Archive for the ‘Reading’ Category

One Tuesday afternoon my left leg was severed. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. Well, it was. It was agonizing.

And so begins a free(ish) book by a reasonably best-selling author. Max Barry's new novel, "Machine Man," will produce a page a day you can read in your browser or have sent to your  e-mail, RSS feed reader, PDA or smartphone. The first page was posted today, but you can still get in on it at any time.

Barry is the author of "Jennifer Government" (an excellent and funny novel about how branding and consumerism will take over our future) and "Company" (an excellent and funny novel about the insular, insane atmosphere inside a corporate headquarters). What's "Machine Man" about? Who knows? Even Barry doesn't, quite, yet. But he's excited about the idea, despite a bit of underlying terror.

"It won't be a polished work. It will be raw and chaotic, and at some point I will probably need to back-pedal furiously to extract myself from a literary dead end. It's slightly frightening, the idea of being unable to go back and change anything. Usually I rewrite books until they beg me to stop."

"Machine Man" is hardly the first serialized book attempted on the Web, or even the thousandth, but Barry has a clear writing voice and a knack for engaging readers. And he's created Internet successes before; his online game "Jennifer Government: NationStates," created to help promote the novel, became its own entity with millions of governments created by users.

"Machine Man" may not be free forever; Barry indicated that if it becomes successful and threatens to turn into an actual novel that makes sense, he may charge for the rest of it. But right now it's a one-day-at-a-time experiment for him and for us. And why not?

It's got a killer beginning.

In the beginning, there was Peanut Press. One of the oldest e-book publishers and sellers (and by oldest, I mean almost 10 years old, ancient by e-publishing clocks), they built up a good rep, got bought by Palm to become Palm Reader and then eReader, and then finally getting bought by Fictionwise (which just got bought by Barnes and Noble!). eReader has been around forever, is what I'm saying, and they've built up a solid and dependable program that works on possibly more hardware than any other. eReader is available for Palm, Pocket PCs, Symbian phones, your Windows, Mac or OQO desktop, the iPhone and iPod Touch (shown), and as of this week, the Blackberry, all for free.

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Before the Kindle app came along, Stanza was the big dog in iPhone e-book reading. And with good reason.

It's free. It does what it does with minimum fuss, with easy-to-understand menus and directions. Once you use it once you've pretty well got it figured out. And getting books from the Web, from a variety of places, is quick and easy. And it's free.

Pros:

The convenience. Download Stanza from the iTunes store and most of your e-book reading is now covered. Stanza can read DRM-free Amazon Kindle files, Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT,  PalmDoc, Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, HTML, and PDF, as well as eReader files in both secure and unsecure formats.  Tap the screen to turn a page and you're off and reading.
The experience. Once you're actually in the book, it's pretty much the same as every other e-book reader. The font is crisp, the page-turning animation can be changed to a sliding effect or turned off completely, it saves your place and lets you add bookmarks, and you can search for words.
The customization. Don't like something about Stanza, you can probably change it. You can change text size through the settings or on the fly with the iPhone's pinch and unpinch gesture. You can change the background color, line spacing, margin widths, alignment, you can even change the cover of the book you're reading if you prefer a different one.
The content. Stanza allows you to connect easily to several major e-books sites such as Fictionwise.com, ereader.com, Manybooks.net, and more. Best might be Project Gutenberg, which has thousands of public domain books ready for you to nab for free, and Stanza handles searching and downloading from Project Gutenberg with ease.

The cons:

Not a lot, really. Stanza is a well-designed program.

I do have a few gripes, though. Stanza breaks books into chapters (presumably for faster loading) but that means you can't easily jump around or search inside the entire book, and the scroll bar isn't always very responsive even within the chapter. Getting your personal content into Stanza on your iPhone is a pain, but that's the case with every iPhone e-reader app (Stanza offers a free desktop app that works as a server for you to download from, or you can upload your content to a personal space at Fictionwise.com). And I prefer swiping to tapping for my page-turning, not an option here.

But other than that, I like Stanza. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, so will you.

Photo by Richard Masoner

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If you've read my column/blog/mental dumping ground/whateverthis is, you know of my love for e-books. I read a lot, averaging a book every other day — I've slowed down a bit — and have been known to get actively shaky when I finish a book and don't have another at hand, ready to go. So the concept of being able to carry a few hundred with me wherever I go was irresistable.

Since then the convenience and savings in both money and shelf space has converted me to the point where I prefer to buy e-book versions wherever possible, saving the print version for gifts, special editions, or books that won't translate well to a small screen (say, pop-up books; pop-up technology is woefully behind the times).

For many people, reading on a small screen simply doesn't compare to a printed book, and that's fine. And enjoying e-books doesn't mean you have to abandon the printed word forever. But if you like the idea of being able to knock off a chapter or two in line at Publix or on the bus, I highly recommend them, and now's a good time to give it a try.

March 8-14 is "Read an E-Book Week." Check out the list of sponsors, most of which are offering free e-books for download for a variety of e-book readers.

And to help you make sense of this, starting tomorrow I'll post reviews of popular e-book sites as well as the various e-book reader applications that are available. Get reading!

It doesn't get much better than free.

There's another serial killer coming to town! Fortunately, it's just Serge.

