Robin Sloan raised money online to fund his first novel

Here’s a guy who’s bypassed both vanity-presses and mainstream publishers by getting readers to pitch in and pay him directly for a book before he’s even written published it. Call it a reader-funded advance.

Robin Sloan is a blogger who previously published a short story, Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store, on the Kindle (you can buy it here for 99 cents). I stumbled across him on Kickstarter, a website where people can post ideas for projects and ask others around the world to sponsor them.

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It didn’t take long for Amazon to make good on its promise to expand into mobile territory. Last week, only a couple of weeks after releasing the Kindle 2, an official app showed up on the iTunes App Store that allows you to read your Kindle ebooks (but not mags or newspapers) on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Here’s a first look at how the app works, including what it does well and doesn’t do at all.

Perhaps even more interesting, though, is that for the first time, customers who don’t own a Kindle can purchase Kindle ebooks. This throws open the doors of the Kindle bookstore to millions more customers. What doesn’t change, of course, is the fact that the titles remain DRM-shackled. But for the savvy user who knows how to remove the DRM, you suddenly have access to what’s still the cheapest ebook store on the planet. For now, at any rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas K. wrote, “Is there any chance you just might find a picture good enough for our kindle of Jane Austen?”

Here’s a larger version of Poe, looking sufficiently melancholy. Probably thinking of what rhymes with sepulchre or something like that.

A reader asked me about a Poe screensaver, so I decided to make one. My god, he looks gloomy. That’s Poe for ya.