Paul Graham Raven of Futurismic writes:

Regular readers will be familiar with the Friday Flash Fictioneers from Futurismic’s free fiction round-ups. We’ve teamed up and collected over sixty of our best flash stories from the last nine months, and yours truly has edited them into ILLUMINATIONS, all profits from which will be donated to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children here in the UK.

ILLUMINATIONS is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence - the stories are already out there in the magical tubes of the internets, so we thought we’d like to set them free formally at the same time as making them available in one convenient and attractive package!

ILLUMINATIONS will be available in book form from Odd Two Out Publishing after 25th March 2008 (or from the authors themselves) for GB£6.99, or as a downloadable PDF for an as yet unannounced price.

Link to full announcement at Futurismic.com

Sales of the seventh and last Harry Potter book are, to no one’s surprise, breaking records in the publishing industry.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has thrown off concerns over internet spoilers and broken embargoes to confirm its position as the world’s fastest-selling book today, with Nielsen Bookscan estimating a staggering 2.7m copies sold in the UK of the seventh and final book during a hectic period of just 24 hours - a 35% increase on first-day sales of JK Rowling’s last blockbuster, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The figure, which includes sales through UK bookshops, supermarkets, internet sites and newspapers on Saturday July 21 2007, brings to a close a remarkable run for the popular children’s serial, which saw record-breaking sales of 1.8m copies in one day for the fifth book in the series, and 2m for the sixth. UK sales of the Harry Potter series as a whole now stand at 22.6m copies, with 72.1m copies sold worldwide.

Link to the Guardian article

Note: this post is spoiler-free.

Security guru Bruce Schneier writes:

It’s online [Note: link is spoiler safe]: digital photographs of every page are available on BitTorrent.

I’ve been fielding press calls on this, mostly from reporters asking me what the publisher could have done differently. Honestly, I don’t think it was possible to keep the book under wraps. There are millions of copies of the book headed to all four corners of the globe. There are simply too many people who must be trusted in order for the security to hold. And all it takes is one untrustworthy person — one truck driver, one bookstore owner, one warehouse worker — to leak the book.

But conversely, I don’t think the publishers should care. Anyone fan-crazed enough to read digital photographs of the pages a few days before the real copy comes out is also someone who is going to buy a real copy. And anyone who will read the digital photographs instead of the real book would have borrowed a copy from a friend. My guess is that the publishers will lose zero sales, and that the pre-release will simply increase the press frenzy.

I’m kind of amazed the book hadn’t leaked sooner.

Paper-based media also has its share of spoilers and early releases:

With only two days to go before the publication of the seventh and final instalment of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, both the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun have broken one of the most stringent embargoes of recent times and published a review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

After reading a copy “purchased at a New York City store yesterday”, one of America’s most influential literary critics, Michiko Kakutani, hails the volume in the New York Times as a dose of “good old-fashioned closure”.

Bloomsbury described the review as “very sad” to Reuters, pointing out that there was only one more day until the official release of the book around the world.

Link to Guardian article (some very vague spoilers, mostly about book structure/pacing)

Author Will Shetterly has released two of his books to the public in text format under a Creative Commons license - meaning they’re free to read and share.

Cory Doctorow writes:

On Tuesday, I blogged Will Shetterly amazing new American magic-realist novel, The Gospel of the Knife — now, Will has released the whole text of the novel under a Creative Commons license!

That’s just for starters: Will has also released the full text of Dogland, the book that comes before “Gospel.” This is an incredible, magical novel about a kid whose father opens a dog theme park in Florida in the 1950s, and lands his family in the middle of the segregation fight, the wonderment and despoiling of Florida, and a centuries-old mystery. Dogland is one of my favorite novels of all time, and having it online to email to people will greatly ease my task of ensuring that as many people as possible read this and have their lives changed by it.

You can read both of the books for free on Shetterly’s Blogspot site.
Links: Dogland, Gospel of the Knife (via BoingBoing)

Anticipation over the ending of the best-selling Harry Potter series reached new heights today as J. K. Rowling announced today on her site that:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be published on Saturday 21st July 2007 at 00:01 BST in the UK and at 00:01 in the USA. It will also be released at 00:01 BST on Saturday 21st July in other English speaking countries around the world.

BBC News says:

[Bloomsbury] said it would publish a children’s hardback edition, an adult hardback, a special gift edition and an audio book on the same day.

As well as making Rowling a dollar billionaire, the books have been credited with bringing children back to reading and reviving the British film industry.

The Guardian has a list of anticipated books for this coming year:

An extraordinary number of the novels coming our way in 2007 deal with war. As for non-fiction, the war in question is between weighty biographies and skimpy celebrities. So choose now between sex with Davina and 16th-century feminism with Germaine.

Link

Author Peter Watts writes through BoingBoing:

I’ve set my latest novel free under the usual Creative Commons license: you can get Blindsight (Tor, October) by going to my backlist and clicking the relevant thumbnail. I’ve also produced seven alternative dust-jackets for the same title, using (with the artist’s permission) artwork submitted to Tor but not used for their official Blindsight cover. You can get those here. (And take a look here for an impressionistic, documentary-style taste of the novel itself.)

I do this only partly to add data to the ongoing get-rich-by-giving-your-stuff-away experiment. The other reason is that a lot of people seem to be having trouble actually finding the book in brick-and-mortar stores; distribution has been spotty despite advance raves, subsequent praise, and (I’m led to understand) significant buzz. Smaller stores report being backordered for weeks; one of the continent’s two biggest book retailers isn’t carrying it at all (although individual store owners have evidently been special-ordering it). And all the buzz in the world is worth jack-shit if the product isn’t readily available.

So check it out and go wild. And when your eyes start to fall out from phosphor burn, consider buying an old-fashioned paper version. There should be enough to go around before long: I’m told Blindsight’s going into second printing.

Link to read the book online for free (via BoingBoing)

A wave of revulsion and open criticism, reaching a climax this weekend, has swept America in the wake of revelations that Simpson intends to capitalise on the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman with a book and TV ‘confession’ in a £1.8 million deal brokered by Murdoch-owned companies.

Link to the full Guardian Unlimited article