One thing about the Internet: the shelf space is endless. And authors are starting to take note. The e-book site Fictionwise has long been bringing out older and out-of-print works by popular authors and releasing them as ebooks, and now Book View Cafe is expanding that idea into an entire Web site.
Book View Cafe is a consortium of over twenty professional authors with extensive publishing credits in the print world. The Internet is giving us an opportunity to make our out-of-print, experimental, or otherwise unavailable work available to you. Every day, new content available nowhere else will be served up on Book View Cafe: short stories, flash fiction, poetry, episodes of serialized novels, and maybe even a podcast now and then. The content will be archived and available after the posting date by visiting the author’s bookshelf.
Authors so far include: Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Brenda Clough, Kate Daniel, Laura Anne Gilman, Christie Golden, Anne Harris, Sylvia Kelso, Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, Sue Lange, Ursula K. Le Guin, Rebecca Lickiss, Vonda N. McIntyre, Nancy Jane Moore, Pati Nagle, Darcy Pattison, Irene Radford, Madeleine Robins, Amy Sterling, Jennifer Stevenson, Susan Wright and Sarah Zettel.
It’s not my preferred way to read a book, granted. Each chapter has its own page so you have to keep scrolling and clicking, a method usually performed to increase page and advertising views but as there is no advertising on the site (yet?) it seems needlessly annoying. Still, it’s a great way to get more material from favorite authors or browse through the works of authors you’ve always wanted to try. Most everything there is free, although there will be expanded or limited edition works available shortly for a fee.