March 7-13: Read An E-Book Week

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I’ve been writing a lot about e-books lately. it’s certainly the buzz topic of the season. But I wonder: just how many of you readers of this blog actually read e-books? I’m betting many have yet to take the plunge. Well, now’s your time to give it a try: it’s READ AN E-BOOK WEEK!

This special annual event revolves around the Read An E-Book Week website. The event is entering its seventh year already, but I’m guessing that it will gain more attention this year than ever, due to all the hullabaloo about the new e-book readers coming on market. The event was dreamed up by self-published writer Rita Toews. She was recently interviewed about the origin, history and objectives of E-Book Week by Mark Coker of Huffington Post.

THE E-BOOK UNIVERSE

I cannot think of a better, more thorough way to get acquainted with the world of the e-book than to visit the E-Book Week Store this week. There you will find a list of links that covers the e-book universe:

14 E-Book Vendors
16 E-Book Publishers
21 Authors, including Cory Doctorow
9 websites
plus 16 other relevant links

Taking some time exploring these lists is like a college education about the state of e-books today.

WHAT TO READ

If you are overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of e-book titles available for download, then I have some suggestions about what to read this week, knowing your interest in building your writing career and readership. I found these titles by browsing around the E-Book Week Store.

Smoky Trudeau’s Write Well Workshop – Episode 9 – Revisions — published just on March 4, Trudeau offers this title as a free download via the Smashwords e-book store. The link takes you to a special catalog page of Smashword books available for free or at discount for E-Book Week. This page illustrates how the Smashwords catalog looks and operates. Click on the Write Well Workshop title to visit the download page. When you get there, note especially the wide range of e-book formats available for download. This is the genius of Smashwords: authors can upload their manuscript [following certain directions], and a special Smashwords engine will churn out all of these versions automatically. In case this book doesn’t ring your bell, you can look through the other 356 catalog pages of books offered free or at discount for this week. While you are at the site, you may wish to read the site’s guide How To Publish on Smashwords. Then you’ll know how to get your book online for next year’s Read An E-Book Week. Note that many of the books in the Smashwords catalog have links to print versions.

Burning the Midnight Oil: How We Survive As Writing Parents — a collection of 35 interviews and essays by various successful writers, offered for free this week only by author Dawn Colclasure. To find the download link, scroll down to the bottom of the page. If you poke around Dawn’s website, you’ll uncover a second free e-book on the same subject, a collection of Dawn’s own essays from 2006: Survival Strategies for Writing Parents.

How to Create an E-book in 10 Steps — offered as a free download by business consultant Sharon Cohen. To get it, you will need to sign up for her free email newsletter. In case you don’t know, this is a favorite tactic by bloggers and marketers to build a mailing list — give away a product in return for an email address. Increasingly, writers are finding a way to employ this tactic to build their own readership base, something you may wish to try at some point. While at this website, consider signing up for Sharon’s free webinar about E-Book Marketing. I’ve signed in to quite a number of webinars and always walk away with valuable information. And, yes, it’s yet another new marketing tactic that some writers are beginning to use. Try it out and see how it works.

HOW TO READ

You don’t already have an e-reader? No problem. There are quite a number of free e-reader applications — for your computer or for your cellphone.

One good place to find download links to popular readers is at Kobo Books. This is one of the major online bookstores in the world, and it’s getting into e-books in a big way. On the site’s front page, you’ll find invitations to learn more about e-readers, including specific Kobo applications for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Palm Pre. You will be given precise directions about how to proceed. And at the same time, you’ll see how a major player is getting into e-books. Kobo’s books are in ePub format.

Adobe Digital Editions is a new, free desktop application that reads PDF and ePub formatted e-books. The program also integrates with the Sony Reader. During the installation process, you will be invited to register. I recommend that you do so, as it opens the way for the software to keep track of your e-books and to read them on up to six different devices. This digital reader, incidentally, supercedes the Adobe Reader, which almost all of us have encountered and probably have used. Also be sure, while at the installation page, to check out the Sample Adobe Digital Library [there's a link also at the bottom of the page]. This will take you to a lot more, beautifully designed e-books., not the home-grown e-books we usually encounter. Just a bit ago, for example, I downloaded the sample first chapter of The Geography of Bliss, a delightful reading experience in this beautiful reader. One hint: the page turn buttons are almost invisible, tucked away at the bottom right of the screen.

If you have one of the new Android cell phones, you will want to buy the Aldiko Reader [$1.99]. Even if you don’t have such a phone, you may wish to check this application page to see just how nice it looks. Hmmm, maybe one can read a book on a smartphone after all.

Currently, the most popular reader for smartphone is Stanza. There’s even a version for the desktop, which I’ve been using myself for some time. You may recall that I wrote about this app not too long ago. This application is still in development, and its features are not yet completely set.

I’m very surprised NOT to see the Kindle and Amazon as participants in E-Book Week. Nor is Apple there either. Or Blio. So even though E-Book Week’s website carries lots of information, it is by no means complete. The e-book universe is expanding at the speed of light — especially this year. So stay tuned for more developments.