We recently added several titles to our collection of e-texts at Molland’s Circulating-Library for the reading enjoyment of all Janeites.

As a result of many user requests, we’ve expanded the section on Jane Austen’s work to include Lady Susan, Love and Freindship (which includes Love and Freindship, of course, Lesley Castle, The History of England, and other juvenilia), and The Watsons. We are considering adding Sanditon as well so it will be included in the all-texts search index.

One addition that we’re really pleased about is a subject guide to the third edition of Jane Austen’s letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye. The index is meant to complement the existing biographical, topographical, and general indices in the letters. Del Cain, a retired librarian from Florida, made these notes for his own use on index cards, which he then typed up. He asked for our help in putting the index online, and we have arranged it by one letter of the alphabet per page. We are trying to think of a way to make the index downloadable and printable without it being a huge PDF.

Janeites who have been enjoying her work on the Internet for a long time will remember Cathy Dean’s e-texts archive, which included some biographies and introductions to various editions of Jane Austen’s novels. Word reached us last year that the site had gone dark, though the texts were still available via the Internet Archive (but for how long?). We managed to track down Ms. Dean and ask if we could transfer the e-texts to Molland’s, and she gave her permission. We thank her for it! Among the items we’ve transferred are two book-length Austen biographies, Jane Austen and Her Times by G.E. Mitton (which is very charming) and Jane Austen by O.W. Firkins (less charming, but interesting to read from a historical perspective).

We’ve also included two family biographical works: James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen and Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A Family Record by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh (the original 1913 text). There also are some new shorter pieces. We have a stack of other texts to scan and add to this growing collection, so stay tuned! In the meantime, we hope you enjoy reading some of these texts, which are fascinating from a historical perspective. The 21st and even the 20th century have no lock on Jane Austen scholarship. Also, we’re very interested in user feedback, so let us know how you use the texts and how they can be improved.

JASNA has published the latest edition of Persuasions On-Line, which has the theme “Global Jane Austen.” Articles include (and how timely is this, after the news today about the casting of Sense and Sensibilidad?) “A la Señorita Austen: An Overview of Spanish Adaptations” by Carmen Romero Sanchez; AustenBlog reviewer Allison Thompson on “Trinkets and Treasures: Consuming Jane Austen,” which, knowing the authoress as we do, we are sure will be both amusing and instructive; and articles on Jane Austen in Japan and Turkey, the South Indian adaptation of S&S, Jane Austen and the French Revolution–well, our head is spinning. Turn off the bally movies and go read!

The Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) has posted a preview of the next edition of its annual journal, Persuasions, which will be sent to JASNA members in May or June. As usual, the journal features essays from the latest Annual General Meeting, which this past year had the theme “Discovering Emma in Vancouver,” and as usual was a great long weekend packed with information and fun. We find that between the pre-AGM preparation of re-reading the novel, the weekend of presentations and discussions, and then reading the essays a few months later, we truly gain new insights into these novels that we’ve enjoyed so many times before.

It’s not too late to get your copy of Persuasions; if you join JASNA by May 1, you’ll receive Persuasions No. 29, the spring issue of JASNA News, and get an early opportunity to register for this year’s AGM, to be held in Chicago.

While you’re waiting for your copy of Persuasions to arrive, check out the latest issue of Persuasions On-Line, which also has several essays from the AGM and a great selection of “Miscellany” articles as well! You can also check out back issues of POL as well as the full text of several out of print editions of Persuasions. We can’t encourage our readers strongly enough to check them out.

Laurie Viera Rigler has resumed her series of blog posts on Jane Austen’s novels with Emma.

These “a-ha” experiences are high on the list of reasons why I love Austen. I have this theory that if you read her works enough times and really contemplate the life lessons therein, you can pretty much give up your psychotherapist. You can even reduce your library of self-help books to Austen’s six novels. They are so much fun to read, so satisfying, so full of dramatic tension and hilarious commentary, that you hardly know you’re getting a life lesson at all. Which is exactly how I like my life lessons delivered.

We agree that much of the genius of Jane Austen (and her continuing popularity) lies in the truth of her novels. John Murray wrote to Walter Scott about Emma, “It wants incident and romance, does it not?” Silly, silly man!

Alert Janeite Sarah sent us a link to a very amusing article in the New Yorker about the recent trend of memoirs that turn out to be mostly invention (and invention is what delights us in novels, after all).

And when history books are wrong they can be miserably, badly, ridiculously wrong, a point that wasn’t lost on Jane Austen, who, in 1791, when she was sixteen, wrote a brilliant parody of Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume, march-of-the-monarchs “History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II.” (Goldsmith, the author of the novel “The Vicar of Wakefield,” wrote history to keep out of debtors’ prison.) Austen called her parody “The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian.” It consisted of thirteen perfectly dunderheaded character sketches of crowned heads of England. Of Henry V, she wrote, “During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for.” Of the Duke of Somerset: “He was beheaded, of which he might with reason have been proud, had he known that such was the death of Mary Queen of Scotland; but as it was impossible that he should be conscious of what had never happened, it does not appear that he felt particularly delighted with the manner of it.” Of the allegation that Lady Jane Grey, Edward VI’s cousin, read Greek: “Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I believe she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain.” Once in a great while, Austen happened to bump into a fact or two, for which she apologized: “Truth being I think very excusable in an Historian.”

