Monday April 19, 2010
The iBookstore marks up my free e-book to $9.99
Oh, the irony. Publishers fled to Apple because Amazon insisted on selling e-books for $9.99, but now I have the opposite complaint. The iBookstore is charging $9.99 for my 2006 e-book Single, when what I wanted to do was give it away for free.
While I’ve been sampling various DIY e-book platforms for years (you can read my findings here and here), I’ve been cool about rushing to get my work into Amazon or Barnes & Noble. It didn’t seem worth the time, and Feedbooks was serving its purpose by allowing people who were already on my site—for whatever reason—to read my books. I had one book in the Smashwords catalog—just as a test of the service—and I hadn’t bothered to trick it out for the “premium catalog.” Then the iPad came along. It seemed like malpractice to not go the extra mile to at least see what the Smashwords/iBookstore publishing experience was like. So I made my cover rectangular—against my better aesthetic judgment—and waited. And waited. The iPad was released on April 3. Single shipped from Smashwords (per Smashwords) on April 6. The book appeared over the weekend, so let’s say April 17. And the price listed for this free e-book? $9.99. Do not buy it. Download it for free from Feedbooks—square cover intact—and import it into iTunes as ePub. I’ll report back when (and if) this price thing gets straightened out.
Posted by jim at 08:07 AM || Comments
Tuesday April 06, 2010
Is this the first ever literary reading delivered from an iPad?
Brian seems to think so, and who am I to argue? Last night’s event at McNally Jackson was lots of fun. (Thanks to Dustin for being a great host.) I read from the “Why They Cried” series I did for Significant Objects, and Brian played some brilliant audio recordings of selected stories from his new collection Ronald Reagan, My Father. “Johnny”—a script cobbled together out of actual movie lines containing the name “Johnny”—is one of the funniest things I’ve heard in a long time. The performance is incredible. Then we talked publishing with the always engaging Richard Nash. At some point, Bob Odenkirk entered the store, but I missed this completely.
Thanks to everyone who came out and thanks to Brian for inviting me. His book tour continues tonight at Quimby’s in Chicago, where Brian will chat with CellStories.net founder Dan Sinker. If you’re in Chicago, you should go.
