The big news this week is Apple’s unveiling of their new iPad tablet. The Apple tablet has long been rumored and speculation about its features, looks and technical specs have been flying around the web for at least a year or two. Now that the iPad has arrived, people are taking a step back to see if it will live up to all that early hype.

I’m not going to be ordering an iPad anytime soon. Between my 1st gen iPhone and Sony Pocket Edition, I’m good to go in the gadget department. Also, I don’t quite have the funds right now. Maybe in a few years when the price has come down.

The other news rocking the literary world this week is the death of a great American writer, J.D. Salinger, known best for his novel Catcher in the Rye. It’s still January and we’ve already seen the death of Salinger and mystery writer Robert B. Parker. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come in 2010.

The good news today is that it’s Friday! As always, have a safe and happy weekend.

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Oh Apple, how you disappoint me. It appears that the new iBooks app for the newly announced iPad will be bogged down with DRM, making it hard (if not impossible) to share ebooks you buy from Apple. I’ve had a hard time getting specifics, but I found a few reputable blogs posting the same thing.

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American literary great J.D. Salinger died today, he was 91. According to Harold Ober, Salinger’s representative, the writer died of natural causes. Here’s a brief excerpt from the New York Times J.D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91:

He bragged in college about his literary talent and ambitions, and wrote swaggering letters to Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine. But success, once it arrived, paled quickly for him. He told the editors of Saturday Review that he was

Did you honestly think I’d go without writing a post about the newest cool gadget from Apple? Don’t worry, I’m not turning Brad’s Reader into a fanboy site, but the iPad has tremendous implications for the world of ebooks. Will it be the long awaited ‘Kindle killer’? I don’t know.

For the last year or so (maybe even longer) there have been rumors that Apple would eventually release a tablet device. That day has come. At first glace, iPad is a beefed up version of the iPhone/iPod Touch. But under the hood the iPad is impressive. I want onto the MacRumors blog and here’s what they had to say:

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Book publishers are still struggling to figure out a way to deal with ebook pirates in a way that will not alienate the average ebook reader. The music industry did a very crappy job of this, and they are paying the price.

In general, the publishers believe that ebooks strip sales from print books (of course, print books are more expensive) and that ebooks are so easy to pirate, they need to be loaded with draconian DRM to protect the financial interests of the publishing company and the author.

I think that these publishers are deluding themselves. Ebooks can help drive sales of print books and ebooks, in the end, are more profitable because of the ‘infinite supply’ theory. Furthermore, DRM has done little to stop pirates. DRM only serves to keep honest readers from buying an ebook.

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It’s hard to ignore an author like James Patterson. His books, an estimated 14 million copies sold, are everywhere from airport bookstores, in the supermarket and featured on prominent shelves in bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders. I’ll confess that the only Patterson book I’ve read is Sail (aff link). The novel was okay. At best it was entertaining. But I’m unlikely to be buying another Patterson novel in the future.

However, being a mega-selling superstar author, James Patterson is someone all struggling novelists should pay attention to and learn a thing or two.

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One of my biggest frustrations with reading ebooks is how they are formatted. I’m not talking about the file type (i.e. Epub, PDF, PDB, lrf, mobi, etc), I’m talking about how the ebook looks on the device’s screen. Like most other things with ebooks, there is no standard, at least not yet.

Right now I’m reading Stephen King’s new novel Under the Dome (aff link) as an ebook – one I purchased from Sony’s ebook store for my Sony Pocket Edition. When I first opened the ebook on my reader, I had to flip through about 10 pages of the usual copyright stuff, acknowledgments, a page with just the title on it (lest I forget what I’m reading between opening the ebook and clicking through those first few pages).

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This has been a sad week for 2 reasons: The humanitarian crisis in Haiti continues to get worse as the death toll keeps rising, and the death of famed mystery writer Robert B. Parker.

In other news, I’m finally starting to get my voice back after coming down with a horrible cold. The worst part about this cold, however, has been the insomnia that has accompanied it. Not very fun at all. I guess it’s that time of year. But I can still be thankful that my overall health is still very good (knock on wood).

Without further delay, here is this week’s installment of Friday Link Love. Hopefully this will provide you with some good reading this weekend, especially if you’re having cold and miserable weather in your neck of the woods. As always, have a happy and safe weekend.

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I was shocked and saddened when I saw a story on a ‘Google Alert’ email that mystery writer Robert B. Parker died suddenly Monday January 18 of an apparent heart attack. Parker died at his writing desk, doing what he loved best, writing a new Spenser novel.

I began reading Parker’s novels in high school, and for a time, appeared to be addicted to them. The plots seemed simple enough, yet had an undercurrent of complex twists and turns. In fact, all those novels I read (which seemed to be a perfect escape from the angst of high school) inspired me to write my own mystery stories.

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The New York Times wants to charge you for the content you read online. Faced with declining revenue for their print editions, the NYT needs a way to bring in more money. But is charging for reading the news online the best solution? This question is hard to answer, given that there are so many free news aggregate sites out there that people can go to for their daily news fix.

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