In other book news, Alert Janeites Laurel Ann and Lisa sent us a couple of links to an article about Penguin’s new endeavor with ebooks, which will be “enhanced” with “a filmography, period book reviews, recipes and black-and-white illustrations.” We were concerned about formatting, but the Publishers Weekly article claims the enhanced ebooks will be compatible with all readers. It’s a pretty good idea, as there are so many nicely formatted ebooks of public domain texts available in every format that publishers will have to offer extra content to get readers to pay money for them. Jimmy Guterman of O’Reilly disagrees.

Although ebooks should have extras, those extras should take advantage of the interactive medium, not merely deliver more — and inferior — text.

Inferior? Jane Austen? Harrrumph. Or does he mean etexts are inferior to paper? Trust us, as a dedicated ebook user, once you start reading and get lost in the story, the medium in which the story is delivered becomes completely transparent. And besides, “interactive medium” indicates a connection to the Internet, which all ebook readers (meaning the electronic devices) do NOT have, and which many ebook readers (meaning people reading books) don’t want.

What’s most galling, of course, is that Penguin isn’t attempting to increase interest in ebooks as a medium by making these classics, long past copyright, available in free, un-DRM-encumbered formats. In an old-meets-new mashup, publishers could use free distribution of still-in-demand classics to generate interest in a form, ebooks, that is still only in the earliest days of its potential public acceptance. Wouldn’t you be more likely to try something new if it was free?

As we already pointed out, there are already tons of free ebooks of public domain texts available everywhere in every format. The publishers have to do something different to get people to buy them. We would like to see some scholarly notes and essays along with the more fun stuff, by the bye; there’s plenty of room for all.

In other news, two recent entries in Norm Geras’ Writer’s Choice blog series on Normblog mention Jane Austen. Meg Rosoff discusses the different layers of Pride and Prejudice:

Above and beyond the love story - people who would never consider reading the book have swooned over various film and TV versions - Pride and Prejudice is actually a book about class, about fortunes on the way up and down, inherited wealth versus new wealth, good marriages and bad, gentlemen and bounders, and the emerging English middle class at the end of the 18th century.

…and Olivia Lichtenstein writes about the continuing fascination of filmmakers with Pride and Prejudice:

In the past decade alone, Pride and Prejudice has spawned a BBC costume drama, an Oscar-winning feature film, a Bollywood version (Bride and Prejudice), the books Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, its sequel - arguably amongst the biggest of recent publishing sensations - and, of course, by extension, the two feature films they engendered. This year, a spoof Pride and Prejudice is planned, Jane Austen Handheld, a film which is to star Stephen Fry, Russell Brand and Lily Allen. I wonder whether frequent repetition diminishes the value of the original work of art, or at the least, people’s perception of it.

Naaaaaah.

And lastly, Alert Janeite Lisa pointed us to the Blogger News Network, which has a review of Pemberley Remembered, a new P&P sequel; we’ll have a review here at AustenBlog next week.

That’s it for Weekend Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, so until next week, remember: Books Are Nice!

Pray forgive the dearth of posting of late. We’ve developed a nasty allergy to the computer this week, but seem to be getting over it.

Continuing our theme of electronic books as we wrap up Read an Ebook Week, we were really pleased to hear from Linda (also known as Linda Fern), who has digitized a really valuable resource for Janeites, The Loiterer. From the introduction:

The centrepiece of this collection is James Austen’s The Loiterer, a periodical of sixty issues published in Oxford in 1789 and 1790. James wrote the majority of the issues with his brother, Henry, among others, contributing articles. After the final issue was published in 1790, James had the entire sixty issues bound into two volumes and published with a limited number of copies. A “pirated” Dublin edition was published in 1792.

[. . .]

After reading The Loiterer in its entirety, I considered it to be a valuable adjunct for understanding Jane Austen’s life, world and works. Also, it may possibly answer some questions that have eluded us as to what and when Jane Austen knew on some subject or other..

We agree! Linda also has collected the content of the late Ashton Dennis’ “Male Voices in Praise of Jane Austen” website and a series of essays about “Jane Austen and the Wars” by R. Jason Everett. We strongly encourage our Gentle Readers to check it out–and bookmark the site and plan to return, there’s lots of good stuff here to read.

Also expanding on our post of earlier this week, Harry T. has uploaded Mobipocket format ebooks of Emma (with the Brock illustrations), Jane Austen’s Minor Works, including just about everything that isn’t a novel, and the Brabourne edition of Jane Austen’s Letters to MobileRead.

Ms. Place at Jane Austen’s World has post about the Thomson illustrated Complete Jane Austen, with a link to Google Books.

