The Darkness That Comes Before by R. Scott Baker is the first of the Prince of Nothing Trilogy. If you enjoyed the depth of Steven Erickson's Tale of Malazan series you will likely enjoy this series. The first book develops some interesting characters but overreaches when it comes to world building. The back-history and geopolitical layout is crammed in awkwardly. It might be needed later but the over-imaginative spelling and fun with umlauts is unnecessary.
Ray Bradbury’s e-books were the price of new contracts | TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics: Mike Masnick at Techdirt has more details and commentary on why Ray Bradbury’s novels are are becoming available as e-books. Bradbury is noted for his dislike of new technologies, such as video games and the Internet, and indeed has said that Fahrenheit 451 is not actually about censorship but about new technologies such as television that distract people from reading books.I can understand the disdain for TV but not the internet or ebooks. I found the end of Fahrenheit 451 somewhat dehumanizing in itself. People memorizing a book were essentially becoming the object itself.
But at this point, Bradbury didn’t have much choice—his contracts were coming due
NEWS | New Thursday Next Book by Jasper Fforde in 2012 ~ Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review: It looks like everyone's favorite Literary Detective Thursday Next will be back come next summer. Jasper Fforde's Dark Reading Matter will be the seventh - but probably not final - book in the Thursday Next series.
Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn’t just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he’d have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.
...dropped out of the litotes market, which...
“Epizeuxis,” murmured Sprockett, “a rhetorical device that repeats the same word in the same sentence for increased dramatic effect. This book was almost certainly destroyed by a rhetorical worm.”
The trip back downriver was uneventful and over in only twelve words.
AZARDI has been designed for education, training and instructional content which requires large scale interactivity. The AZARDI Interactive Engine introduces advanced Question and Answer tools, Story line and Events modules to reduce production costs and time to market.
The Walls Are Too High
The Garden Is Too Small
The Kingdom of Gods (Inheritance Trilogy, book 3) by N K Jemisin: As long-suppressed rage and terrible new magics consume the world, the Maelstrom -- which even gods fear -- is summoned forth. Shahar and Sieh: mortal and god, lovers and enemies. Can they stand together against the chaos that threatens?
McCaffrey is the first woman to win a Hugo Award, as well as the first woman to win a Nebula Award, and the first author to hit the New York Times Bestseller List with an SFF title (The White Dragon).
Finished The Night Eternal, the last book of the Strain trilogy. The vampires that Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan come up with are unique, even among the biblically based vampire/monster stories. The thriller action/adventure aspect of the book is excellent and the conclusion is satisfying. If you like your vampire stories less glitter and teen angst based and more gritty and thoughtful then this is a great series to read.
Finished Aloha from Hell by Richard Kadrey. The third book of the Sandman Slim series and a great conclusion for a trilogy. Really hope to see more Sandman Slim books down the road.“Sometimes Russian book covers are not just bad, sometimes they inexplicably have popular actors and characters on them. This is their story.”
The Indian government thinks the $35 Aakash Android tablet has the power to change the world. After testing one out, we’d tend to agree.
That’s $40 less than the Nook Touch sells for now, and unlike the $99 Kindle Touch, the Nook Touch doesn’t have advertisements
This list is a work in progress, so if you know of any SF/F books that have been banned anywhere in the world, please drop us a line at info@worldswithoutend.com.
George R. R. Martin’s popular superhero anthology series Wild Cards is to be made into a movie by SyFy Films and Universal Pictures.
Regular Tor.com readers will reconginze Wild Cards as a shared universe of superpowered people featuring stories written by some of the top names in the SF field.
Finally got around to finishing this book. The weird thing is that it took months to read it because I was savouring it. The noir-style urban fantasy with nuggets of wry humor is one of my favourite styles of fantastic fiction. That's why I enjoy Butcher's Dresden Files, Green's Nightside, and even Pratchett's Vimes/Night Watch.
A great book that continues from Sandman Slim and expands the Heaven/Hell story in interesting ways. I enjoyed it so much that I would only read a chapter or two at a time, particularly after finishing a mildly disappointing book. I'm looking forward to Aloha from Hell.
