E-Book Roundup and POLL

Author Chris Howard offers two of his books for free. First is his Young Adult novel, Nanowhere. Second is also a novel, Seaborn.

Will a digital library ever happen? Who's to say. Google has been working on it for years as have the folks at Project Gutenberg. I think the biggest hurdle will be copyright protection, something authors take seriously.

While GalleyCat talks around some interesting topics, most interesting to me is the argument for (and against) encrypted PDFs. I've used NetGalley in the past and plan on using them again. For me, their biggest area for improvement is the selection. While mostly spiritual books, I'd love to get more fantasy and sci-fi on there. On the flip side, reading a galley in front of the computer is a bit hard when you really want to read it in bed (hot laptops + hairy chest = burnt hair). Which brings us to a Kindle-like device that is easily portable and (presumably) less hot. But they won't work with encrypted PDFs. Maybe a nondisclosure agreement would help? Even a EULA (End User License Agreement) could benefit publishers looking to protect the author's work while trying to market the author's work. They don't need to be mutually exclusive.

The discussion moved on later in the week with some super-duper promising news from NetGalley. Read carefully there folks, because it says that NetGalley is aiming to have a new Kindle compatible PDFs by the end of April. Sweet! Now I just need a Kindle. Anyone want to help out with funding?

Is it a #digiarc, an e-ARC, or an e-galley? You decide by voting in the poll to the right.

(for some reason the poll doesn't show for me, so if you can vote there, great, if not, vote in the comments)