2,000,000 free electronic books

Project Gutenberg has been around for a while. The World eBook Fair sounds amazing; we had trouble loading their page, though. The article comes from the Booksellers Association of the UK.

Project Gutenberg has joined forces with The World Public Library and Digital Pulp Publishing, Internet Archive, Baen to promote The Forth World eBook Fair. Two years ago The First World eBook Fairs introduced 1/3 million books, which became a million and a quarter last year and this year tops two million. They expect to have 2 1/2 million by July 4. More...

Daily Beast Book Club

The Daily Beast has announced a book club, to feature books that they have found particularly exciting. We love the idea of anybody getting behind a book or two.

TDB: It seems like every month, among the hundreds of books we receive, there’s one in particular that takes us away, turns us nocturnal, and transforms us into one-track conversationalists who can’t talk about anything but that book. In this space, The Daily Beast will profile such books. More...

Rare books

A fine article from the blog Bookride on collecting, and paying for, rare books, via Boing Boing.

Bookride: The first thing to remember is that most books are of low value or no value. Some books are worth less than nothing. More...

Amazon versus the States

The old saw is that nobody can avoid death or taxes, but there are some exceptions, at least to the taxes part of it. Amazon sells its books sales-tax-free in most states, primarily because they don't have any bricks-and-mortar presence in those states. The idea is that state taxes go to the support structures of the state (roads, police, etc.) and if a company doesn't use those services, why should they pay for them? The states, of course, take a different position entirely. You can draw your own conclusions: Forbes provides the background.

Forbes: Amazon's moves are the latest in a fight involving states trying to get out-of-state companies that perform commerce largely online with their residents but have little or no physical presence in the state to collect taxes. Governments could generate $3 billion in new revenues if Web retailers had to collect taxes on all sales to consumers, according to Forrester Research. More...

Introducing a new literary magazine

The Washington Post has alerted us to a new magazine, available in a variety of formats. We love the idea of someone in the writing game starting a new business rather than, as more and more seems to be the case, going out of business.

WP: Amid all the dismal reports about the death of fiction, here's a refreshingly bold act of optimism: a new bimonthly magazine called Electric Literature. And it's not just MFA kids self-publishing their diatribes against Mom and Dad. The first issue sports stories by such heavyweights as Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham and National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard. More...

Read Infinite Jest this summer

I admit it. I have a copy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on my shelf at home, and I fully plan to read it someday. I like reading big books (and small books too; I work here, after all). Apparently a bunch of people are tackling it this summer. Slate offers an audio discussion of the book here.

Amazon's weekly review roundup

Amazon's collection of interesting newspaper book reviews is always worth a look. They call it Old Media Monday.