Read Alana's short fiction on the Web: “The Valley” at The Edge of Propinquity, “Nomi's Wish” at Coyote Wild, and “No Matter How You Hide Her” at Baeg Tobar.

Comics (online and otherwise)

02/06/2010 08:38 PM

I use Google Chrome here at home, and about 50% of my bookmarks bar is Web comics that I read (followed by blogs, followed by a few links for my freelance work). So it's amazing that I forget about MySpace Dark Horse Presents -- which is currently featuring not only a Buffy-verse comic by the fabulous Jackie Kessler, but is also featuring part 2 of a new series by Mark Crilley, who you might remember I raved about back when I reviewed Miki Falls for School Library Journal. The story, Brody's Ghost, which appeared in the last issue of MySpace Dark Horse Presents with part one is Crilley's new project, and is scheduled to be a six-volume Dark Horse series. Sign me up!

I feel like I've been getting by mostly on links lately -- in part that's because I've been so busy with the whole work/other work/pregnancy classes & appointments schedule that I don't have much brain for blogging. As it is, I think we are officially done with our pre-baby purchases as of today -- everything we don't already have can wait until later (except maybe some minor, medicine-chest type things we have on a list in a folder somewhere that's surely in the house, but is not where I looked for it before our shopping trip). Bug is growing so big that I have no idea where she's got left to expand -- the doctor at my appointment last week guestimated she's already at seven pounds five ounces, and she's still supposedly got three and a half weeks left before she's due.

I know I posted about my grandmother's rainbows here. I don't remember if I posted that I did get two prisms from Twostripe for Christmas, and they've been giving me rainbows nearly every morning. Lately, I've been making sure that Bug gets in on the rainbow action:

And that's life around here lately. There have been a few great mythic D&D games (featuring one in which I made a character Originally Participate, Barfieldians -- so. much. fun! in the evil DM sort of way), and I'll try to write a little bit more about those in the future.

So, What Was the Point Again? (And book birthdays)

02/04/2010 09:50 PM

After the weekend, Amazon said to the world, "Well, we can't help but do what Macmillan says, because they have a monopoly on their own titles." (Well, that's one way to put it.) The wonderful Barbara Vey of Beyond Her Book posted about it as it was happening, with both Amazon's letter to the public and Macmillan's letter to the public side by side. Another great article on Paid Content gives a breakdown of why this is actually a much better deal for Amazon, as far as making money goes. So why the fuss? (And why hasn't Amazon put the Buy buttons back on Macmillan books yet?) Suspicion says that this was all done so Amazon can say, "Hey, it's not our fault that the mean, horrible publishers are charging too much for e-books, consumers. We tried to protect you."

Honestly, Amazon, I can protect my own wallet, thanks. I spend a pretty minimal amount on e-books, have found plenty legal e-books for free (and know there are way more available on Project Gutenberg), and I still like my print books. Consumers will ultimately be the force behind how e-books are priced, without so many shenanigans, I hope. (Correspondent jeff_duntemann pointed out in the last entry that he thinks 50% off of the print price is about right -- of all of the industry pros I know, he's the guy I'd expect to have a handle on this, so I have a feeling he's in the right ballpark.)

One of the things that Barbara points out that once again scares me about the power of Amazon & Kindle is that any of the free previews available on Kindle for Macmillan titles vanished from the Kindles of the folks who had downloaded them already. They're overusing that Big Brother potential, and I hope they realize folks find it annoying (and worse).

--

But on to happier things. Do you know how many book birthdays there have been lately? First, mdhenry had Happy Hour of the Damned come out in mass market. (There are contests all over the interwebz to support this release: see Bitten by Books as well as the Home Pages of Michele Bardsley, Stacia Kane, and fellow book birthdayer Dakota Cassidy, who just birthed Accidentally Demonic.) Nalini Singh's Archangel's Kiss, the second in her new series, is now on shelves. And in a few days, frost_light's first Cat & Bones spin off, First Drop of Crimson, is being released. Whew, what a lot of birthdays!

Jeaniene's publisher is actually offering a sneak peak of First Drop of Crimson over at the HarperCollins site. It's almost a full fifth of the book, so if you can't wait, check it out now. Jeaniene also does super nifty book trailers, so I'm posting one below. She's also got a contest at Bitten by Books that's worth checking out.

So, tons of new books, contests, and prizes. Is it time to go shopping or what?

Hold the Phone (or, in this case, Kindle)

01/30/2010 11:40 AM

Publishing hijinks are ensuing as Macmillan and Amazon duke it out. Macmillan wants Amazon to charge more for its e-books, and in the disagreement, Amazon responded by saying, effectively, "then take your ball and go home." The e-tailer is no longer selling Macmillan books in any format.

Yowza.

Jay Lake, John Scalzi, and Jackie Kessler all do pretty good commentary. I understand from reading enough publishing and author blogs that e-books aren't actually substantially cheaper to produce than, say, mass markets. But I also know that I, as a book buyer, would much rather buy the print version of a book if I'm paying roughly the same cost for either edition. (The exceptions here include Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, which I'd rather not own in print, as it appears ginormous, but which has been recommended to me recently by two independent sources. Sadly, I can't find an edition for my Nook. I'd also happily buy the compiled "Dark is Rising Sequence" for my Nook to make good on my New Year's Resolution to finally finish books four and five this year, but it looks like only books 2 and 4 are available in e-book format. I would also love to get legal ebook editions of my D&D books so I didn't have to lug the things around, but WotC seems to have abandoned that plan in favor of D&D Insider, which requires an Internet connection and a subscription fee.)

