So don your sans-prescription dark-rimmed glasses, and put on your impractical-yet-fashionable summer scarf. MakeUseOf is about to get hipster with a whole bunch of indie novels that you can read for free online.

Read Books for Free Online

As a basic link list, Online Novels does not provide a sexy, decked-out, graphically-oriented website. However, it does exhibit quite a few novels with very detailed and articulate descriptions of each one.

Despite Online Novels’ vintage HTML that is so ironic, it offers some quality material for you to scroll through. Most authors have their own home-pages, so you can even check out their other material.

Most of the books that you will find here are free, and they can typically be read using just your browser. There are even a few short stories and poems if you just want a quick read.

In addition to the in-browser novels, there are actually some titles available directly from authors for your Amazon Kindle. Granted, if you can’t pay out for these, you could always just use your parents’ credit card in true hipster fashion.

Booksie

Booksie is a community for aspiring writers to publish their work one chapter at a time. This site is a little more user-friendly than its Online Novels counterpart, and it also offers free audiobooks, PDFs, and eBooks.

(Please note, if you want to use your desktop to read the cleaner eBook versions, you should try out Koobits.)

Writers use Booksie with the intent of getting their work read by the world. You can do your part and join the fun as a reader of novels while they are released piece by piece. The site really focuses on the in-progress work of a book, so you actually see it develop in episodic chapters (a la Great Expectations by Charles Dickens).

This site is great for having something new to read, but if your imagination palate craves something light, Booksie also has a wide variety of poems and short stories to choose from.

However, if you aren’t big on fan-fiction, you should be warned that there are a few of them here, but generally speaking, the site has its share of good literature.

The work found on Booksie might not be of the best quality, seeing that it is written by authors who put fingers on the keyboard in their spare time, but the nice part of this is that each piece comes directly from the original creator and is completely untouched by the hands of a market-minded agent or publisher. Read with an open mind, and you just might be able to appreciate some of it.

WeBook

As previously mentioned in MakeUseOf directory, WeBook is like the Texas cage-fighting match of online literature. The premise of the entire site is that authors submit their work, let you read it, and as it gains popularity (by your votes), it will eventually reach an agent who can get it published… and make it mainstream.

While this site was initially developed for authors just trying to catch a break, it provides totally free content for those who want to sit back with a cup of Earl Grey and enter someone else’s mind for a little while. However, if you are an author, you have to pay a one-time submission fee.

Each book is run through a gauntlet of three rounds that are all part of a process called “PagetoFame”. Authors start out with a single page submission for the first round, get voted up to a five pages round, and after that, they go on to the final fifty pages round.

If the book-in-the-making gets past these three rounds, it goes on to the Literary Showcase where agents can take a gander at it.

You’ll primarily only be reading parts of unfinished books via WeBook, but when one finally makes it as a New York Times bestseller, you can tell everyone you know, “I read that chapter before it was even published.”

Conclusion

So maybe these sites aren’t going to make you a hipster, but they are going to give you a look at some fresh reading material by a few unheard-of authors. This just goes to show you that you don’t always have to depend on the publishing houses to tell you what to read.

What are some good pieces of work that you have found using these sites? Would you recommend them? Also, what other sites have you found where you can read books for free online?

Image Credit:momigo

There is no official standard of what the modern day publication should be like, but most people agree that iPad’s Flipboard and Zite are two great examples to follow. Big publishers pay professionals to redesign their publications to be more iPad friendly, while smaller ones try to do everything on their own or use ready-made templates like OnSwipe for WordPress.

If you are a fan of an iPad magazine layout and you want to publish your own, or if you just want to read your favorite news in this kind of layout, you could try Pressjack – a multi platform magazine publisher that will help you produce a web magazine from RSS feeds.

Early Editions

Pressjack is available for Windows and Mac. It works by collecting the RSS feeds of your choice and converting them into a nice e-magazine. The service is intended for publishers, but that doesn’t mean that ordinary people like us can’t try the app to create a bundle of our favorite feeds.

Pressjack is still in its very early beta with many “coming soon” features. But all the basic features are ready, and the 30-day trial version of the application is already available to download. In the near future, the developer will offer three pricing plans, including a free plan supported by advertisements.

The main window consists of three tabs: “Content“, “Articles“, and “Output“. Let’s start by building the content of the magazine. You can use the default “My Publication” or you could add more publications to the library.

When you add a new publication, the app will ask you to give a name to the publication. You could go with a general name or you could use the article source as the name, like MakeUseOf.

