The website Thoughts by Ted generated 244 passionate comments over the weekend by asking a simple question: is it wrong to read a pirated digital copy of an out-of-print book? This informal survey of readers offered a glimpse into the murky world of illegally-produced digital books.

The blogger had enjoyed one book by an unnamed author, but couldn't locate a digital copy of her other works. Many readers encouraged him to read the illegal copy instead of purchasing her out-of-print books.

What's your advice to this frustrated reader? Just like Napster at the turn of the century, publishers have to think about this kind of reader before it's too late:

"I really dislike having to haul dead-tree versions of my favorite novels around; they take up far too much weight and space in my carry-on luggage. Unfortunately, these out-of-print novels were published by a Neanderthal Publishing company who hasn't made any of the books available in ebook format, DRM'ed or no. Grumpy, I searched on Internet, and found all three novels were easily available for free download -- in a pirated form, of course."

Earlier today, the NY Times contemplated book-buying freezes at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and company-wide bonuses at Hachette--diagnosing the "split personality" that has spooked writers around the country.

In these strange times, one writer used Amazon Kindle to re-configure his career. A few months back, horror novelist Aaron Ross Powell uploaded his Mormon-influenced zombie story, The Hole, to Amazon Kindle. In a recent essay, he explained that step-by-step process for anybody interested in adding content to Amazon's Kindle.

His post joins today's news about the upcoming release of the Kindle 2. From uploading tips to formatting to pricing ideas, the essay is a good place for aspiring digital book authors and editors to look for ideas:

"I set the price at $3.49. Amazon knocked twenty percent off to $2.79. That put the book firmly in the impulse buy category. The novel has sold relatively steadily since publication, with a slight bump in October (people like to buy horror stories around Halloween, oddly enough)."

The first photos of the next generation of Amazon's Kindle digital reader were confirmed yesterday--including that October photo from Boy Genius Report.

According to that site, Kindle 2 will be charged with a USB cable, rather than the current generation's special charger. Experts speculate that the new machines will be available "early next quarter," along with a student version which will arrive next year as well. (Via.)

In related Kindle news, the Nieman Journalism Lab reports that the NY Times has 10,000 subscribers paying almost 14 bucks a month to read the paper on the Kindle--estimating these subscriptions gross $1.68 million a year. In the end, they don't believe the current incarnation of the Kindle can succeed. What do you think?

"I think for the Kindle to reach mainstream success, it'll have to shift its focus from being an ebook reader with a junky mobile web browser to being a great mobile web browser with an ebook reader attached. It'll have to become something more like the iPhone with a bigger screen and better battery life," wrote the Journalism Lab. (Via.)

As publishers struggle with the recession, many writers are looking for work in unexpected places. Some are even looking past television and movies towards the next big thing--the blockbuster world of videogames like Gears of War.

Over at Slashdot, a young writer asked videogame experts: "I'm an enthusiastic hobby gamer with a real passion for well-developed games. But there's very little guidance out there on getting exposure as a writer in this world ... How can I get involved in writing for the game industry?"

That question resonated, generating nearly 150 responses--some from industry professionals. One writer advised: "[P]ut together your portfolio. In the case of games, you'll want to have some dynamic media - sketched storyboards (art shouldn't matter too much, so keep it simple), play or movie scripts, and/or, ideally, game mods that have your name in the writer-line."

Another videogame writer listed a crowded resume that will sound familiar to any writer cobbling together a living in the 21st Century. The entry also included helpful bibliography:

"I did as much writing and design as possible, in whatever areas I could get my hands on: news writing, graphic design, web design, and the creation of a fake fast-food franchise run by ninja named Ninja Burger. When the time came to get into video games, all that experience helped immensely. Design is design; writing is writing. The more you do of each, the better you get at it. I wrote about games, I designed games... I even co-wrote and co-designed an [online game], but my time spent designing church bulletins, editing news columns, writing copy for a comic book catalog and doing technical writing all helped me learn not just the ropes, but all the knots as well."

Earlier this year, SharedBook unveiled a collaborative venture with Golden Book to personalize children's books like The Poky Little Puppy, and when we met with the company's CEO, Caroline Vanderlip (right), at their Wall Street headquarters a few weeks back, she was enthusiastic about extending that model further. SharedBook has established additional partnerships with publishers participating in its online children's book store, where consumers can order books with customized dedication pages. The program is set up so that publishers can still maintain their online footprintse; a personalized edition of Pinkalicious, for example, is available for $34.95 from either the HarperCollins website or the SharedBook children's store. (The most recent partnership, established just this week, brings LucasBooks into the fold with a personalized edition of a new novel about the Millennium Falcon—the first time the personalization option has been made available for a frontlist title.)

And SharedBook's collaborations aren't limited to publishing houses—the company has also created affiliate relationships with independent bookstores like Tattered Cover (Denver, CO) and Capitol Book and News (Montgomery, AL) as well as websites like Grandparents.com and Kidmondo.