Finished reading The Passage by Justin Cronin. Well written with interesting characters and a unique take on the whole Zombie/Vampire/Outbreak thing. The story line of the little girl in the first half of the book was masterful. I found the ending weak. There was no dramatic or clever conclusion. My first thought as I got to the end was that I would now have to wait for the sequel. I also felt that there were some awkwardly structured passages in the last part of the book. Well worth the read but I would have waited for the second book before starting in on the first.
The crew of the Ketty Jay, fresh from defeating an incursion of the nefarious Manes, have been hailed as heroes and have become minor celebrities across the lands of Vardia. Avoiding notoriety and seeking their next job, Captain Frey and his crew have relocated to Samarla to undertake a train heist.
Inheritance, by Christopher Paolini (Nov. 8, Knopf)
Not so very long ago, Eragon Shadeslayer, Dragon Rider, was nothing more than a poor farmboy, and his dragon, Saphira, only a blue stone in the forest. Now the fate of an entire civilization rests on their shoulders. Long months of training and battle have brought victories and hope, but they have also brought heartbreaking loss. And still, the real battle lies ahead: they must confront Galbatorix. When they do, they will have to be strong enough to defeat him. And if they cannot, no one can. There will be no second chances. Fourth and final book in the Inheritance series. [Young Adult]
The Alloy of Law, by Brandon Sanderson (Nov. 8, Tor)
Three hundred years after the events of the Mistborn trilogy, Scadrial is now on the verge of modernity, with railroads to supplement the canals, electric lighting in the streets and the homes of the wealthy, and the first steel-framed skyscrapers racing for the clouds. Kelsier, Vin, Elend, Sazed, Spook, and the rest are now part of history — or religion. Yet even as science and technology are reaching new heights, the old magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy continue to play a role in this reborn world. Out in the frontier lands known as the Roughs, they are crucial tools for the brave men and women attempting to establish order and justice. One such is Waxillium Ladrian, a rare Twinborn, who can Push on metals with his Allomancy and use Feruchemy to become lighter or heavier at will. After twenty years in the Roughs, Wax has been forced by family tragedy to return to the metropolis of Elendel. Now he must reluctantly put away his guns and assume the duties and dignity incumbent upon the head of a noble house. Or so he thinks, until he learns the hard way that the mansions and elegant tree-lined streets of the city can be even more dangerous than the dusty plains of the Roughs. Fourth in the Mistborn series.
What the team ended up doing was developing an app that adapted to the user rather than have the user adapt to the app. The app is designed to duplicate a Braille keyboard, which has only 8 keys. But instead of having the user find the keys, the app finds the user’s fingers.
Finished reading Snuff by Terry Pratchett and enjoyed it so much it inspired me to finish The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Reading a good book gives you such a high sometimes that you immediately go out looking for that high again. Night Circus did that, but Clockwork missed the mark.You are more important than girls in service. You are more important than anybody else in the Watch. You are mistaking value for worth, I think.’Pratchett is not all silliness and fantasy adventure. Snuff tries to share a flavour of what middle ages village life was like. Learning about a word like gongfermor is always a treat.
Gong farmer (also known as a gongfermor, gongfermour, gong-fayer, gong-fower or gong scourer), was a term that entered use in Tudor England to describe someone who dug out and removed human excrement from privies and cesspits; the word "gong" was used for both a privy and its contents.
‘What sort of thing were you thinking of writing, Jane?’ The girl looked embarrassed. ‘Well, commander, at the moment I’m working on what might be considered a novel about the complexities of personal relationships, with all their hopes and dreams and misunderstandings.’ She coughed nervously, as if apologizing.Pratchett takes a poke at Jane Eyre (Sense and Sensibility) I wonder if he read Sense and Sensibility and Zombies.
It’s not all in your head, commander: no matter what you hear, I sometimes hear it too. Oh dear, you of all people must recognize a substition when you’re possessed by it? It’s the opposite of a superstition: it’s real even if you don’t believe in it.Even if its not a real word its a cool idea.
