This week, host Mark Jeffrey welcomes guest J. Daniel Sawyer, the Parsec-nominated author of “Predestination,” “Sculpting God” and “Down From Ten.” Plus, we’ll ask the question, “will physical books be gone in five years?” For more information, show notes and an upcoming schedule, go to http://thisweekin.com

Coming Up:
Nicolas Negroponte declares the paper book dead within five years, Anne Rice vehemently disagrees and author J. Daniel Sawyer is our guest on This Week In Books, starting right now.

Guest: J. Daniel Sawyer, author of DOWN FROM TEN, releasing Oct. 29 on Amazon.

Introduction:

The Parsec Finalist novel Predestination: Book 1 of the Antithesis
Progression, a science fiction spy thriller about the former U.S.
National Security advisor, the people who are hunting him, and the
interplanetary war his defection inadvertently starts.

The Parsec-nominated anthology Sculpting God, which I bill as “Bedtime
Stories for Adults.”

Parsec-Nominated Down From Ten:
“You need to listen to Down from Ten, the podcast novel that will cut you with its beauty.” -Philippa Ballantine, Award-winning author of Geist, Chasing the Bard, Digital Magic, and Weather Child

All my fiction podcasts are produced with full voice casts, soundtracks
(largely original compositions by Danny Schade, with occasional podsafe
or public domain supplementation), and soundscaping

Clarke Lantham
My dark comedy/hard-boiled detective novel “And Then She Was Gone” is
currently available as an ebook on Amazon, Smashwords, and B&N.  I’m
staging a rush for October 29 to try to push up the Kindle charts and
attract attention outside the community.

Question:
1.)  Your novels are available only as podcasts or self-pubbed ebooks.  Have you made any moves towards ‘legit’ publication?  Do you have an agent?
2.)  What got you into writing fiction & doing podiobooks?
3.)  How did you go about
4.)  Let’s go through each podiobook, what each one is about.  How long are they?
5.)  How do you promote your work online?  Goodreads?
6.)  You have a Kindle rush coming up on Oct 29.  First: explain what that is.  And Do those still work?  How many units do you need to sell?
7.)  Did you attend the Parsec Awards?  What was that like?
8.)  Where can people find you online?  Plug your website and Twitter.

NEWS:

Stephen R. Donaldson released ‘The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Against All Things Ending’ this week.  Mark and Daniel talked for 10 minutes about this release and the Thomas Covenant series in general, as well as Stephen R. Donaldson’s other books including ‘The Man Who .. ‘ series and the Gap series.

ARTICLE ONE: Will physical books be gone in five years?

As e-book readers and tablet computers become more common, one prominent tech mogul says that physical books could disappear sooner than expected.
In an interview with CNN’s Howard Kurtz on “Reliable Sources,” author Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop per Child, said the physical book’s days are numbered.
“It will be in five years,” said Negroponte. “The physical medium cannot be distributed to enough people. When you go to Africa, half a million people want books … you can’t send the physical thing.”
Negroponte emphasized the efficiency of being able to put hundreds of books on the laptops his organization sends to villages. “We put 100 books on a laptop, but we also send 100 laptops. That village now has 10,000 books,” he said.
CNN iReport: Have you replaced books with an e-reader? Share your story.
When it comes to making e-books standard, Negroponte thinks that developing countries may actually be faster than developed countries.
“That’s what cell phones did,” Negroponte said. “Cell phones were more popular in Cambodia and Uganda because they didn’t have phones. We had phones in this country, and we were very late to the table. They’re going to adopt e-books much faster than we do.”
Negroponte founded One Laptop per Child in 2005 with the goal of providing one internet-connected laptop to every school-age child in the world. Through the help of industry insiders, the organization created the XO, a lightweight and durable laptop.
For $199, it’s possible for individuals to buy a laptop for a child in the developing world through the website www.laptop.org/en/.

ARTICLE TWO
ANNE RICE on Twitter and Facebook responded to this article:

Why do books have to look like they did in the 1500′s? Why are they still made of paper? Imagine a beautiful synthetic book, feather weight, with bright white pages, impervious to mildew, water, or rot. Why not? Why is there no investment in this area?
A new synthetic book could preserve the age old fonts,the glory of full color illustrations, the beautiful feel of the volume in hand, yet be cheap to produce, cheap to ship, and easy to store. To save the book, we need to remake the book. We have reinvented clothing with synthetics. Why not books?
Kindle and ebooks are fine for those who are connected, and possess technology. But a new featherweight synthetic physical book could go with one to the most remote villages or mountain peaks or desert islands of the world. It could endure in a tropical rain forest. Shipping and storage of such books could revolutionize the “book industry.”

Borders Launches $89 & $199 eBook Packages for Self-Published Authors
By Jason Boog on October 15, 2010 3:53 PM
Borders has entered the self-publishing fray, competing with Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords with the new Borders Get Published program for eBooks.
The program will be driven by the BookBrewer publishing platform. Starting October 25, writers can publish and sell eBooks through the Borders eBook store, as well as other partner eBook retailers.  Borders hopes that both bloggers and self-published authors will use the service to publish their work.
eBookNewser has more about pricing and royalties: “There are two tiers of pricing for those looking to get published –$89.99 and $199.99. Under the basic package, BookBrewer will assign the book an ISBN and make it available to major eBook stores at a price set by the writer. Royalties will be based on sales and will vary with each retailer. The higher priced package comes with a full version of the ePub file, that authors can share with friends, family and press and submit to other eBook stores.”

ARTICLE FOUR
HANDWRITTEN Dr. SUESS BOOK UP FOR AUCTION
Would you pay $1,000 for a handwritten Dr. Seuss book? That’s the current bid for a long lost Dr. Seuss manuscript up for auction at Nate D. Sanders. The collection is pictured above, via the auction site (click to enlarge).
The manuscript began almost forty years ago. The rhyme master wrote the first seven pages of the 19-page manuscript and an assistant completed the job. You can see Seuss’ corrections throughout the remainder of the manuscript. The story focuses on athletics: “All Sorts of Sports. Shall I play checkers? golf? croquet? There are so many games there are to play.”