And in the “What the Heck Is It?” department, Alert Janeite Julie P. sent us a link last week, and Maisy has also linked it in comments, to P&P by “DVD Bookshelf.” As near as we can figure, it displays the text onscreen as a narrator reads it. Is this supposed to be a film for the strictest purists or something? Besides, when we listen to an audiobook we like to multi-task: needlework, housework, craft projects, HTML coding…

That’s it for Weekend Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books (including Electronic Books) Are Nice!

This post was made possible by Pat Benatar’s Greatest Hits, which we sung along with badly, with accompanying head banging and shoulder shimmying, to help us to break out of our blogging malaise. We even managed to wake up the Wickhams at the crack of 3 p.m. George just screamed at Lydia to “put on a (expletive deleted) shirt.” Oh my.

We are Bookblogging midweek since A. we didn’t get around to it over the weekend and B. It’s Read an Ebook Week! We have had our Cybook Gen3 for a few weeks now and it rocks our socks. Naturally one of the first things we did was download all of Jane Austen’s novels, plus Lady Susan, Love and Freindship, the Memoir, Life and Letters, and a couple of other interesting oddments to our Cybook. And not only do we have all of Jane Austen’s work (and work about her), we have books by the Brontës, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, L.M. Montgomery, Dickens, and a metric truckload of Trollope–and much more–and we are using maybe 5 percent of the capacity of our 1GB SD card. We carry this device around with us daily. The Cybook is the thinnest and lightest reader with an eInk screen, though the cover adds some heft to it, but it fits easily in our smallish handbag. We have played with a co-worker’s Kindle and were extremely impressed by the ease of use. We thought the interface seemed kludgy before we used it, but it’s amazingly intuitive. We also have heard many wonderful things about the Sony Reader, and if you don’t mind or even prefer a backlit display there is the eBookwise, or you can use your Treo or BlackBerry or mobile phone or PDA to read eReader or Mobipocket format books. (We still have many eReader format books on our Treo.)

Incidentally, all of the books we mentioned above were free. We also received $50 in downloads of paid books from BooksOnBoard when we purchased our Cybook (haven’t used it all yet). But most public domain books, for all devices, are free to download from somewhere. Manybooks.net probably has the best selection, both of books and of formats; Feedbooks has a smaller selection but its books are really nicely formatted. Community members at MobileRead have digitized dozens of public domain books in various formats, and MobileReader Harry T. has uploaded lovely ebooks of Jane Austen’s novels in Mobipocket and Sony Reader formats, including the C.E. Brock illustrations from Molland’s and Solitary Elegance! We just downloaded five of the Big Six in Mobipocket format to enjoy on our Cybook.

Admittedly, ebook readers, especially the eInk readers such as the Cybook, Kindle, Reader, and iRex iLiad, which are the top of the line technology (and correspondingly expensive), are still in early adopter territory. We can see that they may not work for some readers; though we are really impressed with how well Amazon has done in making the Kindle work out of the box even for the non-tech-savvy and in providing a variety of content. DRM is an issue, which is going away with music but still very much an issue with ebooks; the main problem with DRM is portability between devices, and the Kindle and Reader use proprietary ebook formats. But for those of us who mostly read classics anyway, it’s not as much of an issue; there really is a tremendous amount of totally free public domain content out there, and everyone is at least talking about DRM. Whether it will do any good remains to be seen.

We used to say “Can’t curl up in bed with a computer, so we’ll never read ebooks.” Well, you can certainly curl up with one of the latest generation of readers; and some intrepid types even take them into the tub and on to the beach, properly protected of course. We still read and collect and enjoy paper books, but we are really enjoying our adventures in ebooks. Incidentally, stay tuned–we’ll be adding some new etext titles at Molland’s very soon! We’re happy to answer any of our Gentle Readers’ questions about ebooks or the Cybook in comments.

Speaking of digital text, JASNA has digitized Persuasions No. 10, which includes essays from the 1988 AGM in Chicago (which is, of course, where the AGM will be this year as well). The theme of the conference was “Jane Austen’s England” and the list of papers, both related to the conference and not, look fascinating.

The News Observer (North Carolina) has an article about the Everyman’s Library, currently featured at an exhibition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library.

Early dust jackets were graced with Thomas Carlyle’s assertion that “The true university in these days is a collection of books.” The Everyman’s edition of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” was graced with Sir Philip Sidney’s lovely line, “A tale which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner.”

We’ve updated the list of upcoming books and those currently on the shelf in the menu at right. Hopefully we’ll get it together to do a post highlighting all the latest publications!

That’s it for Friday Weekend Midweek Bookblogging, and always remember, Gentle Readers: Whether electronic or paper, Books Are Nice!

Lots of bookblogging to do this week! Huzzah! *AustenBlog Cheerleading and Dance Team begins chanting “Books Are Nice! Books Are Nice!”*

First up we have a real treat: photographs of a first edition copy of Pride and Prejudice! Julie T. tells the story in an e-mail to the Editrix:

My wonderful son is visiting his girlfriend at Wesleyan University. Today they went to the school’s rare book room, and look what Jake asked to see! It’s a first edition, and please note the name inscribed in the front cover, “Harriet Gardiner.” What could be more appropriate for the owner of this book (other than, perhaps, Elizabeth Darcy)

Click on the thumbnails below for larger images:

Photos by Jake Zien

Thanks so much to Jake and Julie for sharing the images, and for allowing us to post them.

