08:15 PM by pilotbob in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help us select the next book that the Mobile Read book club will read for April 2010.

The nominations will run through Mar 26.
Voting (new poll thread) will run for 5 days starting Mar 26.

Book selection category for April per the "official" club opening thread is:

April 2010
Humor

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 pool 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 poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations.

Official choices each with three nominations:

The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald.
The Egg and I, first published in 1945, is a humorous memoir by American author Betty MacDonald about her adventures and travails as a young wife on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. The book is based on the author's experiences as a newlywed in trying to acclimate and operate a small chicken farm with her first husband Robert Heskett[1] from 1927 to 1931 near Chimacum, Washington. On visits with her family in Seattle, she told stories of their tribulations, which greatly amused them. In the 1940s, MacDonald's sisters strongly encouraged her to write a book about these experiences. The Egg and I was MacDonald's first attempt at writing a book.

Topper by Thorne Smith
It all begins when Cosmo Topper, a law-abiding, mild-mannered bank manager, decides to buy a secondhand car, only to find it haunted by the ghosts of its previous owners—the reckless, feckless, frivolous couple who met their untimely demise when the car careened into an oak tree. The ghosts, George and Marion Kerby, make it their mission to rescue Topper from the drab "summer of suburban Sundays" that is his life—and they commence a series of madcap adventures that leave Topper, and anyone else who crosses their path, in a whirlwind of discomfiture and delight.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Via www.fantasticfiction.co.uk A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, and suspicious of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, crusader against dunces. In revolt against the 20th century, Ignatius propels his bulk among the flesh-pots of a fallen city, documenting life on his Big Chief tablets as he goes, until his mother decrees that Ignatius must work.

My man Jeeves by P G Wodehouse
Containing drafts of stories later rewritten for other collections (including "Carry On, Jeeves"), "My Man Jeeves" offers a fascinating insight into the genesis of comic literature's most celebrated double-act. All the stories are set in New York, four of them featuring Jeeves and Wooster themselves; the rest concerning Reggie Pepper, an earlier version of Bertie. Plots involve the usual cast of amiable young clots, choleric millionaires, chorus-girls and vulpine aunts, but towering over them all is the inscrutable figure of Jeeves, manipulating the action from behind the scenes. Early or not, these stories are masterly examples of Wodehouse's art, turning the most ordinary incidents into golden farce.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
Wikipedia says "The novel explains the tale of Hank Morgan, a 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut who awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval Britain at the time of the legendary King Arthur".

Fool by Christopher Moore
This is from Publisher's Weekly (as cited on Amazon):
Starred Review. Here's the Cliff Notes you wished you'd had for King Lear—the mad royal, his devious daughters, rhyming ghosts and a castle full of hot intrigue—in a cheeky and ribald romp that both channels and chides the Bard and all Fate's bastards. It's 1288, and the king's fool, Pocket, and his dimwit apprentice, Drool, set out to clean up the mess Lear has made of his kingdom, his family and his fortune—only to discover the truth about their own heritage. There's more murder, mayhem, mistaken identities and scene changes than you can remember, but bestselling Moore (You Suck) turns things on their head with an edgy 21st-century perspective that makes the story line as sharp, surly and slick as a game of Grand Theft Auto. Moore confesses he borrows from at least a dozen of the Bard's plays for this buffet of tragedy, comedy and medieval porn action. It's a manic, masterly mix—winning, wild and something today's groundlings will applaud. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Augustus Carp, Esq. - Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man by Henry Bashford
From amazon.com: 'Bashford's comic 1924 volume offers the mock autobiography of Augustus Carp, a self-aggrandizing, stuffy, puritanical oaf, who indulges in numerous vices in the name of Christianity, rationalizing his own weaknesses while condemning others for the same acts. Great fun.'

