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Sat July 20 2013

NYTimes launches dedicated Kindle Fire app

05:49 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Amazon Kindle

It's been a long time coming, but the New York Times has finally released a dedicated news app for the Kindle Fire aimed at delivering the latest coverage of US and international news from the Gray Lady. It's completely free until August 1st, so if you're a proud Kindle Fire owner, why not give it a try.

Here the full press release:

The New York Times (NYTimes.com) today launched a news app for Kindle Fire, which delivers the latest news and award-winning journalism of The New York Times, designed and formatted for optimal reading on Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

To mark the launch, The Times will offer free access to all 25+ sections of New York Times news, information and opinion, including videos, slide shows, interactive graphics and blogs through July 31.

Beginning in August, non-subscribers will be able to access up to three articles each day on The New York Times Kindle Fire app. Non-subscribers may also subscribe to The Times using their Amazon.com account. New York Times subscribers with Web + Tablet and All Digital Access digital subscriptions will have unlimited access to The Times on Kindle Fire as well as unlimited access to The New York Times Kindle Edition, which provides a representation of the daily newspaper.

Features include offline reading, cross-platform save, share options across social media and e-mail, as well as text-to-speech functionality, which can read articles and blogs aloud. Users can also dictate comments using Android’s native speech-to-text functionality.

The Times app for Kindle Fire is available in the Amazon Appstore. To access all sections of the app after July 31, a NYTimes.com + Tablet Apps or All Digital Access digital subscription will be required. Details and pricing for these plans are available at www.NYTimes.com/Access.

[ 2 replies ]

August 2013 Book Club Nominations

01:04 AM by WT Sharpe in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

MobileRead Book Club
August 2013 Nominations

Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for August, 2013.

The nominations will run through midnight EST
July 30 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.

Book selection category for August is:

Science Fiction

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.


Official choices with three nominations each:

(1) Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Sony

Spoiler:
Often listed as one of Clarke's finest novels, Rendezvous With Rama has won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards. A fast-paced and compelling story of an enigmatic encounter with alien technology, Rendezvous With Rama offers both answers and unsolved mysteries that continue to fascinate readers decades after its first publication.

Available at libraries everywhere.

(2) A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub | Kindle / Scott Dutton Design & Illustration: ePub

Spoiler:
A Princess of Mars (1917) is a science fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Barsoom series. Full of swordplay and daring feats, the novel is considered a classic example of 20th century pulp fiction. It is also a seminal instance of the planetary romance, a sub-genre of science fantasy that became highly popular in the decades following its publication. Its early chapters also contain elements of the Western. The story is set on Mars, imagined as a dying planet with a harsh desert environment. This vision of Mars was based on the work of the astronomer Percival Lowell, whose ideas were widely popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

(3) Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Patricia Clark Memorial Library: ePub | Kindle

Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

While attempting to escape a civil war, four people are kidnapped and transported to the Tibetan mountains. After their plane crashes, they are found by a mysterious Chinese man. He leads them to a monastery hidden in "the valley of the blue moon" -- a land of mystery and matchless beauty where life is lived in tranquil wonder, beyond the grasp of a doomed world.

It is here, in Shangri-La, where destinies will be discovered and the meaning of paradise will be unveiled.

(4) Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
Amazon UK / Amazon US

Spoiler:
This is the penultimate Culture novel by Banks--written in 2010. In fact, it is our final visit to the Universe of The Culture as it is set later than The Hydrogen Sonata which was his final science-fiction novel.

Surface Detail is regarded as one of the finest books set in that Universe.
It has an epic sweep spanning Real and Virtual worlds. We meet the fascinating Ship minds, a memorable villain, and are submerged in a murder story, Machiavellian politics, a revenge quest and fascinating minor characters all set within four inter-related and integrated plots. The blurb from Amazon reads:

"It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters.
It begins with a murder.
And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself."

While the culture novels share a common setting, they can be read as stand-alone books.

(5) Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
Amazon US / Barnes & Noble

Spoiler:
From Wikipedia:

The novel is set in a post-visitation world where there are now six Zones known on Earth (each zone is approximately five square miles/kilometers in size) which are still full of unexplained phenomena and where strange happenings have briefly occurred, assumed to have been visitations by aliens. World governments and the UN try to keep tight control over them to prevent leakage of artifacts from the Zones, fearful of unforeseen consequences. A subculture of stalkers, thieves going into the Zones to get the artifacts, evolves around the Zones.

