If you like Dick but you’re more into nonfiction, here’s a 2003 Wired article on Dick’s lasting influence on Hollywood.

(Illustration: The._.Joker)

As some of you are aware, every November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. If you’re a NaNoWriMo DoRk–and I can use that term because I’ve been one myself in the past–then you know that it’s incredibly difficult to squirt out the minimum required number of words every day for 30 days straight. (I never made it past day 3.) Most likely, the last thing you need at this delicate point in your quest is to be interrupted by a bunch of writing advice. What you need is caffeine, snack items, and another big helping of willful idiocy self-abuse.

But these titles probably won’t be free much longer, so try to sneak over to Amazon and grab them before they go away. Then, come December, you can peruse them at your leisure over a snifter of brandy while you relax by your hearth; I’m pretty sure no writer worth his salt would sit by a regular fireplace.

[via eReaderIQ.com]

But what this long-running genre magazine is doing is far more interesting than just blindly throwing out freebies as a marketing campagin. This is the first print periodical I’ve seen to try out a true freemium model, similar to services like Dropbox or Evernote. In a lot of ways this is similar to how online newspapers and magazines use paywalls to attract both readers and paying customers—in this case, F&SF will offer all of its nonfiction and news elements for free, plus one story out of each issue, and charge of the remaining fiction pieces.

Another way of looking at this is the magazine is adopting an email list newsletter model to sell more copies. Each issue, everyone on that “email list”—meaning everyone subscribed to the free version—will receive a content-packed free issue that will remind readers to think about upgrading to a paid subscription.

I’ll be curious to see how it works out, and whether it will lead to other problems like devaluing the perceived worth of the magazine’s nonfiction content. Already paidContent has noticed one issue with customer service, although it’s largely Amazon’s fault. Because every Kindle subscription comes with a free 14-day trial period, some customers were getting confused by the free vs. paid versions and thinking that this was a trick—that after two weeks, the free version would automatically switch to paid. It’s the sort of customer hand-holding that Amazon normally does well, but in this case Amazon’s own platform has undermined the experiment by generating a lot of unjustified negative customer reviews.

You can view the special offer on the Amazon Store if you’re interested.

If you’re curious about it, you’re in luck. The audiobook version—which is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, who I think we can all agree is the Hollywood talent to turn to when you need the word “fuck” said with verve and forcefulness (e.g. “Snakes on a Plane”)—is free from Amazon’s audiobook company Audible for a limited time. The Kindle version is $4.79, and the hardcover is just over $8 right now.

One nice touch, and why I’m mentioning the offer in the first place: Audible will wirelessly deliver the file directly to your Kindle via Wi-Fi if you like.

[found via eBookNewser]

Now there’s Delivereads, a free service that goes one step further by picking out the articles for you, then emailing them directly to your free.kindle.com email address.

Delivereads is a lot like (yes, more links are coming up) the websites longreads.com and longform.org, which both curate worthwhile articles and essays for you. But you still browse for articles at those sites and then choose which ones to email, whereas Delivereads automates everything after the initial sign up.

Whether you like what Delivereads sends will depend on whether you like founder Dave Pell’s taste in articles. He’s listed some of his recent picks on the Delivereads sign up page.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

The idea — to essentially crowdsource the slush pile (or to “make it social” if you prefer), and thereby turn it into a form of cheap, high-volume/mixed-value content — is the same as what some bigger publishers are doing; Harper Collins has authonomy, and last month Penguin revealed its new site Book Country. All three sites assume you will join to share your own writing as well as read, and although they make no promises, there’s a chance an editor might discover you and offer you a contract.

I don’t have an issue with this approach, and it certainly seems like in theory it could prove more accurate than the current system at helping publishers find marketable books.

But I’m not personally interested in spending too much time on any of these sites right now. The larger the slush pile grows — and let’s face it, the slush pile is now pretty much everything, including the ebook stores from Amazon and Barnes & Noble — the more I want and need some decent curation. The problem right now is that the volume of published work is far too great for current levels of crowdsourced curation to be effective. For example, a Smashwords title might have three reviews, all three of which are from people who know the author. More commonly it will have no reviews at all. Without a publisher’s stamp of approval or some proof from the marketplace that the work is of sufficient quality, the reader has no idea whether to bother.

