Howto.co.uk/writing lists nine writing books online for you to read (currently). These are –

• How to Publish Your Own Book by Anna Crosbie
• Writing for Magazines by Adele Ramet
• Improve Your Written English by Marion Field
• Producing Successful Magazines and Newsletters by Carol Harris
• Write Your Life Story by Michael Oke
• Creative Writing by Adele Ramet
• How to Write for Television by William Smethurst
• Times of Our Lives by Michael Oke
• Spell Well by Marion Field.

Each is broken up into an index of chapters online and each chapter is broken up into web pages, with bookmarked links to sub-sections, and convenient arrow keys to move through the text. Links to purchase on amazon are available, plus some advertising, but this does not break up the reading experience, and the usability is done well on each book.

Howto also has a range of categorised other books available electronically as online reads. Of particular interest to writers, perhaps, you may find several holistic self-improvement books of various themes in the well-being category, there are some excellent howto research and howto read faster books in the Learning category, interviewing techniques howtos found in the careers category, and for the professional writer, a business category also.

If you happen to be about to give a speech at a wedding, check out the family category also. There is also an excellent child carers book available in there, as part of my own occupational interest.

Although some books at HowTo are obviously more U.K. based, the writing book selection contains many books as relevant to international readers naturally. For me, I immediately started reading through Adele Ramet’s Creative Writing title.

LinkMe : HowTo/Writing

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Can you tell I love e-books, then?

Now, it is a difficult time for writing lately, here in the UK, especially as a parent who’s school keeps doing events filling up the days before school breaks for summer. Despite this, I’ve given myself the task to update the very popular “36 Free E-Books for Writers” post and have the updates ready by the end of August. This will be a celebratory gift from me, to the readers here, and a blog birthday gift as Juiced on Writing will be turning one years old during August.

For those who have downloaded the Ultimate Guide to Free E-Books for New Writers – this will be updated also. This e-book already contains 59 free e-books I’ve found, but I’ve since found a few others, and will shortly be posting about even more.

I can’t make a promise towards delivering the new guide and post of e-books before the end of the summer holidays as on a personal front, it is looking like our family may be welcoming in a new adopted child at the same time, but it’s good to have set targets and goals placed for me to concentrate on over the next few weeks.

Stay tuned on my next less personal post, as I have some more free e-books online for you.

And if you have published any new free e-books of interest to writers, please drop me a line, either using the the comments form or email address available here at Juiced on Writing. And I will ensure your e-book is listed also.

Photo Credit : Tai Toh’s Photostream at Flickr [Creative Commons]

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Further information is available in a sample Myebook book on the competition available at myebook.com, which I have also embedded here for you.

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Plastic Logic was based in Cambridge, U.K. They also have bases in the U.S. and Germany, but from a local perspective I was thrilled by what I saw with the developmental stages of the new e-reader. This is the reader I’m waiting for personally, so I’ll take a closer look at it here, now that it is hoped the Plastic Logic Reader will be available this year.

There were terms like ‘electronic paper’ and ‘e-ink’ being bandied around in that little newspaper article focusing on the successes of local businesses. Terms which went way beyond the knowledge area, and perhaps even the interest of readers of the local ‘rag’. Afterall, the U.K. was still awaiting the release of the Sony E-Reader at the time, and still haven’t yet had Amazon contemplate selling the Kindle to a European audience. We can’t even access e-books from Amazon online regional stores.

But here was a local company coming up with a feasibly superior candidate in a flatter and larger size, usable to read electronic copies of newspapers and magazines on the go (not to mention the many e-books which come in various formats). Or indeed, with the compatibility of reading straight PDF files or Microsoft Office formats, the many UK commuters could read their technical manuals, or business papers on the trains to work, without having to get out and boot up their laptops.

As the owner of a new laptop, I’ve got to admit it may be fantastic for writing on, but I’m not going to lug it around to a quiet library or coffee shop to read my vast and ever increasing library of e-books upon. But I would be very tempted to take a paper-thin reader in my satchel.

