Category: books

Randy Pausch

I blogged about Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture back in September. (Well, I just linked to the video. I didn’t really say anything about it.) He’s now got a book available, based on that lecture. It’s available from Amazon, in hardcover, Kindle, and audio CD versions. And the audiobook is also available from iTunes. There’s also a page up at the Carnegie Mellon site, with links to various versions of the original lecture (DVD, PDF transcript, etc) and other related links. I guess this all took off after ABC aired a special on him about a week ago.

The whole “inspirational” thing makes me kind of queasy, especially when people like Oprah and Diane Sawyer get involved. But, hey, Randy’s a computer science guy, so it’s OK for me to be interested, right? I’ll probably read a sample of the book on my Kindle, and if it doesn’t look like it’s just the lecture, padded out to fill a book, then I’ll shell out the $10 and read the whole thing. Or maybe I should buy the hardcover through the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network site, so they get a few bucks from it.

more stuff to read

I’m still loading my Kindle up with free stuff. I haven’t bought a single ebook from Amazon yet. I just re-discovered the 2007 Nebula page at Fictionwise, which lists a bunch of Nebula-nominated stories from last year that are available from them for free.
And I also just noticed that Fictionwise has a number of magazines available in Kindle-compatible formats, including Analog and a few other SF and mystery magazines. I’ve been somewhat disappointed in Amazon’s selection of magazines for the Kindle; they’ve only got 11 magazines available, and none of them are primarily fiction magazines. I may decide to try out a couple of magazines from Fictionwise and see if they work well on the Kindle.

more Kindle DRM discussion

Right after the Kindle was released, there was a lot of talk about the DRM/licensing model it used. The subject seems to have come up again this weekend, starting with a post on Gizmodo that got referenced on Slashdot and Boing Boing. If you look through the comments on all three of these sites, you’ll see some well though out opinions, plus of course some less (perhaps) cogent ones.

I’ve loaded my Kindle up with a fair number of free (and legal) non-DRM’d ebooks from various sources. I do intend on buying some stuff from the Amazon store at some point, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Yes, I do know that I won’t really be *buying* these books, but rather just buying a license to read them on a particular device under specific conditions. I’m OK with that. I usually only read a given book once or twice, and I don’t feel the need to keep a copy of every book I’ve ever read, so I really won’t mind it if my Kindle ebook “library” disappears if I ever decide to just get rid of my Kindle. If I buy an ebook that’s really great, and I really want to keep a copy around, I’ll probably go out and buy a hard copy too.

One of the arguments that I see come up frequently is the idea that if DRM’d ebooks *completely* replace hard copy books, then various really good things about the current book economy will go away — lending books to friends, buying cheap used books, borrowing books from the library and so on. I really don’t think we need to worry about this happening any time in the near future. I think the ebook reader market is going to remain a niche market for quite a while. Even if the price comes down, it’s just not a model that’s going to appeal to most people. There are a lot of people who just don’t read enough to warrant buying any kind of dedicated device for reading. Just picking up an occasional paperback at Border’s, or the library, or the airport bookstore, is more than enough for them.

And I don’t think that the iPhone, or smartphones in general, and going to be used as ebook readers by too many people. That’s also an opinion I’ve seen tossed around a bit. I think the iPhone (or iPod Touch in my case) is great for browsing through the NY Times site and checking out a few articles, but I wouldn’t want to try and read a novel on it.

So I guess that’s my (more than) two cents on the Kindle DRM thing. I don’t know if anyone will find this post particularly useful or interesting, but I just had to get all that off my chest.

Kindle

I got a Kindle today. I ordered it back in early February, so it took about a month for Amazon to get it out the door. It’s pretty much what I expected. The screen is very readable, in any (reasonable) light. As many others have pointed out, the button layout makes it a little awkward to figure out a good way to hold the thing without pressing either the next page or previous page button. I think I’ll get used to it though.

The built-in web browser is interesting, and might be somewhat useful. Gmail seems to be usable on it. Lotus Notes webmail is out of the question, though. Mobile-friendly sites like http://nytimesriver.com/ ought to be useable.

I haven’t bought any books for it yet. For now, I’ve just got some free books on it that I downloaded from ManyBooks and Tor.

For the most part, I’m liking it. I have so many hard copy books sitting around that I won’t be using it for most of my reading any time soon, but I’ll start reading something on it soon, just to start using it. I’ll likely blog more about it after I’ve played around with it some more.

Harry Potter withdrawal

Steven Levitt has a short bit up on the Freakonomics blog mentioning that he’s just finished the last Harry Potter book, and now has been “left aimless in Harry’s absence” and would like to know what he can read to “restore meaning to his life.” There are a lot of great suggestions in the comments, including not just books, but some comics too.

