Okay, I lied. I said I wasn’t going to post anything today, being Thanksgiving, but I just can’t help myself!

With the holiday season now upon us, 2009 is just around the corner. While I can’t believe how fast 2008 sped by, I always look forward to a new year and see it as a time for new beginnings and more progress.

Amazon apparently has that same philosophy, and according to this TechCrunch post, will be unveiling the new Kindle 2.0 sometime in the first quarter of 2009. The changes being reported are mostly cosmetic, with the new Kindle being thinner than the original. But it’s also said that the new Kindle will resolve some pesky button issues that users currently suffer from (ie. turning the page accidently).

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This morning, as I was recklessly surfing the internet, a new website caught my attention. The site is called BookTrib and claims to be all about books! Hey, they got my attention. Here’s a short excerpt from their About page:

BookTrib is a full service portal dedicated to bringing all the news, blog, sites, and information about books, writers, and readers under one link. One place to stay up-to-date about the world of books and everything related to them. If it’s about books, it’s on BookTrib.

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For those of you worried that this blog is turning into a political one, fear not, this will probably be my last politics-related post for a while – at least until inauguration day on January 20, 2009.

I just wanted to take a few moments to write about how the election of Barack Obama will change things in this country, and probably around the world. I’m not talking about race or any of his policy positions (although those are all important as well), instead, I’m talking about the internet.

President-Elect Obama will be the first US President to have harnessed the power of the internet, in a big way, to win an election. He had millions of supporters across the country helping his campaign, including donating small sums of money, that had a large impact. This is unheard of in presidential politics.

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Social networking just won’t go away! Today, as I was browsing through my morning Publishers Weekly email, I came across this article, describing retail giant Barnes & Noble (B&N) launch of their own social networking site.

Much like other book social networking sites, My B&N has features that let users showcase the books they’ve read and what they’re currently reading (the site also lets them feature music and movies).

The site, called Goodreads also allows users to create different lists and share them via other social networking sites (cross-social networking?).

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Like I said in this post, I usually take my time reading my beloved Poets & Writers magazine. Well, today I read an article that shook me to the bone.

The article was an expose on writer Andrew Porter and detailed any writer’s worst nightmare. After working tirelessly on a collection of short stories, he lost everything. Here’s a quick excerpt that tells about Porter coming home from a friend’s house:

When he returned home, around one in the morning, his apartment had been ransacked. "Everything was gone," Porter remembers, "my stereo, my CDs, my clothes, my computer, my disks with all my backed-up stories, even the little briefcase where I kept all of my hard copies. In other words, everything I’d written that year, almost everything I’d ever written, was gone." (Poets & Writers Nov/Dec 2008 107-8).

Yikes! That is very scary. Even the hard copies were taken! Needless to say, it took Porter a while to recover from this incident and he almost gave up on writing altogether.

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The world that encompasses ebooks is huge, and expanding with each passing day. A good example of this is the number of different ebook reading applications that have recently made their debut for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The game has shifted from being focused on an "ebook-only" reading devices (think Kindle, Sony Reader), to oriented toward all-in-one devices such as the iPhone.

In fact, if we continue to focus on the iPhone and the apps that have evolved over the last few months, it’s turning into a huge cottage industry. How big? Big enough that venture capitalists are taking notice (actually, they’ve been noticing since before the Apple App Store was even open). Recently, iFund launched this blog that discusses that will "Share  (and hear) perspectives around the iPhone and emerging mobile ecosystem."

What does this mean for the world of ebooks? It means that we’re on the cusp of an explosion in ereading software and ebook distribution platforms for mobile devices that will help push ebooks into the mainstream. The iPhone has really taken the first step, and as the iFund blog points out, will hopefully push others to follow:

The iPhone is a driving force that is finally pushing others in the mobile ecosystem (from developers to handset manufacturers to carriers) to move faster. Ultimately this is better for everyone as users do more on their phone, buy data plans, transact, etc.

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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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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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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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The magazine business is a tough one to break into. Even tougher are literary magazines. A majority never see a profit (even the successful ones) and many simply shut down because of rising costs, dwindling sales and a strained business model (you can only sell so many MFA program ads).

MagCloud just might make publishing that literary magazine you’ve been dreaming about a little closer to reality. I initially caught wind of this cool new service via this post from the if:Book blog.

According to MagCloud’s homepage, the process appears to be simple:

MagCloud enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.

And the price seems to be fair as well – $0.20/page plus the cost of shipping.

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