book culture. There is the loss of the smell and feel of books. There is the loss of the interpersonal connection of books. There is the loss of the cultural signal of book covers. Some see value in the actual turning of pages, as if the shifting of space by paper has some independent meaning. There is some fear that digitization means that books are lost.
To some people, the physical book represents a pillar of civilization. To be true, the mass availability of printed works changed the world, contributed to the rise of the middle class, making the acquisition of knowledge easier for greater numbers of individuals.
Every innovation heralds changes in culture. Who can forget the infamous “Video Killed the Radio Star”. The printed book decimated the tradition of oral storytelling and the culture and community surrounding that. By hanging on to the print culture, what is it exactly that we are preserving?
Is the argument that we read more with print than in digital form? Not me. I find myself reading at every spare moment. I don’t even mind the …
Dear Mr. Lane:
 As I immediately emailed to you when you sent met his book, “Good God, the fairy godmother of cover images likes YOU, doesn’t she?!” I adore this cover, as I did the cover of the first Amaranth novel. (Anne Cain did the art. One might almost say “Of course, Anne Cain did the cover art.” I’m not sure she’s capable of doing a bad cover.) And while I read the novel in one sitting, unable to put it down, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Dark Heart and, despite its labeling on Loose Id, I wouldn’t call it a BDSM novel as such.
Coryn is a newly trained Master Mage, a healer. On his travels one day, he stops three men from slaughtering a plague-ridden slave. He heals and claims the slave as his own, then goes to the plague-ridden city Elverton to help the people there. Days later, he has healed so many people, he himself is dangerously weak, but he’s not closer to figuring out where the plague came from and how it’s spreading, which is when he calls in more of his Guild, healers …
Dear Ms. Marsh,
 I’m trying to branch out in my Harlequin reading experiences so I decided to try your book in the “Romance” line. With no mention of secretaries, babies or royalty I decided to give it a go.
Recent widow Tamara Rayne is looking towards reentering the profession she gave up when she married a celebrity chef. With that in mind, she’s honing her food critic skills at the restaurant once co-owned by her husband Richard and his friend, entrepreneur Ethan Brooks. Even before Richard’s sudden death, Ethan had barely paid any attention to her so Tamara is amazed when Ethan begins to flirt with her.
Ethan had good reason to avoid Tamara since he didn’t think he could control his attraction to her and remain on good terms with Richard. But now that Tamara is available and seems to be getting over her grief at Richard’s death, Ethan decides to pounce. And what more romantic place to pursue her than on a luxurious trip across Tamara’s mother’s homeland of India. But has Ethan read Tamara correctly and is Tamara ready for another relationship just when she’s beginning to stand on her own two feet again?
This book …
Dear Ms. Prescott,
 I used to love Chick Lit books, especially those written by Englishwomen. I adored learning Briticisms and watching the underdog triumph in the end. Then the genre got stale and I got tired of reading the same old or worse. When you offered “Mucho Caliente” for review, the fact that the heroine is an (slightly) older woman caught my eye and made me decide to give it a go.
Does Gemma dare wish upon a Latino superstar? Thirty-seven year old Gemma hadn’t reckoned on being seated next to Latino heartthrob Emilio Caliente on the flight to Ibiza. She’s bravely dismissed her cheating husband’s generous divorce settlement, opting instead for a creatively satisfying, financially independent, bohemian lifestyle on a Spanish island in the sun. Falling in love with a pop music superstar eight years her junior was definitely not part of her plan.
Common sense dictates staying away from Emilio Caliente and his cinnamon kisses: his life is in turmoil, his latest single has bombed, the press want to see him naked and his hellacious manager seems increasingly deranged. But surely the chain of extraordinary events that insists on bringing them together
…
 Last week, I wrote that publishers had sacrificed the quality of the printed book in order to preserve their margins reducing the shelf worthy quality of hardcover, trade and mass market fiction. Because of the decreased quality of the printed books, it’s no real sacrifice to move to digital books.
<—-this is the first of a set of redesigned covers for Harry Potter series as imagined by MS Corely.
Digital book technology, however, can help publishers make creative and unique collectible books at a much lower cost. Ebooks are simply one by-product of digital book technology. Digital book technology encompasses a new way to process books, manage backlists, and distribute title information.
One benefit of advancing technology will be better print on demand. Both Google and Amazon are looking to provide POD fulfillment services to reduce the waste of print runs (Amazon has filed a patent to include advertisements in POD books as well as ebooks). POD can be used to create one of a kind collectible items for the reader. Mike Briggs brought this idea up in the comments and I …
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Open Threads at Dear Author. Want to know what new releases are out this month and what readers are excited about reading? Check out the threads below. 
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