I try to stop by ereaderiq.com on a daily basis to stay on top of the Kindle ebook market. That site is my favourite of the bargain e-book ombudsmen because it allows you to track not only ALL free ebooks but new releases of mainstream paid titles, price-drops on all ebooks and titles that are arriving to the format. It’s one stop shopping.
Unfortunately the Free Ebook stop is becoming more and more like that shady rest area everyone is kind of afraid to use the bathroom at. When Amazon announced their program to make self-pubbed e-books easier to create and market it seems to have opened the floodgates. What I’m seeing now in the Free E-book market is scarily what blogs were like back in 2006-2007, when everyone read articles about Dooce and decided they’d Also Get Rich Writing Blogs. Fast forward to now and the articles are about Karen McQuestion, Amanda Hocking, J.A.Konrath and the other four or five people making real money from self-publishing. The e-books are following the outmoded blog advice and sticking to one subject of popular interest. So that means we’ve got a knee-deep slush pile of diet books, budgeting books, household tips–everything that used to be dumped on the blogosphere.
We’ve even got more than a few blogs-turned-into-books. I can think of only one example where I’ve enjoyed one of these–and that’s my friend Betsy Phillips’ excellent City Of Ghosts. The rest of it seems to be an excuse to have a book. Is that a bad thing, though? Part of me is thinking that maybe I’ll take my Christian posts from here and turn them into a sort of devotional ebook. Hmmm. Let me ponder that in my heart.
Yesterday was the moment when this whole theory of blogs turning into books finally coalesced in my mind. It was this book that did it for me.
Click to embiggen
The title intrigued me, as does anything with the words “born again”. As I tried to decipher the book’s description, which feels like it’s been run through a bad ‘nutcase-to-English’ translator program, I realised that I’ve seen this writing a thousand times before. It’s straight-up blogosphere raving, and I wonder how many of these e-books released over the next span of 18-24 months are going to be handing us glimpses into the dank farms of hatred and bitterness that lurk on the fringes.
I guess it’s a plus that with the e-books the ravings are in one place and don’t have a comment section.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
Hopefully s/he doesn’t want to be the idiot who designed that cover…
What dolphin said. Can we get much lower? Glad it’s free.