A Holiday Prize for John Norman Fans

John Norman's Gorean Saga is far and away E-Reads' most successful series. Originally comprising 25 titles, Norman added a 26th volume, Witness of Gor (pictured right),  in 2001 to satisfy decades of speculation by loyal fans that there might be another work germinating in the author's brain.

Since then, those fans have been back in the rumor mill wondering if there's going to be 27th volume. The answer? There certainly is, and I'm looking at the text as we speak. It's my pleasure to announce the forthcoming publication of Prize of Gor. I can't reveal the story yet, but take my word for it - it's well worth the wait.

We're rushing it into print in time for the holidays. Watch this space for more news!

- Richard Curtis

Good News for Jennifer Blake Fans

E-Reads has just reissued five novels by Jennifer Blake, one of America's most beloved romance writers. This brings the total of her books in our program to 24.

The new additions are available as downloads and will soon be released as paperbacks as well:

Love and Smoke
Joy and Anger
Wildest Dreams
Midnight Waltz
Louisiana Dawn

Go to Jennifer's E-Reads page on for a complete listing of her backlist titles. And for a romantic trip, click on her website.

RC

Watching Books

The blessings of submitting books by email are so obvious that it’s hard to imagine a downside. But indeed there are drawbacks and unintended side effects of this technological shift, and we need to acknowledge them. There is a vast difference between reading text printed on paper and text displayed on a screen. Thanks to television, the Internet, video games and computers, we have come to expect color, interactivity, instant gratification and a complete immersion of the senses from our screens.

Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed - even, God help us, bored - when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? Are we trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium?

For a discussion of reading books on screen, click here.

Kindle 2 Rumors Persist, Now With Pictures

A few weeks ago, Amazon was telling the rumor mills to stop buzzing about the next generation of Kindle and that if a Kindle 2.0 was coming at all it wouldn't be until next year. But now that Sony has announced their new PRS-700 Reader and it's getting all sorts of press, Lo! What should appear the very same weekend? Leaked spy shots of the next Kindle. Coincidence? Nah.

Granted, these are the sneaky tactics you expect in an election year, when it seems everyone is doing their best to play a game of one-up-manship. Presidents, banks, and reality TV contestants are all queuing up to see who can fail the most spectacularly in their efforts to win the hearts of all the Joe Sixpacks and hockey moms. However, we at E-Reads don't want to see either the Kindle or Sony Reader products fail. We love them both. They both deserve the limelight.

But the possibly fake/likely real Kindle 2.0 spy shots by "Boy Genius Report" make me think the device isn't yet up to par with the latest Sony Reader, and I'm sure Amazon isn't entirely pleased with seeing these pictures getting blogged at heavily trafficked Gizmodo.com. The revised Kindle in the spy shots has cleaner lines, but it looks more like a Star Trek medical tablet than ever before, and I assume all those buttons mean that it won't be a touch screen, like the new Sony. But it is reported to be sturdier and recharge via USB cable. Maybe Amazon is still playing catch-up, maybe they're simply refining a low cost alternative to the Sony Reader. Who knows what's really going on. All I know is that when your product has rumors and buzz, it's going to take on a life of its own in the public's mind. And anything that puts ebooks in the public's mind is good by us.

- Michael

A 21st Century Man Accidentally Launched in the 20th

His name was Fereidoun M. Esfandiary but he changed it to FM 2030. Born in Persia, a man of dark and intense good looks, he lived and studied in London, New York, Berkeley, Lebanon, Miami, Jerusalem, Damascus, Los Angeles and a dozen other venues. But no city could contain him for long, and it is arguable that Planet Earth couldn't, either: his mind was simply too large. His philosophical explorations took him to places that even science fiction writers hesitated to venture, espousing Nostradamus-like predictions that have come to pass with haunting prescience.