Speaking of Pride and Prejudice, Laurie Viera Rigler continues her series at About.com’s Classic Literature blog with a really lovely entry on P&P. (more…)

Laurie Viera Rigler continues her series on Jane Austen’s novels at the About.com Classic Lit blog, this week writing about Mansfield Park.

If you’ve ever had an opinion that your friends considered uncool, and you stuck to it despite ridicule and pressure, you’ll find a kindred spirit in Fanny Price, and you’ll want her reward to be the man she loves. However, if you’re still doing shots with your inner bad girl, you’ll be rooting for Mary Crawford to win the object of her, and Fanny’s, affections.

Heh.

Whilst trolling manybooks.net for free e-books, we happened on a site called The Best Media in Life is Free, which has a listing of free e-texts of books from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The listings are broken up into Pre-1700, 1700s (The first two on the list…The Monk and The Mysteries of Udolpho!), 1800s (including Jane Austen’s novels), and 1900s. Now that is what we call a reading list! We recommend manybooks.net for e-books in just about any format you need; and feedbooks.com also has a wonderful list of free public domain e-books, which have been beautifully formatted for easy and pleasant reading.

Speaking of e-books, a while back we snarked on the Kindle a bit, but in the past week had the opportunity to play with one. We take back our fugly comment, because the Kindle is anything but. It’s really quite cute! It’s tiny and clean-looking, and it makes using and reading e-books an incredibly easy experience. You just push a button and get a book in seconds; which might pose a problem if one is not careful with paid downloads, but feedbooks.com has set up a really easy way to get free, nicely formatted public domain e-books on your Kindle as easily as you download them from Amazon. Download their Kindle Download Guide, which installs as a book, and “shop” for free e-books right from the guide. We are having serious gadget lust and need to get an eInk e-book reader SOON! It probably still will be a Cybook Gen3; but we really love the ease of use of the Kindle.

Adventures in Reading reviews Jane Austen: Obstinate Heart by Valerie Grosvenor Myer.

Austen is described as a person with charm and wit, but also as an individual looked down upon socially as being rather “backwards” or common by her family later in life. Some of Austen’s nieces and nephews are described as rather snobbish and prudish (they would be entering the Victorian period after all) and Myers discusses how parts of Austen’s life were “white washed” in the years after her death by her family. Myers’ approaches a “sour grape” perspective on Austen’s life versus the romantic entanglements of her heroine’s.

Lori Smith, the author of A Walk With Jane Austen, was interviewed at the She Plants a Vineyard blog.

SPV: Many women love Jane Austen’s novels. What is it about her novels that are so timeless and that we can relate to?
Lori: There are lots of answers to that question—her writing is lovely, she herself had a wonderful wit and energy for life, which comes through in her stories, they’re full of humor and her characters are people that we still recognize today. And she’s writing about falling in love, which is an awful lot of fun on its own. But there’s much more substance to her than just the romance.

I think a big part of it is the character that Austen wove into her stories. They’re not so much about falling in love as they are about the kind of people who are allowed to fall in love, people whose characters have been refined, who have been willing to admit their own faults and change. They’re worthy. I think that gives her stories incredible strength—which sometimes movies and spin-offs miss.

We were referred to A Great Undoing, Natalie Jenner’s entry in the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award competition. The novel is a modern retelling of Persuasion, set in Montauk, Long Island and Manhattan in the 1960s. You can download and read a free excerpt and leave feedback. The novel currently is a semi-finalist in the competition and will advance to the next round based upon the feedback that the excerpt receives, so get to it, Janeites!

And we are reminded that we have not updated our sidebar book links in a very long time, and hope to get to that task this week. That’s it for this week’s Weekend Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and always remember: Books Are Nice!

The Winter 2007 issue of JASNA’s online journal, Persuasions On-Line, has been published and is available to read for free on the JASNA website.

We haven’t had a chance to read all the articles yet (or even close to it) but can’t wait to dig in. We can recommend two papers related to breakout sessions that we attended at the Vancouver AGM, Jane Fairfax’s Choice: The Sale of Human Flesh or Human Intellect by Lynda A. Hall and Reading Elegant Extracts in Emma: Very Entertaining! by Susan Allen Ford, who also is the editor of Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line. (Especially cool at that breakout: an actual copy of Elegant Extracts dated possibly from the eighteenth century!)

Another article which we knew about in advance and really looked forward to reading is Joan Klingel Ray’s essay about the extent of the relationship between Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen, which acts as a much-needed counterpoint to a lot of romantic speculation that’s been bandied about (and filmed!) in the past few years. Whether or not you liked Becoming Jane or the book that inspired it or the eye-sporking insanity that has surrounded it, we suggest you read that article!

And like the past few years, the Winter issue contains Barry Roth’s valuable Jane Austen Bibliography for 2006. Check your library and reading list and make sure you didn’t miss anything!

