MeFi Projects

A 2017 post on the Blue linked to an essay (archive.org!) about a kinda mysterious 1886 American book, The Story of Don Miff, highlighting its unusual "postmodern" elements. I made a proper proof-read ebook, not previously available, that you can get at >> gutenberg.org <<. [more inside]
posted by sylvanshine on May 12, 2024 - 1 comment

Tales From The Town (previously on projects: 1, 2) is my ongoing weekly story series about a small, strange town (latest episodes appear here every Saturday; earliest episodes can be found here). About half the stories follow the adventures of four siblings growing up in a weird, rambling, semi-haunted house, and the rest feature various vignettes about the other inhabitants of the town. It recently reached its 101st episode and to celebrate I've released two free anthologies of the stories from the first two years of the series. Volume 1 (Summer, then Winter) collects the first 52 (standalone) episodes, while Volume 2 (The Lodger Suite), which was an attempt at an ongoing episodic story, collects the next 40 or so. [more inside]
posted by dng on Mar 24, 2023 - 0 comments

Female Kill Machine 2 is the lightning-paced absurdist quantum explosion of ever-escalating cyberpunk insanity and hyperviolence sequel to the lightning-paced absurdist quantum explosion of ever-escalating cyberpunk insanity and hyperviolence original (Female Kill Machine 1). Female Kill Machine 2 is available to buy and read for £0 (or more) at Ko-Fi, Amazon and Patreon right now, and features upwards of 27,000 words of Absurdo astonishments (Female Kill Machine 1 is also available from those same sources: Ko-Fi, Amazon, Patreon). [more inside]
posted by dng on Oct 6, 2022 - 0 comments

Female Kill Machine is a lightning-paced absurdist quantum explosion of ever-escalating cyberpunk insanity, set in a near-future world of almost total corporate control, where the world's richest men amuse themselves by attempting to build the most deadly female killing machine possible. But what if you have no interest in fulfilling the purpose for which you've been built? What if instead of fighting all you want to do is think? Warning: this book contains despicable villians, occasional bouts of hyperviolence, and also a penguin. Female Kill Machine is available as an ebook on ko-fi (free/pay what you want); amazon (£3/$4, or free on kindle unlimited); itunes (£3/$4) and patreon (free for subscribers). [more inside]
posted by dng on Sep 4, 2021 - 2 comments

There’s a cult band from the late 80s onward called the KLF (and other names); they made a step-by-step guide to achieving a number one single with no money or musical skills. Legitimate copies of the book are hard to find, or priced for collectors. Released in 1988, though copies are around on the internet; based on the same source version, there are many typos and OCR artifacts. I decided to clean it up and share. [more inside]
posted by Pronoiac on Feb 2, 2021 - 3 comments

An unhappy bride weeps beneath the moon on her wedding night. A priest who should know better leaves the safety of his church to follow a cat out into the city and see where it is it goes. A lonely girl sits at her window and wishes, just once, to go to the ball. And is that the devil on the road, waiting for you as you make your way home… The Unhappy Bride and other tales is a collection of contemporary fairy tales, in which you'll find Queens and Kings, wolves and cats, the devil himself, even the stars made flesh. You’ll find love here, too, so much love. And with it always sadness. [more inside]
posted by dng on Dec 5, 2015 - 2 comments

This is [indirectly] Jessamyn's fault. :) [more inside]
posted by bitter-girl.com on Feb 18, 2015 - 2 comments

Do Not Disturb The Dragon! is a picture book (an actual real physical book available in bookshops and everything, which is quite exciting, for me at least) about a dragon that really just wants to sleep and sleep and sleep some more, but everyone else seems to be determined to keep her awake. It’s quite funny, and exciting, and contains at least one picture of things being set on fire, which is everything you could ever want from a book about dragons, really. [more inside]
posted by dng on Sep 8, 2014 - 1 comment

I took Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and remixed it so that throughout the entire story, Scrooge has a boner. It’s juvenile and incredibly stupid, but I dare say parts of it turned out pretty damn funny. It’s available as a free eBook, and you can download it in MOBI (Kindle), ePub (everything else), or Word formats. Or you can just read the whole thing online. [more inside]
posted by JoeGoblin on Dec 18, 2013 - 6 comments

