Category Archives: net tools

Bought book reviews: LibraryThing cracks down to nip the problem in the bud

LibraryThing is cracking down on sleazes who charge authors to generate five-star reviews. This isn’t a major problem at LibraryThing now. But the site is wisely taking precautions. The key rule is, "Reviewers must not be paid for their reviews, except in free books and similar non-monetary perks." Exactly. Do we really want LT to [...] Continue reading

Posted in The Solomon Scandals, Uncategorized, book publishing, books, librarything, net tools | Leave a comment

Tweet, tweet! More Twitter tips—this time from Kat Meyer

How to use Twitter for books marketing—or, to be more precise, relationship building? We passed on some tips earlier, and now Kat Meyer, the star of the TeleRead post, shares additional thoughts. For example, how do you pick people whose posts you want to follow?
Related: Mari Smith’s hashtag tips, to which Kat points. This [...] Continue reading

Posted in Twitter, Uncategorized, book publishing, books, net tools, netbook | Leave a comment

Twitter as a book promoter and career-builder

Check out our long post on the above if you haven’t seen it already.
Exhibit One is Kat Meyer, the Q&A whiz and TeleBlog regular, who is a professional book marketer. Kat has more than 1,500 followers on Twitter, not a bad start for someone building a new business.
Kat’s latest interview, by the way, is [...] Continue reading

Posted in BookGlutton, Kat Meyer, Uncategorized, e-book, e-book pricing, e-book technology, e-books, ebook, ebook publishing, ebooks, net tools | Leave a comment

How to use Twitter to promote your e-book or paper book—and build professional and personal relationships, perhaps the biggest benefit

TeleRead’s Twitter Champ just might be Kat Meyer, in Tucson, Arizona, who’s done those incisive Q&A’s with Smashwords’ Mark Coker, Stanza’s Neelan Choksi and others.
Kat has pumped out some 5,000 Twitter updates. She subscribes to messages from more than 1,000 fellow users and has attracted more than 1,500 "followers." I also track Tim O’Reilly, [...] Continue reading

Posted in Amazon Kindle, BookGlutton, E-books and all that, EPub, Kat Meyer, Twitter, Uncategorized, amazon, e-book, e-books, e-books and other digipubs, ebook publishing, ebooks, iPhone and iPod Touch, iPod Touch, ipod, net tools, smashwords | Leave a comment

E-mail us your comments if they don’t show up: Anti-spam Dobes at work

In their zeal, our anti-spam Dobermanns sometimes gobble up valuable comments from TeleRead community members, so please e-mail us yours if they don’t show up. Often we can retrieve ‘em from the Dobes’ stomachs.
Sometimes the server may just burp.That’s what apparently happened today, and several legit comments might have gotten lost.
These problems are [...] Continue reading

Posted in TeleRead, Uncategorized, net tools | Leave a comment

In defense of readers

When I was browsing InstaPaper’s “Give me something to read” site, I came across this article. Although it is mostly about usability in web design, it touches on e-books and other reading issues in its discussion of how and why web designers should optimize their sites to make readers more comfortable.
I couldn’t help but [...] Continue reading

Posted in Chris Meadows, Uncategorized, e-book ergonomics, iPhone and iPod Touch, net tools, typography | 43 Comments

Ficlets is dead; long live Ficly

The day I mentioned in my “requiem” has finally come: any visitor to ficlets.com will be redirected to the blog announcement of its closure. However, all is not lost.
Kevin Lawver, the original creator of Ficlets, has gotten his “ficlets memorial” up and running—all stories and comments from the ficlets.com site are preserved there in [...] Continue reading

Posted in Chris Meadows, Uncategorized, net tools | Leave a comment

Requiem for Ficlets.com

In March, 2007, I wrote a post about an interesting new “Web 2.0” fiction site: Ficlets.com, in which users wrote stories singly or cooperatively in 1024-byte chunks. It seemed promising, especially given that writer/web celebrities like John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton were participating. It won web awards at SXSW. People liked it.
But eventually those [...] Continue reading

Posted in Chris Meadows, Uncategorized, e-books and other digipubs, net tools | Leave a comment

KindleFeeder: RSS manager and feeder

I’m totally hooked on KindleFeeder, free new service. KindleFeeder automatically pushes RSS feeds wirelessly to your Kindle. That sounds a lot like Feedbooks, right? It is, but the word "automatically" is the key differentiating factor.
Feedbooks offers a service that lets you manage and read RSS feeds on your Kindle as well, but updating them is [...] Continue reading

Posted in Amazon Kindle, Joe Wikert, Uncategorized, amazon, kindle, net tools | Leave a comment

Reviewing THE CRYSTAL STOPPER—a Public Domain Reprints book

In my post about the Espresso book machine, I mentioned a non-profit organization called Public Domain Reprints and promised to review the book I had ordered as soon as it arrived.
As it happens, I actually have not read The Crystal Stopper in quite a while, so the review will not focus on the story [...] Continue reading

Posted in Chris Meadows, Google, Internet Archive, P-books, POD, Print on demand, Project Gutenberg, Uncategorized, book publishing, books, net tools, public domain, typography, web books | Leave a comment