Looking for an ebook read but don't fancy messing with the complicated authentication schemes that often get in the way? New site eBooks Just Published focuses on newly-published titles that don't use any form of digital rights management (DRM), making it much easier to read them on a wide variety of devices. Perhaps surprisingly, there's more fiction than non-fiction on offer. There's also a useful subcategory of entirely free titles if you're looking to save a few dollars.

Popular author Stephenie Meyer put her eagerly-anticipated vampire genre sequel Twilight Sun on indefinite hold after copies of her rough draft showed up on BitTorrent sites. The (obviously somewhat biased) TorrentFreak takes authors to task for not using online leaks as a promotional tool, but I have to ask: Would having access to a digital copy of a nearly-complete book inspire you to purchase the ink-and-paper version? Would having an advanced ebook reader, like the increasingly popular Kindle, change your answer? Let's hear both sides in the comments.

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Windows/Mac/Linux: Free ebook converter GutenMark takes plain ebooks from the Project Gutenberg site and converts them into chapter-separated HTML files, italicizes words in foreign languages, removes all-caps instances, and much, much more. One of the main uses of GutenMark is to make ebooks much easier to read on mobile screens, removing hard line breaks and other annoyances that come with some straight-up Gutenberg text downloads. As its own home page describes it, GutenMark is a "prettifier" for Gutenberg texts, and a pretty good one, at that. GutenMark is a free download for WIndows, Linux, and (with more complications) Mac OS X.

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Radiologists in Shanghai are reportedley using iTunes to organize medical papers published as PDFs. It's not as crazy as it sounds—we ran down how to organize your PDF library with iTunes over a year ago. [via]

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International lifehackers, unite! Dutch speakers, our life hacking friends in the Netherlands have released an ebook compilation of their best posts and are offering it as a free download here. Nice work, lifehacking.nl!

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Need some fresh e-reading material for your commute, but all out of e-books? Feedbook, a free RSS aggregator, takes in RSS feeds and spits out compiled PDFs in formats for pretty much any e-reader under the sun, including the Kindle, or you can create custom PDFs (with a free registration) for standard screens. The PDFs even come with a table of contents, and the site offers up a few free e-books of its own. Not every feed works all the time, including this here site's full feed this morning, but those that do come out looking surprisingly nice. Feedbook is free to use, but a free registration gives you a few more conversion options.

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Here's a cool option you probably didn't know was buried in Vista: the ability to read an online archive of replica historical documents direct from the OS in their original format. The documents are part of an online archive which is accessible to anyone with the Silverlight plug-in, but Vista users can access them natively. This is one of dozens of tips featured in our special Lifehacker Vista hub, worth checking out if you're using the OS.

Want a free ebook copy of a Kurt Vonnegut novel? Free ebook site Wowio has five of them, along with lots of other copyrighted fiction, literature, comics, and other works. The site offers the wares through sponsorships, and only limits your downloads to three books per day, 30 per month. The two caveats are a somewhat limited selection (as you might expect) and that the site's U.S.-only due to licensing restrictions. Otherwise, it's not a bad place to check for fresh content for your PDA, cell phone or computer screen. For more free page-turners, try the top ten sites for free books and the 100 best free Project Gutenberg books.

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Normally we leave gadget reviews to the crazy cats over at Gizmodo, but when reader Pete Riley told us he's "totally hooked" on Amazon's new reading device Kindle because of its time-saving superpowers, we had to know more. Right now the $399 e-reader is out of stock, but since Pete's one of the lucky ones who got ahold of the device, he was kind enough to write up his impressions.

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To celebrate the seventh birthday of his blog, author Neil Gaiman (who wrote Stardust, which was recently turned into a movie) ran a poll on his website asking readers to nominate one of his novels to make available for free download.
He asked readers to vote for the book they'd most like to offer someone who hadn't read any of his books before - and they voted for his book American Gods.
It's now online and available for download all this month - if you haven't read it, check it out. It's a great read. Although personally speaking I'd rather read it in dead tree format. I know, I'm old fashioned. :)