Read an Ebook Week / Nebula Reading

Guess what! This is Read an E-book Week! Visit the Ebookweek website and check out all the stores, publishers, and authors who are offering deals and freebies of ebooks in celebration of the growing popularity of ebooks. (Yes, you'll see me in the list, along with Cory Doctorow and Steve Jordan and an array of writers from a variety of genres.) If you haven't given ebooks a try yet, this is the perfect time to download some books for free and give it a try. And here's a shoutout to Rita Toews, who put the whole thing together.

This is also the month in which members of SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) are reading the works on the final ballot for the Nebula Awards, the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult SF, and the Bradbury Award for outstanding screen-writing. Congratulations to all the finalists! I'm hoping to attend the awards ceremony this year, as it's going to be held near the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, and the attendees will have a grand time visiting the space complex and—very long shot—maybe even seeing a shuttle launch.

Here's the connection to ebooks: Many of the authors have made their works available to SFWA members for download, so that there'll be a fighting chance for people to actually read the nominated pieces before the voting deadline. I've grabbed all that are available and put them on my Sony Reader, so that I will have a fighting chance of reading them. The free software Calibre even made it easy for me—tagging each piece with the appropriate designation (Nebula 2009 Novella, for example) so that I can see them neatly organized on my reader. This is compared to years past, when I compiled a huge stack of magazines and printouts and books borrowed from the library, and struggled mostly without success to get through them. I still may not get through them, but the odds are a lot better! Read on!