Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Stanza is an ebook reading program for the iPhone.  It boasts over 500,000 downloads since it’s debut.  All Romance eBooks, an etailer that carries a number of small epublishers, has it’s own bookshelf whereby it lists the titles available for download.  You select the book you are interested in and an excerpt downloads to your Stanza program.  The excerpts have a link at the end in blue - www.allromanceebooks.com.  You touch just the link and it should take you to the allromanceebooks.com website where you can then purchase the book.

BooksonBoard is offering the entire Samhain library through its site.  You go to BooksonBoard and then purchase the books to download.  Apparently these books are then downloaded to your iPhone and viewable via Stanza.  

Like Fictionwise.com, neither AllRomance eBooks nor BooksonBoard have an iPhone optimized site.  Half the time, the BooksonBoard special iPhone landing site has a 404 error for me.  No idea why.   For my druthers, the AllRomance Ebook has an easier interface since it works directly through Stanza for browsing.  I’ve not been able to get the “buy link” to work. Maybe they could make it bigger (I think I must have inept fingers).

But …

All Romance eBooks (ARe) is now accepting paypal payments for those readers who do not have credit cards or prefer not to use credit cards. I love Paypal and am thrilled that more businesses are moving toward accepting this form of payment.

Angie W, Executive Editor of Samhain Publishing, brought a new ebookstore to our attention last week: All Romance Ebooks. All Romance Ebooks or “ARe” opened its doors on November 1, 2006, and while it took a while to get my attention I appreciate it didn’t go around and spam comment on all of our blogs like another ebook company did a couple of months ago.

This ecommerce site offers ebooks from all the major electronic publishers except for Ellora’s Cave. I started with its FAQ section and its suprisingly complete, even bringing up issues I hadn’t thought of such as whether they are selling our personal information to any third party (NO) or whether the “tell a friend” section is a way for them to harvest more emails (another NO). Here’s why I love this idea. As a consumer, I like to go to one place to buy all my books, particularly ebooks. I cannot remember all of the ebook publishers out there and bringing all the epublished romance books together in one location makes for easy browsing and even easier purchasing.

Publishers who …