All this talk about banned books (see my posts here and here about the controversy surrounding Republican VP pick Sarah Palin), got me thinking about ways to prevent books from being banned. There’s nothing worse than a government trying to censor what the public reads. Books are meant to be read.

And as many of you know, I’m a huge fan of ebooks. So I did a little research into how ebooks can help prevent those who want to ban books from public libraries, bookstores and other places, like Sarah Palin did, and keep books available for anyone to read. When you think about it, ebooks really are a perfect solution to keeping the power of choice firmly in the hands of the reader, where it belongs.

I came across this post from Epublishers Weekly from earlier this year that outlines 30 benefits of ebooks over print. And sure enough, at # 37, they hit the nail on the head:

Ebooks defeat attempts at censorship. All these works were banned: Analects by Confucius. Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Ars Amorata by Ovid. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio by John Milton. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. Wonder Stories by H.C. Andersen. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Ulysses
by James Joyce. … Many of these books were confiscated, burned, or denied availability in libraries, bookstores and schools. Ebooks guarantee that readers maintain their right to read.

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I’m not one to dive much into politics on this blog, there are too many political blogs to count if you’re looking for your politics fix. However, given that it is an election year and this next election will very much decide the new (or same) course the country will take, I can’t help but chime in now and then. And when the issue is libraries and books, you can bet I’ll have something to say.

News reports continue to surface about the past of the McCain presidential VP nominee Sarah Palin. Most of the reports are disturbing, to say the least. The latest sent a shiver down my spine as I read this article on CNN’s Time website that Palin wanted certain books banned from the library when she was mayor of a small Alaskan town:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

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Move over ebooks, move over print books and what the heck, throw everything you know about writing a novel out the window. Well, maybe not quite everything.

Many of you are probably familiar with the micro-blogging tool called Twitter. Personally, I don’t use the service because I’ve never really had a use for it. And getting sent messages about the minutia of everyday life from people I don’t really know isn’t all that appealing to me.

Now there’s new use for Twitter – writing novels and instantly sending them to your mass following! One such writer, Matt Richtel, wrote about his thriller novel he "published" on Twitter, which he affectionately calls "Twiller" (get it? Thriller + Twitter = Twiller). You can read about his exploits in this post.

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I have a fickle relationship with the online superstore Amazon.com: I love buying stuff from them, I even have Amazon affiliate links and ads on this blog (hey, domain hosting doesn’t pay for itself), yet I’m beginning to feel that Amazon is starting to have an unfair monopoly in the book industry.

This uneasy feeling actually started when I wrote this post, this post, and this post about Amazon’s shady policy of requiring POD publishers to use their (Amazon’s) own printing service. Then today, as I was reading my favorite blogs on Google Reader, I came across this post on the Teleread Blog about Amazon acquiring Shelfari, a book sharing and social networking site for bookworms.

So let’s run down the list of of how Amazon has a tight grasp on the book selling market:

• Amazon is the dominant seller of books online. If you’re book is going to be published, there’s a good chance it’s going to be sold by Amazon.
• As mentioned above, they insist on POD publishers to print their books using Amazon’s own POD printing service. So even self-published authors who want to sell on Amazon have their hands tied.
• Amazon owns Abe Books, another online bookstore.
• Amazon has the Kindle – its own proprietary ebook reader. While you can upload your own content onto the Kindle, it still has an unbreakable tether to Amazon.

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I must be really be scraping the bottom of the barrel if I’m writing about words I hate. Just kidding (nervous laughter)! Actually, this can be an interesting topic because the English language is very much a living one, and is always evolving. Words that are slang today, might find their way into the dictionary tomorrow. Thus it’s no surprise that the Oxford English Dictionary adds about 1000 new words each year (source).

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You can read books written by your favorite classic authors, you can even read their biographies and study other works written by them. But if you really want to get into the head of your favorite writer, then why not visit the place where they wrote their best works?

I came across an interesting snippet from the Guardian about taking vacations to famed literary spots around the world. And for those of us here in the United States, it doesn’t necessarily mean a trip overseas either:

For those keen to immerse themselves totally in the world of literature while on holiday, there’s a company in the States (www.literarytraveler.com) which offers literary tours.

