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I didn't see any mention of Baen in the first most-of-a-page of comments, so I'll just mention they have a great free e-library and reasonably priced ebook program, as well as a science fiction e-magazine.

The other site I'd like to recommend is one to bookmark and check back every month or so: Alexandria Digital Literature, or AlexLit, used to have a truly marvelous collaborative filtering engine, where you'd tell it what books you like and dislike, and it would tell you what books you haven't already read that you're likely to enjoy. I found some of what are now my most favorite books that way. But the site is down right now and they promise a revised version "sometime in 2008." So keep checking it.

(I interviewed Dave Howell, the guy behind AlexLit, on one of the episodes of my Biblio File podcast.)

"...the only way to know what's good is to read it yourself..."

Not quite true...

Most review sites show all the reviews or the highest and lowest rating reviews. This just shows the general population rating.

The Library of Alexandria website has you rate several books. Then it compares your ratings with all of the other users in its database and finds the users who's ratings are closest to yours, your "neighbors". Then it makes recommendations based on other books your neighbors have rated. It even assigns a confidence level based on how many neighbors have rated a book, what the spread of ratings is, and how close each neighbor is to you.

It started out as a straightforward data gathering and recommendation website. The layout of the website has gotten a little more awkward since they added an online bookstore, but you don't have to order books just to get recommendations. You can sign up for a free membership and then just go to the Departments:Recommender links to get at the rating and recommendation area.

The more you rate, the more accurate Hypatia's recommendations for you and your neighbors will be. I am not an employee of alexlit, but I am an enthusiastic user. I've entered over 2000 ratings over the years.

Sounds like what you need is the Recommender (otherwise known as Hypatia) at AlexLit. I used to use it a lot, and though it suffered a bit in its infancy from the opinions of the natural first users, it's grown. Though AlexLit has branched out into selling eBooks, the recommender includes any book that someone has decided to add. It's been around for years.

Ask Hypatia what you want to read, at the website you will see in brackets thusly:. Through the miracle of collaborative filtering, she can come up with a list of books at least as likely as anything anyone here can give you.

I can't say about the specifics of using your viewing history to predict it, but the method they use to predict based on those--collaborative filtering--is old hat, and you can find prior art for it all over the place: for example, Alexandria Digital Litarature, an e-book vendor that also sports the best reading-recommender I've ever seen. (You tell it what books you loved, liked, disliked, and hated, and it compares your list to those of a zillion other Alexlit users and predicts new titles you might enjoy.) It's not steered me wrong so far.

I would venture to suggest that the main reason dedicated e-book devices haven't taken off is that there isn't all that much you can do with them other than read an e-book...and in some cases, you can't even read any e-book you want, only the ones you buy from the manufacturer. Thanks, but no thanks.

Now PDAs, on the other hand, have a zillion uses...including e-reading. And those have shot right through the roof sale-wise, and there are apparently enough people who enjoy e-reading on them to keep at least a half-dozen major and who knows how many minor PDA-compatible or PDA-only e-book vending sites in clover.

For instance, I've been in correspondence with Lee Fyock of PDA-only e-book site Palm Digital Literature (nee Peanut Press), and while he can't reveal figures, he can tell me that business has been very good. Note that Peanut has been around for several years now, is adding new titles and authors constantly, and has been viewed as such a desirable property that it's been bought out not once but twice, the second time by Palm itself! That doesn't sound like strictly a publisher's dream to me.

I don't see Peanut, or Alexlit, or Fictionwise , or Baen Webscription, or any of the others as being in any danger of shutting down soon. So, clearly, there's more to this e-book thing than some people seem to think.

(Oh, and as for e-books being strictly a vehicle to impose content control, that's not necessarily entirely true either. See the Baen Free Library, Prime Palaver #6.)

...he's addressing the encryption of books vs. giving them away, in regard to e-book piracy. I think all the people who try to draw conclusions from this in regard to the music industry are missing the point just a bit. They're very different industries, in very complicated ways.

The thing that's worth cheering for is the boost it gives to 1) giving away stuff free, and 2) avoiding encryption. The encryption of e-books is one of the major hot-button issues on Slashdot today, after all.

