SF Signal has a page collecting links works from this year's Hugo nomination list that are online for free. This is a great chance to read some of the year's best speculative fiction - nearly all the nominated novellas, novelettes and short stories are online, and Harper Collins has even put up a substantial [...]...

Always wanted to create comics but can't draw? Try Bitstrips. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes: BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site — you make "characters" using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of [...]...

Joel Rickett writes: Some of the UK's best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools. The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming's The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan's classic thriller The 39 Steps. It [...]...

Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo has a great article up about book-buyers' rights in the age of ebooks and licensing. If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the "first sale" doctrine. Digital [...]...

The Guardian has an exclusive excerpt from Philip Pullman's latest book, Once Upon a Time in the North, which takes place in the same world as his acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy and a few decades earlier. The most interesting thing was the bears. The first time Lee saw one slouching casually out of an alley [...]...