(6) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:
Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

(7) Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Amazon Canada / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble US / Bookworld Australia

Spoiler:
From Amazon:

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.

Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

(8) Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
Amazon Canada / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Sony Reader Store

Spoiler:
Alastair Reynolds's critically acclaimed debut has redefined the space opera with a staggering journey across vast gulfs of time and space to confront the very nature of reality itself.
Available at libraries everywhere!

Amazon.com Review:

Alastair Reynolds's first novel is "hard" SF on an epic scale, crammed with technological marvels and immensities. Its events take place over a relatively short period, but have roots a billion years old--when the Dawn War ravaged our galaxy.

Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.

Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas--Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity--and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.

The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons.

At the heart of this artifact, the final revelations detonate--most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

(9) Solaris by Lem Stanislaw
Amazon UK / Amazon US / B&N (US) / Diesel / Google Play (AUS)

Spoiler:
From Wikipedia:

The book is about the ultimate inadequacy of communication between human and non-human species.

In probing and examining the oceanic surface of the planet Solaris from a hovering research station the human scientists are, in turn, being studied by the sentient planet itself, which probes for and examines the thoughts of the human beings who are analyzing it. Solaris has the ability to manifest their secret, guilty concerns in human form, for each scientist to personally confront.

Solaris is one of Lem’s philosophic explorations of man’s anthropomorphic limitations.]

(10) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Amazon Canada / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble US / Bookworld Australia

Spoiler:
From Amazon:

Winner of both the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin -- barely of age herself -- finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.

Five years in the writing by one of science fiction's most honored authors, Doomsday Book is a storytelling triumph. Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering and the indomitable will of the human spirit.


From Publishers Weekly:

This new book by Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author Willis ( Lincoln's Dreams ) is an intelligent and satisfying blend of classic science fiction and historical reconstruction. Kivrin, a history student at Oxford in 2048, travels back in time to a 14th-century English village, despite a host of misgivings on the part of her unofficial tutor. When the technician responsible for the procedure falls prey to a 21st-century epidemic, he accidentally sends Kivrin back not to 1320 but to 1348--right into the path of the Black Death. Unaware at first of the error, Kivrin becomes deeply involved in the life of the family that takes her in. But before long she learns the truth and comes face to face with the horrible, unending suffering of the plague that would wipe out half the population of Europe. Meanwhile, back in the future, modern science shows itself infinitely superior in its response to epidemics, but human nature evidences no similar evolution, and scapegoating is still alive and well in a campaign against "infected foreigners."p. 204 This book finds villains and heroes in all ages, and love, too, which Kivrin hears in the revealing and quietly touching deathbed confession of a village priest.

The nominations are now closed.

[ 88 replies ]

Fri July 19 2013

How does writing style influence your reading choices?

08:04 PM by speakingtohe in E-Book General | General Discussions

How does writing style influence your reading choices?

A couple of MR discussions have made me wonder just why I like the books I like.

Content and genre aside, there are some authors that I enjoy so much I will read practically anything they write, and others whom I really like the first book I encounter and struggle with the next.

I am a bit ignorant on the subject of writing styles in general and would like to know more. I understand narrative, expository, descriptive and persuasive, but until yesterday I had no idea what second person present tense meant.

Overall I prefer first person present tense, with the narrator being the main character or sidekick.(examples Robert B. Parker, Rex Stout) I also like many books with switching POV’s and books that can go from one timeframe to another, although some of them leave me scratching my head wondering who or when. (Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler was confusing as to timeline in spots but I enjoyed the book)

Descriptive is all well and good, but too much description has me going blah, blah, blah in my head. As does too many rabbits pulled out of a hat.

I like to be able to picture the characters and settings in my mind but I don’t need a whole page or two devoted to the sound of the wind in the trees, although my mother loves things like that. And I am inclined to actively resent pages and pages and chapters and chapters devoted to magic 101 or the complete dynamics behind an alternative reality. (example: Nancy Holzner’s Deadtown series, liked the first, but the second just goes on and on with the demon fighting lessons)

An example of rabbits out of the hat books are The Dresden Files, which I like for the most part, but too many last minute saves by something that seems to have been belatedly poked into the first chapter because the author has dug himself a big hole does nothing for my suspension of disbelief.

I do enjoy my reading and don’t really have to know why I like certain books, but I would kind of like to.
Helen

[attribution: image by Susan Corpuz]

PS
It was pointed out to me by HarryT that I might really prefer past tense and he is absolutely right.