I wrote this funny, short mystery story in 2011 about talking turkeys on Thanksgiving Day who wanted to escape the farmer's axe. My new Thanksgiving tradition is to give it away for free for five days every November. It's written entirely in rhyme, so I'm hoping it'll be a fun read for both grown-ups and kids. [more inside]
posted by destinyland on Nov 22, 2013 - 0 comments

A Dangerous Woman Press is my way of creating an ebook The World's Most Dangerous Woman that is a hybrid of short stories complete with mini-chapters that taken together, form a cohesive novel -- plus there are one shot stories and a companion magazine that takes the supporting characters related to the main book and gives them starring roles in their own serialized stories. [more inside]
posted by Alexandra Kitty on Nov 4, 2013 - 0 comments

I released a short ebook about integrating Stripe payments with Ruby on Rails applications. It goes in depth into things you can do to make your Stripe integration robust in the face of a variety of types of failures, as well as how to make it sure and auditable. I also wrote a short blog post about the process of writing and selling the book.
posted by zrail on Sep 11, 2013 - 0 comments

I've recently launched my first book at my new ebook-only publishing house. Dedicated to publishing only literature in English translation and selling the books DRM-free and worldwide, I've partnered with prestigious publishing houses in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Brazil to bring the best of contemporary world literature to, well, anybody anywhere, if they can read English and have an ereading device. [more inside]
posted by mekanic on Apr 26, 2013 - 2 comments

With the fifth anniversary of my father's death approaching this April 10, I've spent the past three months diving into some of his WordPerfect for DOS files. As of today, three titles have been published via Kindle Direct Publishing (without DRM), and I've begun the process of prepping for print publication via CreateSpace. [more inside]
posted by theonetruebix on Mar 18, 2013 - 2 comments

My parents got a Kindle for Christmas, and I've looked into ways for them to read public domain books from outside Amazon on it, and the interfaces for browsing for books and transferring them are ... non-optimal. I found the Magic Catalog, an ebook index of Project Gutenberg books, linked up so that you can immediately download books and add them to your Kindle, without using a computer or Amazon. It's in a useless order, though – it's not sorted by the book title, or by author. So I thought I'd take a shot at fixing that. Here’s the prototype, sorted by the author's last name. This is my first ebook, so please forgive the rough edges.
posted by Pronoiac on Feb 18, 2013 - 7 comments

The Publication Standards Project campaigns for free and open standards for digital publishing, for the benefit of readers, writers, libraries, and publishers alike. We started with a two-part essay by nickd on A List Apart. Last month's campaign concerned DRM, and this month we're focusing on libraries. We hope our supporters will embrace Monday, July 16 as Information Access Day and take the opportunity to open a conversation on issues of information freedom, literacy, and access.
posted by booknerd on Jul 12, 2012 - 0 comments

After 48 years I've finally published my first book - an ebook for children that's written in rhyme. It uses 12 public domain illustrations for a "mystery" story about four talking turkeys, one of which is plotting an escape before Thanksgiving Day. It was pretty exciting when it briefly passed a Curious George ebook on Amazon's list of the best-selling children's ebooks about animals. I dedicated the book to a friend who died last week, because I'd always thought we'd watch the world changing together...
posted by destinyland on Nov 22, 2011 - 0 comments

A Minecraft-themed parody of @horse_ebooks.
posted by aparrish on Nov 10, 2011 - 0 comments

AE - The Canadian Science Fiction Review, of which I am the editor and co-founder, has now been publishing free Creative Commons SF continuously for one year. In celebration, we are releasing our first issue as a free ebook (Kindle and EPUB) and throwing a party in Toronto. [more inside]
posted by 256 on Nov 1, 2011 - 0 comments

A year in the making, the book I co-edited is now out! The book includes inventive, thoughtful, and funny pieces in which Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, Benjamin Kunkel, Joe Meno, Deb Olin Unferth, and many others consider the landscape as the literary world faces a revolution, a sudden change in the way we buy, produce, and read books. [more inside]
posted by cmaxmagee on Mar 2, 2011 - 2 comments