Today, I'm pleased to announce, the ebook of SBAN is now online and available for sale at ebook retailers across the Internet and around the world. The new ebook copy is also now being converted into a print-on-demand paperback that will be available for sale later this year. More announcements on that front forthcoming.
Anyone with an ebook reader, smartphone, tablet or even just plain old PC or laptop can buy the ebook and read it on their device(s). The ebook is available in formats for all the major portable reader devices today (Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android tablets & smartphones, Google Books devices, etc.). Formats for reading the ebook on your PC/laptop reader (PDF) are also available or will soon be available, depending on the outlet. (Some sites take longer than others.)
The central clearinghouse for all of this is the publisher's page for SBAN. As of this writing, SBAN's ebook publisher, Untreed Reads, is offering a 30% off sale -- just $5.59 for "Shakespeare" by Another Name in its new e-formats.
Readers already familiar with SBAN know most of the new ebook well. SBAN's introduction, foreword (by Sir Derek Jacobi), chapters, epilogue and many of the appendices remain essentially the same -- with the addition of some minor copy-edits, corrections and clarifications.
New to the 2011 edition:
- SBAN's cover featuring a new bust of Edward de Vere supervised by Ben August and sculpted by Paula Slater (as chronicled on this blog).
- An introductory chapter called "The Argument" that succinctly encapsulates the case for Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" and addresses arguments against the Oxfordian camp put forward in James Shapiro's recent book Contested Will.
- A new images section*
- A new appendix addressing the recent media frenzy over the "Cobbe Portrait of Shakespeare"
- A new appendix concerning the movie Anonymous and the questions it raises over the "Prince Tudor" hypotheses -- i.e. concerning claims of one or more secret heirs to the throne born to Queen (or Princess) Elizabeth
- A new appendix delving in to just a few of the many treasures published in Richard Paul Roe's new magnum opus Shakespeare's Guide to Italy
The editors and CEO at Untreed Reads, a publisher that specializes in ebooks, have done tremendous work converting a traditional binding-and-paper book into an ebook that we have tried at every turn to make sure serves its new medium well. (As an example, one of many decisions along the way: References to Shakespeare characters appear in the first edition of SBAN using small caps typeface. But many e-reader devices do not support small caps, so we opted to retain the style as best the format allowed -- via ALL CAPS.)
Below, our two-paragraph description of the book:
The debate over the true author of the Shakespeare canon has raged for centuries. Astonishingly little evidence supports the traditional belief that Will Shakespeare, the actor and businessman from Stratford-upon-Avon, was the author. Legendary figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Sigmund Freud have all expressed grave doubts that an uneducated man who apparently owned no books and never left England wrote plays and poems that consistently reflect a learned and well-traveled insider's perspective on royal courts and the ancient feudal nobility. Recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford—an Elizabethan court playwright known to have written in secret and who had ample means, motive and opportunity to in fact have assumed the "Shakespeare" disguise.
"Shakespeare" by Another Name is the first popular literary biography of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." This groundbreaking book tells the gripping story of de Vere's action-packed life—as Renaissance man, spendthrift, courtier, wit, student, scoundrel, patron, military adventurer, and, above all, prolific ghostwriter—finding in it the background material for all of The Bard's works. Biographer Mark Anderson incorporates a wealth of new evidence, including de Vere’s personal copy of the Bible (in which de Vere underlines scores of passages that are also prominent Shakespearean biblical references). Anderson's page-turning portrait of de Vere makes a "convincing argument" (USA Today) that is "compelling" (Chicago Sun-Times) and "especially impressive" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and "deserves serious attention." (New York Times)
So... please share this link. Please enjoy the new book in its new electronic form. And, I would gratefully request, please consider writing a review and posting it on one or more of the many new venues where the SBAN ebook now lives. (The list of third-party ebook retailers can be found in a column on the right hand side of Untreed Reads home page. The most important sites include Amazon/Kindle (US), Amazon/Kindle (UK) and Nook. SBAN on Apple's iBooks is also live, but a URL link can't be made here, as it must be accessed through Apple's iBooks app. Other vendors, such as the Kobo Reader Store, Sony Reader Store, Waterstones (UK), WH Smiths (UK), Scribd, and Google Books, are still processing the submission and should be uploading the ebook soon.)
As someone once wrote, “My thanks and duty are yours…all the rest is mute.”
As someone once wrote, “My thanks and duty are yours…all the rest is mute.”
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*The 2011 ebook SBAN contains some different images compared to the 2005/6 first edition. Significantly, because of the high level of detail found in the maps and timeline published with the first edition SBANs (and the fact that these images as displayed on many e-reader devices today would be practically unreadable) we opted not to publish the maps or timeline in the SBAN ebook.
2 comments:
Congratulations on the reissue of this terrific book. I hope the digits edition finds a whole new audience. The price is right too!
Okay, I obviously meant digital, not digits.
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