FREE/BARGAIN — Science Fiction & Fantasy

[salty-horse]

Originally Posted by isarl

I do too – what bothers me is that, in the ebook, they are separate pages. You turn a page, you see the first half of the illustration; in order to see the rest, you have to turn the page again. I can't do that to Paul Kidby!

Oh, sorry, I thought it was the other way around!
I'm OK with that too - I convert "comics" ebooks into image archives (cbz/cbr) and view them in dedicated comic book software - most of them have a toggle for double-page mode.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

Oh, sorry, I thought it was the other way around!
I'm OK with that too - I convert "comics" ebooks into image archives (cbz/cbr) and view them in dedicated comic book software - most of them have a toggle for double-page mode.

Wow, I'm kicking myself for not drawing the comparison to fixed-layout formats like comic books myself – thank you! Maybe I should look at converting this one to a comic-book archive format instead, or a “flepub” as Kobo calls them! Off to go do some learning!

[kyteflyer]

50% off Aeon Rising by Matthew Mather at Amazon US and CA: $2.49
https://www.amazon.com/Aeon-Rising-A.../dp/B0B29FJJZ2
https://www.amazon.ca/Aeon-Rising-Ap.../dp/B0B29FJJZ2

“An apocalyptic supernova flashes over the South Pole. A mysterious mission sent deep into the Amazon….”

Read it twice, can’t wait for the next in the series.

[Manabi]

Originally Posted by isarl

Just to add a data point here, when I am inside Canada and purchasing from Kobo's Canadian store, they bill me based on the address on my user profile. Not based on my billing address for whatever credit card I use. This is not exactly the same as using an entirely different country's Kobo store, but I thought it would be interesting to know.

I don't know how, but some stores seem to work just fine even without the correct address for your credit card. Last year Google changed my Japanese account to a US one, so I had to go through a process to make it Japanese again. As part of that I added a Japanese address. Despite that being the only address on file, it charges my US credit card without problems.

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

"Putting together this bundle was an exercise in misery. I didn't have access to enter the books I really love, so enjoy these, the best of a bad lot."

"I was drunk when I agreed to put this bundle together and hated every minute of it. I picked only the worst books I could find so readers will suffer, too."

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Piers Anthony is a writer that was wildly popular previously, but seems to have just vanished from the public consciousness.

Around a decade ago people started noticing Anthony had some truly disgusting themes in his books: misogyny, rape, pedophilia, etc. That stuff's definitely in his books and people calling attention to it severely damaged Anthony's reputation. No doubt that's a part of why his books aren't talked about much now, and why they aren't widely available.

Basically society changed, decided some of the things in Anthony's books were unacceptable and moved on from him.

Originally Posted by isarl

However, it seems to simply use a separate JPG for each page. This wouldn't bother me quite so much except it also does it for the two-page spreads, so I'm toying with the idea of stitching those two-part images together myself and replacing the references in the ebook. Just a bit leery of messing something up, I suppose. Any cautions or words of encouragement from more experienced readers who are also picky about this sort of thing? I guess I can always just make a copy of the original EPUB so that if I mess up I can go back to the original version.

As long as you have a backup of the original, you can't screw things up unrecoverably.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

"Putting together this bundle was an exercise in misery. I didn't have access to enter the books I really love, so enjoy these, the best of a bad lot."

[Dr. Drib]

We should probably keep in mind that Piers Anthony is now 88 years old, so I imagine he's slowed down a bit.

[GlennD]

Originally Posted by Manabi

Around a decade ago people started noticing Anthony had some truly disgusting themes in his books: misogyny, rape, pedophilia, etc. That stuff's definitely in his books and people calling attention to it severely damaged Anthony's reputation. No doubt that's a part of why his books aren't talked about much now, and why they aren't widely available.

Basically society changed, decided some of the things in Anthony's books were unacceptable and moved on from him.

totally true. His "Bio of a Space Tyrant" series had all of the above....and that was from the "hero". I admit I read it, but it was sort of train-wrecky (you couldn't look away). I was young enough to be intrigued by the adult content but am now old enough to be appalled by it. Most of his other series seemed to feature a ton of innuendo and sexual content aimed at teenage boys, unless they were even more adult than that. We could probably have a whole thread of examples of his excess.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by Manabi

"I was drunk when I agreed to put this bundle together and hated every minute of it. I picked only the worst books I could find so readers will suffer, too."

[…]

As long as you have a backup of the original, you can't screw things up unrecoverably.

Thanks for the laughs and the encouragement!

