We've been busy on the archive this holiday season. Here's what's new:

1. Database. LabRat has updated the database spreadsheet. It's current to the Dec. 9 upload, indexing 3,568 stories. Lots of data for your searching/sorting/filtering pleasure!

2. Christmas stories. We've collected 21 Christmas-themed Lois & Clark stories in a Holiday Anthology for your e-reader. Available in epub and mobi for formats. Help keep the holiday spirit alive -- read a Christmas fic today!

3. All the novels. How many words does it take to make a novel? Googling will get you figures from 40,000 to 60,000 words. We split the difference and decided on 50,000 words. Care to guess how many stories on the archive are 50,000 words or greater? Drumroll, please ... there are 231 novels on the archive, using that definition.

Would you like to have the whole collection, formatted for your enjoyment on your Kindles, Nooks, iPads, etc? You are in luck! A team of volunteers has converted them to ebook format, so you can load up your e-reader, then curl up in your favorite reading spot for some serious fanfic consumption.

Do you want them all in one download? Your luck continues! There's a zip file containing all 231 epub files, and another zip file for the 231 mobi (Kindle) files. And the stories are also listed by author for a la carte downloading.

Here's an interesting stat: We have at least 80 novelists whose works appear on the archive. Seven of them have written nine or more Lois & Clark novels. One of them has written 23, and co-authored another!

Our most prolific novelists...

Carol M - 7 novels
Yvonne Connell - 9 novels
Jenni Debbage - 10 novels + one co-written
Terry Leatherwood - 9 novels
Cindy Leuch - 5 novels
Philip Mogul - 5 novels + one co-written
Raconteur - 6 novels
Wendy Richards - 13 novels
Nan Smith - 9 novels
Stopquitdont - 7 novels + one co-written
Shayne Terry - 9 novels
ML Thompson - 23 novels + one co-written
Tank Wilson - 6 novels

You guys are the tip of our iceberg of awesomeness. Really, isn't our fandom amazing? We are blessed to have so many talented authors writing stories for us to enjoy.

I'd like to give a shoutout to the ebook volunteers who have been working behind the scenes for the past couple of years -- and in an increasing frenzy this month -- to turn archive text into e-reader-friendly ebooks: Doranwen, Bob Bartholomew, Kismatt, Iolanthe, Ryan, Kate, Machelle and Ceri. Thanks so much, guys! An extra tip of the hat to Kismatt, who made cool graphic covers for her conversions.

-- Lauren

(The 50,000-word definition is kind of arbitrary. If we had gone with 40,000 words as our definition of a novel, there would have been more than 300 novels on the archive! But we wouldn't have made our end-of-year deadline if we'd done that. A project for the future, definitely.)

Wow, that's impressive. Thanks, everyone, for their hard work. And go, ML!

Michael

That's awesome. I can see I'm going to be giving my Kindle a workout! Thanks, Lauren & everybody who helped! We have a fabulous fandom and I'm fortunate to be a part of it.

PJ

How very cool! Big thanks to all who worked so hard!

Thank you for putting in all that work to make it easier for us to read some fantastic fiction.

Joy,
Lynn

Oh, that's impressive. Thanks so much!
Artemis

Clearly, I have some reading to catch up on! Thank you so much for all your hard work. It is greatly appreciated.

This is really wonderful! FoLC's are hardworking folks who fearlessly juggle RL with writing and creating beautiful websites.

My hat is off to all of you!

Wow, that's great! Thanks so much everyone.

This is even more impressive since the 231 are single stories of novel length. If the series stories were combined and included I'm sure that number would close to double. Congratulations.

I tried to download this file (All the Novels file, BTW) today to my Nook (the epub version) and it said it was "unreadable". Does anyone know what to do to fix this problem? I'm thinking it's because it's in a zip file.

Thanks.

Hi Virginia:
I did an individual epub file and it opened fine on my Sony Reader. Yes, it is probably because the whole thing is a zipped file. DL to your computer and you probably have software that will unzip the file. Or just DL individual stories.

Artemis

Sorry about that -- should've mentioned you need to unzip the zip file. I've amended the wiki page.

Re: zip tools, the freeware 7zip is nice, if you're looking for a zip utility. It's for Windows. Not sure what zip programs are available for Macs.

Lately I've been rereading some favorite fanfics on a Kindle Fire HD and really enjoying that text-to-speech Play button. It's almost like having new audiofic. (I miss audiofic! It's been years since we've had any new recordings.) Kindle's voice is kind of robotic, and the pacing can be odd, but it's handy to be able to read eyes-free every once in a while.

Lauren W.