Girlebooks publishes original material – without DRM
By Paul Biba
We had one new publisher today, Dancing Fools Press, so how about another one. I got an email from Laura McDonald at Girlebooks.com about their new effort to get original ebooks by contemporary authors onto the site. Note that, like Dancing Fools, they are not using DRM. Their initial offering sounds most interesting. Here’s what they say:
Girlebooks has published their first ebook store offering by a contemporary author, Radium Halos. It is a fictional story based on the true events of the radium dial painters–a group of female factory workers who, in the early 1920s, contracted radiation poisoning from painting luminous watch dials with radium paint. Our narrator is Helen Waterman, a 65-year-old mental patient who worked at the Radium Dial factory when she was 16. She tells us her story through flashbacks, slowly revealing her past, the loved ones she’s lost, and the dangerous secrets she’s kept all these years.
Their whole concept looks interesting. According to their site:
What is Girlebooks?
This website is the work of one woman with the help of her mom and some contributing bloggers. Much more than a simple free ebook resource, Girlebooks aims to make classic and lesser-known works by female writers available to a large audience through the ebook medium.
Why books by women?
We love books by both men and women. However, if we may generalize, women’s most loved and re-read books are generally books by other women. The same is probably true for men. Also, as women authors were not always as celebrated and promoted as they are today, we are digging up many hidden jewels that that are in the public domain, free, and deserve a wider audience.
What is different about your ebooks?
You can get free ebooks in lots of places on the internet, but our ebooks are hand-made and professionally formatted. That means each ebook has a linked table of contents and text reflow for small reading devices. We also offer our ebooks in many formats to accommodate most ebook reading devices. All of our ebooks, even the ones in the ebook store, are DRM free (no digital rights management). This means that once you download the ebook, it is yours forever.
For those of you who are interested in works by women, I suggest you run, don’t walk, to get the various travel books of Isabella Bird. This woman must have been one of the most intrepid travellers ever to stomp over the earth. You can find her books a Gutenberg and other sources. Unlike a lot of travel books they are even well written.
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