Vanderlip also filled us in on the most recent developments with Book It!, the newest version of the former "Blog2Print" widget, a tool enabling readers to select content from any participating site, save it to a clipboard, then create a book around it. "Content owners are showing as strong an interest in that as the consumers," she told us, as we delved into the potential applications for academic coursework and the ways in which the prepared content could be further personalized before publication. See, in a similar vein, last year's "Create-a-Cookbook" project... one of several new ways of packaging and selling content that Vanderlip optimistically predicts will help transform the economics of the publishing industry. "We've had some good luck with people who finally understand what our tools can do," she said of the past year's developments. "There's been an enormous research effort to find more and more ways to enhance the product... digital innovations with value propositions to the end user. Some companies are more limited in what they're willing to do than others, but I think that's always the case."

We were pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning and discover GalleyCat had made the Blogs.com list of the ten best literature blogs, as determined by David Gutowksi, the creator of Largehearted Boy—especially since we made it onto the roster with several of our own favorite book blogs, including the websites of novelists Laila Lalami and Mark Sarvas.

Although, strictly speaking, if we're a "literature" blog, by virtue of the fact that we talk about the book business, there really ought to be room on that list for publishers like Chad Post of Open Letter, who's been blogging about the realities of independent publishing (and publishing world literature) at Three Percent. Maybe there's a blog or two on that list that only covers books intermittently we could bump to make room for Post... or for another great book blog we haven't even thought of yet, that you'll tell us about in the comments section...

Books by John Scalzi, Clive James, Peter F. Hamilton, China Mieville and Neal Asher can now be purchased for the iPhone, as Pan Macmillan partnered with the e-reader company, Lexcycle--becoming one of the largest publishers to step into this new digital realm.

The first round of titles are available on the iPhone and iPod Touch using Lexcycle's Stanza application, and the companies expect to add more titles over the next year. In addition, the partnership will allow Stanza readers to sample bestsellers in special excerpts.

Sara Lloyd, Digital Director of Pan Macmillan, said her company had studied the market carefully before the partnership. From the press release: "Since the iPhone launched its App Store we have been watching developments closely to see which reading apps became most popular. Lexcycle's Stanza emerged very quickly as a clear leader in its category and so we immediately made contact to ask about developing a strategic partnership to bring our ebooks to readers through this new channel," she explained.

A giant digital book and audiobook online store just joined forces with a leading mobile phone digital reader, bringing an entire catalog of romantic books from Samhain Publishing to your iPhone.

BooksOnBoard, an ebook company with more than 270,000 titles, will bring romance titles to the Stanza reading platform--reportedly the first time new titles will be sold on the popular platform created by LexCycle that allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to read digital books. Click here for GalleyCat's interview about that company.

Neelan Choksi, COO of LexCycle explained in the release: "By working with BooksOnBoard, we've taken the first of many steps to address the #1 'feature' requested by Stanza users -- the ability to purchase the latest and greatest content to read on Stanza." (Via.)

We've told you about several instances of authors giving their work away online over the years, but the stories usually involve one author engaged in a solo venture. But now 24 writers—including Vonda McIntyre, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Laura Anne Gilman—are pooling their resources at Book View Café, offering up short stories, novels, an unproduced screenplay... all sorts of "out-of-print, experimental, or otherwise unavailable work."

"Given the deteriorating climate of print publishing," Le Guin comments in a press release, "the Café seemed like a great experiment to be in on." Gilman concurs: "Book View Café will allow readers to get their reading fix—and discover new authors—easily and quickly. It’s a win-win situation for everyone, and one I’m excited to be part of." The proprietors suggest that they may, in the future, offer some additional content for sale—until then, it's all available for free, though they wouldn't look askance at donations to cover the site's basic operational costs.

Charlie Corts is tucked away in a windowless room on one of the lower floors of Simon & Schuster's corporate offices, with three HD digital cameras mounted on tripods, pointed at a black backdrop that fills one wall; in the corner, he's got two large monitors and a computer hooked up to eight 750-gig hard drives—enough processing power, these days, to run an efficiently slim digital video studio. Corts's new position as Simon & Schuster Digital's director of video production and development is a corporate homecoming of sorts—before producing video clips for Yahoo! Finance's "Tech Ticker," he was creating content for the CBS.com website.

"In the past we had some great videos, but it was hard to find them on the site," chief digital officer Elinor Hirschhorn admitted to us during a recent visit to the studio—part of the ongoing S&S Digital strategy is to take the videos that Corts shoots and bring them "front and center" on the company's home page (along with other online venues). Referring to the various offices an author about to be published by Simon & Schuster might visit during a trip to the publisher, Hirschhorn said, "We're trying to have one of those steps to be through the studio to create multimedia that will help them market themselves."

The effort began with an interview with Stephen King about the origins of "N.," one of the short stories in his latest collection, Just After Sunset, and how it was adapted, through a co-production deal with Marvel Comics, into a multi-episode digital series by Marc Guggenheim and Alex Maleev. That interview, along with other bonus features, is now being included in a DVD that's bundled with a special edition of Just After Sunset. "The DVD wouldn't have happened without Charlie," says Sue Fleming, the executive director of content and programming, noting that Corts also edited the 25 ninety-second episodes—which were a big hit this fall on their dedicated website, on MySpace, and for sale at iTunes—into a single, unified short film (which is, we were told, headed to short film festivals). "It's an evolution of ideas... that came at the end of the process," she explained. Now that they have a template for this sort of digital marketing, she added, "it's gone beyond just the ability to record in the building."

Corts has already shot interviews with roughly 50 other authors, and though he was tight-lipped about exactly what lay "beyond," he did confess to having "a lot of fun things" in the works.