Next, add the feed by clicking the “+” button above the “Publication Feeds” table. Fill in the feeder’s name, category, and the feed’s URL.

After adding all the feeds that you want in the list, click the “Build” button under the feed list and Pressjack will start downloading the content of the feeds and building your magazine.

The Articles & The (Future) Features

You will find a list of all the articles from your feeds under the “Articles” tab. You can select one from the list and preview the text and other contents of the article in the right pane.

There are several article options which are disabled in the trial version. I think it means that they will be available in the future full version.

The “Output” tab is the place to preview the fully functional final result. It’s also the place to enable or disable features that you want to include in the magazine, such as Bookmarks, Print, Help, Fullscreen, and Statistics via Google Analytics.

You can also include the option to share the magazine via email and/or social networks.

Those who want to go further can customize the “Scripts” to fit their needs. Those who don’t know what they are doing had better leave these scripts alone.

Publishing The Magazine To The Web

The final product of Pressjack is an interactive web magazine. Publishers will be able to upload the magazines to their chosen web server and give access to their readers to read them online. Unfortunately, this feature is still disabled in the trial version. What users can do is upload the magazine to the Pressjack server, and the magazine will stay alive for 7 days.

This limitation will make the current version of Pressjack unusable for publishers who want to spread their magazines to the masses. However, individual news junkies can use the application to build their own personalized web magazines.

To upload the magazine to the web, press “Publish“. This process can take a while depending on how large the article collection is and how fast the internet connection is.

When the magazine has been uploaded, a small window with links to the online and offline versions of the magazine will appear. Even though the online version will only be available for about a week, you can keep the offline version forever.

This is what the web magazine looks like. Those who are familiar with Flipboard will see a resemblance in the interface between Pressjack and Flipboard.

The first page after the cover is the table of contents. You can jump into any article from this page, or you can flip through the pages like a normal magazine.

The magazine’s features are available at the top of every page.  Hover the mouse over the features to know more about them.

Ironically, even though Pressjack designed the magazine layout to mimic iPad magazines, the result is not accessible from an iPad (or other iOS devices) because it uses Flash technology.

What do you think of the “iPad magazine layout” trend? Have you tried Pressjack? Do you know of other similar applications? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.

One day when I was browsing news stories, I noticed that one particular story was published not by CNN, Associated Press or the Washington Post, but instead by a small time blogger who had landed a pretty cool exclusive story. Front page Google News.

For a moment I thought about the traffic that must have offered her site, not to mention some nice points in search engine land for authority and legitimacy. It didn’t take me long to realize that I could do the exact same thing. So I set out to learn exactly what it takes to become an authorized Google News publisher.

Submit Your Site – But Be Flexible

The first time I submitted my blog URL to be considered as an authorized Google News publisher, I was flat out rejected. I was pretty disappointed but I was also impressed with how Google handled the rejection. They provided very solid points about my blog that disqualified it for consideration. Most notably, I was a sole author and I had no contact information listed on my blog. So for the next couple of months, I set out to correct these two points and then try again.

The first thing I started doing was hiring authors for the site. One basic requirement for Google News is that you need a team of writers. Then I created an “About Us” page to list all of the bios for each writer.

With that task out of the way, I moved on to my next task, creating a professional contact page. I didn’t want to put my home phone number on the Internet, so I established a Google Voice phone number, and created a contact form with all the contact details on the same page.

Two months later, with a solid writing team and a page with contact details, I re-submitted my URL for consideration on Google News. Within a few weeks, I received an email from the folks at Google telling me that I’d been approved.

However, with that monumental task out of the way, reality sunk in. Getting accepted was one thing, but getting listed on the main news site was quite another. Even if you finally get accepted as a Google News publisher, there are a few more things you need to do so that the crawler will pick up on your latest updates.

Create A Googe News Sitemap

Just because you’re a publisher doesn’t mean that your site is optimized for the news crawler. Google News recommends that all publishers establish a news sitemap. Specifically they want to know the name of your “publication”, the language, access time (whether you require registration) and the Genre. There is a great Google News Sitemap plugin that will dynamically create this sitemap for you.  It lets you define the default settings when you first activate it.

Each time you write a post, the footer will also have a section where you can tell Google News exactly what the post is all about. If it’s not a breaking news item, change the Genre to “Blog“, and click “Non-News Item“. This is where you also add keywords.

Identify The Originating Source

Another new technique Google is using to track down the source that originally scooped a story is by trusting publishers to tell Google who the originating source was.

