Issue date: May 7, 2000

Last week's Best of the Web
My web: Ha Jin

Best of the Web

Get your book published -- electronically

Stephen King's hit e-book has been downloaded more than 400,000 times. It can be read on a computer, a personal organizer or an e-book reader like the one shown.

So, you plan to be the next Stephen King, publishing a book online and riding it to riches? Noted authors and author wanna-bes alike can publish their masterworks electronically. With just a computer and a modem, you can start publishing -- and reading -- e-books.

As with so many young technologies, though, there's no single kind of e-book. Some, such as King's novella, Riding the Bullet, come designed for an e-book reader, the $200 to $300 device you can carry around and load up with digital books. Still others are designed for handheld devices such as the Palm organizer.

Or there's a simple software solution. Consider Mighty-Words (mightywords.com). The site has hundreds of works available for purchase, starting at $2 each, on topics ranging from celebrity bios to cooking. They're longer than a magazine article, shorter than a book. After a credit-card purchase, the site transmits material to your computer in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). You'll need the Acrobat reader software, available for free download from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html. For a storage charge of $1 per book per month, any author can upload works to the site, set a price (the author's choice) and receive half the royalties on any sales.

Online Originals (www.onlineoriginals.com), a respected British online-only publisher, accepts full-length books for review and possible publication. Some, in what the site calls the "Works" category, are edited, while "OO Direct" publications are not. Writers and the site split royalties. Books can be read on a computer screen or a Palm organizer.

Other helpful resources:

EBookNet (www.ebooknet.com) is full of articles about e-book publishing and reading technology.
To read a book on your computer, you may need a piece of software. The Glassbook Reader is free at glassbook.com.
If you have an e-book reader, big online bookstores such as amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com can help.
SoftBook Press (softbook.com), maker of the SoftBook Reader, sells books, magazines and newspapers to keep you reading.

-- Richard Folkers

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My Web: Ha Jin

Movers, shakers and their bookmarks Speaking of books, here are the favorite sites of Ha Jin, 44, who'll accept this year's PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his novel Waiting next Saturday in Washington, D.C. The Chinese-born writing professor at Atlanta's Emory University made literary history by winning both that prestigious prize and this year's National Book Award.

www.amazon.com Sure, it's a no-brainer for an author to pick an online bookstore, but Jin especially likes Amazon, because it's so "big and inclusive." His latest purchase: a New American Standard concordance of the Bible.
www.bookoo.com It's a Chinese-language online bookstore with "many literary articles."
www.washingtonpost.com The online version of the newspaper from the nation's capital has "lots of good articles on politics." -- R.F.