Happy early Valentine’s Day!

Here’s an interesting little news bit. Remember Barbara Cartland? If you’re like me, she was your first introduction to romance. Well, she’s back! 

The estate of Barbara Cartland, in partnership with M-Y Ebooks, will release a portion of her backlist starting on Valentine’s Day. 10 books will be available for sale then with 160 titles to be released overall. 

According to barbaracartland.com, the prolific author left behind 160 unpublished manuscripts when she died. They’ve since been published and are referred to as The Pink Collection.

I don’t know about you but one thing that drives me crazy about Kindle books is the lack of page numbers. Where am I in the book? How many pages do I have left?

Well, now I’ll know – because Amazon is giving in to readers’ wishes to add real page numbers to their ebooks.

They write, “Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class. Rather than add page numbers that don’t correspond to print books, which is how page numbers have been added to e-books in the past, we’re adding real page numbers that correspond directly to a book’s print edition.”

Kindle is also making some other changes. They are going to make it easier to sell an author’s other works at the end of Kindle ebooks.

“We will now offer a seamless experience that lets you immediately rate the book, share a message about the book with your social network, get personalized recommendations for what to read next, and see more books by the same author.”

Another good move. Now I don’t have to go all the way back into the Kindle store and type in the author’s name to find the next book in the series. It’ll be right there at my fingertips.

Easy is always good!

Now here’s an interesting idea – a sort of library for Kindle books.

A small company called Kindle Lending Club is connecting people who are willing to lend e-books to strangers who want to borrow them.

The five-person start-up was founded by a 40-year-old Canadian mother of three. She began with  a Facebook page which proved so popular, that she hired two web developers to expand her idea into a bonafide business. So far, the Kindle Lending Club is said to have facilitated the lending of more than 1,000 books among strangers.

Amazon announced its own Kindle lending program late last year but that seems to facilitate e-book lending only among friends, not on a potentially global scale like the Kindle Lending Club.

I would never want authors to lose out on their just profits. But an e-book library seems like a natural progression. We have libraries for tree-books, why not e-books? If anything, I buy more books from authors whose work I first discovered at the library.

It will be fascinating to see how this concept  progresses.