Archive's Bookie News

Once again it's that time of year as Banned Books Week kicks off and runs until Oct 7th - The centerpiece of this year’s Banned Books Week celebration  is a virtual read-out. Everyone is invited to create a video of themselves reading from their favorite banned or challenged book and upload it to a special Banned Books Week channel. Videos of challenged authors and other celebrities will be posted on both YouTube and our Videos page in coming days. Anyone interested in this initiative can find out more HERE


 Project Gutenberg, boasting over 36,000 titles in its online collection of ebooks is an amazing. While Project Gutenberg makes it easy to download the ebooks in a variety of formats, a new website, Litfy provides readers with an iPad optimized version of ebooks which you can read on the go, as long as you have an Internet connection.

Black Horse Westerns are to continue their eBook releases and I'm pleased to announce that my own Arkansas Smith will be one of the selection for next April. And speaking of the excellent Black Horse range and their ride into the digital territories, there's an interesting round table discussion on the pros and cons of eBooks at Black Horse Extra. "The fact that nothing ever needs to be out of print is, as far as I’m concerned, a big plus to digital publishing. It means that in theory everything ever written can be easily available. I also think that genres such as the western can reach a bigger audience as ebooks. I don’t really think there is a downside to ebooks themselves, since traditional books should be able to co-exist with this new technology. The ease of self-publishing means that at the moment there is a lot of swill about, and that could be seen as a downside, but quality will out and in time the bad writing will simply vanish. So long live the ebook." Gary Dobbs AKA Jack Martin


Kindle eBooks are now available in public libraries, with more and more libraries, particularly in the US now supporting the format thanks to Amazon's decision to issue an update that would allow their popular reader to support the ePub format which is the closest we have to a universal eBook format.