The rule is pretty simple. If you are sharing a blog update about a news story you’ve read, Google News requests that you add a meta tag named “syndication-source” and assign it the URL of the original story you got it from. If you’re the the originator – if you wrote an exclusively researched news story – then use a meta tag named “original-source” and assign it the URL of your news story.

Of course, as those of you with WordPress blogs know – adding custom meta tags is easier said than done. Well, I have a solution for you.

Just place the following code in the header.php file inside the <head> section:

<?php if ( get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘original-source’, true) ) : ?>
<meta name=”original-source” content=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘original-source’, true) ?>”/>
<?php endif; ?>

<?php if ( get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘syndication-source’, true) ) : ?>
<meta name=”original-source” content=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘syndication-source’, true) ?>”/>
<?php endif; ?>

What this does is checks whether you’ve created a custom field named either “original-source” or “syndication-source” and if you have, it will tag the page with the appropriate meta information with the page URL.

Adding the custom tag on the post is fast and easy for you, and you make Google happy because they get a better idea of where the news story first broke.

Accurate Title & Keywords

Google News is almost entirely automated, and it relies heavily upon the accuracy and honesty of publishers to tell Google News what the story is about. The best way to do this is through accurate title and keyword information. I suggest installing the SEO All-in-One pack.

Make sure to use the most accurate title and keywords with every post. The cool thing about doing all of this fine-tuning for Google News is that you’re also improving your site for general Google searches as well. So you get a double bonus for your efforts.

If you have a blog and you’ve tried to get approved as a Google News publisher, share your experiences with us in the comments section below. Have you had any failures or major successes? We want to know!

If this is you, then a print-on-demand publisher is exactly what you’re looking for. You don’t need to spend much (or any) money upfront – all you really do is publicise your book and the buyers can get one made when they want it. Meanwhile, you could be making a small amount or a large amount in passive income and it hasn’t cost you much except your time spent writing. Sounds good?

Choosing your print-on-demand (POD) book publisher is another thing entirely. In the end, it comes down to your needs and your particular book. For instance, some publishers are better at printing novels or photography books than others. Some will give you better royalties, while others will do a better job of helping you with promotion. To help you choose, here’s a list of four of the best online print-on-demand book publishers and a few of their key features.

1. Lulu

Lulu is one of the larger publishers and will happily cater for many types of books. You can easily publish a novel, a cookbook, or simply create a photo book for your family. They have the ability to publish and sell eBooks on your behalf and claim to have the largest distribution channels of all online publishers. Useful free services include consultations, while paid services offered include cover design, ISBN purchasing and distribution. If you choose to sell in the Lulu Marketplace without an ISBN, your upfront costs are negligible.

You can also set your profits by choosing your own royalties and Lulu makes its money by taking a small cut from your sales. Lulu pays royalties via Paypal or cheque. Read more about publishing with Lulu here.

2. Blurb

Blurb is well known for its full colour photography-based books, however it also offers a couple of black and white text novel options. You can either use their online software to prepare a book or you can upload a pre-prepared PDF. Whichever option you choose, there’s no upfront costs.

When you sell the book, Blurb takes a small fee. Plus, you can set your own prices and thereby choose your own profit margin. Blurb offers payments through PayPal.

3. Wordclay

Wordclay offers a basic DIY publishing service which is free for publishers. If you wish to pay a modest fee, services such as editing, ISBNs and distribution are available to you as well.

Again, you can choose your own royalty and Wordclay takes a cut from your sales. Wordclay sends US cheques.

4. CreateSpace (aka Booksurge)

CreateSpace offers a DIY “no fees upfront” royalty-based publishing option to complement their regular publishing offers. They are actually part of the Amazon group of companies, so there’s no extra fees involved to distribute your book through Amazon. ISBNs can be obtained for free via CreateSpace.

CreateSpace also claim to offer the best royalties in the business “” plus they allow you to choose your own royalty. Royalties can be paid by US cheque or to a US bank account.

Words of Advice

When choosing your publisher, make sure you research well and ensure it’s a good fit for you before you commit your time and money or sign any agreements. Companies such as these do have the occasional unhappy customer but it’s not the norm. Here’s a few important things to look out for:

• For non-US citizens, remember that different companies have different tax witholding requirements and that the cheque fees and your ability to deposit US cheques may de-value your earnings somewhat.
• Having your book formally listed with an ISBN will often require you to ensure the quality of your book. This may require you to purchase a copy of your book each and every time you make a change (this can include price or directory changes). If you sign up for an ISBN, read the fine print, be prepared to purchase if required and don’t make changes to your book after this unless it’s very important.
• No-frills DIY publishers will endeavour to make money from added extras such as cover art, editing and ISBNs. If you want to use these services, ensure you compare the prices between publishers and the cost of doing it yourself.

