Voicemail: Tim enjoyed the Tracy Hickman interview, and comments on how busy the bookstores near him are; Ben in Tampa thanks the guys for introducing him to Brandon Sanderson and the art assignment he procured as a result, which you can see at http://inkthinker.deviantart.com; Trampas is not happy with the PC Kindle app he's been trying out, and now he's having second thoughts on his desire for an iPad (Stackpole recommends the Adobe and Sony free readers); Trampas comments on the thought of replacing print books with ebooks in order to save space;
A recommendation for Librivox for those interested in hearing audio versions of classic books; Mario suggests Zane Grey's public domain stories for some good reading; another listener likes that Mike and Mike are keeping up with the latest ebook developments; Waldo asks Stackpole how he got his start as a professional writer; Mari from Michigan recommends to her fellow college students a technique to convert her class reading to audio using text-to-speech conversions;
Listener Review: Web Genii brings us a review of Soulless by Gail Carriger, the first in the Parasol Protectorate series
Sandra the Trucker comments on Web Genii's problem with extra characters when converting from PDF to text; Jordan from Baltimore asks about royalties and ebooks; Amy from KY comments on the Dorchester Publishing switch from paperback to electronic formats, with more info on Dorchester's financial situation; Patrick from Phoenix wonders if the struggles facing Barnes & Noble's and Borders will affect the availability of some of the smaller magazine titles.
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Just listened to this show and wanted to comment on the last call (about magazine publishing). If you didn't already know this, magazine publishing has been going downhill for YEARS. The lack of bookstores like Borders/B&N isn't going to be their downfall; their downfall is the same thing that books are running into now - not changing their business model to work with the new technologies.
I worked for a large magazine publisher for several years in their web development department, and the only magazine that saw any growth in revenue are those that had good online presences. Almost every magazine out there has consistently seen a decrease in subscription rates steadily for the past ten years. Sure, not having as many big bookstores around might hurt some magazines a bit, but print magazines will be dead long before that really becomes a serious issue.
One more very important point to consider is that most magazines don't really make that much money from you buying a magazine at a bookstore (or magazine stand or whatever). They don't make their money on subscriptions either (at least not directly) - you can't believe that Sports Illustrated is making profit on printing and mailing you an issue each week for the <$1 per issue, can you?
Magazines make their money based on ads almost exclusively. and rates per ad are determined based on number of subscriptions (which is why you can often get free subscriptions to just about every magazine if you wait around for it to happen). So, in reality, the only way that a magazine really has any potential to profit off of you when you buy a magazine in a store is if you in turn subscribe to that magazine later. If you're just going to pick up a magazine one time because it looks interesting at the airport (or whatever), the magazine's publisher really doesn't care too much about you at all. They'd rather you pay less per issue and have that monthly subscription.