It’s interesting to see what people think of when they’re asked to suggest new material to a Harry Potter fan. The Potter books have a certain ineffable quality to them that has made them popular far beyond the audience that would usually be attracted to a “young adult” fantasy series. Mr. Levitt certainly doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who reads a lot of Piers Anthony, for instance. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Piers Anthony.) I do think that any open-minded, intelligent reader could find some great underrated stuff in the SF & Fantasy aisle in Borders, given a little direction, though.

Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is mentioned by several commenters. That’s certainly a work that has some superficial similarities to the Potter books — it’s a fantasy series featuring a couple of young kids as protagonists. And it’s a great work. I think somebody could probably get a great term paper out of comparing and contrasting the themes in Potter vs HDM. (And, come to think of it, I’d bet a good number of high school students probably already *have* written that paper.)

There are several recommendations for the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett. Also great books, but different in tone from Harry Potter. Come to think of it, I’ve only read one Discworld book (Mort). I think I have another one around here somewhere waiting to be read. I should really dig that out and read it.

On the comics front, there are a few recommendations for Fables, which I blogged about recently. (I now have the first six volumes waiting to be read.) And Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (and some other Gaiman stuff) gets mentioned. (I’ve read all of Sandman, and I’d certainly second the recommendation on that.)

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series gets a couple of mentions. I haven’t read any of that, but I’m getting curious about it. Maybe after I get through some of the other stuff in my pile, I’ll pick up a couple of Dark Tower books and give them a try.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell gets a couple of nods. I read that a couple of years ago, and it’s great. Definitely a good book to read after the Potter series, if you’re interested in seeing how another great author handles magic.

There are a couple of recommendations for Orson Scott Card’s Ender books. I’ve read the first, Ender’s Game, and have the next few in a pile waiting to be read. Good stuff, but I don’t really see any relation to Potter, other than (again) a young protagonist.

And Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels get mentioned too. I’ve now read through all but the most recent Thursday Next book, and I’m definitely worried about withdrawal after I finally finish that one! (Hopefully, Fforde hasn’t finished with Thursday books yet, though.)

So, in a nutshell, there’s lots of great stuff to read out there, both books and comics! I’m curious as to whether Mr. Levitt would consider picking up any of the comics work mentioned in the comments. Would a serious economist like him consider picking up a Sandman or Fables graphic novel? Would your average businessman want to be seen reading a comic in public? I don’t know. It’s never been a concern for me, but then again, I’m a nerd, and proud of it.

more Kindle stuff

I just noticed a post by Tim O’Reilly on the Kindle over at Radar. He talks a bit about the possibility of getting O’Reilly books out on the Kindle. In one of the comments, something interesting is mentioned: The Kindle has no monospaced font! That’s really a big problem, when you start getting into code samples in programming books. Oh well, yet another obstacle keeping me from the Holy Grail of tossing all my 1500-page programming books and replacing them with e-book equivalents.

books about Paris

A friend’s niece is going on a class trip to Paris soon. That made me think of my trip to Paris back in high school. I’m not going to write a long post reminiscing about that, but I thought I’d just post links to a couple of books on Amazon about Paris, mostly just because I wanted to play around with the function that allows you to do that from the Amazon Media Library.

The two books above were reviewed in The Economist a few years back, and I got interested in them based on that review. I had meant to buy them for myself at some point, but someone bought them for me as a gift before I’d gotten around to doing that.

(Edit, 02/14/2021: The Amazon iframe thing above stopped working at some point, so here are plain links to the books:
Paris: The Biography of a City
Paris Tales
More than ten years after I posted this, and I still haven’t finished reading the first one, or started reading the second. Sigh.)

Cataloging Books

I just entered a bunch of books into Delicious Library on my Mac. I hadn’t bothered entering anything into there since I got my new MacBook. Since the new MacBook has an iSight camera built in, I was kind of curious to see how the scanning function would work. Well, it scanned the bar codes OK, and came up with the correct UPCs, but it didn’t once pull the correct item for the UPC. I tried it on about ten books, and it didn’t work on any of them. I gave up, and went back to just typing in the ISBNs.

I then tried exporting from DL and importing to Amazon’s Media Library. I cut the ISBNs from DL’s export file, and pasted them into a separate text file, since Amazon seems to just want one ISBN per line, and nothing else. Amazon read in the file, and recognized about 20 items out of 80. Not a great success rate. I didn’t really try to troubleshoot that import at all, though, so maybe I messed something up. Amazon also has a scanning function similar to DL’s. I gave that a try, but I couldn’t get it to recognize my bar codes at all.

The thing that got me started on this was an attempt to figure out exactly which William Marshall books I own. Last night, I noticed one on Amazon (The Far Away Man) that didn’t sound familiar, so I ordered it. I guess there are a few others I haven’t read yet either, based on the list at Overbooked.