The Reader Stats

• The Plastic Logic Reader is the name currently being used within demos, however it may be renamed before going commercial.
• The Reader is suggested to be going into pilot and trail with some partners in the last half of 2009 before a public commercial push in 2010.
• It’s thinner than a pad of paper, and lighter than many of those thick business periodicals and newspapers picked up at the train station (weighing less than one pound).
• The Reader comes with software for library organisation, and gesture-type user directions (a touch-screen).
• The touch screen allows for navigation, annotation, note-taking and an electronic keyboard.
• The screen can rotate from landscape to portrait format.
• The screen resolution for the Plastic Logic Reader is 150ppi (in comparison with Kindle 2 at 167ppi)
• The library of electronic books and magazines can be synched with wirelessly or wired up to a network.
• Compatible with PDF files, Excel, Word, HTML, EPub and many other file formats – without conversion (or cost in conversion).
• Black and White (Colour version being worked on, but the latest demos suggest these won’t be out for 3-5 years).
• The screen is actually on flexible material – just set into a hard-backing. This brings up the potential of having a fully sized electronic magazine of flexible foldable pages which can contain libraries of books and periodicals to read in a normal fashion in the future. How cool would that be?

Videos of the Reader in Action

Over time, Plastic Logic has presented various demonstrations of the Reader to various audiences and conferences, and has amalgamated several videos of the reader in action. These are available at YouTube. I am also providing one of these below for Juiced On Writing readers.

LinkMes:

1. Plastic Logic website
2. Plastic Logic Reader – videos at YouTube.

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The Read an Ebook Week website provides some details on various e-book reader devices, and a series of partners providing support, and possibly e-books. There are also some interesting e-book news and resources available from this site.

Go and find yourself an e-book, and make it a task to read it this week. Personally,  in Second Life I have just purchased a bookshelf of Horror themed classic books, and have in store some quiet time to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula via note (text) cards while sitting in my second life hammock. Now that’s the perfect way to read an e-book, don’t you think?

If you want a list of free to download PDF e-books for writers, please download my own The Ultimate Guide to Free E-books for New Writers, which contains links to 59 Free E-books on many writing topics for you.

LinkMes:

1. Read an Ebook Week website.
2. The Ultimate Guide to Free E-books for New Writers– 59 free to download e-books for writers listed in this guide.

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Tom was the first person I know of who discovered myebook.com, and has also used it to build a community for his Unleash the Book Inside You course. His blog post over myebook.com is well worth a read, featured also on the blog for Fuel My Blog late last week.

What’s in WordLube?

You know what? I’m not going to tell you. It’s free to access – although the myebook.com format only allows for in-browser viewing so you can’t take a copy for yourself. Tom has included 5 days worth of exercises to clear your writer’s block, and several mindmaps to help you visualise the mindset.There is even an embedded youtube video on Tony Buzan, and one of Tom’s beautiful mediative audio guides.

If the contents of this free gift for writers is enough to tempt you, take a look at the Bookwright’s Unleash The Book Inside You Home Study Course also.

LinkMe: WordLube (free e-book on Writer’s Block)

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Sign in – registration is free – and you have access to an online reader which has chat and annotation functions on each ebook read. Users – and groups of users can use these facilities to discuss the books they are reading – in fact consider this from an online reading group perspective.

Authors can upload their own books to allow these discussions and receive feedback on their work, and the Book Glutton site itself (launched in January 2008) holds over 1000 books at this time, with many groups of readers also.

Cory Doctorow’s Ebook, entitled Ebooks : Neither E, Nor Books, is currently sitting on the homepage books list. The ebook – based on a paper presented at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004, makes for interesting reading (even before the arrival of the Kindle and Sony e-readers).

Here are a couple of quotes –

For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I’ve had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license.

No, if I had to come up with another title for this talk, I’d call it: "Ebooks: You’re Soaking in Them." That’s because I think that the shape of ebooks to come is almost visible in the way that people interact with text today, and that the job of authors who want to become rich and famous is to come to a better understanding of that shape.

Go to Book Glutton to read this dissertion on ebooks, and to join in with reading several other books online, and chatting over them.

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If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the "first sale" doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?

In the fine print that you "agree" to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you’re not paying to own ‘em, in spite of the use of the term "buy." Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn’t take away your purchases. Still, it’s a license you can’t sell.

Further discussion can be found on the Gizmodo entry linked to below.

Link : Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Locked Up : Why Your Books are No Longer Yours (Gizmodo site, March 21, 2008)

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1. Guardian Poll

The Guardian UK is still on it’s Ebook vs Real Book spiel (see Ebooks in the Media Today item) and has now posted a two-item poll for readers.

Link : Guardian Poll

2. Notethisdown’s Seth Godwin Ebooks

The Notethisdown blog has posted a small list with links to favourite Seth Godwin ebooks. I happen to have all of these myself, and even have a special category in my Ebook’s folders for Seth’s books so they are easily found. Practical information, and a great writing style. And most of these are free, and can be shared with friends.

