Issue 4 of HandHeldCrime is now available at http://www.handheldcrime.com/

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has an interesting feature which lists the top 25 most popular searches for the last 30 days in a particular genre. Here's the top Mystery searches for the last 30 days, and the top 25 Film-Noir searches.

Pat Harrington, a name which seems to be coming up a lot around here lately, just won first place in the OMDB Cola Caper Contest (cross-genre category) with a piece called JOE THE ANGEL AND THE PEPSI CHALLENGE. Despite what you may think, Pat is not bribeing me to constantly mention her and her work here on NEFARIOUS. This is just a good chance for me to mention both Pat and OMDB (Over My Dead Body!), both of whom contribute much to the Mystery genre on the web.

I came across this interesting article on ZDnet about the current state of the "e-book" industry. Excuse a little Blatant Self Promotion (BSP) when I say that I had my eBooks Centre webpage done and ready to go here on NEFARIOUS - Tales of Mystery before this story appeared on ZDnet. I think the story comes to some of the same conclusions as myself, although I disagree that it will take so long for the eBooks market to achieve critical mass.

CIO magazine also did a piece about eBooks and how it is effecting the traditional Publishing companies. It's definitely heavy on the business aspects of all of this but you might find something of interest. CIO generally characterizes most of the publishing giants as slow and lumbering when it comes to the whole eBooks question.

One of the ideas that I picked up somewhere in all of this was that some types of writing -- short stories, novellas, mid-list books -- that have been traditionaly hard to publish due to their size or low volume sales turn out to be well suited to e-publishing. That's one idea that's close to our hearts here at NEFARIOUS - Tales of Mystery.