A Few Words About Open Road Media

   I'd like to say a few words in praise of Open Road Media.  Open Road's been around for a few years now, making a lot of backlist titles available as ebooks, and the range of work offered is wonderful.  You can check out the goodies at:
               http://www.openroadmedia.com/ebooks.aspx
   You'll find Walter Lord's books on the Titanic and thrillers by Jack Higgins.  Science fiction classics by Theodore Sturgeon and political science works by James MacGregor Burns.  Modern classic war novels by James Jones and contemporary horror by Robert McCammon.  Literary biographies by Fred Kaplan and Erich Fromm's books on psychology.  Suspense novels by Ruth Rendell and short stories by Stanley Elkin.  Work by Octavia Butler, William Goldman, Fay Weldon, William Manchester, Barbara Pym, and more. 
  Working with Otto Penzler's MysteriousPress.com, they've brought us excellent suspense novels by Brian Garfield, James M. Cain, Donald Westlake, and others.
   Open Road offers a selection as varied as that of the best traditional publishers, and that isn't surprising because the CEO and co-founder of Open Road, Jane Friedman, was president and CEO of HarperCollins for a decade and before that she was a VP at Random House.
   The people at the helm of Open Road know publishing as well as the technology of creating ebooks, and they do a NICE job of preparing ebooks.  Open Road has recently issued a large portion of Irwin Shaw's backlist; it had been more than twenty years since I'd read Shaw's Rich Man, Poor Man or Beggarman, Thief and I revisited them once the pre-orders showed up on my Kindle.  If there were any typos, I didn't notice them, and the same is true of the other Open Road titles I've read.
   Open Road has published ebooks of backlist titles that hadn't been available in bookstores for years, among them Irwin Shaw's Voices of a Summer Day, Budd Schulberg's The Four Seasons of Success (under the title Writers in America), and Malcolm Lowry's October Ferry to Gabriola.  Open Road does backlist right, and the company deserves our congratulations, our thanks, and a share of our ebook dollars.  Here's hoping they stick around for a long time to come.

   (And if anyone from Open Road happens to read this, please consider the following writers if possible: Don Robertson, Stanley Ellin, Thomas Williams, Jon Hassler, Charles Beaumont, Gerald Kersh, Tabitha King, Walter Tevis, Evan Hunter, Jack Finney, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jorge Luis Borges, Roger Zelazny, and Joseph Epstein.)

*****

And a brief commercial.  Have put a few of my ebooks back up on Smashwords, from which they'll make their way back to Sony, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, and Apple's iBooks store some time fairly soon.  Give 'em a look when you get a chance (but if you've not read Sturgeon, or Shaw, or Goldman or some of the others mentioned above, make sure you grab their books first).