Billy Young's Blog - Posts Tagged "e-books"

The hunt for a job has come to a standstill as Christmas approaches. Not really a surprise as the job market is very quiet at this time year and it won’t improve until after the New Year. In fact it will be the end of January before I’m likely to see it pick up again. Of course I still have to continue the search even though I know there isn’t much of a chance of finding anything.
I have now made my books available in E-book format through Smashwords.com. I have thought about it for a while since being told about the site but only now decided that it would be a good idea. For one it gives readers the choice of formats and it also opens up another market for my books. It was a lot of work to reformat it to Smashwords standards so they would be able to get the premium distribution, opening up the possibility of it getting onto Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, as well as other online sites. In the end it all comes to giving the customer the right to choose how they wish to view my books and that can only be a good thing, right?
I’ve also been spending a little too much time playing Spellforce 2. It’s not as good as the first one. Three times I hit bugs that have caused me problems. On one occasion it completely crash and the other two times it just froze graphically. For a game to be still so unfinished even after it has been released as an Ultimate pack or Gold edition is at the very least annoying. Still it is playable enough for me to waste many hours fighting my through each map with more still to do.

Happy New Year, I hope that it has started well for you all and that the coming year bring you great happiness. Mine started quietly with just me and the family staying up for the bells. Boring I know but as the saying goes, family is everything. As the old year came to the end we all look back on how the year has been. Or at least that is how we writers would like to think of it but really few of us do. There are times in our lives when we do yet for the most part we look forward with a hope that what is to come is better than what has went. Not that it has been that bad, just that it can always be better, right. No matter how good things maybe for us humans we look for more, we want things nicer, we never have enough. It is not greed, it isn’t even selfishness, what it is, is just the drive that keeps driving us to provide for those we love. It is very much what drove our ancestors’ in the hunt for food. Without it would we have the will to continue? I don’t think so. I think I may have had one to many tipples for I’m getting a little deep in my thinking.
Anyways this week I set up some discounts for my e-books on Smashwords.com. This means that if you go there and quote the code when buying one of my books you get it for one dollar. The discount codes last until the beginning of February. You have the choice of e-book formats, so you can find the one that is right for your reader. Here are the codes and next to them the book they are for:

BM99Y A Winter Journey
LM87Y Bublos
WY59T Banshee Angel of Judgement

Tammy is making space in the living-room ready to put up the Christmas tree under Magz’s instruction. It is quite good natured though rather loud and raucous in the way only families can know. It is times like this that make the memories that will make us smile in years to come. Just the same as when Tammy couldn’t wait for the tree to go up. She wanted to help but was more of a trial for her mum as Magz struggled to get the tree just how she pictured it. No matter how exacerbated she got she would not give up till it was finished. Of course she would find something wrong with it within a couple of days and take it to bit to rebuild it. Now it is Tammy’s job put the tree up even if it is under her mother’s eagle gaze.
I found a cheap tablet for myself on Ebay. It was too good a bargain to pass up but I do have to wait for it to come all the way from Hong Kong so it will take a few weeks to arrive. It has sixteen gigabytes of storage which is plenty of room for the e-books that I want to read on it. At the moment I have found about fifty or sixty book yet they only seem to take up a small twenty seven megabytes. Yes that is tiny though I should fill it out more as time goes by. I know modern tablets can do more display books for your reading consumption like play movies, play games and music. It is that I have other things to do all those types of activities on so the pad is really only for e-book which is harder I find on other hardware.
Why didn’t I just go for an E-book reader? We I think it is a male thing. I wanted something that had some more power than I really needed. Simple. In the end though I got such a bargain that I didn’t pay any more than I would have for a reader. Plus I also got a full HD colour screen rather than the grey spectrum offered on a simpler device. As is I think the Ainol NOVO 7 Mars should be up to the job.