A lot of bookworms would be surprised that many literary figures didn’t live in large cities like New York or Chicago or even Los Angeles (as many writers seem to migrate to today). In fact, according to the Guardian article, Concord, Massachusetts, a humble town of only about 15,000, can brag about being home to the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa M. Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others!

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Yeah, I love my iPhone (1st generation)! And over the last month it has gotten even better. When Apple opened up the iPhone and iPod Touch to third-party native applications (also called "apps") I was excited because I knew there would be a lot of apps for reading ebooks coming out. A few looked really good, and believe it or not, an ebook reading app wasn’t the first thing I put on my iPhone. After mulling it over, reading the reviews and doing a cost-benefit analysis (totally kidding), I came to the conclusion that the app that is simply called eReader would work the best for me. And so for it has met and/or exceeded all my expectations.

The Basics: Why I Decided on eReader

First, let me say that eReader is made by the same cool folks who bring you the Fictionwise website – a large online store for ebooks. For me, that was a big plus. I don’t have a lot of time to scour the internet searching for an ebook I want to read. Fictionwise has a great selection and their prices seem fair (of course, they could always be cheaper). Just as a comparison, I also have the Sony Reader P-500, and have been disappointed by Sony’s ebook store’s slim selection.

Another big plus was the fact that eReader was a free app to download to my iPhone. And I’m not just talking about the free-to-try-but-to-get-the-cool-stuff-you-have-to-buy type of free either. It was just free, plain and simple. Another ebook reading app I was looking cost almost $10 and I would have had to download special software (which I tried and couldn’t get it working, despite my best efforts) onto my computer. That brings me to my next point…

Ease of use! The description of eReader and many of the reviews said it was a very easy, intuitive app to use. In other words: No technical skills needed. My experience with eReader has confirmed what many other users are saying as I have found it a breeze to use.

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If you’re reading this blog then you probably have some experience with the short story. You either read them, or maybe you have even written a few yourself. Heck, maybe you even love short stories and do nothing but read and write them! I am one of those people who love the short story, and there’s nothing better than sitting down with a literary magazine and losing yourself in a few good stories.

But have you ever really thought about the history of the short story? Where did it come from? When was it the most popular? These aren’t required questions to enjoy the literary form, but it does add a little depth to know what you are reading (or writing) didn’t just suddenly appear – there’s an evolutionary process that brought us this wonderful gem.

Once upon a time…

Long before computers, books, the printing press and probably even the English language, cavemen used to sit around their fires and tell their families of the long, hard hunt they just returned from. Or perhaps they told stories that were passed down to them by their elders, and these stories helped to explain the forces of nature or the movement of the moon and sun across the sky.

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Sony is taking a positive step forward by adopting epub standards for its eReader P-505. What does this mean? Basically epub is a format for ebooks that can be used across many different hardware and software platforms. For a more detailed, and better description, check out this website.

What I find particularly refreshing about Sony’s move towards epub, is that it opens the doors for publishers to get their books onto the eReader. I came across this article from Publishers Weekly, and it states:

Brennan Mullin, v-p of Sony Audio, said the company was adopting the epub standard to encourage more vendors, booksellers and publishers to get involved in the e-book market and to broaden the amount of content that can be viewed on the Reader. The move to use epub is a significant change in approach for Sony, which has used its own standards and restricted consumers to buying e-books for the Reader from its own store. The use of epub will allow consumers to buy titles from a variety of outlets and will grow the number of titles compatible with the Reader to well passed the 45,000 now available through its online store.

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Before I start, I want to apologize for my decreased posting frequency. My blog posting always slows a little during the summer months. Nevertheless I haven’t forgotten about you and I should be back to my old posting self shortly. Thank you for your patience!

With that said, I’m proud to say that I finally selected an ebook reader application for my iPhone! I thought that the ebook app would be the first thing I’d buy on July 11, but not so. There were a few ebook readers to chose from, but none of them really made me excited.

Originally, I was going to go with Bookshelf. Then I tried downloading the program onto my Mac and could never get it working. So I eventually gave up. The application itself does look promising, however, I just didn’t have the patience to fiddle around with a buggy program. I have read a lot of positive reviews about Bookshelf, so it is staying on my shortlist of ebook apps in the future.

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