Serge A. Storms is the monomaniacal, relentlessly cheerful, homicidally inclined "hero" of 11 books by author and former newspaperman Tim Dorsey. Along with his sidekick, the chemically-enhanced and clinically laid-back Coleman, Serge travels the length and width of the state appreciating the finer points of Florida while taking a moment to deal deadly and creative karma to to con men, tourist hustlers and the inexcusably rude (as defined, of course, by Serge).

This time Serge has a new sideline: blogging travel tips to needy travelers. And not the boring stuff like pool quality or finding the best drink specials. No, he delves into the important things every tourist needs to know, like how to recognize barracuda hookers, how to determine which cars at the motel belong to felons and the vital importance of Home Depot to the casual killer.

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If we buy from used bookstores, anyway. According to Novelists, Inc — a organization that purports to represent "multiple novelists" — the rise of used book sales is severely threatening the publishing industry.The idea is that online services allow used and remaindered copies of a book can compete side-by-side with new editions, often on the same day the new edition is released, and they want to see a percentage of used book sales paid to the publisher to compensate.

NINC recommends that commercial used-book sellers be required to pay to publishers a "Secondary Sale" fee upon the reselling of any book within two years of its original publication date. A percentage of these fees would then transfer to authors in accordance with contractual agreements between authors and publishers, thereby reinforcing the Founders' intent, as stated in Article I of the Constitution, to protect authors' exclusive right to benefit from their work.

The fee would only be levied on books sold within two years of their publishing date, and they argue that most booksellers use electronic inventory systems anyway so adding this paperwork wouldn't be a hardship.

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Author Jane Lindskold (the Firekeeper series, many others) is writing a multipart series of blog entries over at Tor.com detailing her opinions regarding the covers created for her books.

Turns out that authors have very little control over what will be representing their work on the crowded retail bookshelves, and since an awful lot of readers make their choices based on a quick glance at the cover this can really help (or hurt) an author's career. Covers, both their the subject matter and color palette, set an expected tone for a book and one that isn't always accurate:

My second problem with this cover is the implied audience for the book.  It looks like a kid's book–and not a Harry Potter-type YA that might appeal to adults as well, but a solidly "kiddie" book.

This is due, in large part, to the one glaring representational error in the art.  By the time this scene occurs, the children are not children any longer.  The boy with the panpipes, for example, is actually a muscular young man of twenty-two.

However, I don't know how many times I had to (reluctantly) stop an adult from buying The Pipes of Orpheus for some eager, bright-eyed, eight-year-old. Usually, I'd ask the adult to at least read the opening–which features the detailed evisceration of a small child–before they made their purchase.

Her entries on the subject include "Look at What They Wrapped Around My Baby!", "When Right is Completely Wrong" and"Series Doesn't Equal Set." Be sure to read the comments as well, where other writers and artists chime in with their own experiences.

If you're one of the lucky folks with an Amazon Kindle you can nab free versions of "Prague" by Arthur Phillips, "Caught Stealing" by Charlie Huston, "The Whiskey Rebels" by David Liss, "The Foreign Correspondent" by Alan Furst, "Murder List" by Julie Garwood, "Six Bad Things" by Charlie Huston, "The Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death" by Laurie Notaro, "A Dangerous Man" by Charlie Huston and "Free-Range Chickens" by Simon Ric. 

For the rest of us, they're available in various combinations of Microsoft Reader, Adobe, MobiPocket, and eReader over at Books on Board. All but the eReader versions are free; the eReader editions are 10% off.

You can also get 25% off any other books by those authors at Books on Board by using this promo code: RandomHouseOnBoard .

UPDATED: Dec. 15 was the last day for the 25% off coupon, but the free ebooks will be available until Feb. 28.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for one of your bros is to point out just what he has done wrong, especially if it reflects poorly on your choice of bros. And toward that end, Master Bro Barney Stinson (from the CBS show "How I Met Your Mother," played to sleazy perfection by Neil Patrick Harris) has released the legendary rules of bro-therhood that have heretofore been passed down solely through oral history, father-son talks and cocktail napkins. The Bro Code. And it is awesome.

Written by "Barney" and Matthew Kuhn, the HIMYM staff writer who handles Barney's Blog, some of the rules have been seen (and illustrated) on the show itself, but many of them are here for the first time. Which bro buys the next round? Can a bro sleep with another bro's sister and/or mother? Can a woman be your wingman? When a bro is showing off his new car, are his fellow bros expected to look under the hood and go "aaah" even if they have no idea what they're looking at? How exactly do you rate a chick on the Hot/Crazy scale? Is it permissible for a bro to provide details of his sexual escapades? (Answer to the last: surprisingly, no, as too much detail will require your fellow bros to imagine you naked, and there's no coming back from there) Every detail of a bro's life is covered, or at least the ones involving scoring chicks, which are the only details that matter if you're a bro.

Or give it to your single female friends as a scary reminder of what they'll be facing that night when Barney-clones approach them with free drinks and raised eyebrows.

It's available in paperback or as an audio book read by Neil Patrick Harris (listen to an excerpt here), and includes charts, questionnaires, diagrams, and the complete text of the original Bro Code written in the 1700s by revolutionary bro Barnabus Stinson. Just the thing for the undirected dude in your life.