Exciting news for all you iPhone and iPod Touch owners out there – mega bookstore chain Barnes & Noble (B&N) released a free app today, available on the iTunes app store. The app lets you browse books, read editorial/customer reviews, access to exclusive content, and even take a picture of a book’s cover and find out a whole bunch of cool information about it.

Could B&N be gearing up to go even more digital (think: ebooks) later on in the year?

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I’m really excited about the release of the new book by Chris Anderson, from The Long Tail blog, and plan to pre-order my copy soon. For those of you who don’t know, Chris has been leading the way in promoting ‘free’ as a new kind of business model. I advocate it here on this blog as well by encouraging and supporting authors who give away free ebooks to help promote a current title (for example).

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Way to go RIAA! You just won a court case against a single mother for 24 stinking songs. You not only ruined this woman’s life (unless a higher appeals court finds some common sense and overturns the $1.9 million dollar judgement), but you also have managed to pull of the world’s worst PR campaign – sue the hell out of people, with sketchy evidence, for sharing a few songs online.

Of course, I’m referring to the verdict against 32-year old Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who was ‘convicted’ of uploading 24 songs to a popular file sharing website.

I try not to stray too far from books, writing and literature on this blog. But there are implications for the growing ebook industry in this case, and I hope publishers are paying attention.

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I’m a big fan of the ePub ebook format because it’s free, open source, easy-to-use and is free of that evil DRM. So you can imagine I was pretty thrilled when I learned of a new website that gives away free ebook exclusively in the ePub format. I learned about the site from the good folks over at Teleread on this post New, free epub book site goes live.

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Yes, after much prodding I have finally jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon. My main reason for not joining sooner was that I wasn’t sure how I’d use Twitter. Would I write about the mundane details of my every day life? Would I write about writing? Would I make sarcastic comments about the book I’m currently reading?

Right now I’m still experiment with Twitter and, as they say, trying to find my ‘voice’. So my tweets might be all over the spectrum, from personal to sharing an interesting article on ebooks. I can assure you, however, that I have no intention of tweeting every little detail of my life (i.e. “I’m going to the bathroom now”). On average, since joining Twitter, I’m writing one tweet per day. But that will probably increase a little as I get more comfortable with Twittering.

With that said, you can check out my Twitter profile at: http://twitter.com/bradvertrees

I’m currently looking for a Wordpress plugin so I can integrate my Twitter profile into this blog. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.

Happy Twittering!

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.

Don’t worry, the intertubes aren’t broken. This is the same Brad’s Reader, just with a new, improved and upgraded design. My blog also has a few new features as well. Here’s a rundown of what’s new:

- More categories: The categories have been  updated to reflect how Brad’s Reader has evolved over the last year or so. You’ll find a handful of new categories and a few old ones are still around. This will make finding posts that interest you easier (i.e. there is now a category for ebooks!).

- Related posts: You will now see a small list of similar posts under each one. I’m actually really excited about this feature. When I first started Brad’s Reader, I did this manually. But as the blog grew it became impossible to go back and find related posts.
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One of the great benefits of the internet is that it levels the playing field for the small guys like myself. Bloggers are getting book deals. Authors are able to write, publish and sell their own work and completely bypass the traditional large publishing houses (unless you plan to sell your print-on-demand book through Amazon, then there might be problems, which I have written about here). The list goes on, telling the stories of Average Joe finding literary fame where there once was nothing.

I guess those large publishing houses began to feel left out, or at least, one of them did. I came across an interesting blog post on the UK’s Guardian Unlimited that talks about HarperCollins joining the Web 2.0 revolution. Now in beta testing, the publisher is letting authors with an unpublished novel, post the manuscript online and let others comment on it. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

You can currently only join by invitation, but membership will soon be available to anyone. While there is scope for avid readers to add to their own virtual "bookshelf", the site seems to be aimed particularly at budding authors – members are encouraged to "create a profile for your own book" and "start uploading your work". (And, if there’s any doubt about their intentions, the right-hand column contains the links: "Get Read. Get Spotted. Get Online.")

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This post is a follow-up to my post last month about publishers going green.

Every little bit helps. That is my philosophy when trying to tackle something like waste and the environment. So I was pleased when I came across an article on Publishers Weekly about HarperCollins moving its massive catalog of titles online!

HarperCollins is developing an interactive, electronic sales catalog. The catalog will offer booksellers an online tool to order books and reduce Harper’ paper output.

This will allow booksellers (and hopefully the general public) to browse the catalog, read reviews, place orders and a host of other cool features. While this is something they could have done a lot earlier, it’s always better late than never. I think Jane Freidman, the President and CEO of HarperCollins, makes a good point:

"It has been clear to me for some time that catalogs are out of date as soon as they are printed. So much of what we do today is in real time. Why not our catalogs? In addition, an electronic version reduces a tremendous amount of waste in all areas, paper, production and shipping. "

While simply moving their catalog to the internet doesn’t solve all of our problems with waste, the environment, global warming, etc., at least it’s a small step in the right direction. If everyone (even large corporations) took small steps like this, it would add up to make a big difference.

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I came across an interesting article today as I was browsing through the news. At first I didn’t think much of it. But the more I thought about it, the more it intrigued me. I’m talking about plans to publish, in print, Wikipedia in Germany (Publisher plans printed version of Wikipedia). Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The media company — whose units include publisher Random House Inc. and music venture Sony BMG — said Wednesday that it plans to publish "The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia" starting in September with the content made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia.

The article goes on to mention that they plan to publish a new volume every year. The article didn’t mention anything about an English version being printed, but I’m sure it’s not far behind.

Here’s my take:

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