His views and forecasts were both provocative and visionary and uncannily right on the mark. At the time he made his forecasts both in his books and in the media they were controversial and viewed as impossible. Now, we take many of them for granted. Just an example of some of his forecasts: in the 1970's and 1980's as everyone was concerned with the weapons race and security, FM's projections showed the reasons for the de-acceleration of the arms race; as early as the 1970's he anticipated the breakdown of Communism; while the Club de Rome and others made dire predictions, worrying about and raising alarms regarding scarcity of energy, resources, food and water, FM in an article published in The New York Times wrote about the Age of Abundance; in the early 1970's he carried out and anticipated our current dress down mode; his book Telespheres anticipated telemedicine, teleducation, telebanking, etc.; as early as 1974 he was lecturing and writing articles about physical longevity and the possibility of physical immortality.

He was worldly, unworldly and otherworldly all at the same time. Born in 1930, at age 18 he was a member of the Iranian Olympic team. In time he served on a United Nations council formed to address the Palestinian question. In the 1960's he began producing a unique body of literary work ranging from speculative novels to futurist manifestos to treatises about self-realization. His name-change was motivated by scorn for outmoded tribal naming conventions. He also believed he would live to celebrate his 100th birthday in 2030, a dream that was not to be realized owing to a fatal cancer.

E-Reads has begun to reissue FM's work in e-book and trade paperback format. His comic masterpiece Identity Card is a tragedy clothed in wit. In an attempt to flee his underdeveloped, bureaucratic country, a Middle Easterner searches for every possible way to obtain an identity card that will allow him to leave Iran, but his quest for freedom is soon mired in ceremonious formalities that reveal the fatuousness of modern civilization.

Another novel, Day of Sacrifice, was selected by the New York Herald Tribune as one of the best novels of 1959. It has been translated into eleven languages and is on the required reading list of the U.S. State Department. London's Punch described it as, "A splendid piece of work....What is so impressive about the book is the remarkable assurance with which it is written, the remarkable professional and philosophical assurance of say, Albert Camus, in "The Stranger," a book which it somewhat resembles....I find it a most distinguished novel on a most important theme..."

For more about FM 2030 read Wikipedia's profile.

- Richard Curtis

Sony Set to Launch Generation-3 Reader

An unforeseen application of Sony's E-Reader is as an editorial tool. To save printing costs and spare editors spine-strain as they shlepped five or ten pounds of manuscipts in their backpacks, book publishers recently began issuing Sonys to editors. They now simply upload book submissions and read them that way. The problem is, they haven't been able to highlight text, write notes, and otherwise do the thing that editors do best.

The next version of the Reader, to be released for the holidays, addresses those issues and more, though we're still far from full editorial markup capabilities.

For civilians who just like to annotate books, the new version of the Reader offers a touch screen, popup virtual keyboard, and (attention sleeping spouses!) built-in LED reading light. You can also turn pages by brushing the screen with your finger. Expanded memory provides capacity of about 350 books, far more with an optional memory stick.

Want wireless access? Go buy a Kindle; the Sony has forsaken it, at least for this latest round of improvements. And has the price come down? No, it's gone up. To $400, in the hope that consumers will like the tradeoff for the new features.

Mac lovers will have to go on holding their breath. Sony Gen-3 is still PC.

For a full description, click here.

- Richard Curtis

Music Hath Charms to Destroy Humanity

A virus created for biological warfare is overtaking humanity, threatening the very fabric of society as its victims are transported, by the emotional power of music, to a seductive dream world. Francis Lanier is immune to the virus and able to travel through its dream world in order to rescue others. Tintagle, Paul Cook's auspicous debut novel, follows Lanier through a series of ever more treacherous adventures as he becomes embroiled in the politics surrounding the virus and its cure.

Tintagle was hailed by Publishers Weekly as "an imaginative thriller," and the New York Daily News declared, “It ends with a marvelous surprise.” E-Reads also carries Cook's The Alejandra Variations.

- Richard Curtis

Were We Our Brother's Keepers? Are We Yet?

The period between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is a time of deep reflection and acute introspection. It is also a time for remembrance of the history of the Jewish people, a history that mingles glorious triumphs and bitter humiliation and loss. Jews worldwide ask themselves if they have done all they can to repair the world and, because the only honest answer to that question is No, resolve to try harder in the year to come.

