This enjoyable collection of short stories that the author refers to as “dark fantasy tales” which I have just read at the author’s request, turned out to be very enjoyable. Generally I am not fond of the Gothic genre, vampires and similar do not really engage my interest to be honest, so I approached this collection with some doubts. In the event I was very pleasantly surprised by the stories though.

The stories in this ebook cover the entire range of this genre, we have vampires, ghosts galore, mysterious creatures going bump in the night, murders, elves who create mayhem in a garden and so on. But all written with a strangely gentle approach, so whilst I read a number of these tales at night, I wasn’t frightened by them, or felt the need to check under my bed for long legged beasties or any such things. Somehow they were not scary.

At Smashwords it is described as follows:
An unsolved murder on a seductive resort island with brooding secrets….a mechanical movie prop intended to help create a dream on film, but instead becomes part of a nightmare for those involved….an odd alliance between a priest and a vampire….a modern day meeting with the Phantom of the Opera….tales of ghosts and monsters and otherworldly encounters. This collection of stories by science fiction, fantasy and mystery author Gary Alan Ruse explores fantasy realms and the dark side of human…and non-human…nature with thrills and chills, and in some cases a touch of humor.

Read full story »

I received an email this morning from the Sony Ebook Store, as I do regularly as the proud and happy owner of a Sony ereader, with the promising subject line of: “Stock up with eBooks for $1.99 & under at Reader Store” So, full of interest I clicked on the link which stated “see them all” and was taken to their online ebook store.

And sure enough, there were a couple of ebooks offered for prices ranging from $0.99 to $1.99, with a button which urged me to see “the rest”. So I clicked on that button full of anticipation of what wonders of literature they would be offering me for such attractive prices.

This threw up a list of some 1664 ebooks for me to want to buy and read. The only problem was that of the first 50 ebooks that were offered to me (in the Romance section for some reason), only a couple cost less than $2.99. I hunted around in the ebook store trying to find the promised collection of ebooks for $1.99 and less.

Read full story »

If you have an ereader, you will know that in spite of all the fuss and shouting, the great bulk of ebooks cost around $1 to $9 each, even ones written by well established and famous Airport Book authors (the Tom Clanceys of this world I mean by this).

However, regardless of what model of ereader you happen to have, be it a Kindle, a Sony, a Nook or some completely unknown Chinese back street model, you have access to literally millions of free ebooks too if you want.

Obviously all those out of copyright ebooks that you can get at the two Gutenberg sites and similar are fine, but for obvious reasons they are all elderly to downright ancient ebooks, and whilst 19^th century writing may be your preferred reading, this is not the case for most readers I suspect. Thus it is useful to know that you can find an enormous range of contemporary ebooks for free on the net.

I don’t mean illegal download sites:

I am not talking about illegal downloads from Torrents, or any other form of illegal ebooks here, but ebooks that are being offered for a variety of perfectly good reasons by their authors for us to download and read.

Mostly this is to encourage us to buy the follow-up ebooks from these authors, or the next 15 volumes of a series, or simply to get their ebooks read by people, in the hope that they can then start to charge for their work once they have established a readership base. Sort of like Loss leaders in Supermarkets I suppose.

Read full story »

I have just finished reading Is For Good Men To Do Nothing; Chris Verrill’s account of his attempt to set up a training school for Afghan refugee women in Pakistan to teach them useful skills so that they can return to Afghanistan able to earn a living and thus achieve a degree of economic and social independence.

Declaration of interest:

Chris is a good friend of mine as we worked together whilst I was in Beijing on his current project, The Beijing Playhouse, an English language Community Theatre (what we Brits call an Amateur Dramatic Society). I helped out on a variety of technical levels as stage lighting and sound was my work while I was in Beijing, and we keep in touch now that I have moved to the Philippines.

Chris never gives up!

One thing I learned about Chris whilst in Beijing was that he never gives up, he is a real fighter for anything he believes in, and this rather wonderful book reflects this quality in him remarkably well.

The attack on the twin towers did it:

On the morning of 11^th September 2001 of horrid memory, he was by chance with some of his Rotary Club friends at a Rotary meeting when the news of the attacks began to filter through, and like all of us he was brought up sharp by the events as they unfolded.

For Chris, this event made him determined to do something to change the culture of hate and incomprehension between the USA and the Muslim world, in his case a determination to help bring educational chances and economic security to at least some of the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Economic security and education are the answer:

Read full story »

Two very energetic Indie authors – Lizzie Ford and Julia Crane – have decided to add their own online ebook stores to their websites in order to allow potential readers who are out of the range of Amazon and other mainstream ebook sellers to buy their ebooks directly from them.

Lizzie Ford wrote a post for my blog as a guest writer some time ago (link below) in which she described her meticulous planning as an author, so faithful readers of my blog already know about her amazingly systematic approach to writing and getting ebooks to readers.  In my view she is a sort of mini Jeff Bezos in some ways.

Read full story »

The New Zealand company Kiwa Media have come up with a whole range of what appear to be excellent ebook Apps for kids who are lucky enough to have access to an iPad – Which appears to be a surprisingly large group of kids I gather.   Not sure I would leave such an expensive gadget in the hands of a 4 to 6 year old, but others have different ideas obviously.

Anyhow, that aside, what we have here are a series of rather splendid highly interactive ebook Apps aimed at the age group 4 to 6, with all the interactive aspects one would expect now in such applications.  And I have to say that from those I have looked at, they have done a very good job with these ebooks, they are funny, well illustrated, the narrator’s voices are good and they work well too.

What is an ebook app?

Read full story »