A Damon Runyon Omnibus
She quotes Wikipedia: [Runyon] was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the Brooklyn or Midtown demi-monde. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character as well as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted. He spun humorous tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit," "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," "Good Time Charley," "Dave the Dude," or "The Seldom Seen Kid." Runyon wrote these stories in a distinctive vernacular style: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years -- except Biff.Ever since the day when he came upon six-year-old Joshua of Nazareth resurrecting lizards in the village square, Levi bar Alphaeus, called "Biff,"had the distinction of being the Messiah's best bud. That's why the angel Raziel has resurrected Biff from the dust of Jerusalem and brought him to America to write a new gospel, one that tells the real, untold story. Meanwhile, Raziel will order pizza, watch the WWF on TV, and aspire to become Spider-Man.Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung-fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes -- whose considerable charms fall to Biff to sample, since Josh is forbidden the pleasures of the flesh...

The Eyre Affair" by Jasper Fforde
"The first in a series of outlandishly clever adventures featuring the resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Next-a New York Times bestseller!In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Bront?'s novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel-unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix."

Candide by Voltaire

01:37 PM by thinkpad in Android Devices | Spring Design Alex

Looks kind of cool:

The one thing I don't like: the page turning buttons looks awfully small. I wish I had bigger page turning buttons on my Kindle and this one is even smaller.

11:00 AM by pilotbob in E-Book General | News

Mobileread member kilohertz53 reports that sony sent him the following email offering to fix the battery life issues on his upgraded Sony PRS-500 for free again and they pay shipping. Here is the letter he received:

Dear PRS-500 Reader(TM) Owner,

Sincerely,
The Reader Team

I'm not sure what more you could ask for... other than the original fix not having the problem of course.

BOb

09:43 AM by anurag in E-Book General | News

http://amazon.com/kindleformac

07:28 AM by Nate the great in E-Book General | General Discussions

So I just posted the second part of the Pocketbook 302 review over on my blog. Here are an excerpt:

The Pocketbook 302 is just coming on to the market, and I was lucky enough to get one of the first review units. This is part 2 of the review. I posted the first part of the review last week, and it has a fair amount of detail. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. This part will cover entirely different material. Also, you might be interested in the hands on videos I shot.

My Opinion

I’m putting this section first, rather than last, because I think I spent a little too much time pointing out the flaws of PB302. I like it. I could easily see having one as my main e-reader. It’s the first dedicated e-reader that I’ve seen that really lives up to the term e-reader. Most every other device is just an ebook reader; the PB302 is more because it has an RSS Reader and a browser. These features are slightly flawed, yes, but they are features that you can’t get on any other e-reader without a hack (Nook, Iliad). (The Kindle doesn’t count because in most countries you can’t use the browser).

In my opinion, the only ebook reader that can compare with a PB302 is a (hacked) Nook. I’ve thought about this for some time, and I can’t say that one is clearly better than the other. This is great news for the PB302; it costs $80 more. I think I would go for the PB302 myself; I prefer its hardware design.

continued here

Any feedback would be appreciated.

12:07 PM by pilotbob in Miscellaneous | Announcements

We are happy to announce that the forum changes are in place. This pass at forum changes was mainly for the device sections. The goal was to maintain what was working and fill in some missing areas.

To start with there is now a "General Discussions" section. This section was created for those discussion which were about e-books and e-book reading but didn't really fit into a device or software thread. These threads usually ended up in the "News and Commentary" section. You will also see the "News and Commentary" section was renamed to simply be "News" to focus it a bit more.

You will see there is now one category where all E-Book Reader device sections will be found. This includes dedicated devices such as the Kindle and the Sony and non-dedicated devices such as the iPad and the eDGe. The devices are listed in alphabetical order to make them easy to find.

There is a new "More E-Book Readers" section to discuss dedicated e-book reader devices for which there is no section. And grouped under that section are many device specific sub-forums. As discussion in the generic "More" section about a new or coming device become popular a new sub-forum can be added. We value all participation no matter what device you use but we needed a way to keep the forum list from becoming very long and daunting.

In addition the "Other Devices" section is now named "Alternative Devices" for discussion of Netbooks, PDAs, Smartphones etc. Once again, this incubation area will be watched carefully and device or OS specific sub-forums may be created for more popular devices or software.