...feared that moment was coming closer. Possibly only the presence of Feeney was holding the darkness at bay, the dreadful urge to do the hangman out of his entitlement of a dollar for the drop, thruppence for the rope and sixpence for his beer. How easy it is to kill, yes, but not when a smart young copper who thinks you are a good guy is looking to you. At home, the Watch and his family surrounded Vimes like a wall. Here the good guy was the good guy because he didn’t want anyone to see him being bad. He did not want to be ashamed. He did not want to be the darkness.The theme of darkness important moreso than adding goblins. Most important, of course, is the funny:
‘You know, I’ve got lots of poo,’ said Young Sam proudly. ‘I keep it in jam jars and I’ve got a lab o ra tory in the lava tory. Have you got any ele phant poo? It goes – and here he paused for ef fect – ‘dung!’
He was the co-inventor of the C programming language, and a central figure in the development of Unix. He spent much of his career at Bell Labs. He was awarded the Turing Award in 1983, and the National Medal of Technology in 1999.
"Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible," James Grimmelman observed on Twitter.
A quick look through the encyclopedia suggests this is a monumental, massive addition to the canon of SF reference works, likely to supplant its predecessor as the definitive guide to the genre and possibly likely to supplant TVTropes as the website you go to check out one article and end up spending an afternoon there :-)
To judge by what works on Kickstarter, however, democracy won’t offer any improvement. Those flashy garnishes are exactly what the public cares about. The most successful book projects have an already-established audience, an attractive creator, a high-concept premise and/or an affiliation with someone famous.
it is amazing how all those little things you read in all those second-hand books suddenly turn up and hand you a plot. As a matter of fact I did a lot of interesting work for Monstrous Regiment in lesbian book shops.
Everything is put on hold while the latest Discworld Novel is consumed. This one is a Commander Vimes/Night Watch novel. A lot of poo jokes, but tastefully done of course.
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians has been optioned and Fox is planning on turning it into a series.
The Dark at the End, by F. Paul Wilson (Oct. 11, Tor)
Bound by his promise to Glaeken, Jack has refrained from making any direct moves against Rasalom. But things have changed so there’s nothing holding Jack in check any longer. Other changes are occurring as well. Jack is healing at an accelerated rate — much like Glaeken did when he was immortal. This can only mean that Glaeken’s time is almost up and when he dies, Jack takes his place. Rasalom continues to plot against the Lady. Twice she has died and returned; a third time and she will be gone, leaving a clear path for the Otherness to infiltrate this reality. But Ernst Drexler forms an uneasy alliance with Jack, while Dawn Pickering is searching for her supposedly dead baby. Now the stage is set for Jack’s massive assault on Rasalom. The final Repairman Jack novel.
I'm always a bit leery about starting a series. When the gap between new novels is more than a year it is hard to get back in to the series. I rarely re-read a book and reading the summary of previous books often doesn't do the job for me.
"I guess I am the anally retentive Ghostbuster, after all"
After a moment or so, inspiration came.
“I’ve got this trench coat,” I told her. “One careful owner.”
As of this writing, 206 people answered the survey. Click the image to enlarge it.
Key findings, plus my observations
A library can only lend a Kindle ebook if Amazon already sell it.
Put yourself in the place of a librarian who is looking to buy more ebooks. If you had to choose between 2 titles, and only one was available for the Kindle, which would you choose? I would think for economic reasons alone that a librarian would chose the title that could be read on the Kindle over one that could not. It’s a better value for the library to support as many readers as possible.
Kindle without ads: $109.00.
Kindle Touch without ads: $139.00.
That’s a $30 difference.
Stop to think about that for a minute.
If Amazon is giving you a $30 break like that, how much more are they making over that $30?
You’re no longer a reader.
You’re a product they’re selling to others!
And Amazon’s X-ray feature? That’s not to enhance your reading experience. That’s to figure out where the future ads can go!