And another note: the folks at Alexandria Digital Literature have always offered their e-books/e-stories in plain and unencrypted format, and so far they've never had any problems with people pirating those texts.

The Library of Alexandria is a book recommender database. I joined when they were still in their pure data gathering stages. Nowadays you have to click on the Departments:Recommender link to get past the online fiction store.

You rate several stories [Dreadful, Boring, So-so, Enjoyable, Really Good, Excellent, Fabulous]. Then you can ask for recommendations. The database correlates your ratings with everyone elses ratings and finds the people with ratings closest to yours, your "neighbors". Then it uses your neighbors' ratings to recommend books that you haven't rated yet. The recommendations each have a confidence rating [Pure Speculation, Wild Guess, Extremely Low, Very Low, Low, Medium-Low, Medium, Medium-High, High, Very High, Extremely High, Almost Positive] based on how many neighbors recommended the book, what the range of ratings are, and how "close" each neighbor is. Obviously, the more books you rate, the more accurate the system can be. With this system I've discovered lots of books that I love, but never would have picked while browsing in a bookstore.

Dragging this post somewhat back on-topic, users can enter in story title's and authors that are not in the database yet. Similar to CDDB and freeDB, most stories were entered by the users, not the administrators.

I am not connected with the Library of Alexandria website except as an occasional customer of their online store and as a long time user of their database; over the past four years or so I've entered 2314 ratings.

• Alexlit
  
• Mind's Eye
  
• Peanut Press/Palm Digital Literature
  
• Fictionwise
  
• MemoWare
  
• Baen Webscriptions/Free Library

AFAICT, there are only two features that e-books have over regular books:

1) You can use the same physical device for multiple content. Unless you are on the space shuttle, who cares?

2) You can download books from the Internet. Great, except has anybody here tried to use Napster/Gnutella recently? From the moment you first start looking to the moment you are able to use the (correct) file how much time elapses?

Gutenberg or Gnutella'd titles take a little longer, as I have to unwrap the text before running it through a converter--but even then, emacs makes it easy enough that it just takes a couple of minutes and a few Meta-X commands before I'm done. And if it's a Gutenberg book or otherwise freely available, I can even donate it to the Memoware free e-book library when I finish. (Search under "Meadows" there for all the titles I've donated so far.)

For me, reading books on my Visor is fast, convenient, and a sure-fire boredom fighter. But to each his own.

If you're also into roleplaying, the game Nobilis might also interest you. It's hard to describe it in one sentence (which is why I linked to a review, instead), but it cites Zelazny, and particularly Lord of Light, as one of its influences. It's out of print and hard to find just at the moment, but an expanded second edition is coming out soon. It's a very sweet-looking game.

And as always, Alexlit's collaborative filtering recommendation system can look at the books you like and love, and suggest more you might enjoy.

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Alexlit, one of the first e-lit sites, which started out with an ubercool collaborative filtering book recommendation system and added on from there.

Mind's Eye Fiction, which Alexlit subsequently bought.

Fictionwise, another e-lit publisher, which, if I'm not mistaken, actually has a contract to publish some of Harlan Ellison's works.

Peanut Press, which publishes e-books for Palms & PocketPCs--and was bought by NetLibrary.

Now, granted, most of what these sites deal in is reprints, and save for Peanut Press, they focus more toward short stories than entire books. But they seem to be doing rather well, even in the age of the dot-com crash.
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I think it's dumb that King expects us to pay for different editions. But there is a certain amount of precedent.

Frankly, I think King's set his e-book up to fail, with unrealistic expectations.
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I don't like the karma system. (One obvious reason is that I don't post often cause I'm no karma whore and I only post when I have something to say, and I haven't got the +2 bonus and so this post won't be even read by enough people). Fsck the karma whores!

If you're looking for really good science fiction stories, why not check out Alexandria Digital Literature, aka "Alexlit"? It has a neat can't-miss system where you tell it what you thought of what books you've read, and based on the tastes of the hundreds of other Alexlit patrons, suggests some other books you might like. And there's a lot of science fiction and fantasy included in the list. Once you've rated a few hundred stories, you'll start to find ones you've never read appearing, and you can even print out the list to take to the library with you.
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Even leaving aside Project Gutenberg, there are still many ebookeries that don't go in for this sort of encryption. For instance, Alexandria Digital Literature and Mind's Eye Press have been selling shorter works by reknowned SF authors (Vonda McIntire, Spider Robinson, Robert Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, etc.) in open formats (ASCII, HTML, Palm/AportisDoc, etc.) for quite some time, have never had problems with piracy, and seem to be doing well enough to stay afloat. (And Alexlit even has a nifty collaborative filtering book recommender that is worth visiting the site for all by itself.)

