Posts Tagged ‘ebooks’

StarShipSofa, the British online audio science fiction anthology magazine, has released a novella by Lawrence Santaro called "Lord Dickens's Declaration." You can listen to it for free — that's what they do, after all; present audio presentations of top science fiction by authors such as Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Michael Bishop, Tad Williams, Charles Stross and many more — but for a limited time you can buy a limited edition ebook and the proceeds will go towards helping Jeanne and Spider Robinson's bills as Jeanne fights off a rare biliary cancer that's taking everything they've got.

I've mentioned here before my love of Jeanne and Spider's work, and any chance to help out (while getting new stuff to read at the same time) is a Good Thing. You can read about her ongoing battle (and her fight to continue producing a Stardancer movie) at http://stardancemovie.blogspot.com.

What's "Lord Dickens's Declaration" about? Think "steampunk/time travel/alternatehistory" and you won't be too far off. There are gentlemen and ladies and intrigue and SCIENCE and steamships and long discourses on the nature of time itself. Also, cavemen. Santaro usually writes horror fiction but he rises to the challenge here. The book is also beautifully designed and illustrated to look like an old and treasured book, which just adds to the steampunk feel. Nicely done.

While you're in the area, check out the StarShipSofa's podcasts. They're free, professionally done, and a welcome addition to your portable library.

Bookz Pro, on the many ebook readers available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, just updated to be fully compatible with the 3.0 OS, and it's added some functionality. Version 2.6 now includes auto-rotation, a search bar in your library, and the ability to read from ZIP files. This is added to a decent list of ebook reading tools for a program that has set out to be the easiest native text document reader for the iPhone. Bookz Pro has a built-in dictionary, multi-language support, it opens large text files extremely quickly, and it even allows you to password-protect specific books. Bookz Pro is $4.99, the free version (without the dictionary, password protection of appearance mods) is, well, free.

All well and good. But when they updated why did they change the app's icon, which was cool and distinctive (see above left), into something that looks like an "I Can Read!" book? Clipart restrictions? Aiming at the children's iPhone market? Lost a bet? I don't recall offhand if the pro and free versions had different icons before so perhaps this is a way to make the difference more obvious, but jeez.

It's never made a lot of sense that ebooks – which require no materials, no shipping, no storage, no stocking or maintenance manpower, and no destruction of unsold inventory – often cost as much or more than their print equivalents. eBook aficionados have spent the last 10 years shaking their heads and wondering when the publishing companies would get a clue… when the aficionados weren't simply scanning in the books themselves and sharing them for free, of course.

OK, not all the publishing companies. Baen Books, as always, was ahead of the curve with a sensible and attractive pricing plan from the very beginning. But I almost have to throw them out when complaining about publishers; they keep throwing off the curve. Meanwhile the rest of the publishers priced their ebooks high and huddled together, hoping that it wouldn't catch on.

Then Amazon shook things up with the $9.95 New York Times Bestseller ebook pricing. Suddenly that seemed to be a better deal – it certainly helped drive sales of their otherwise overpriced Kindle – and we saw a chink in the pricing wall.

Now it's spreading, and I hope it continues. eReader.com, one of the oldest ebook retailers, has changed their pricing structure and they're going Amazon one better. Now all new books start at $9.95 or less the first week of their release. After that the books revert to the publisher's list price but will not exceed $12.95. Read that again: will not exceed $12.95. And you can still earn 15% Reader Rewards, rebates which can be applied to future purchases.

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A century ago, when times were tough (as they are now) and jobs were scarce (as they are now) and people needed inexpensive entertainment to get through their days, the pulp magazines were born. They were filled with lurid tales of adventurers and detectives, ape men and wild women, science fiction and romance, true crime and fantastical yarns. Science fiction was born here, and noir detective stories. Readers were transported to deep jungles and cursed pyramids, desert islands and mad scientist lairs, and they got to forget their lives and all the uncertainties of a post-world-war world for a little while.

Now, things are getting tough again. And we could really use some cheap entertainment again…*

Enter "Steampunk Tales." This collection of 10 stories by award-winning authors takes you back to the days of Victorian inventors who never used muscle when a gear would do, and never met a piston they didn't like. Steam-powered computers, mechanical men, dirigibles and anything that can be thought up by a human mind and realized in brass, iron and leather.

As for the stories themselves – like in the original pulp magazines, some worked for me, some didn't. Some, like  "Project Moebius-5" and "Tempus Fugit," had great promise but ended abruptly and poorly. Some were experimental and had excellent passages, if not plots, like "The Anachronist's Cookbook" and "The Man and the Robot." "Benedice Te" was a rollicking good adventure, "A Grain of Sand" was a decent inventor's tale, and the world of "The Reanimation Emporium" is one I'd like to read more stories about. One or two of the rest I didn't finish, but overall it wasn't a bad evening spent.

"Steampunk Tales" will be published monthly, and will only be available for the iPhone or iPod Touch. Once the 3.0 OS comes out, you'll be able to order new issues from within the app. Just $1.99.

* OK, yes, "cheap" doesn't include the pricve of the iPhone/iPod Touch itself, but work with me, here.

Showtime may have figured out how to advertise a TV show on the Kindle.

Give everybody the first script for free.

Right now, and until August 31, you can download the script to the pilot episode of their new show "Nurse Jackie," starring former "Sopranos" star Edie Falco, to your Kindle e-book reader. You'll also get (free!) schedule information and nags to watch the show when it premieres on Monday, June 8th.

It's not a bad way to build some buzz, and I'd love to get scripts for other shows the same way (Dr. Horrible? The Guild? Are you listening?) Look for more Kindle-based promotions to come along, as long as its still the latest sexy thing.

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.

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.