The Black Lung Captain by Chris Wooding is the second book in the Tales on the Ketty Jay. It is a tale delivers on the promise of the first book and guarantees that future books in the series (two have already been announced) are going to be worth getting.Readers of that book will feel immediately at home here, as Wooding continues his Firefly-meets-steampunk story of a clapped out aircraft and its crew struggling to make ends meet in a hostile world of shady deals and, at the fringes of civilisation, hostile savages.
Verdict: Perhaps predictably, The Black Lung Captain doesn't match the brilliance of its predecessor. The characters are as strong as before, but the sense of excitement just isn't quite there. Perhaps this is merely because of expectations heightened by Retribution Falls, but it's equally likely to be due to the plot, which doesn't allow for the surprises that the first novel managed to fling the reader's way. That said, aside from the good characterisation, the events are supplemented by some interesting revelations about certain people and other aspects of the world, while the humour - again, as before - is well observed, with plenty of amusing moments to lighten the tone (which is perhaps a little darker this time around). In all, an enjoyable read - it just lacks the panache that made Retribution Falls exceptional.
This one was a joy to write, lovely and smooth, as by now the crew of the Ketty Jay were beginning to feel like old friends. But instead of me telling you about it, I’m just gonna quote this rather wonderful review in the Guardian:
“This is a steampunk romance full of battling aerium-fulled aircraft, villainous buccaneers and hordes of ravaging ghouls, held together by an expertly orchestrated plot which uses every trick in the book to keep the reader hooked… Marvellous.”
A third and fourth instalment are coming soon. Oh yeah.
Actors: Richard Coyle, Charles Dance
Writers: Terry Pratchett
Format: Widescreen
Number of discs: 1
Rated: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Acorn Media
DVD Release Date: September 20, 2011
Run Time: 252 minutes
Everyone has their own tastes when it comes to fonts, so having choices is definitely a good thing. Plus having more font options can be a real benefit for those with poor eyesight, in which case a nice bold font can work wonders.
Finished Retribution Falls last night. It's a Steampunk-ish novel set in a world where lighter than air craft rule the skies. Its not really Steampunk because it's set on a different world, but there's alot of brass fittings and goggles all over the place.Bluefire Reader is a wildly popular iOS app that supports Epub and PDF. Unlike Stanze, Bluefire reader supports Adobe DE DRM. It works with any number of ebookstores and it even supports library ebooks. It has long since replaced Stanza as the touchstone reading app for iOS, and I would say that Bluefire Reader might give Aldiko, the leading Android reading app, a run for its money.
But instead, publishers seem to be desperately putting the cart before the horse. “Because our e-books cost this much, then this is how much e-books are supposed to cost. See? We wouldn’t be pricing them like that if they weren’t supposed to be that expensive! Now pay up and be happy.” They’re not pricing to maximize profit, they’re pricing to try to keep their ailing business model alive. Meanwhile, more progressive publishers like Baen have been happily selling e-books at $6 each, and even bundling Internet-sharable CD-ROMs full of them into printed books, for years without apparent detriment to their business.
This is just a maintenance update, so there aren’t any major new features. But the update does add a few dozen bug fixes.
Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention, has announced the 2011 Hugo Award winners.
"MSReader was one of the early Big 3 ebook formats, along with Mobipocket and Palm. The first apps were released in 2000, and at that time it was the most typography rich ebook format. It stayed the rich-format ebook format up until Epub was released.
To be honest, I suspect that the only thing keeping the format going all these years was that the DRM had been broken way back when. Seriously, hard-core ebook users used to buy this format because we knew we could convert it from LIT to whatever format we preferred. That’s certainly why I bought MSReader format, and in fact that’s the only reason I ever heard discussed as a reason to buy it."
"What was the last codex book you read? The last e-book?
The last codex book was Edmund Morris' biography of Beethoven. The last e-books were 'New Culture of Learning' by John Seely Brown and Doug Thomas and Gary Shteyngart's 'Super Sad True Love Story.'"
"These books are simply fun – don’t think too hard about them and the world that Hearne creates, just sit back and enjoy the ride. The takes on various pantheons of gods are fun, the action satisfying and it’s all woven together with a geek humor that refuses to take itself seriously."