Red Lemonade might address some of this in the coming months. There’s a Featured section where presumably Red Lemonade’s staff passes an editorial filter over submissions and chooses worthwhile titles to promote, and I’m optimistic that this could be a good source of free new works by new authors.

At launch this morning Red Lemonade has only 54 titles, which seems very manageable from a crowdsourcing perspective. By contrast, over the weekend Smashwords announced that it has now published two billion words from authors. You’ll need a lot of battle-hardened readers to sort through that many words to find the good pieces.

I think the challenge for Red Lemonade and its social slush pile competitors, assuming they grow popular enough, is to create a better ranking and filtering system that helps customers find great things to read — and I suspect the solution will require something more than just crowdsourced free labor. The publisher or website who invents that is probably going to enjoy a huge, and deserved, advantage over competitors in the near term.

(Photo: Hryck.)

Well, “new” isn’t quite right. These are either classics, like E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” or books that went on to become classic movies, like James Leo Herlihy’s “Midnight Cowboy” and Charles Webb’s “The Graduate.”

The remaining two titles might not sound as familiar, but W.P. Kinsella’s “Shoeless Joe” became “Field of Dreams,” and Peter Bryant’s “Red Alert” was the basis for “Dr. Strangelove.”

All five books are temporarily being offered for free from RosettaBooks on the Kindle store, although it looks like they’re only being made available to U.S. customers due to SRI (stupid rights issues).

Fun ebook history trivia!

(This is about the publishing industry, not about bargain books.)

RosettaBooks actually plays a huge role in the burgeoning ebook industry. It was founded in 2001 by the owner of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, and it made deals with authors whose existing contracts with publishers didn’t include e-rights. It was sort of the same business plan Wylie Agency started last year with its Odyssey Editions company.

Random House immediately sued RosettaBooks and sought to prevent the company from publishing digital editions of the printed titles it controlled, but it lost, and lost an appeal as well. Eventually Random House was forced to work out a deal with RosettaBooks with respect to the titles in question. Random House also worked out a deal with the Wylie Agency last year over the Odyssey Editions titles, presumably because it knew from experience that another lawsuit was probably pointless.

(Photo: The Graduate, 1967)

Barnes & Noble has all 71 titles available for purchase from $2-6, but right now Amazon has listed 56 TextVook titles for free on the Kindle Store.

I tried out the World War I animated title, and it’s about what you’d expect from a 4,000 word ebooklet with embedded cartoons: you’ll quickly learn the key points of the subject, if not the subtle details. (It’s a little odd to see the Black Hand looking so cute and cartoony, though.) The animated clips only work on iOS devices, but the ebooks can otherwise be viewed on any Kindle app or device.

Update: The Digital Reader and Mike Cane have also posted about this, and they point out that only 5 animated titles are among the freebies on offer.

If you’re a King fan, or just want free fiction, this is a good opportunity to put one of those free “send to your Kindle” plug-ins to work. I opened the print version of King’s story so that it’s all on one page, then used Klip.me (formerly Send to Kindle). I had to add Klip.me’s email address to my Amazon trusted address list first (the service will walk you through this the first time you use it), and then it worked just fine, and now the story is on my Kindle. One great thing about Klip.me is that it lets you edit the text before sending it off to Amazon, so I was able to delete the sidebar stuff that interrupted the flow of the story. Nice!

“Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” by Stephen King (The Atlantic Magazine)

(Photo: eparales)

• To make it less appealing to thieves.
• To elicit sympathy from nosy coworkers, non-crazy subway riders, or cute coffee shop patrons.
• To uncover anti-Kindle people in your midst — just watch to see who smirks with delight.


Here's the actual .jpg if you want it for yourself.

• To trick your spouse into buying you a second Kindle.
• To remind yourself of the frailty of material possessions.
• To play a prank on your Kindle-owning parent.
• Because you’re weird like me.

Once I got it on my Kindle, I acted all sad and showed it to my boyfriend, who totally fell for it. He even pressed the screen to make sure it was fake. I don’t think it’s as convincing up close — the cracks aren’t sharp and three-dimensional like they would be in real life — but like most pranks, if you sell it well then people fall for it.

This was Nate’s idea over at The Digital Reader, by the way, and the pattern for the crack comes from lachlan.dean. (The text is a page from “The Fuller Memorandum”.) I’ll probably try to make some other versions if I get bored in the coming weeks, and I’ll put them all up on the Screensavers page so you can download them.