We would love to discuss this issue with anyone who is interested, and have started a discussion at Molland’s.

We just heard that Amanda Grange’s latest Austen hero retelling, Edmund Bertram’s Diary, will be released on November 30, though Amazon UK claims to be shipping it; you can save a few pounds (not to mention postage and packing) if you order directly from Robert Hale. For the more patient in North America, Berkeley will be publishing a paperback version next year, along with Captain Wentworth’s Diary, though we don’t have dates on those yet. We are told a copy of His Lordship of W’ville’s diary is on its way to AustenBlog World Headquarters, so expect a review soon. (Up next…Colonel Brandon’s Diary, which we are told contains “Frustrated elopements, affairs, divorce, consumption, illegitimate children, a duel” and other good stuff! Who knew Jane Austen wrote melodrama? Just as backstory, of course.)

It also has been whispered in our shell-pink ear that Berkeley will be publishing a paperback edition of The Confession of Fitzwilliam Darcy by Mary Street, long considered the Holy Grail of Jane Austen paraliterature, next March. Team Darcy is no doubt dancing in the streets in anticipation.

Mr. Knightley’s Diary is of course available from Berkeley now, as well as e-book editions for Mobipocket, eReader, MS Reader, Adobe, and even a Kindle edition.

Some may be asking, “What’s a Kindle edition?” The Kindle is a new e-book reading device that was launched with great fanfare by Amazon this week. The device, and the Kindle edition e-books that work on it, are only sold by Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said he wanted to make the iPod of e-book readers, and we don’t think he quite succeeded, but he might have come really close. The really new and interesting thing about the Kindle is that it contains a wireless radio so that users can purchase and download books without using their computer. The book will be downloaded directly to the Kindle. The books are competitively priced (a bone of contention among e-book readers; usually prices for e-book editions of hardback books are about the same as the paper copy) at $9.99 for New York Times bestsellers and less for many older books. We think the main selling point of the Kindle is the eInk screen, which is not backlit like a PDA or computer monitor and is the closest electronic imitation of paper that is available right now. The Sony Reader also has an eInk screen, as do the Bookeen Cybook Gen3 and the iRex iLiad. Just about any PDA or smartphone (including Palm, PocketPC, and BlackBerry devices, and we believe iPhones can handle ebooks after a fashion) can be used as ebook readers, as can any computer, and while we love the portability of carrying dozens of books on our Treo, we find that our eyes grow tired after a while of reading on a backlit screen, especially as we spend a lot of time using a PC.

One of the selling points of the Kindle was the availability of more than 90,000 books on launch, and we were pleased to see Jane Austen well-represented, including her own books as well as various paraliterature titles. Also, the Kindle can use unencrypted Mobipocket, HTML, and text documents, so it is possible to use the free versions of Jane Austen’s novels at Project Gutenberg or manybooks.net. This also is true for just about every e-book reader available. The article in Newsweek touting the launch of the Kindle even mentions Jane Austen in a couple of places:

And, to soothe the anxieties of print-culture stalwarts, in sleep mode the Kindle displays retro images of ancient texts, early printing presses and beloved authors like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen.

and

A company called DailyLit this year began sending out books—new ones licensed from publishers and classics from authors like Jane Austen—straight to your e-mail IN BOX, in 1000-work chunks. (I’ve been reading Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” on my iPhone, a device that is expected to be a major outlet for e-books in the coming months.) And recently a columnist for the Chicago Tribune waxed rhapsodically about reading Jane Austen on his BlackBerry.

In our opinion, the Kindle is a great first step for a true e-reader for the masses. It’s easy to use and has a wide selection of titles; by the time one works one’s way through what is already available plus what can be picked up for free around the Internet, we’re sure even more titles will become available. However, there are some concerns. The most important of these concerns, in our opinion, is that the Kindle editions use a proprietary format that includes digital rights management to prevent copying. That means you can’t read Kindle editions on any other device; you can’t even buy a Kindle edition if you don’t own a Kindle that is linked to your Amazon account. You can read some other formats on your Kindle, but if you’re an early adopter of e-books and already have a library of DRM-protected Adobe PDF or Mobipocket format e-books, or any flavor of eReader books, you are out of luck. They can’t be read on the Kindle or converted to read on the Kindle. (Non-DRMed Mobipocket is supported natively and non-DRMed PDFs can be converted for reading on the Kindle.) Beta and VHS, anyone? And what happens if Amazon decides to get out of digital books in a few years? How are you supposed to read all those books you bought for the Kindle with the click of a button? Neil Gaiman and Mark Pilgrim discuss two views of DRM related to the Kindle. Of course, the proprietary format of iTunes downloads hasn’t affected the popularity of the iPod any, though of course it’s much easier to convert your physical media for use on the iPod than it is to convert a book for use on a Kindle. (You have to scan the book and format it. We’ve done it, but we’re a little nuts.)