Link : Notethisdown’s Post.

3. 20 Best Websites to Download Free Ebooks

The Hongkiat.com site has provided a great post listing twenty websites for downloading ebooks from, complete with screenshots of the sites also.

Link : 20 Best Websites…

4. Plastic Logic’s EReader Revealed

The latest buzz appears around the latest ereader, some suggesting as a Kindle-killer. Plastic Logic’s ereader is a larger flexible device to target business users, capable of showing Office applications, and PDFs. Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Note: Plastic Logic has offices in Cambridge UK, my own major city, and I first read about this particular reader some months ago in my local newspaper business section. On the photographs, I can personally see myself being quite comfortable using such a reader like a magazine (in fact, it can have PDF magazine editions on it) and tucking it back into my saddlebag when traveling or commuting. Also good for all those huge technical manuals I used to heft around as a software test manager.

I personally think they may be missing a target market here, concentrating on the business user. Most retail magazines now come in electronic formats, and with the bluetooth and wireless technology incorporated, could be provided as downloads and updates as often as the paper-version. When commuting or even traveling off on holiday, I tend to take large quantities of books, manuals, and magazines with me, and being able to hold them on the one flexible device – including perhaps all those travel brochures or travel guides, just seems immensely hopeful for the future in ebook / ereader technology. Hey, I could even get my latest House & Garden and BBC Focus (Science) magazine fixes at the airports as downloads, on my way out of the country. How kewl is that?

Note: the Plastic Logic ereader still is in demo, and still needs colour.

Link : TrustedReview’s Plastic Logic writeup.
Link : Plastic Logic website

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The One Show, BBC, Thursday 4th September

Last night, the One Show, a magazine style program the BBC puts on at 7pm each week night, featured a debate between an eBook reader company manager and a woman who advocated only real books. The piece was brief, and set in a cafe. In my own opinion, the woman reader did little to recognise anything about the economical and ecological impact of book distributions, but the arguments put forth by Mr e-reader were limited also. Such was the nature of the lack of depth found in the One Show’s brief excepts. But at least I got to see an e-reader (the brand was never mentioned) in real life. They’re bigger than I was expecting.

No Link for this one, but the BBC website does re-run shows over the internet.

Lifehacker Asks : Do Ebooks, Legal or Not, Make You Buy Real Books?

Based on one author pulling her next book because illegal rough drafts showed up on bitTorrent sites (um, I’ve got to ask how they got there in the first place – who had a copy?) the Lifehacker site asks whether access to a digital copy of a book would make you go out and buy it in real form. There are some interesting comments on the post, well worth reading.

Link : http://lifehacker.com/5045885/do-ebooks-legal-or-not-make-you-buy-real-books

A Japanese Rants for More Ebooks

On a Japanese blog, Amlau pleads for more English-language ebooks to be published by publishers – even when they’ve gone out of print in real-life. Amlau can’t get enough english books where he lives. And it’s a good point about finding new markets for books which quickly go out of print locally.

Link: http://www.amyolau.com/2008/09/05/rant-for-ebooks/

Jeffrey Carver is Giving Away 2 of His SciFi Books in Electronic Form

Jeffrey A. Carver is giving away Volume 1 of The Chaos Chronicles, Neptune Crossing and Volume 2, Strange Attractors. The downloads are available in multiple formats also, including mobi, e-reader and PDF. On his blog (which I happen to read as an excellent writing blog), Jeffrey explains his new deal with his publishing company Tor.

Link : http://starrigger.blogspot.com/2008/09/ebooks-round-two-ding-strange.html

Stuff.tv say Only 13% Want Ebook Readers

I’m not sure what the 13% is of – or what group of people Stuff.tv are talking about or have surveyed (I’m going to presume it’s their own customer base), but they suggest that only 13% want an e-reader – whether now or ever. This post was as the result of the Sony reader arriving in Waterstones in the U.K. recently. 

My opinion – actually, if you consider how many books are published in the course of only one year, 13% sounds a good percentage in e-sales. But I’m probably wrong.

Link : http://stuff.tv/news/Only-13-per-cent-want-eBook-reader/10774/

The Guardian says They Still Haven’t Cracked Ebooks

With the arrival of the Sony e-reader, the Guardian newspaper online dishes the dirt, and basically isn’t impressed yet. The capsule review subsidiary blog also talks about this e-reader.

Link : http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/09/ebooks.html
Link : http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/09/capsule_review_sony_reader.html

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