I love Barnes & Noble.

I know, I know, they a huge, faceless business that crushed mom and pop book stores across the nation, rending their bodies and shoveling the remains into their gaping corporate maw. But they’re also the only bookstore within thirty miles of my house. In my town, B&N didn’t crush a bunch on indie bookstores, it introduced the population to these funny things called “words” which were “written” in “books”.

And they’ve made certain choices that I consider very moral. They went with an industry-standard ePub format, rather than creating their own proprietary eBook format. And they made it easy to get your own content – ePubs, PDFs, etc – onto their hardware, the Nook. And the Nook is easy to root (gain complete control over). Finally, when Microsoft threatened B&N with a patent suit over their use of the Android operating system, B&N told Microsoft to fuck off.

So, yeah, for a corporation, B&N is in my “good” column.

They’re also in trouble.

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Did you get a shiny new NookdlePad for Christmas? Since people think Amazon has been selling more than a million Fires a week for the last month or so, chances are pretty good you did.

But what good is a shiny new eReader that isn’t chock full of shiny new books? Well, I suppose it’s still useful for holding down papers, or maybe making your friends and coworkers jealous, but that’s not really the point, is it?

So here are my top five recommendations for filling up your Christmas eReader:

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A few weeks ago, Harry Connolly announced that his series, Twenty Palaces, had been canceled.

That post is every author’s worst nightmare in text. You pour your heart and soul into something, for years, and then one day, somebody just says, “no, thanks. That’s enough.” And it’s every fan’s nightmare, because when you read an exciting, well-written series, it becomes a part of you. You feel, just a little bit, like you own it. So why am I recommending this to you? Because I like to frustrate you? No. But first, let me tell you a bit about the series.

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