Cory Doctorow, an author and evangelist for freedom in digital media, writes about some of the privacy concerns with the Kindle at BoingBoing. We think many consumers won’t be a bit put off by these issues, but his criticism is important. It’s one thing for a company to keep records of what you’ve purchased from them and use that information for future marketing purposes (and one of the things we love about Amazon is getting suggestions of things we will like based upon other things we’ve purchased), but knowing when and how you read a book, what you’ve bookmarked, how many times you’ve read it, is just a little creepy and Orwellian for our taste. The information gathering should stop at purchase, in our opinion.

And, we hate to say it, but the Kindle puts the fug in fugly. We like the idea of a keyboard for notes and annotations, but there’s an awful lot of wasted real estate there. Half the reason to have a dedicated e-book reader is portability! Keep it small, and reserve most of the surface area for the screen. This is not difficult to figure out. And, being tied to the Sprint network, the Kindle is currently US-centric, as the type of wireless signal used by Sprint is not used outside the U.S.

So why is the Kindle important to Janeites? We think it is an important step in making e-books easy to buy and use and raise the consciousness of e-books in the public eye; it also will fuel the development of other readers, and speed availability of many of our favorite authors’ books in digital format. (Hint: Georgette Heyer! Dorothy L. Sayers! Patrick O’Brian! C’mon, publishers!) The latter is important even for owners of devices other than the Kindle, as once a book is converted to text for the Kindle, it’s fairly easy to also make it available in other formats (see Mr. Knightley’s Diary, above). And again, why is this important to Janeites? Because there is 200 years of scholarship and publishing related to Jane Austen. Imagine having everything ever written about Jane Austen on instant demand. And the Kindle has a web browser–one even can use it to access the e-text library at Molland’s, for instance. There is lots of stuff out there, and we would like to see more, and we would like to download it all to our eInk device of choice and carry it around with us, for we are greedy when it comes to Jane Austen. We’ve contributed a mite to this archive of Janeite knowledge with our e-texts at Molland’s (and will be contributing more in future). Won’t it be a wonderful thing when books never go out of print? When we won’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for an obscure paraliterature title from the 1940s, because it’s available for a few dollars as a download? No one will have to warehouse it or pay for it to be printed; just give it server room. That will indeed be a wonderful thing for Janeites.

And guys, the Kindle can help you get chicks. Maybe.

Incidentally, Santa is bringing a Cybook Gen3 to AustenBlog World Headquarters next month (if it doesn’t sell out before the elves get there to pick it up, that is). Expect a full report. And we would love to hear from anyone who purchased a Kindle.

That’s it for this week’s Friday Bookblogging, Gentle Readers, and remember: Books Are Nice!

Alert Janeite Lisa sent us a link, annoyed at yet another eejit who thinks Jane Austen was a Victorian.

“Let’s say you’re reading Pride and Prejudice. Imagine a world where you have links to movie versions integrated into the text, so you could click and see a director’s vision of a scene. Or if you wanted to know more about Victorian culture or language, or more about Austen, the information is only a click away.”

We were annoyed, too, but for different reasons.

These are all valid observations that Siemens and his researchers are taking into consideration in developing new online reading models. Upgraded technology, such as gentler monitors and the invention of “e-book readers” will likely address some of the practical complaints, while our own expectations about the reading experience will gradually change with technological advancement.

“e-book readers” in “quotation marks”? And speaking of the invention of “e-book readers” as though they haven’t been invented yet? Oh, for a Cluebat of E-book Righteousness with which to smite the unbelievers! We read e-books on our smartphone all the time; we just had a post about reading Pride and Prejudice on a BlackBerry last week. Right now we have our beady eyes on one of these numbers; and Amazon is rumored to be putting out an “e-book reader” of their own very soon, which might make e-books incredibly popular; apparently it includes a wireless connection–a phone connection, mind you, not Wifi, though it might have that, too–for over-the-air downloads.

We don’t think e-books will ever completely replace paper books, but we think once the publishers and device manufacturers hit the sweet spot between price and convenience, they will have a place. And interactive e-books certainly will have a place, as well.

We were amused by this video produced by the Topeka and Shawnee County Library, which appears to be part of a series of videos. The camera gives a point of view interpretation of the opening of Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, which is read in voiceover. It’s quite fun; check it out!

A different kind of storytelling is going on with some Janeites who are doin’ it for themselves at lulu.com. Check out Allison T.’s reviews of Judith Brocklehurst’s novels, Maria, or the Story of a Disgraced Woman and A Letter from Lady Catherine below.

We also heard this week of a new book by Helen Baker, author of The Book of Ruth. The new book is called Connivance and is a post-Persuasion story about Mrs. Clay and Mr. Elliot. Both of Ms. Baker’s books are also available from lulu.com.

And we don’t think we remembered to link Chapter 9 of There Must Be Murder, “The Most Unpromising Circumstance.” There’s a cliffhanger ending and everything charming.

Have a wonderful weekend, Gentle Readers, and remember: Books are nice!

Reviews by Allison T.

It is with great pleasure that I bring to your attention two charming Austen sequels by Ontario region JASNA member Judith Brocklehurst: A Letter from Lady Catherine and Maria, or the Story of a Disgraced Woman, both self-published at Lulu.com.

