Quote:
Originally Posted by captobvs
Although I have most of these series in pb I'm looking to find the "Swords" series by Saberhagen, the "Dungeon" series by Farmer and anything by C.J.Cherryh for my Kindle.
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You can get some of Cherryh's work via
Closed Circle, an e-bookstore she runs with a couple of other authors.
While it's DRM-free and the money goes directly to the authors themselves, I think their execution of the concept is a bit lacking. They seem to grasp some potential in e-books, but still confuse them with paper books.
They have their website set up so that it charges per format (though there's also the option of a MultiFormat "Full" pack), you get one download link via e-mail which expires in 24 hours, and if anything happens such as a corrupt or lost file (apparently you're supposed to "protect" your sole download like a not-easily-replaceable physical book, according to the FAQ), or you got a single format and find out you need another, you have to re-buy the book.
That seems a bit much to pay for in terms of what you get for the price when the better-known books cost 9.95 (though there are some $5 more obscure titles).
By contrast,
BookViewCafé has excellent terms: online reading access, MultiFormat straight off the bat, re-download as necessary, and generally $4.99 per book, bundle/omnibus pricing available. It would be nice if Cherryh et al. joined them.
As for what I'm reading, I recently finished
Diane Duane's Romulan Star Trek novels,
The Bloodwing Voyages (omnibus containing
My Enemy, My Ally,
The Romulan Way, and
Sword Hunt/
Honor Blade) and the final volume in the set,
The Empty Chair.
MEMA and TRW were as excellent a re-read as I remembered, but SH/HB/TEC definitely suffered from apparently having been one story that ended up being split and printed as three books over the course of several years, due to Duane's scheduling conflicts, according to the afterword in the back of the Omnibus.
While it was an entertaining enough story (except for the parts which dragged) and it was nice to catch-up with what her characters were doing, it felt like wish-fulfillment AU fanfic. Not that Star Trek novels aren't just licensed fanfic anyway, but MEMA and TRW both read and felt like they could have fit in with the series as-is, while SH/HB/TEC had me wondering about the Point of Departure, as alternate history fans call it.
Since I read them both in e-book editions, I might as well comment on the formatting.
There were a few minor typos I spotted (I own paper copies of MEMA and TRW, thanks to a relative of a relative who moved overseas and left her old Star Trek novel collection behind, which eventually passed down to me), but rather weirdly, in the Omnibus, certain words are "decapitalized", so stuff like the Security and Life Sciences branches of Starfleet are oddly lower-cased. And they're both books that force spaces between paragraphs, too.
Good thing I got them in ePub (both at Kobo with the recent 50% off holiday coupons, for $4.38 each after taxes; not bad for the Omnibus, which amortizes 2 and 2/3rds worth of novels printed over 4 volumes to a cost of $1.10 per book, though Kobo's since jacked up the base selling price of the Omnibus again) so they were easy to fix.
There was a cute in-joke on the frontispiece of
The Empty Chair. Apparently, Simon & Schuster books are also published on one of the Romulan planets.
As for what I'm reading next, sampling from the Fictionwise books I bought earlier this year to determine which authors' other works I'll be picking up with the 60% off holiday coupon in the Deals forum. Currently on
R.A. MacAvoy's
Damiano, which is pretty good so far and has earned her an automatic "buy" position.