Category Archives: eBook

CALL FOR ENTRIES: Shelf Unbound Writing Competition

SHELF UNBOUND WRITING COMPETITION FOR BEST INDEPENDENTLY PUBLISHED BOOK, SPONSORED BY HALF PRICE BOOKS

Shelf Unbound book review magazine announces the Shelf Unbound Writing Competition for Best Independently Published Book sponsored by Half Price Books. Any independently published book in any genre is eligible for entry. Entry fee is $30 per book. The winning entry will be selected by the editors of Shelf Unbound magazine.

“Independently Published” books include self-published books (such as those published through CreateSpace, Lulu.com, iUniverse, etc.) and/or books published through small presses releasing less than five titles per year. Books entered in last year’s competition are eligible for re-submission in this year’s competition. There is no limit to the number of books an individual can enter; each book is a separate entry.

The official rules for the competition can be found at here.

To submit an entry, email a PDF or Word Doc of your entire book, including the cover, toMargaret@shelfmediagroup.com, subject line Contest Entry (or mail a physical copy of your book to: Shelf Media Group, PO Box 852321, Richardson, Texas 75085-2321), and send a check for $30 made out to Shelf Media Group to Margaret Brown, Shelf Media Group, PO Box 852321, Richardson, Texas 75085-2321, or pay via PayPal (click on this link and select “Competition Entry Fee”). All entries received (and entry fee paid) will be considered.

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Calibre pops out release 1.3!

Whether you’re an eBook aficionado, an aspiring writer, or ar just trying to get a handle on all of your eBooks across all of your devices the open-source Calibre program is your solution.  You can manage your library, sync your files to virtually every device you’ve got, and even convert eBook formats.

Calibre is free to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.  You can get it HERE.

While relatively glacial in pushing updates, Kovid Goyal has now updated this excellent program twice in a month!

About

Calibre started life on 31 October, 2006, soon after the release of the SONY PRS-500, the first e-ink based reader to be sold commercially in the US. At the time, I was a graduate student, with a lot of time on my hands. The PRS-500 did not work at all with Linux, my operating system of choice, so I decided to reverse engineer the USB protocol that it used, to get it working on Linux. This was accomplished with the help of the fine folks over at mobileread.com and calibre was born, albeit named libprs500.

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Is Self-Publishing here to stay?

This question was recently asked, and some mighty strange answers were provided:

“…Is self publishing here to stay? Hogwash. Self publishing will be here to stay when self published authors start showing up on Good Morning America or The View or the front page of the Huffington Post or Salon or the New York Times Book Review, and I don’t mean well known marketable authors who’ve jettisoned the mainstream publishers without which they’d still be a bunch of nobodies tweeting their asses off about their latest novel. Sure, once in a blue moon an “indie” author will break through into one of those venues, but the major publishers are still dictating what America reads. Go ahead, shoot the messenger…”

And:

“…Excuse me, I forgot this is an ebook group, so let’s add the ebook phenomenon to the print on demand phenomenon! You can publish an ebook for nothing too. Of course, with both ebooks and POD, you could pay a couple of hundred dollars for a professionally designed cover, and a few hundred dollars on up to an editor, and then you could pay I don’t know how much to a blog tour broker, and you could pay to have your book displayed on a web site promoting great reads to people looking for something to read…”

And:

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Online retail book sales growth continues

According to Tbe Bookseller website, Bowker is reporting another increase in online retail book sales.  From the article:

Online retailers, including Amazon, accounted for 44% of all book spending in the US in 2012, according to Bowker. The figure is up from 39% in 2011, while bookstore chains now account for less than 20% of book spending.

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Stephen Curry – Kindle surprise and disappointment

In Occam’s Corner, hosted by The Guardian, Stephen Curry discovers that he really likes the Kindle.  From the article:

I thought I loved the physical feel of books too much to become enamoured of ebooks. I loved the heft, the smell, the touch of the paper, the firm but yielding resistance of the spine of a new paperback, the perfect cut of the pages that transforms a gathering of sheets — leaves that flutter easily between the fingers — into a near solid block. Comparisons are hard to find because there is nothing quite like a book. The intimacy of the tactile sensations, along with the joy of ideas and entertainment that are to be found between the covers of those that are well written, have combined to make the book an object not just of veneration — how many are scandalised to find second hand tomes annotated with a reader’s scratchings? — but of love.

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