The Slipstream

A degree of the surreal,

The not-entirely-real,

And the markedly anti-real.

Greylands eBook Launch website

Posted by

This special site with all of its events and attractions, will be live for one month only, starting July 4th. You can tell how many days remain of the month from the counter on the homepage.

“[Greylands] was always one of my personal favourites among the books I have written… but it was out of print,’ said the author of the book, Isobelle Carmody.

‘Books have always gone out of print and authors have always accepted they must, unless they rose into the heavens as classics. But [I realised that] in this brave new world of eBooks, there is no longer any need for any book to go out of print. Cyberspace is the library of the infinite.’

Isobelle first set out to turn Greylands into an eBook herself, as an experiment, since the rights had reverted to her some time before.

“I wanted to see if I could get my head around the technology and understand exactly what it meant to turn a book into an eBook,” she said. “The idea of the online launch came later and it would certainly have remained nothing but an idea, without the talent and hard work of uber talented webmistress, Min Dean.”

Min Dean is a commercial website developer, who also runs the Obernewtyn.net fan site.

Between them and with a little help from friends, they created the launch site, and then they had the idea of using the site to host a month Great E-volution Forum.

Little did they know what they had begun. It might be a sign of the interest and fear and confusion people feel about the sudden rise of the eBook that a small forum generated such interest and it turned into an enormous event.
The Great eBook Debate will feature daily essays from luminaries of all aspects of the book world; authors, journalists, educators at all levels, overseas and indigenous authors and editors, large and independent publishers, illustrators and poets have all offered to have their say, in essay form, many with resource links which will carry you to other articles and views.
The debate will deliver thirty guests in all, which means that by the time the month is done, you will know you all you need to know about the eBook revolution and book forms, old and new, from all angles.
If you choose to join the debate by making one or many visitor comments, you will be in the running for one of three great prizes, each of which will include a Kindle, signed print books and audio books. The winning three posts will be announced with a fanfare and another couple of special announcements, at the tail end of the month.

The site will go live at midnight on July 4th.

Min Dean, Isobelle Carmody, Adelaide Stolba, Paul Hood and Alex Adsett (from left to right) celebrate the launch of the month long Greylands launch site at Ahmet’s Turkish Restaurant at Southbank in Queensland!

So drop in to catch up on the latest essay on the Great eBook Debate page and post a comment for your chance to win one of the prize packs. Many of the site’s other attractions will be locked until their appointed day in the month, when they will go live, so make a habit of stopping in to check what’s new.
Aside from a special launch of Greylands by a mystery guest, there will be the launch of the eBook trailer, created to celebrate the e publication of Greylands, and a ‘making of’ video from the creative genius behind the trailer, Peter Mounsey of Alchemetica. You can also read archival copies of reviews that came out when the book was first released.

If you’re a tweeter, follow @firecatZ for daily updates telling you the name of the day’s guest and the title of their essay; if you’re a facebook user, check out the Greylands Facebook page for updates or to make a comments.

The eBook of Greylands will be available for download once it has been launched, and you will be able to use embedded links to acquire it from Amazon or Smashwords, if you choose.