And yet these sites are never mentioned in any of these articles. It's just the flashy newcomers like King and the big spenders like Fatbooks who get the publicity, while these high-quality smaller providers languish in obscurity. Feh.

If anybody can publish anything, then nobody will want to read it. Which is why the future lies with ebook concerns like Alexlit, Mind's Eye, and others. Forget FatBrain...I don't have the time or money to spend on someone else's vanity e-press.

(As a side note, Alexlit also offers a very nice collaborative-searching literature recommender engine, which I believe is the first of its kind on the 'net. Which is sort of an instant peer suggestion device.)

My two favorite e-book sites, Alexlit and Mind's Eye, both offer e-books for download in a variety of formats--text, HTML, Rocketbook, Palm(Aportis)Doc, and so forth. My third-favorite, Peanut Press, is closed-format, Palm-only, but my Visor is easy enough to read it from. I've read whole novels that way--including A Fire Upon the Deep, which is one of the longest novels you can find these days.

I'd recommend checking out Alexandria Digital Literature. They have a really cool service, where you rate books you've read, and it matches you to neighbors and recommends things you might like. And, unlike Amazon, it really works well. That's what's convinced me to read Bujold, and boy was it right!

They also sell electronic stories, mostly short stories, which is sort of interesting. You can get things in a format to put them on your palmpilot immediately, which is useful for trips and stuff. Is this the future of publishing? I don't know.

Definitely worth checking out for anyone who likes to read as a hobby, which most people reading this topic probably do.

Programming and book-writing are different. For one thing, no matter how the term Open Source is bandied about, you can't really have an "Open Source" book--someone doesn't know what he's talking about. First of all, a book is already source--it's the written code that our brains "compile" into understanding. This similarity is why we call programming formats "languages."

Second, as for being "open"--well, the only way a book really could be open is if it were being written with contributions from any yahoo who came down the pike. Which, I suppose, might be an interesting idea...come up with character sketches and an outline, farm out each chapter to a particular person, then have an editor try to put them all together into something that made sense. But for the normal everyday definition of a book...how can you have "open source" for something that has already been completed? If it's public-domain...then yes, anyone who cares to can make "updates," yes...but since Shakespeare, Clemens, Burroughs, and all those other ancient pubdom authors are dead, there's no "project gatekeeper" to apply those updates. (And if someone claimed to be, how many literary authorities do you think would accept that?)

I know this won't do any good, but please, people, try to think before you apply the term "open source"? It's a term with a very specific meaning, and by misapplying it and broadening its use into a general-purpose buzzword, you make it that much less useful.

Second, to the issue of literary quality. The original poster's point about the publishing industry is actually pretty much true, as is the objectivity of programming. Still, I think some people might not quite get it, and maybe this example will help clarify things a little.

What if 99.999% of all Slashdot posters were all high-posting-volume, low-content Anonymous Cowards (instead of only seeming that way sometimes :) and there were no moderation system? Would you even bother reading the discussion threads anymore? I don't just mean would you still read it as it is now, but would you still read it if it were a hundred times worse?

Well, that's the way it is in the literary world. With /., at least people have to have some modicum of technical knowhow to even want to read it, much less post to it. But to write, you only need to know how to write--so out in the greater world, any ten-year-old can crank out bad fiction (and looking at the fanfic newsgroups sometimes, it often looks as though most of them do). The vast majority of things that are written are things that nobody except their authors would want to read.

And so the whole vast system of publishing houses, editors, slushpiles, agents, and so on gradually evolved as a form of self-defense, as a system to provide some level of quality control to the consumer, so in return the consumer will have good books to read, rather than spending his time doing something marginally more useful and enjoyable, like clipping his toenails.