"The pros of this program are immediately apparent: the interface is rather DIY friendly, the icon design seemed crisp and best of all the creation of the TOS (Table of Contents) couldn’t be simpler. One merely highlights the chapter heading as an h1 or h2 (or any ‘h’, really) for each chapter, then hit a button and “voila!” the beautifully-linked chapters appear in a list on the right hand side, glowing in their success and all ready to be tested. This contrasts to the more involved, coded approach that users of Calibre have struggled with, sometimes abandoning their TOS altogether."
"Sometimes sheer bravado and break-neck pacing can lift up a potential cliche into something more. In the case of Jonathan Wood’s first novel, No Hero, the author has created a riff on supernatural noir that’s rollicking good fun and acknowledges its debts with good humor. It also one-ups its influences with some excellent action scenes. What’s the set up? The main character, a cop, asks himself one question a lot: 'What would Kurt Russell do?' It’s not a question he’s had to answer a lot—until a secret government agency recruits him to fight the Progeny, be-tentacled horrors from another dimension. Omni checked in with Wood to find out more…"
"So when I read about his planned new series that takes place in a 'Riemannian universe', one where the metric - the math concept that encodes the basic physics of the universe - is positive definite and symmetric in space and time as opposed to the indefinite antisymmetric metric in the Einsteinian universe we seemingly inhabit, I was truly intrigued and indeed The Clockwork Rocket was what I expected and more and so far it is my all around top novel of the year for the combination of sense of wonder, great world building, characters and general 'human interest' - the shape-shifting, weird biology aliens of The Clockwork Rocket are both strange and familiar and the story of the main character Yalda is as emotional as any I've read this year..."
"Well, this one was a chore, no question about it. Had I not been reading this during my trip through the Southern Balkans and had access to my collection, I would never have finished reading this novel. It's been a while since I've been this underwhelmed by the work of a quality author."
"Our main criteria selection were books that were strong in: Worldbuilding, Characterization, and Language. (As those are areas where Pratchett excels).
We tried with somewhat less success to bring up titles that focused on other things we liked about Prattchett’s writing: the inclusion of humor, careful handling of ethical issues, and a “feel-good” quality to the books themselves. This was somewhat less successful, as these are more ephemeral things, and harder to point at in a book.
What to read after you’ve read all available Pratchett books:"
"PLOT SUMMARY: When he was nine years old, Prince Honorous Jorg Ancrath saw his mother and younger brother murdered before his eyes. By thirteen, he commanded a band of bloodthirsty mercenaries. By the time he is fifteen, he intends to be king."
"But Grossman, the chief book reviewer for Time, has softened over the years, and he admits that has something to do with his own success as a novelist. 'The Magicians,' his dark fantasy novel set in a universe part J.K. Rowling and part C.S. Lewis, became a 2009 best seller. A second installment, 'The Magician King,' arrives next week. And suddenly Grossman is thinking about hanging up his literary judge's robe."
"As of today, the official maintainer for both Sigil and FlightCrew is John Schember (“user_none” on MobileRead). He’s a very bright and competent guy. He’s got what it takes, trust me. As a community, please give him the same consideration and respect you gave me. It will take him many weeks (if not a few months) to get fully up to speed with the codebase, so patience and a warm welcome from the community will make sure things go smoothly."
"The short (somewhat obvious) answer, aside from errors introduced by OCR: because publishers cut corners by laying off proofreaders and copy editors, then rush the manuscripts out too quickly for their skeleton crews to catch gaffes. At least that’s what one editor confessed to Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times. Another editor, however, says in the era of word processors authors have gotten lazier and stupider: “It is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are.”"
"I recently edited a book in which I made consistent use of the semicolon — only to receive instruction from the client to replace the semicolons with commas. When I asked why, the response was that neither the particular inhouse editor nor the author approves of semicolons and thus they wanted use of semicolons minimized."
"First of all one of the new changes allows users to access the dictionary with books that you have loaded in yourself (sideloaded.)"
