Et tu, Brute?

I think I might have discovered a wonderful series on Smashwords by a woman in New Zealand. She published the novels herself; she gives two away and sells the rest for only 1.99. I won't talk about her books until I've read them, at which point I'll write a review. What interests me is that this woman--and others, like me--put her book up on websites herself and then marketed the books through her own blog and website, a radically new way of publishing.

I saw her novel and noticed that she had 25 four-star reviews--pretty amazing. I think she published the first one close to 2 years ago. Nevertheless, getting 25 reviews of that caliber is no small feat and persuaded me download her two free books. If I like them, I'll by the other three. So, the time it took me to discover this woman's books, which I had never heard of in my life, and the time it took me to download them for my Kindle was less than five minutes.

I hate Border's bankruptcy. It's my favorite store--and I don't mean my favorite bookstore. I mean my favorite store. I bought probably half a dozen gifts for Christmas from them and another recently for a birthday, all for people who don't read ebooks.I hang out in the coffee shop with my friends and talk about how much we love to hang out in bookstores.

Yet, I don't know how it can be saved when readers like me, and so many friends who read, have found the ease of downloading from our homes from unlimited sources. I noticed that most of the book descriptions on Smashwords had grammatical mistakes of a fairly serious nature, which tells me that the books are probably very bad. Still, in the midst of unintentional sentence fragments and comma splices, I found a gem and then owned it--in less than five minutes.

I'm afraid Border's would say to me, "Et tu, Brute?"