Looking at the current e-publishing sites out there, you won't find very many successful ones (at least, of those that are better-known) that have no submission standards. AlexLit requires it to have been published elsewhere already. Online Originals has a board of editors who go through submissions. And so it goes.

Self-publishing outfits have existed in the "real world" for a long time; they're called vanity presses. They charge you some ridiculous amount of money to publish your book--the name comes from the fact that it's presumably your vanity that makes you pony up the cash for it. With a more legitimate publisher, of course, they'll foot the bill themselves, and pay you royalties...but thence comes the problem of the midlist--shipping and storage expenses have gotten so high that publishers can't afford to publish anything less than a bestseller.

Which is where, hopefully, e-publishing could provide some breaks, letting more "good but not great" writers get published by eliminating storage and shipping costs...but all the same, there has to be a way to separate the wheat from the chaff...and I believe most people will think that anything someone has to pay to get published probably isn't worth reading.

(It also doesn't help matters, in my opinion, that fatbrain wants you to register before you can even see what they have available at the moment.)

This is actually kind of old news; a SalonMag report from months ago on e-books and the Palm Pilot mentions this site--which is how I found it in the first place.

The Good: The e-books are the full text of the books in question--including an 821K The Fire Upon the Deep--at $7, one of the better buys out there. The reader is free, has good features, even including genuine italics, and there's a Java-powered converter you can get to make Peanut-readable books of your own.

They've got some good books there, too. AFUTD, works by Dickson, Silverberg, and so on. I've already bought several books through them.

They're giving away some books for free, too--including the first book in the Remo Williams Destroyer series, and a short story by some guy I've never heard of.

As soon as you buy the books, you download them. Zap, they're on your hard drive--along with the reader, in case you lost it. No shipping delays...boom, instant sync to your Palm.

The Bad: The price on these books is exactly the same as standard retail price--which isn't so bad for if the book is in paperback, as are A Fire Upon the Deep, Dickson's Necromancer and The Tactics of Mistake, and so on. $2-7 for an e-book...well, it's a little more than you'd pay through Amazon (unless you take shipping into consideration), but that's offset by the convenience of being able to slip a full-sized, thick paperback book into your pocket.

But there are also hardcover editions for sale there...for $15, $20, and so forth. And this makes no sense at all, to me. When you pay $20 for a book, you're paying for the difference between that book and paperback. Better binding, bigger pages, and so forth. But there's no such difference between a "hardcover" e-book and a "paperback" e-book. E-books are e-books.

(I can guess, of course, that the reason they do this is that the publishers don't want the e-books to steal business from the physical hardcover books, hence they price them the same. But there just aren't that many e-book readers yet--so it wouldn't really affect their sales much one way or another, and it could lead to the wrong conclusion...the publishers seeing that the e-books aren't selling very well, and deciding that people don't want them.)

There's no Peanut Reader for any platform except the Palm...which means you either get a Palm or run a Palm emulator on your desktop--and you can't run a Palm emulator until you have a Palm ROM, which you get either by buying a Palm and using a ROM reader, or signing up for the development program and going through a bunch of rigamarole to get it.

And mostly, it seems, the only books available are out of print ones--ones that print publishers have, pretty much, already abandoned. Which means there's some good books there, but not a very good selection just yet. Which is a shame.

Other e-book sites:

There are some other sites selling "real e-books" too.

Mind's Eye Publishing has some works by well-known authors, including Silverberg, Greg Costikyan, and Spider Robinson, at reasonable prices.

Alexandria Digital Literature has some e-stories by known names for sale, too, and also features a nifty-neato collaborative filtering literature recommender that really deserves more attention than it's gotten.

Online Originals sells e-books that haven't ever been published anywhere else, for $7 US each. They also have a rather interesting deal where you can buy a share in the royalties of a particular e-book for $500. It's nice that they're optimistic, at any rate.

And we shouldn't forget the Palmtop Library, which has a whole bunch of free, public-domain e-books for immediate download.

E-book reading on the Palm is nice. It'll be nicer still when there's a better selection. I want Snow Crash on my Palm, dammit! And it would be deliciously ironic to be able to read Ben Bova's Cyberbooks, a delightful satire on the publishing industry and the repercussions that occur when someone invents an e-book, as an e-book, don't you think?