The very good news is we added the following device sections:

BeBook
enTourage eDGe
iRiver Story
Onyx Boox
Plastic Logic Que
Spring Design Alex

We hope that these changes make everyone happy and will be responding to new forum section request more swiftly since the new organization easily allows it.

Thanks for your patience while we planned all this out. We do appreciate it.

Please enjoy.

09:34 AM by Iñigo in More E-Book Readers | iRex

This package is now (2010/12/11) obsolete, use the new port at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho....php?p=1265744

EDIT 20100906: new release: v5

See below the changes.

IMPORTANT: version 4 and up needs the core base package in https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?p=887725

Hi,

FBReader 0.10.7 for iRex DR800S

This is a compilation of FBReader e-book reader for iRex DR800 and DR1000.
There aren't much things changed from the original sources, a customized toolbar, some new icons and configuration and data is saved in "SD card/Programs/_config/.FBReader".
Since v4 it includes Loo and Viacheslav script to associate file extensions.

Random notes:
- This package is based on version 0.10.7
- I've tried 0.12.7 but it was too slow, this version is really fast
- Don't know if it works on DR800SG, but I expect it should do

Steps to install:
1. enable SD card folders browsing
2. connect device to your computer using the USB cable
3. create a folder "/Programs" in SD card root
4. you need libs core package installed into SD card/Programs/_base installed
5. copy the contents of this compressed file there.
You should have something like:

SD card
/Programs
_base (directory)
_config (directory)
_fbreader (directory)
Install (directory)
FBReader.desktop (file)

6. go to SD_card/Install folder and run FBReaderAddExt to associate extensions with this program

Steps to use:
1. Navigate to SD card -> Select Programs folder -> tap on FBReader icon
2. Click on preferences and change some settings as default configuration
is not suitable for e-readers. F.e. I've changed:
- margins to 10, 10, 0, 4
- font size (in "styles" tab): to 8
- indicator: I like the "old style"
- key bindings. Tip: click on "Action for key" and press the bar to
show available actions
3. Take a look at "_fbreader/share/FBReader/default/toolbar.xml" file
if you want to change the buttons/actions shown in the toolbar

Enjoy,
Iñigo Serna

Changes:

v5 - 2010/09/06 00:57
. updated share/zlibrary/hyphenationPatterns.zip. This should fix
the Russian hyphenation problems. Thanks to Loo
. associate .prc and .mobi file extensions with FBReader
. toolbar slightly modified to fit better with DR800+
. move add/remove extensions shortcuts to Install folder

v4 - 2010/04/27 23:07
. needs libs from core _base package v1: fribidi, liblinebreak, libbz2
. included Loo and Viacheslav file extensions association script

v3 - 2010/04/16 23:40
. needs libs from core _base package v0: fribidi, liblinebreak, libbz2
. configuration is saved into /media/mmcblk0p1/Programs/_config/.FBReader
instead of using /home/root/.FBReader

v1, v2
. customize toolbar and add new icons

v0 - 2010/03/24
. based on FBReader 0.10.7
. initial release

11:32 AM by pilotbob in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Over the next week or so starting today you will be seeing some changes in the forums sections. We are reorganizing things in order to make sure there is a place to discuss all your topics, favorite devices and books.

If you see that a forum is missing or closed the messages are in the process of being moved to another section.

So, what's happening? Here are some hints:

To start with the two Sony threads and the two iRex threads will be merged together and device prefixes will be added to the section. This has proven itself to work well in the new Sony section so it will become a common fixture in all of the device sections where it makes sense.

We will also be collapsing some of the sub-forums into their parents to simplify forum navigation and prevent that deer in the headlights feeling of what sub-forum you should use for a trouble shooting question about an accessory.

I'm sure it will make you happy to hear that there will be several new device forums and a General Discussion area so those types of discussions won't dilute the News section.

We have been working very hard on the new layout and I want to thank all the members that have helped us. Your ideas were all taken seriously and considered important. I wish we could make everyone 100% happy but some ideas just conflicted with others.

So, please pardon our dust while we remodel... It should be well worth it.