A good fantasy novel. There is really nothing new here. Men and elves and other species are at war with each other. The coming back 500 years later after being in suspended animation is the only twist and this is a twist that has been used before."Kobo has just added another payment option to its ebookstore. Along with Visa, Mastercard, your immortal soul, or Gift Cards, Kobo now accepts Paypal, the payment processor of last resort."
"The system is geared towards smartphones, which makes sense. There aren’t any ebook readers that can support downloading 3rd party DRMed ebooks in this manner."
"It is no secret that Tablet computers have been rising in popularity and so has peoples desire to use them for reading books. There are many ebook reading apps out there for Android, but where do you start?"Read the pros and cons for each reader at goodereader.com. I've found so far that no single app gets the job done. Aldiko renders the CSS part of an ePub the best but Cool Reader and Moon+ both have some nice features (scrolling options and access to a locally installed dictionary/thesaurus to name two)
FBREADER continues to be one of the most popular e-reading programs for the Android operating system and performs well for larger screen tablets. 7/10
Aldiko continues to lead the current generation of Android Reading Apps for Tablets and does not disappoint on many levels. It reads fewer ebook types then rival applications but does the job effectively with EPUB and PDF books. You can even import books you have purchased from other stores which is very solid. 9.5/10
Moon+ Reader for Android is another application with a lush book shelf interface that greets you when you load up the application. There is also a handy automatic drive scanning utility that will look at your SD card and main memory and import books into the shelf. I liked the fact it scanned both and imported everything without any prompts, complete with cover art. 8/10
The Cool Reader application for Google Android allows you a wide variety of book formats that it can read. Currently the program has the ability to read fb2, doc, txt, rtf, html, chm, tcr, pdb, epub, prc and mobi formats. 7/10
(Mantano Reader) This application does not read many formats at all, mainly PDF and EPUB. Good thing most books on the internet are in these two formats, it does involve you converting books manually if they aren’t. 8/10
"This essay is the first in a three-part series about the past, present, and future of reading. Part two will focus on readers in transition between the page and the screen. Part three will look at the future of reading."
As the screen overtakes the solid page, and the ground floors of libraries have begun to look like the decks of starships, and the page has become its own lamp, as millions of books become available at the click of a key, and a simple search will turn up almost anything one needs to recall, surely the memory of what is read is dissolving all that much faster.
"The most important name (for me, at least) is Jerry Pournelle, who will be reprising his column from the print edition."
"At almost 1,300 pages (between the two volumes), it's instead a massive, bloated and swollen book so packed with filler and minutiae that it's hard to plough on through the novel. The author has spent weeks and months researching the Second World War in extreme detail and by God, every single last bit of that research is going in the novel whether you like it or not."
"Everything is encrypted in https, preventing your communications from being (easily) intercepted.
You can conceal who is in your Circles, and who has you in their Circles.
Unlike Facebook, you don't have to use your real name.
Google Takeout will let you export all your data. So if a journalist has to take down their account, they can take that contact information elsewhere."
"The Kobo Touch is the latest addition to Kobo's line of ebook readers. It replaces the Kobo WiFi but maintains many of the same features while adding some software and hardware upgrades.
The Kobo Touch comes in four color varieties: Lilac, Blue, Silver, and Black. Staying true to Kobo's low-priced approach, it sells for $139 in Canada and a competitive $129 in the United States, $10 less than the Kindle 3 WiFi and new Nook Touch."
Finished reading A Hard Day's Knight by Simon Green. It is the eleventh book in the Nightside series.John Taylor is a P.I. with a special talent for finding lost things in the dark and secret centre of London known as the Nightside. He’s also the reluctant owner of a very special—and dangerous—weapon. Excalibur, the legendary sword. To find out why he was chosen to wield it, John must consult the Last Defenders of Camelot, a group of knights who dwell in a place that some find more frightening than the Nightside.
London Proper. It’s been years since John’s been back—and there are good reasons for that.
"The app still supports Epub and FB2. It has all the formatting options it did before, plus it picked up a couple new ones. It now has enough font, layout, and margin options to satisfy the pickiest reader. It also now has dictionary lookup (the dictionary has to be installed first), and you can now copy a clipping to the clipboard or email it to someone. There’s also bookmarks."
