Literacy Awareness and Shameless Self-Promotion

For those of you who don’t know, today is the first day of Read an E-Book Week. Apparently, electronic books are the wave of the future, and those in the business of publishing them want you to jump on the bandwagon. For more information, you can check out this promotional website.

Personally, I think e-books are great. They will, of course, never replace the wonderful feeling of a physical book made of the leftovers of dead trees, but curling up with my iPod Touch and swiping across the screen to turn a page isn’t really much different, to be honest. Besides which, I currently have a digital library of over 270 titles in my Stanza Reader app, and still have room for many more. Think about it. I carry with me more books than many people own. When I’m bored or in the mood for literary stimulation, I can browse my digital library and I’m almost guaranteed to find something I want to read. The most wonderful thing about e-books, for me, though, is that a great many of them are free.

Now, these aren’t modern bestsellers, mind you. Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, and others that I consider favorites have books in digital format, and they will more than likely cost you just as much as a hardcover edition–or, at least, a paperback.* But, thanks to the wonderful people at Project Gutenberg, tens of thousands of public domain and Creative Commons-licensed books are available for no cost whatsoever! Often, these are bare-bones products without fancy formatting, but the full text is there to read. I’ve downloaded dozens of books from them so far, and will likely continue to do so. For me, it’s a way to sample the classics or obscure items I’d probably never even see in a store. It’s a way to get a copy of something that I might like enough to read once or twice but not enough to spend money on, because I’ve only got so much shelf space to go around. It’s even a way to carry around a copy of a book I love and already have on the shelf at home, because I might wanna peruse its pages while away.

Yes, indeedy, even for a hardcore bibliophile like me, e-books are the way to go. But, as LeVar Burton used to say, you don’t have to take my word for it. Check out the promotional website, ebookweek.com, at the link above, and see for yourself what you think.

Now that all that’s been said, I guess I should tell you in the interests of full disclosure, that I actually offer most of my works in electronic format. Look to the right of your screen. See? You can read my works here. Some you can download in PDF format. The great thing, as I mentioned a couple posts ago, is that most of these works are also downloadable in a variety of formats at the website of the e-book publisher Smashwords. And this week only, they’re all free. Most of them are free all the time, but for Read an E-Book Week, they all are. So I suggest you browse right over to my Smashwords profile and take advantage of this amazing limited-time offer. You have my personal guarantee that you’ll enjoy what you read, or your money back. (This money-back guarantee is limited to those copies downloaded during Read an E-Book Week only.) And once you’ve enjoyed my works, or even before, then you can tell your friends and friends-of-friends, and acquaintances, and co-workers, and everyone who reads your blog and everyone who follows you on Twitter what an amazing writer I am and how they should download my stuff, and how they should continue to spread the word even after this promotional week is over so that others want to download my stuff too but will have to pay for it and I will become filthy rich and ultra-famous, amen.

Now, get out there and read (an e-book). It’s good for you.

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*Note: This is not a practice with which I agree. For that price, I’d still rather have a physical object to hold. I mean, I know it takes money to pay someone to format the books to look pretty on the screen, but there are no manufacturing costs, no shipping costs, etc. Why not charge a little less for the e-book, eh?