I just added two tags to the site: cheap and bundle.

Bundle is pretty self-explanatory: it marks a series that has a bundle of multiple ebooks available for one price.

Sometimes these are a really good deal and well-formatted; sometimes they are not. So you may want to check the comments before you buy one.

Cheap needs a little more explanation. I’m using cheap to mean that every book (not including any anthologies that contain stories) in the series costs less than $5 in ebook form.

As I mentioned earlier, I am starting to check out the really cheap ($0.99 to $2.99) UF/PNR books and finding some good stuff, but for the moment $5 seemed like a good cut-off.

But remember to check the price before you hit the buy button. I don’t think I tagged any series with short-term promotional prices, but I was doing this by hand so I may have missed something.

You can’t see it – or at least I hope you can’t see it! – but I spent my free time over the past week entirely rewriting the database schema for the site in order to support anthologies.

The visible outcome of the rewrite is the Anthologies page … which I admit needs some help right now – but hey, at least it’s there. Stories that appear in an anthology are still listed on the author and series pages as normal, but you can also find a link to their anthology from their individual story page.

As an example, Tempt Me Eternally is still listed in the Gena Showalter and Alien Huntress line-ups, but the page for Tempt Me Eternally also has a link to the anthology Deep Kiss of Winter.

I haven’t converted all of the stories already on the site over to anthologies yet – they each have to be done by hand – and for most of the anthologies I only have one or two stories in the database.

Some stories are available both in an anthology and separately and I haven’t quite worked out how to display those yet so for the moment I am just adding comments to the story page. (Dragonswan, I’m looking at you.)

I’m very happy to have the database work done, though. Next I just need to support books that aren’t in a series …

Tonight I added links to Barnes &  Noble and the Book Depository for most of the books on the site. I’m a Kindle user, of course, but I know some poor benighted souls use Nooks. And I am fond of the Book Depository because of their free worldwide shipping. You can find big shiny buttons on each book page that link to these sites.

Be aware that these are affiliate links. That means that if you follow one of those links and then buy a book, I get a few cents. That money goes to help support this site – well, truthfully to help support me while I spend all my time reading *cough* – but if you’d rather not use an affiliate link I won’t yell at you or anything.

If there are other book sites that you’d like to see linked here, please let me know!

I finally got tags working on the site last night, which should make finding things to read a little easier. Find a series you know you like, then click on the tags to see other series that share that tag.

Most of the tags are pretty basic right now – vampires, elves, things like that – but I’ll be expanding them to be more useful for classifying books in the future. For example, I’ve already tagged the young adult books, a few erotica series, some historicals, and books written in a style that I have rather loosely decided to call modern – largely because I refuse to call it chic lit.

As always, if you have feedback or suggestions please contact me!

I also finally added the rest of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s *-Hunter books (Dark-Hunter, Were-Hunter, and Dream-Hunter). I mean no disrespect, but … too many books!

I didn’t know about it until recently, but Amazon has been working on ‘Kindle for the Web’, a way to read Kindle eBooks in your browser. You can already read Kindle eBooks on your computer, of course, but you have to download the right app (PC, Mac, iPad, etc.) and then download the books. Kindle for the Web just shows the book in your browser without any of that bother.

Anyway, the reason this is important: using Kindle for the Web, you can get free sample chapters for many books and embed them in a web page. Which is what I did today – at least for most of the 370 books on the site.

Here, take a gander at a sample from Pale Demon, the latest Hollows book by Kim Harrison.

The formatting isn’t always the best – and if I have any control over that I can’t seem to figure it out. And unfortunately the samples don’t work for all books. I had to verify the samples by hand, so there was plenty of room for mistakes. If you see something wonky, please let me know!