"But the main thing that came out of this press conference that is of interest to us is that the Potter ebooks will be sold without DRM protection, but instead each sold copy will have a unique “water mark” built into it, so that should that particular copy be sold on line, it will be easy for them to know which customer it was who sold the copy illegally."
"The InRead site allows its users to post their favorite books as well as their reading history. The site offers a series of blogs devoted to books, culture and technology and inRead members can, of course, comment and post to wide variety of social media outlets. Members can “dogear” blog posts to save and circulate and the site offers a variety of original content from published authors. InReads is funded by WETA with additional funding support from the Park Foundation."
"And so, to help you chart any fantastic voyages you might like to take this vacation season, NPR Books is focusing our annual summer readers' poll on science fiction and fantasy (SF/F to insiders). During the coming weeks, your votes will decide the titles that make our top-100 list of the best SF/F novels ever written."
"The British Library has reached a deal with search engine Google about 250,000 texts dating back to the 18th Century.
It will allow readers to view, search and copy the out-of-copyright works at no charge on both the library and Google books websites."
"And yet, I find myself unable to like Fuzzy Nation as much as I like Little Fuzzy. Little Fuzzy, it seems to me, is the Saturday Evening Post, and Fuzzy Nation is DreamWorks. One is gold and one is bronze. That reaction certainly says more about me than about the book. But let me catalogue the differences between the two books that illuminate what has been abandoned. (It's all down to the shifts in culture since 1962, of course.)"
"But he stressed that he was as yet still undecided whether he would eventually take his own life.
He said he changed his mind “every two minutes” but added that if he did choose to die would prefer to do so in England and in the sunshine."
"Funnily enough, in those days before ereaders, all of the above problems obviously existed, but didn’t worry me too much, I didn’t even really think about them, just accepted that the world was thus, and got on with reading. But that has changed now, we have been shown how good and relaxing reading can really be, and I find it hard to return to that relatively primitive form of reading now. Sad isn’t it?"
"Get simple, free notifications when your favourite authors release new books!"
"Tradpub advocates point out that not all authors involved in digital self-publishing agree on everything, therefore none of them can be trusted talking about anything. In this way they are like Creationists who claim that just because different scientists have different theories of how evolution took place, that the very fact of evolution can’t be trusted. It’s idiocy and malignant. It’s deliberately deceptive argumentation designed to frighten and confuse."
"I use this story to illustrate the lack of understanding of what’s going on with ebooks and ebook production. The question about widow control and hyphenation, as ridiculous as it seemed above, is made even more so ridiculous when you realize—as I did about 3 minutes later—that it’s completely immaterial. Widow control is something used to keep little sentence fragments of 1-4 words off their own line. Hyphenation is necessary when you want to produce nice, fully justified type in a book."
"Many people who’ve had to proof read documents start to develop a kind of compulsive “tutting” at misused words. Here’s my top ten words that are misused by either professional writers or public speakers who, let’s be honest, should really know better"
"From the first few pages, The Dumbest Generation smacks of the worst kind of get-off-my-lawn resistance to change, and Bauerlein often bashes “pro-technology” commentators, as if the printed book reading that he exalts somehow wasn't a technology itself."
"Rosenberg is best-known as the author of the popular ten-volume Guardians of the Flame series, about a group of role-players who are transported into the fantasy world they are playing in."
"The following lectures, by no means the only ones available online, represent a lovely little slice of how language permeates all things, for better and for worse."
"The six judges—including Sir Terry Pratchett and Tony Robinson—met yesterday at Waterstone’s flagship store in London’s Piccadilly to thrash out a winner. After hours of debate the conclusion was reached that it was impossible to select a single victor! The entries were so diverse that it was unanimously decided to split the prize and award it to David Logan for his book Half Sick of Shadows and to Michael Logan (no relation!) for Apocalypse Cow. Both writers will receive a publishing contract from Transworld."
