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 …

Note: I mentioned below that several ebook vendors were having big sales this week including BooksonBoard.  I read the BoB promotion to require a minimum of $100 to get the 50% rebate.  This is not accurate. There is a 50% rebate/reward for each book purchased through today regardless of what you spend.

Arstechnica, one of my favorite tech blogs, had an article up last week about EMI’s decision to open an EMI only music store. Ars argued that an EMI only music store was doomed to fail for two basic reasons

most music customers don’t know the label of their favorite musician
music buyers want to find their favorite music easily and in one place. “Research has shown that when consumers are looking for music they want it all in one place.”

These assumptions don’t necessarily carry over to the niche romance ebook reading market. Ellora’s Cave has a brand name in erotic romance of which most ebook readers are aware. For several years, EC was really the only game in town and thus it made sense to drive readers to its exclusive portal. But the ebook market and ebook publishing has evolved since 2001, the birth …

Thinking of the past month and wondering if you should have bought a June title? All of the June titles at Books on Board are 25% off. Here’s some titles you might have missed from our June recommends.