More about Self-Publishing and Writing

You might also like these articles on publishing and creating books:

• How to Actually Make Money Selling eBooks
• Become A Better Photographer with Online 365 Days Groups
• NaNoWriMo.org ““ Write a Novel In 30 Days!

If you’ve written your own book and have self-published, let us know about your experiences with the publishers. Who did you choose and why? Were there any unforseen problems? Were you happy with the book quality? Let us know in the comments!

My children, for good or bad, are the beneficiaries of this talent and have, since birth, been prey to my creative tales.

Over the years, the tales have generally revolved around whatever “thing” they were into…Spiderman Saves Lakeville…Thomas the Tank Meets the Ghostbusters (my kids are uber retro)…The Duke Boys Help CSI New York”¦

Fortunately, the boys seem to enjoy some original tales. The first set of tales, The Adventures of Charlie, was started as a way to get my younger son to stop screaming at the top of his lungs while waiting for food to be delivered at our favorite restaurant, SoNo. Charlie seems to lose a body part every time he does something stupid in public. Sadly, there isn’t much left of Charlie.

The second and newest series, The Adventures of Digger, are about truth, justice, and treasure and started as a way to teach my kids about manners.

StoryJumper is a way to preserve these ludicrous stories by letting you actually publish a children’s book. StoryJumper is an easy-to-use program that allows you to create a children’s book with simple images, text, and photos in minutes. Not creative? No worries! They even offer a step by step guide.

How to Publish a Children’s Book with StoryJumper

The first step to publishing your very own tales is to register on the StoryJumper site. This is uber easy and quick, and once you verify your email, you are all set to start a book!

If you need inspiration, simply click on the green “explore” bubble on the menu, and check out some of the other books created.  You can even personalize some of them if the author allows it.

Once you have an idea ready and waiting in your noggin, start thinking about a catchy title, the setting, the action, and the characters. If you are stuck with writer’s block, fear not! StoryJumper offers a step by step helper to get you writing.

For each page, you pick a scene (background), add “props” (images) and write text. You can also load in your own photos.

The StoryJumper repository of images and props are easy to use. You can search by category or type in a key word.

A page is complete when it has everything on it that helps you tell the story. On the image below, I am writing exactly what my son is saying. He picked the image of Digger and chose this background scene.

Once your book is complete, the sharing process is really easy. The site makes money if you buy a gorgeous printed version, but you can also print your very own free paper copy.

You can also send a link, embed the book in a blog, or place the book out for the public to view and order. If you want, you can allow others to tweak the story.

The awesome thing about StoryJumper is that you can create other things, too! You can print out a quick treasure map or use a pre-written story.

There are lots of other great programs that allow you to make your own books, but what makes StoryJumper unique is that it is really geared for children to use and allows free sharing and printing.

Have you ever written a children’s book?  Would you use this tool to make a quick holiday present?

Image credit: Betsy Streeter

Over the next few years, those early experiences as well as the investigations that followed led me to accumulate a personal library of valued online resources for journalists. These are resources that are now extremely valuable to me. They represent the core of my online research, and they are the places I immediately turn to first when it’s time to conduct another deep investigation for another news article.

As the Internet expands, the community of citizen journalists continues to grow. Along with that growth comes a sort of collaborative network where you can excel in your research more from networking than you can from competing. Unlike blogging where a lot of the work is private and independent, citizen journalism demands a very wide network of contacts, resources and leads. Therefore, in the spirit of that collaboration, I would like to offer the list of resources for journalists that I personally find invaluable to serious citizen news writers. I also welcome contact with, and collaboration with, fellow online researchers and writers.

Top 5 Resources for Citizen Journalists

One of the most significant effects of the Internet evolution into the world of “Web 2.0″ was the maturing of the journalist blogger. Early on, bloggers were scorned by mainstream journalists. However, as the years passed and citizen journalists started releasing significant news stories on blogs even earlier than the mainstream media, even major corporate news entities started accepting the reality and the legitimacy of citizen journalism. At the same time, the old-school media folks were terribly concerned about maintaining the integrity and sanctity of journalism.

It appeared that they were terrified that if just any citizen could take up investigative journalism, that journalistic ethics would go out the window. In fact, this did happen in a fair number of cases, but I would say that there were enough impressive journalistic works produced by the top bloggers, that in time the entire arena of citizen journalism was eventually acknowledged and respected. One of the products of that early concern for journalistic integrity is also my first favorite resource for journalistic writing – Journalism.org.

