Category: books

Flannery O’Connor

I’ve gotten a good number of books through Bookmooch since I joined up a couple of weeks ago. I just got a Flannery O’Connor short story collection in the mail today. I’ve only read a few of her stories, so I’m looking forward to reading more.

And I also just got approved for a free account on britannica.com, through their WebShare program, so I guess I’m a bona fide “web publisher” now. Either that, or they just rubber-stamped all the applications for this program. Either way, the Flannery O’Connor link above is to a Britannica article. The Britannica site is OK, but some of the bells & whistles they’ve got on it make it a little difficult to actually read the article, at least through Firefox.

Wikipedia has a reasonable article on her too, of course.

Last Lecture

I bought The Last Lecture in Kindle format a few days ago. I’m almost done reading it. It’s a pretty good read. Lots of short chapters, mostly random anecdotes from Randy Pausch’s life. There’s nothing in the book that’s likely to change my life, I think, but just a lot of interesting little insights, and some fun stories.
This is also the first book I’m reading, in its entirety, on the Kindle. It’s been a pretty smooth reading experience. Certainly no worse than reading an old-fashioned paper book, but not necessarily any better. Of course, there are some photos in the book, and they really don’t look at all good on the Kindle, so that’s a concern. In the future, I’ll probably avoid buying any book for the Kindle if I know it’s heavy with photos or other graphics.

more on BookMooch

After my post about BookMooch last night, I wound up listing some more books, about 30 in total. And, this morning, I had requests for a number of them. I’ve now got eight packages ready to bring over to the post office tomorrow morning. I’m sending most of them media mail, so it shouldn’t be too expensive. One’s going to Canada, though, so I think I’ll send that one in a flat-rate Priority Mail envelope. It’ll cost me a few bucks, but BookMooch gives you three points for shipping internationally, so I should get three books out of this one trade.

On the receiving side, I’ve got three books coming to me. I’ve added most of the books on my Amazon wish list to my BookMooch wish list. Aside from the three that are coming, I don’t think any of the others are out there in the BookMooch system anywhere right now. I’ll have to look around and see if anyone’s got anything I’m interested in, so I can use up some of the points I’m getting from sending out so much stuff.

Bookmooch

There was an article on CNET today about Bookmooch. This is a book-trading site, basically, similar to LaLa or Peerflix, only for books. The setup is pretty simple. You get a point for every book you send out; every book you “mooch” from someone else costs a point. You get a tenth of a point just for listing a book in your inventory. So I got one point by listing ten books, and now I’ve got a William Gibson novel on its way to me. And I’m sending out a Star Wars novel, so that gets me another point. I don’t know if this will result in overall fewer books in my apartment, or more books, but if nothing else, I’m at least moving some stuff around.

WSJ – You Can Enjoy a Book On a Mere Cellphone

Here’s an interesting little article on the idea of reading e-books on a cellphone, in this case, a BlackBerry. The newer BlackBerries have pretty decent screens, but I still don’t think I’d want to read a book on one. I’ll stick with the Kindle!

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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.

free Doctor Who ebooks

The BBC has a bunch of Doctor Who ebooks available for free download. So that’s another three or four free books I’ve got loaded onto my Kindle now. I don’t know if any of them are any good, but they didn’t cost me anything, and they aren’t taking up much disk space, so no big problem there, right?

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.