[ 43 replies ]

Storm brewing: Library book pricing

07:52 PM by fjtorres in E-Book General | General Discussions

From the Huffington Post, a reminder that the fallout of the Price Fix Conspiracy is hardly over:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-br...7&rid=26912588

If anything, it is beginning:

While the e-book world takes a minute to digest the court ruling finding Apple conspired with book publishers to jack up the price of e-books to consumers, it's worth noting that there is another e-book pricing battle going on.

Consumers are the ultimate victims here, also, but those most directly affected are public libraries. Some book publishers don't lease e-books to libraries at all, depriving library customers of versions of popular best-sellers. Others set the lease rates exorbitantly high, squeezing the already squeezed library budget.

Yes, having been found to be conspiring miscreants, the BPHs are now fair game for the bigger breed of predatory miscreant: politicians...

The American Library Association (ALA), and particularly former President Maureen Sullivan, have raised the issue loudly and persistently, but the publishers haven't been terribly responsive. Now, state and local governments are just starting to become involved on behalf of their libraries and the library patrons.

In Connecticut, Gov. Dan Malloy (D) on June 6 signed a bill requiring the state attorney general and the state librarian to conduct a study on the availability of e-books to public library customers. The study will have a broad mandate, taking in such topics as surveying current practices used by publishers and distributors (companies like Overdrive or Baker & Taylor, which supply the software to make the e-books available to libraries), to determine if there are any problems with those practices and if so, what to do about them.

The requirement of a study was the last compromise in the legislative process, which started out with a bill by State Rep. Brian Sear (D) "to require publishers of electronic books to offer such books for sale to public and academic libraries at the same rates as offered to the general public." That bill would mean the publishers couldn't charge the public $12.99 for an e-book and charge libraries $85 for the same e-book, which is the practice now.

States should study the pricing of e-books, and pass on to Congress and Federal agencies their findings. Localities should speak up for their library users. And Congress should ask book publishers when they will recognize the harm being done to library budgets and to library users through discriminatory pricing.

More detail at the source.

The BPHs should start beefing up their lobbying deartment. Now, in addition to their Amazon FUD campaign, they are going to have to run 51 lobbying efforts to stop library book pricing from being regulated.

Of course, the same states looking at their library practices are also plaintiffs in the still-pending class action Price Fixing suits. They are not likely to be easily swayed with the usual sweet-talk and small brown paper bags...

[ 18 replies ]

Are bookstores still worth fighting for?

07:36 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | General Discussions

E-book sales are skyrocketing and we've all seen the disruptive impact this has on established businesses. There's no telling if bookstores will survive for another few years, but author Stephen Booth suggests that it's important we continue to support them:

If print books were to disappear, the sad fact is that I wouldn't be sitting in a bookshop ready to sign your Kindle when a new book came out. There wouldn't even be a bookshop for me to sit in.

So if, like me, you want to see books flourishing in all their forms, it's vital to support the booksellers who continue to be the mainstay of the publishing business.

And remember – bookshops pay their taxes too!

Do we need our local bookshops and should we try to support them, or have they simply outlived their usefulness? What do you think?

[ 61 replies ]

Google Play Books expanding further in Europe

07:07 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

If you had any doubts that Google isn't serious about its e-book business, doubt no longer. Quietly and unstoppable, the company just added the following European countries to their ever growing list of countries where e-books can be bought through the Google Play store.

  • Denmark
  • Czech Republic
  • Finland
  • Greece
  • Hungary
  • Netherlands
  • Poland
  • Romania
  • Sweden

Yes, my feelings are slightly hurt by the fact that Switzerland is not on that list, just yet. But I keep my hopes up.

Via Android Police

[ 11 replies ]

Flexible E-Book devices: One step closer with flexible batteries

05:35 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

There's no telling when flexible e-book devices will make it to market, but what we can say with almost absolute certainty is that before such technology arrives, we'll need something to make batteries more flexible (in the truest sense). Fortunately, Taiwanese company ProLogium has been working for some time on the development of so called FPC Lithium-Ceramic batteries; these batteries are ultra-thin, bendable, and supposedly extremely safe to use.

The good folks from Mobilegeeks.de had a chance to visit their labs, and they shared their findings in the video below.

For more details check out this company presentation (PDF).

Thanks to MobileReader owly for the tip. [via Tablet News]

[ 15 replies ]

Sat June 29 2013

MobileRead Week in Review: 06/22 - 06/29

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Here it is again, our weekly roundup! Enjoy!

E-Book General - News

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations


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