This project was founded as a collaborative mission between Columbia University and the Committee of Concerned Journalists (CCJ) in 2003. In 2006, the Pew Research Center took control of the project and now provides valuable information about journalism and data about the press.

Today, the site is a tremendous resource for anyone who intends to get involved in journalism, not so much as a resource to conduct the research itself, but as a place to go when you’re unsure exactly what to do with the information you’ve uncovered. This website lays out the core principles of journalism  in a way that’s accessible and understandable to the entire public. My favorite page is the Principles of Journalism list of legal and ethical guidelines. Number 1 is the most important – “Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.”

Research Tools

The next few resources are those that I turn to when I need to find some good, hard data. These are the places that you’ll want to go to initially to launch your investigation. The first resource is a website that’s actually somewhat poorly designed. I mean, the background is something out of the 1990′s, and the entire layout is terribly outdated, but the information contained on this website more than makes up for its aesthetics.

A Journalist’s Guide to the Internet is an online resource created and published by Christopher Callahan, who (at least as of 2003) was the dean of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University (now that’s a mouthful).

This website might feature cheesy icons, but if you need a launch point where you can access U.S. Federal Government agencies and resources, public records and FOIA information, business and non-profit stats and data, law and justice system information and much, much more – then this is the place for you.

The next resource, my friends, is RefDesk. It is the single, most amazing online collection of facts, resources and figures stuffed into one website that I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. Like the previous website, it is clearly not created with pretty formatting or bells and whistles in mind. It is outlined in such a way that as much useful information can be organized and stuffed into one place. I could spend an entire article reviewing this resource, but I’ll try to do it in just a few photos. In the pic above, you can see the left pane with the top Internet search engines that you can use to launch an Internet search.

As you travel down the page, you’ll see featured new stories in the center pane, and then important resources like the ability to click on and view all major news sources in the right pane, or conduct a business or people search in the left pane.

Just beyond halfway down the page you’ll find the “Fact” section where you can conduct searches in various reference sources, or in the left pane you can look up statistics and figures, or in the right pane you can locate a list of “how-to” sites. This one page is like having the entire Internet at your fingertips – it’s amazing!

Research Social Media

The last two resources for citizen journalists that I’d like to cover are not specific sites but actually categories of sites that we’ve covered here at MakeUseOf very often.

An important part of being a good journalist is knowing what’s relevant and important to the general public. Not only are social networks excellent for gauging public sentiment or buzz, but if you need information about someone, they obviously make a fantastic research tool for that as well. Charnita wrote about 3 excellent social search engines that you can use to find people. Abhijeet hit on Snitch.Name, another very cool resource to do the same sort of digging. Of course, recently Mahendra covered how to search people using alternative search engines, so I’d say MUO has this area pretty well covered.

Another useful area is determining what’s hot at the moment – the current Internet buzz. Leon covered 5 great buzz and viral video websites, and John covered how to capture breaking news on Twitter. However, one of the coolest resources for news enthusiasts to capture the latest news while gauging public reaction to it is Newscri.be.

Newscri.be lets you not only choose the category and major news source to receive your latest headlines, but you can also choose which headlines you feel should be at the top of your list, remove those you don’t want, and comment on those that remain (and read the comments of other users). It’s like a huge community of news fans redefining “top news,” rather than the corporate run news media doing so.

Local Information and Public Records

Probably the most valuable references for a journalist are public records. Many historical records for your local community, you can discover on archive if you hook up a membership with your local University library. For example, the University of Berkeley allows the public (as most library’s do) to come in and conduct research in person, even though the online resource is not available to the general public.

University libraries are always a treasure trove of local, state and federal government information as well as a plethora of scholarly journals. Every good citizen journalist owns a trusty library card.

And when you need to conduct a criminal records search or background check on someone, make sure to review Mahendra’s article on how to conduct a free criminal background check online, or Israel’s post on how to conduct a background check with your iPhone.

When you’re finished your research and you have a premium example of journalism that you’d like to submit for publication, check out the resources that mainstream news organizations now offer to citizen journalists, such as MSN’s story submission area or CNN’s iReport. Of course, if you’d like to remain avant garde, then you can always join forces with other citizen journalists over at IAmNews.  Whichever path you choose, if you stay true to the principles of journalism, you’ll do just fine.

Do you have any experience with citizen journalism? Do you have any additional resources that other researchers might find useful? Please share them in the comments section below.