I predominantly buy e-books that are novellas or short stories by authors and artists I like (which aren't available in print) or get e-books for free, which shows about where my price point runs. I tend to agree that most buyers just won't pay the $15 price point on an e-book, but if Macmillan wants to try, I think Amazon would be smarter to let the consumer show that they won't pay that margin than demand that Macmillan offer their books at a lower rate. And there's certainly no reason for Amazon to drop the print editions! That just seems foolhardy.

Why I'm Keeping My Nook (and some author pimpage)

01/28/2010 09:07 PM

So, I've made the decision to keep the Nook. After reading an e-ARC on it with tremendous success and using it for Substrate (with bookmarks, since I hadn't figured out the notation function yet--I'll get to that), I was pretty well determined to keep it. In the last week, I discovered that the secret to making notations on side-loaded content (content not purchased/gotten from B&N) is to have them as ePub files instead of PDFs. Ah ha! What can you convert to an ePub? Word docs, PDFs, etc., etc. What program do you use to do so? The much raved-about Calibre e-book manager.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a solution to my complaints.

Now, would I have liked to have an e-book reader that just magically had all the functionality I'd desired? Well, sure -- who wouldn't? But since it sounds like a lot of folks are using Calibre to make their e-readers work the way they want them to (including Sony Readers, though I'm not sure about Kindle, since Kindle doesn't use ePubs), apparently Calibre was designed to make machines that didn't have that magical functionality suddenly work better. I'm pretty excited.

Now, that said, a quick comparison: I got copies of Rachel Vincent's (rkvincent) My Soul to Lose novella from two different places when it was being offered for free as a teaser into her YA series, "Soul Screamers." One came from B&N itself in the B&N format. One came in PDF. I thought I'd look at both on my nook and compare. In short, the B&N version is much prettier, though it has a much smaller cover image when you open it. The PDF version has the same page break issues I described earlier -- they're easy enough to read around, but the B&N format fills the whole screen, so each "page turn" is a new full-screen image. I can change the font in the B&N version (two font options, five size options). The B&N version then shows me how many "pages" (as in, full screens) I have until the end of the document. In my experimenting, this could vary between 114 and 130 pages. None of the pages were numbered uniquely, the way they are in a print book or a pdf. The pdf edition might take me two clicks to get through a page, but it does have both the Nook page count at the bottom (87 pages, with two turns keeping me on the same page) and the pdf/print page count at the top of each unique print page. This doesn't matter so much to me for reading-for-fun type books, but if I were using a book for a class? I'd probably make sure I downloaded, then side-loaded, a pdf version through an alternate e-book source so I'd be citing the same pages as everyone else. For the pretty factor, though, the B&N edition wins -- it's easier to adapt, and each page turn works as a unique page in the reading experience, even if it doesn't correspond to print.

At any rate, there's my long review. If I end up having more to say later, I'll mention it!

On a tangent, did anyone else see the iPad reviews today? Was anyone else shocked that they're not using e-ink for their e-book reader function? Maybe that's impossible if you also want to use the display for other things... but to me, the e-ink display is what makes e-readers superior to reading on a computer. I was pretty darn surprised that Apple hadn't embraced it.

And now, for some author pimpage. You guys know mdhenry, right? The guy who writes the Amanda Feral (aka Sex in the City + Zombies) novels? His third book is coming out in February, and in part due to the recession (and possibly in part due to the success of similar campaigns for network TV shows), he's sponsoring a "Save Amanda Feral" campaign. Click the banner below to find out more!

Gamers Help Haiti

01/21/2010 09:48 AM

Many of you have probably already seen this, but DriveThruRPG is doing a special promotion: donate $20 and receive a huge bundle of gaming products worth over $1000. A lot of publishers have donated, including Margaret Weis Productions. Both the CORTEX system and Serenity RPG are part of the deal. (Either of those by themselves cost more than $20 digitally through DriveThruRPG on a normal day.)

The money is being donated to Doctors without Borders. If you've been thinking of donating to the Haiti earthquake victims (or have been thinking about getting some new game supplements and sourcebooks), this is a great enlightened-self-interest promotion. It's been so popular that their servers are having trouble keeping up with all the donations and downloads!

Review up at Flames Rising

01/20/2010 02:50 PM

I meant to mention this earlier, but I am finally, finally starting to catch up with my reviews for Flames Rising, largely thanks to my Nook.* Matt posted my review of the Grants Pass post-apocalyptic anthology, edited by Jennifer Brozek, which you can read here. (Amanda Pillar, the in house editor, mentioned it in her livejournal.) There were quite a number of authors I've been meaning to read featured in the anthology, so it was a great way to be introduced to the fiction of Cherie Priest (cmpriest) and friend-of-the-blog Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire), both of whom I've been reading on LJ for ages but haven't actually read in the sphere of fiction. (Seanan's novel Rosemary and Rue is sitting prominently on my TBR pile; her piece in Grants Pass was probably my favorite in the whole collection.)

I've got some crit group pieces and three novels to review between PW and SLJ before the end of the month, then back to the FR pile!

*For this reason, I am probably going to keep it, by the way -- the reading experience is so much more pleasant for e-books and critique group manuscripts than the computer that I think I'm going to come out ahead by using it, even if I can't yet annotate the pieces I'd really like to annotate. I'm using the bookmark feature to get by for now, which hopefully will be enough to remind me about what it was I wanted to say on those pages. I'm crossing my fingers that they'll improve it in the future. In the mean time, since the majority of my e-books are in pdf or ePub format, it seems worth keeping rather than purchasing a Kindle, which can do the annotations now, since the conversion process there sounds, from the reviews, like a big ol' hassle (plus the hassle of exchanging items, waiting for a new device to arrive, etc., etc.).