Good news, bad news

First the bad news. I am no longer lusting after the new Kindle Paperwhite as I discovered that for some reason Amazon left out the text-to-speech function. Some folks speculate this is to try to make Kindle owners buy from Audible, but I suspect it's more likely the combination of no e-ink competitors offering that feature, and not that many Kindle owners using it. But I like to use the read-aloud function for proofing manuscripts, so I'm annoyed! I have to decide if I can really justify having a Kindle for reading and another Kindle just for proofing. Sigh.

The good news is The Sixth Discipline is now free on Blio! They still don't have either Where Magic Rules or Shades of Empire for sale, but at least this one is now free on that site, too.  That just leaves Sony and Kobo who have not made it free.

No news is not good news

I just checked Sony, Kobo, and Blio ebookstores, and The Sixth Discipline is still not free on any of them. I can find plenty of free Smashwords book in the Sony store, so I think they are just slow to make the change. The Kobo store doesn't seem to have any Smashwords books below 99¢, so I think they simply don't support price matching to $0.00. Blio doesn't have a good way to search or sort for free Smashwords books, and they are very new, so I have no clue what their policy is.

I guess time will tell.

There is no grass growing under Mark Coker's feet!

Mark Coker is the founder and head of Smashwords. He recently cut a deal with Baker & Taylor to provide Smashwords content to them for distribution to libraries and for the Blio platform, and now I see that another vendor has appear in the Distribution Channel Manager screen:  Page Foundry. It doesn't look like my books have shipped yet, but unless I opt out, they will.

I never heard of Page Foundry, but more places to sell books has to be a good thing!

Addendeum: Smashwords has posted more info about this new (Android) platform on their blog.

Housekeeping

My first sales from Blio (online store with ebooks distributed by Baker & Taylor) came in! That means Smashwords now has another retail ebook outlet up and running.  For some reason, No Safe Haven is still not available in that store, even though The Sixth Discipline and Tribes are both for sale. I have not had any luck getting Smashwords to remedy that, either. I will have to try removing the book from the distribution list and then requesting it to ship again.

I spent the morning updating the Books tab on this site (click the tab above to see) and my Shelfari shelf (see the bottom of the home page).  Having thus taken care of some housekeeping chores, I am now going to reward myself with some reading time.