America’s great literary hope, Jonathan Franzen, has once again made the shortlist for another award. Franzen has been added to the Bad Sex in Fiction shortlist for his newest novel Freedom (aff link). The award is sponsored by British magazine Literary Review, and given to the author who, well, writes really bad sex scenes.

According to this Huffington Post article, Franzen is on the shortlist because:

The scene in Freedom that attracted the judges’ attention was a phone sex encounter between two characters. While the passage is over-the-top in context, it becomes downright garish when excerpted — so much so, in fact, that I couldn’t bring myself to reprint even a sentence of it here. My favorite part, however, is Franzen’s wonderfully descriptive phrase, “protruding pencil of tenderness.” Use your imagination.

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It’s been about 3 years since I bought my 1st generation iPhone 2G and I’m still using it. The device has held up remarkably well over the years. Yes, it’s a little slower now and no longer receiving any updates from Apple (not compatible with OS 4), but I can still make/receive calls, surf the web and everything else the iPhone is capable of.

I thought the iPhone was the perfect device when I brought it home from the Apple Store. It’s still a great phone. Then, less than a year later, the App Store was unveiled and suddenly the iPhone became even more powerful. A whole new world of possibilities opened up.

One of the first apps I downloaded was eReader from Fictionwise. Shortly thereafter, I did some traveling and read two entire books just on my iPhone while on the plane. Great times!

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I just wanted to wish everyone here in the US a Happy Thanksgiving. Hopefully you’ll be able to take a break from your writing to enjoy some turkey. I’m a vegetarian, so I didn’t eat real turkey. I ate “tofurky”, fake turkey made out of tofu. It was very good.

I also hope you can spend some time with your family. This year is special because it’s the first year with my son (now 3 months). Of course, he’s too young to eat turkey, but he did have some yummy milk. And he also got to spend some time with our family. I think he had fun.

Anyway, since it is Thanksgiving I just wanted to thank all you loyal readers out there for your support. Thank you!

Sony will be rolling out an eReader app for iPhones and Android-based phones. According to the Sony website, the app will be available this December. The new mobile app is nothing special, doing what all the other eReader apps can do. It will be able to:

• Get bestsellers and new releases from Reader Store.
• Access books purchased at Reader Store on your Reader, PC, iPhone or Android phone.
• Make bookmarks, notes and highlights, and adjust font size as you read.

I’m thinking with the release of this ebook app that those of us with the Sony eReader will soon be able to purchase and download our ebooks directly from their online ebookstore, rather than using their clunky, bug-riddled software.

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The holidays are upon us again and that means there are great deals to be found. And with eReaders skyrocketing in popularity, they are going to be one of the more top selling gifts this year.

That said, great deals and steals are already starting to leak out from large retailers.

Here’s a rundown:

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I had the pleasure of attending a book signing by bestselling author Clive Cussler (aff link) at my local Barnes & Noble. I’ll admit

Cooks Source, the small cooking site that stole an article from another writer, and then suggested that said writer should pay them for the privilege will likely be closing their doors. Editor Judith Griggs posted a long pseudo-apologetic, passive-agressive note on Cooks Source’s homepage.

I hate to pat myself on the back, but I kinda predicted this (along with many others). To quote myself from my post Public Domain Invoked Incorrectly in Cooks Source:

Cooks Source is already feeling the pain. Whether or not they can get their reputation back and keep going is hard to say. Right now, I highly doubt they

Barnes & Noble has released it’s latest eReading baby out into the world. The NookColor is now shipping and demo units should be at most of the B&N stores. This means that reviews of the new device are hitting the blogosphere. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to a NookColor (yet) so I’ll have to rely on the reviews of other bloggers.

For this post I’m using the NookColor review posted on CrunchGear. Instead of trying to rehash everything they say or copy/paste their entire review, I’m just going to pick out the highlights. Here we go:

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Dan Simmons is one of those authors I stumbled upon by accident while browsing through my local bookstore. I saw this book entitled  The Terror (aff link) in the bargain section. It looked interesting enough so I decided to give it a shot.  After reading a few chapters, I couldn’t put it down. I wrote a review of The Terror so you can see what it’s all about.

Fast forward a year and I decide to come back to Dan Simmons. This time I buy his novel A Winter Haunting (aff link) as an ebook. I didn’t find it as enjoyable as The Terror, but it kept me entertained.

The novel centers around down-and-out English professor Dale Stewart, who decides to take his sabbatical in his old home town of Elm Haven, Illinois. His wife has left him, his career as a writer is stagnant and a love affair that ended abruptly, has left him depressed, with one suicide attempt and a cocktail of antidepressants.

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The book sales numbers are out for the month of September and there’s good news and bad news. According to Publishers Weekly, ebook sales were up 158.1% for September. For the first nine months of the year, ebook sales skyrocketed:

Sales for the 14 publishers that reported e-book sales hit $39.9 million in the month, and were up 188.4% in the first nine months of the year to $304.6 million.

The bad news is that traditional print book sales took a dive:

Sales for the 14 publishers that reported e-book sales hit $39.9 million in the month, and were up 188.4% in the first nine months of the year to $304.6 million.

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