It is therefore appropriate that during these "Days of Awe" we offer Were We Our Brothers' Keepers? The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938-1944 by Haskell Lookstein, an important work that explores in depth the American Jewish response to the Holocaust as it occurred. By examining contemporary Jewish press accounts of such events as Kristallnacht, the refusal to allow the refugee ship St. Louis to land in America, the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, and the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, Haskel Lookstein provides us with an important perspective on the way in which events are reported on, perceived and interpreted in their own time.

Rabbi Lookstein has been deeply involved in issues of concern to the Jewish community. He was Chairman of the Greater New York Coalition for Soviet Jews, President of the New York Board of Rabbis, President of the Synagogue Council of America, Chairman of the Rabbinic Cabinet of National UJA, and member of the Board of the Joint Distribution Committee. His works have appeared in numerous publications in the US and Israel.

- Richard Curtis

Pub Date

Few events in the life of a book are as thoroughly invested with magic and mystery as its publication date. Although the season, month, and day of publication are, as often as not, selected merely to satisfy the expediencies of a publisher's schedule, many authors and even some publishers assign kabbalistic value to pub dates, and a great deal of myth and nonsense has come to surround the process. One hears such platitudes as, "January is a lousy month to bring out a book," or, "Nobody buys books in August," or "Can you believe they released my book on Friday the thirteenth?"

What's true and what's nonsense? Click here for a discussion of publication dates.

A Must-Have Book for Ballet Fans

In On Wings of Joy, Trudy Garfunkel's engaging history of dance, readers are introduced to the major performers, choreographers, and composers who influenced the development of ballet. Beginning with the birth of the art in the sixteenth-century French court of Catherine d' Medici, this informative text traces ballet as it evolved in Europe and Russia and subsequently in England and then America. Included are details about the creation of such classics as Giselle, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and Serenade, as well as the contributions of such prominent figures as Pavlova, Nijinsky, Balanchine, and Ashton. Fascinating facts include inside looks at contemporary ballet companies, how toe shoes are made, and what a professional dancer's day is like. All in all, a delightful, enjoyable and informative historical overview that will delight anyone who enjoys the art of dance.

"A lucid and interesting history that reads like a novel."
--Kirkus Reviews

"A truly fascinating look at ballet. The author has done an excellent job of weaving historical events into her discussion if dancers and their art...A very readable, enjoyable book."
--Booklist

"A most engaging and informative volume."
--WQXR Radio

"It is wonderful to finally have a complete and comprehensive history of dance that is accessible to young people and equally valuable for parents, experienced dance goers, and other adults. How important to have this, an easily readable exposure to dance, to help counterbalance the disappearance of arts education in our public schools."
--Edward Villella, Artistic Director, Miami City Ballet

"A fascinating book."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

"A lively history."
--Dance Magazine

"Recommended. Easy-to-read and informative."
--Attitudes and Arabesques

"A wonderful accomplishment that strikes that perfect balance: it is great if you know nothing about ballet and it is terrific fun even if you know a great deal. My copy is going up on my desk shelf with Denby and CHOREOGRAPHY by Balanchine, so it will be one of those books to which I always turn."
--Carol Landers, Director of Research, New York City Ballet

"Covers an enormous amount of material in a readable and comprehensive manner without missing a beat."
--School Library Journal

"Parents will find this book to be excellent; this nonfiction story of ballet can easily cross over to appeal to fiction readers and ballet enthusiasts of all ages."
--Children's Bookwatch

Trudy Garfunkel, is the author of three books on dance: "Letter to the World: The Life and Dances of Martha Graham", "Start Exploring Ballet", and "On Wings of Joy: The Story of Ballet from the 16th Century to Today"; and a consumer's guide with recipes, "The Kosher Companion". Her essay on Martha Graham appears in "The Oxford Companion to United States History". A public relations, marketing and editorial consultant, she has worked with many authors, artists, photographers, publishing companies, nonprofit and arts organizations, museums, and dance companies.

- Richard Curtis