For what it's worth, I have learned since my earlier comment that the provided version (at least by Kobo UK) of The Last Hero is already in fixed-layout format, and while Calibre's viewer seemed to have troubles with it, my Kobo itself displays it just fine, and in landscape mode the left and right pages display totally seamlessly. (Many thanks to geek1011 and NickelMenu for enabling landscape mode on my Aura 2!) Now if only I could wave a magic wand and grant my eink screen a high-resolution colour space too – maybe one day. Many thanks to pdurrant for mentioning the sale. <3

[Ashartus]

Originally Posted by Manabi

Around a decade ago people started noticing Anthony had some truly disgusting themes in his books: misogyny, rape, pedophilia, etc. That stuff's definitely in his books and people calling attention to it severely damaged Anthony's reputation. No doubt that's a part of why his books aren't talked about much now, and why they aren't widely available.

Basically society changed, decided some of the things in Anthony's books were unacceptable and moved on from him.

I think it was longer ago than that, in the early 90s his books took a turn, there had been lots of sexual content before then but the portrayal changed. I remember being creeped out a bit by one of the books in his Incarnations of Immortality where he used time travel as a justification for a teenager to hook up with an older man. Then read Firefly which even back then I realized was really abhorrent and never touched anything he wrote again.

[Tarana]

About Time - Jodi Taylor $.99 Amazon, Kobo and B&N
Book 4 of Time Police series.

[salty-horse]

Salon Fantastique edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling is $3 on Amazon.com, Kobo US, Kobo worldwide, and probably elsewhere.

It's an anthology of original fantasy fiction, first published in 2006.

Table of contents: https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?85760

For Amazon users, note that since the new edition was published last month, it's affected by Amazon's DRM changes

[Tarana]

Captain Nemo By Kevin J. Anderson $1.99 Amazon, Kobo and B&N
Fantasy

Captain Nemo is the fictional life story of one of Jules Verne’s most memorable characters from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. This alternate history covers his boyhood friendship with the dreamer, Jules Verne, adventures aboard sailing ships, battles with pirates, and survival on a mysterious deserted island. Each time he returns home to his beloved France, Captain Nemo shares the tales of his exploits with the struggling writer Verne.

We follow Nemo’s exploration of hidden caverns that lead to the center of the earth, travels across darkest Africa in a hydrogen balloon, and his imprisonment by an evil Ottoman caliph who commands the dark genius to construct a sub-marine boat, the Nautilus, in order to attack merchant ships that venture through the newly completed Suez Canal.

[Tarana]

The Book of Three By Lloyd Alexander $1.99 Amazon, Kobo and B&N
Fantasy Book 1 of Prydain Chronicles
Kid's book that I read in my 20s and it left a positive lasting impression hence my site name.

Taran dreams of adventure, but nothing exciting ever happens to an Assistant Pig-Keeper, until his pig runs away. A chase through the woods leads Taran far from home and into great danger, for evil prowls the land of Prydain. With a collection of strange and wonderful friends whom he meets on his journey, Taran finds himself fighting so that good may triumph over evil, and so that his beloved home will not fall to a diabolical fiend.

Vanishing Acts By Ellen Datlow, Ed. $1.99 Amazon, Kobo and B&N
Anthology of short story science fiction

an inventive look at the future of endangered species and extinction in a sci-fi collection from a World Fantasy Award–winning editor and celebrated authors like Ted Chiang and Joe Haldeman.

[Manabi]

Originally Posted by Tarana

The Book of Three By Lloyd Alexander $1.99 Amazon, Kobo and B&N
Fantasy Book 1 of Prydain Chronicles
Kid's book but I read in my 20s and it left a positive lasting impression hence my site name.

I really liked the Prydain Chronicles when I read them as well. I preferred them over C. S. Lewis' Narnia books, because the religious elements weren't so blatantly obvious. I always felt like Alexander tried to write good books first and include religion second, while Lewis did the reverse. That was my conclusion as a preteen, but I still think it's accurate.

[itisbomb]

Skulduggery Pleasant: Books 1 – 3 bundle
by Derek Landy

is $1.99

Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/sku...ery-pleasant-1

Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Skulduggery-P...s%2C378&sr=8-6

Book 1: SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT. Meet Skulduggery Pleasant: detective, sorcerer, warrior. Oh yes, and dead.

Book 2: PLAYING WITH FIRE. Vengeous. Dusk. Sanguine. Three of the deadliest killers alive are in town to resurrect an unstoppable creature of horrifying power… and only Skulduggery and Valkyrie stand in their way.

Book 3: THE FACELESS ONES. You’ve seen it all before: some bad guy wants to bring about the end of the world. A few people get hurt, sure, but everything’s all right in the end. Well… not this time.