A Letter from Lady Catherine begins when that lady, despairing that Anne will ever find a husband, swallows her pride and informs the Darcys that she and Anne will visit and they are to look out for likely suitors. A carriage accident on the journey leaves Lady Catherine with a broken arm and food poisoning and Anne is forced to take action to care for her mother and herself. She meets a pleasant young man—a reader and a thinker—and begins to find him more attractive than any gentleman she has yet met, when the Darcys arrive to take Anne to Pemberley. A burgeoning literary career, attractive new clothes and a newfound health contribute to Anne’s increased happiness, but, as a wealthy heiress, she can never marry the poor man she loves—or can she?

After her disgraceful elopement, Maria Rushworth (née Bertram) is banished by her family to a lonely, half-ruined farmhouse in the north of England. Tormented by thoughts of Henry Crawford, she appears to local society as “Mrs. Ward” and turns to horse-breeding to make money, while Aunt Norris discovers a new happiness in bringing the rat-infested house to order. Maria, or the Story of a Disgraced Woman tells the story of how the bored and lonely Maria transforms herself into a well-regarded businesswoman. But then the story of her affair leaks out, and Maria is whisked by the family back to Mansfield Park, where she must help Lady Bertram with the hard parts of her embroidery and take care of pug. Will she be stuck there forever?

The plots of these two sequels are so fresh and unusual that I can’t reveal more about them without spoiling the endings, and that, in and of itself, tells you something about the quality of the stories. And Judith’s characterizations—whether of Austen’s people or her own—are charming , though I was a little grieved to find that both Fanny and Edmund have turned into real Mr. Collins-like pills, and refuse to have Maria visit them or even talk to her. But I closed the books with a sigh of regret that they were over, and look forward to reading them again.

Great characters, great plots—but wait! There’s more! What sets these two novels apart from many historically-based Austen continuations is the elegance and precision of the prose. There are no annoying anachronisms, no violations of the Regency rules of behavior, and the language really echoes that of the period. As a bonus, Judith puts in little Austenian allusions for our amusement: for instance , when the gentleman that Anne loves gives her a King Charles spaniel, a little dog of no use whatsoever for hunting, Mr. Darcy, who is not found of little dogs, comments that at least it isn’t a pug. (What would Lady B think?)

Austenland is growing so large that it is becoming a financial challenge keep on purchasing (and housing) the sequels that appear each month, but I found these two books well worth the money.

It’s not quite autumn yet, but there is a crispness in the air around AustenBlog World Headquarters (though we no doubt will be reduced to a state of continual inelegance again before the month is out) and the days are growing shorter. We’ve been running across lots of interesting and thoughtful articles about Jane Austen and her work and other books inspired by them lately, and we have been saving them to share (harvesting them, if you will) for this week’s Friday Bookblogging. (more…)

We were delighted to discover that Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters by Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh and William Austen-Leigh is now available for free download at Project Gutenberg. Life and Letters is the book that was later expanded and mostly rewritten by Deirdre Le Faye as Jane Austen: A Family Record, one of our favorite Jane Austen biographies.

If you are into e-books, the book is also available for free download in an astonishing selection of formats at Manybooks.net.

Thanks to the coders and Distributed Proofreading team that made the book possible for all of us e-book fans!

Naturally, all of Jane’s novels and some of the minor works/juvenilia are available for free download at both Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net, as is J.E. Austen-Leigh’s Memoir (and at Manybooks.net).

We wish we were in Bath this summer (actually we wish we were there most of the time), but we can enjoy the offerings of the Centre’s Web site anywhere we have Internet access.

Check out the new quiz, which is pretty tough! We are told the questions will rotate occasionally, so check back often.

Also, Chapter 7 of There Must Be Murder has been posted. Catherine gets some distressing news and overhears an interesting conversation, but may herself become the subject of unkind gossip.

The Centre’s online magazine offers its usual excellent selection of new articles, including a period recipe for lemonade, Jane Austen’s final piece of writing, a review of Persuasion 2007, a biography of George III, and instructions for making a chatelaine.

This month’s sample article from Jane Austen’s Regency World is “Rejecting Jane,” in which slightly reworked bits of Jane Austen’s novels were sent to unsuspecting literary agents and publishers, with mixed but predictable results; but if that was the real query letter they sent, we suspect that was the cause of the rejections more than the content of the work.

“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say any thing wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”

Catherine is absolutely correct: books are very nice, indeed! (As is Henry Tilney!) With a veritable cornucopia of upcoming books for Janeites to enjoy, we have decided that tonight and for the next three nights, AustenBlog will have at least one post related to books by, about, or inspired by Jane Austen, culminating on Friday in a giveaway of a copy of The Jane Austen Handbook: A Sensible Yet Elegant Guide to Her World, personally inscribed to the recipient by the Authoress. (We also will have information about bookplates for the runners-up and other Handbook-related fun.) If any of our Gentle Readers would like to send in reviews of recent releases of Jane Austen-related books, we would love to publish them, so make haste!

