While this post doesn’t directly deal with literature, writing, publishing or ebooks, I feel that it needs to be addressed. I’ve been a very strong supporter of free speech – it’s the cornerstone of an open and enlightened society. However, with free speech also comes responsibility. That can be a thin line to balance. But in the following case, the line has been crossed.

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I believe blogging is a powerful tool that is giving the mainstream media a run for its money. Blogs are becoming more accepted as a means to disseminate news and other information. This is why I think Blog Action Day 2009 is such a great idea. The event focuses on one pressing issue society faces, and this year that issue is climate change.

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This December Brad’s Reader will be 3 years old. In celebration, I’m going to be giving back to all of you who have made my blog a success. I never imagined that my blog would grow and evolve the way it has when I started writing a few posts about literature on the old Blogger platform.

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I’m back! I returned last night from my annual summer vacation – this year we were off to Washington state to visit family. What made this trip stand out from the others, however, is that it was virtually paperless for me. Unlike trips in the past, I packed no print books and went all digital.

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For those of you who have been reading this blog, you know I’m a big advocate for using the ‘free’ pricing model. In the Sunday Books section of the New York Times, this article Absolutely, Positively Free…if you think you can afford it takes author and blogger Chris Anderson to task over his new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (aff link).

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In a move to try and drum up foot traffic at bookstores across the country, Publishers Weekly is announcing the first ever National Bookselling Day, according to this article from their website. PW has partnered with several publishers, various literary publications and different bookselling associations across the country to help promote the event.

While in theory this sounds like a great idea, I wonder how they are going to get Joe Average Reader on board to actually visit his local store on November 7. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but if they are not careful, it can easily turn into an event that only PW and the involved parties care about – not the readers who are the ones who shell out cash to actually buy books.

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Since switching to the new blogging platform yesterday, one issue I have noticed already is the Brad’s Reader RSS feed. You’ll probably need to update your RSS reader to continue reading all the great content you have come to love from this blog.

To update your feed, you can either click on the RSS icon on the left side of the homepage. Or, just point your RSS reader to: http://www.bradsreader.com/feed/

As always, if you have any further problems or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact me.

I’ve been seeing some great comments on this blog lately, and I’d like to see more! Here are a few posts that have been getting the most attention lately:

5 Benefits of writing without a plan

Move over Kindle, Japan is way ahead in the ebook game!

Science fiction: A study of ethics and morals

NYT article gives shallow reasons for not embracing ebooks

Resurrecting my Sony Reader PRS-500 with Calibre

Author smackdown: Stephen King disses Stephenie Meyer (one of the most commented on posts!)

Of course you can comment on any post you like, the above posts have been commented on most recently. Don’t be shy and let the world know what you think. I hope to hear from you soon!

I was deeply saddened to read this Ars Technica post about Yahoo! shutting down Geocities. The service, which was bought by Yahoo! in 1999 enabled people with limited technical and design skills to create their own little home on the web:

Started in 1994, Geocities was like the Facebook to Angelfire’s MySpace—competing webpage services that allowed over-enthused HTML newbies to create artfully horrific webpages to represent themselves in the early days of the Internet. (I was a diehard Angelfire fan, myself.) Geocities was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 with the intent of extending Yahoo’s reach with its Internet advertising and services.

Geocities was where I set up my first website, and where I first posted my short fiction and various essays. I still remember the night I "published" my first short story on Geocities, after getting the HTML just right, and wondering how many might read my story. Probably not very many.

Goodbye Geocities, you will be missed!

The glitch that caused Amazon’s website to pull many ‘adult oriented’ books (mostly gay & lesbian titles) from its sales rankings, causing the books to be harder to find, caused quite a controversy last week. I detailed it in this post Amazon ‘glitch’ stirs rumors of alleged censorship (April 14).

While the question of whether or not Amazon engaged in deliberate censorship because of homophobic tendencies is still up in the air, the fierce and harsh response to the incident on blogs and Twitter brings up other questions. Were people too quick to judge? Was there a ‘mob mentality’ in the online community?

These questions, and more, were brought up in this NYT article:

Although the way messages speed across social networks makes today’s digital world ripe for mob-fueled conspiracy theories, the controversy over Amazon was striking both for its ferocity and for the velocity with which it spread.

And at least one blogger, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, backtracked on his criticism of Amazon:

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"I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true," Mr. Shirky wrote, noting that "the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me."
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