"Pierce writes that the Nook Touch beats the Kindle in all three of those categories. Its home screen is more intuitive and more attractive than the Kindle’s, and its touchscreen interface generally offers a much better way to interact with books, from turning a single page to quickly scrubbing through multiple pages at once. The Nook Touch is also smaller and lighter than the Kindle 3—imagine the Kindle 3 sans keyboard—making it even more pocketable."
"If you’ve already read everything on your bookshelf and don’t want to rely on Amazon recommendations, there are a few great websites that can help you discover new books."
"Buy.com has the original Aluratek Libre on sale right now for $50,after a $20 mail-in rebate."
"The short version, publishers, is this—somebody at your company is running a PDF or Word file or whatever through some kind of meatgrinder converter, and then failing to give it a final proof before slapping a full, non-discountable retail price on it. And what’s arriving in customer’s hot little e-hands are shoddy books with basic errors that are just appalling. As a customer, it is completely unacceptable to me to pay full sticker price and get an inferior product. And I don’t just mean inferior in the ‘I can’t re-sell it like I can with paper and it’s crippled by DRM’ sense. I mean ‘inferior’ as in my teenaged brother could spend twenty minutes reading it and run out of fingers on which to count the really obvious mistakes."
"When you look at the movie industry you always get the digital version for free when you buy the hard copy. When you buy a Blu-ray Disk it normally comes with a free digital edition for your computer, ditto with DVD Disks. Considering that eBooks are so popular, why is it that the leather bound tomes we have come to love are not accompanied by the digital version?"
"A single charge lasts up to two months with wireless off based upon a half-hour of daily reading time. If you read for one hour a day, you will get battery life of up to one month."
"Aldiko, makers of the Aldiko reading app (for Android), has just signed a deal to add BooksOnBoard, an independent eBookstore, to its reading app. Aldiko users will now be able to choose from any of hundreds of thousands of titles sold in epub by BooksOnBoard, and then buy them and read them without leaving the app."
I was right about the new Nook | The Digital Reader: "It is based on a 6″ Pearl E-ink screen and it does have a Neonode touch screen. It has only the one power button, Wifi, 2GB storage, a card slot (upper right edge), and 2 months battery life. Price is $139 and it ships in early June. Ooh, it has an onscreen keyboard, 6 fonts and 7 font sizes, and in general a better user interface."
"But I doubt that many of the kids starting school now will build up the same kind of personal reference system around print books, any more than most children of the 1920s bothered to learn how to hitch up a team properly. To them, print books will seem ponderous and slow--what we find serene and undistracting, they will find as annoying as making your own Jello out of calve's feet and eggshells. They will have their own mental information maps that revolve around search and keywords, not physical proximity. It won't be better for all things. But it doesn't have to be. It just has to be able to outrun the competition where it counts. If they are--and I think they are--it will eventually become un-economic for most firms to retain print divisions."
"NOVEL
WINNER Blackout / All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)"
"Ebooks, in theory, should be easy to change. After all, a huge print book drawback — stale text sitting on a shelf — no longer constrains digital editions of textbooks, fast-moving tech topics, or a biography of Charlie Sheen.
But between theory and reality stand two big challenges:
Getting the changes to readers who've already downloaded an ebook file
Spotlighting what's changed, so folks don't have to hunt for the meaningful fresh bits"
"In a press release sent out this morning, online mega-seller Amazon announced that Kindle books are now outselling both print and hardcover books combined. It took a little over two years since the Kindle launched in 2007 to have its e-books outpace hardcovers, but it happened in July of 2010 before overtaking paperbacks six months later as well."
"Kobo released a new version of its Android app yesterday. The new app brings a number of tweaks and bug fixes as well as Reading Life™, Kobo’s social media platform."
After an exhausting move I'm ready to get back to blogging again. Now that I've got a tablet my interest in reader and tablet hardware is waning. My focus may shift to (free) Android apps and ebook publishing.
I'm catching up on my reading so I should have some book reviews coming soon.
"This post is designed to give you a concise, yet comprehensive preview of most important free tools you can pick up to publish and promote your e-books. I hope it will help you discover the ones, which in a best possible way fit your author profile and personal needs."
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