Good news for Team Knightley: a paperback edition of Mr. Knightley’s Diary by Amanda Grange will be available in the U.S. in October from Berkley. (Click on the thumbnail to see a larger version of the gorgeous cover illustration.) Berkley also will be publishing Captain Wentworth’s Diary in paperback, though no date is available yet. However, for those who can’t wait, or are on the other side of the pond, Captain Wentworth’s Diary will be available in about a month; it is available for preorder in hardback from the publisher’s site at a very nice discount. We hear that the next book in the series will be Edmund Bertram’s Diary, which should be out sometime in 2008, and after that…rumors of a certain gentleman of the military sharing his secrets have reached our shell-pink ears. AMMMMM!

For any Gentle Readers heading to Book Expo America this week, there will be a panel on Jane Austen called “Confessions of Jane Austen Addicts: Author, publisher, and bookseller perspectives on Austen’s enduring popularity” (all the way at the bottom of the page). Panelists include Kathryn Court, president and publisher of Penguin Books; Patrice Hannon, author of 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Jane Austen: The Truth About the World’s Most Intriguing Romantic Literary Heroine and the upcoming Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love; Laurie Viera Rigler, author of the upcoming Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict; and, though they are not listed on the site, we are told Emily Auerbach, author of Searching for Jane Austen; Emma Campbell Webster, author of the upcoming Lost in Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure; and Antonia Squire, children’s book buyer at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California. Also contrary to the site, we are told the panel begins at 4 p.m., not 4:30!

Attention Team Tilney (and Team Valancourt, we guess): Graphics Classics’ Gothic Classics Volume 14, featuring graphic-novel treatments of Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, is available for purchase. If you want to receive the novel right away, order direct from the publisher; they tell us it should be available on Amazon in about two weeks.

Alert Janeite Julie P. told us about A Match Made on Madison by Dee Davis, which the cover blurb claims is an homage to Emma; since it’s about high-society matchmakers, the comparison is perhaps inevitable!

Alert Janeites Joan Ellen (a sequel author herself) and Kim sent us a deal from Publisher’s Lunch Weekly that might be of interest to Team Darcy.

UK bestselling author Alexandra Potter’s ME AND MR. DARCY, a contemporary novel about life, love and dating literature’s most eligible bachelor, to Signe Pike at Ballantine, for publication as a trade paperback original, by Stephanie Cabot at The Gernert Company.

Look for it sometime next year, we would say.

Speaking of Team Darcy, Diana Birchall’s novel Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma, previously available only through online outlets, will be republished next year by Sourcebooks, publisher of Linda Berdoll’s books, Mr. Darcy’s Diary by Amanda Grange (clearly Team Darcy has a strong foothold there), and The Jane Austen Miscellany, which means that anyone who has had trouble tracking down the book will be able to purchase it in almost any bookstore. Indeed, the bookstores will be full to bursting with Jane books in the upcoming months!

(We will update the blogroll this week, we promise most faithfully!)

There’s an old story about how to boil a live frog: he will protest at being put into a pot of boiling water, so put him in a pot of nice cool water, and then slowly, slowly bring up the temperature. Before the poor thing knows what hit him, you’ve got one parboiled froggie.

(Disclaimer: AustenBlog.com does not condone or promote the slow torture of amphibians. It’s a metaphor, savvy?)

If you have a friend or family member to whom you have been trying to introduce the wonderful novels of Jane Austen, take the boiled frog approach, and do it a little at a time by using the dailylit.com service.

dailylit.com will e-mail a small piece of a classic novel each day; just enough to read in, say, fifteen minutes or so. For instance, Persuasion is divided into 95 sections, so each piece will be much less than a chapter. If the reader is at a good spot and eager to continue immediately, he or she may click a link in the e-mail to immediately receive the next section. With the prevalence of e-mail and Internet access on smartphones and mobile devices, anytime you’re stuck waiting somewhere, you’ll have something to read; if you are working hard at the computer and wish to take a little break, a few minutes to read an e-mail is an excellent pause that refreshes.

Suggest this method to your friends and family who want no parts of Jane Austen’s novels, and see if they are amenable to trying the novels in bite-sized chunks.

We currently are reading Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers this way. We own a copy of the novel, which sits on a shelf and mocks us. Rather than have to schlep around a humongous book or be intimidated by its length from even beginning it, we will read a little bit each day. Perfect!

If you have a Sony Reader e-book device, free downloads of four of Jane Austen’s novels are available at mobileread.com, including the Charles Brock watercolor illustrations, though of course the Reader renders the illustrations in grayscale as it is strictly a B&W device. (Gee, wonder where they got the illustrations? ) One hopes that the other two are on their way (ETA: the Big Six are now available)…even though we’re sticking with our Treo for reading e-books for now!

Collier Bluff Books is offering five free e-books of Kate Warren’s book The Bennets: A Pride & Prejudice Prequel to AustenBlog readers. The first five readers who e-mail collierbluffbooks AT yahoo DOT com (that’s an e-mail address; read it out loud) and mention AustenBlog and the contest will receive a PDF download of the book.