Chamber Four

Author: Beth Wiseman

2009, Thomas Nelson

Filed under: Romance

Is your idea of a happy ending a sexless marriage between a submissive yet nosy woman and a rich, pushy doctor in which they adopt a child before their third kiss? Oh it is? Well boy, do I have the book for you. Plain Pursuit is full of flat characters and boring, predictable events. It was clear from the beginning how it would end, and Beth Wiseman, picking up the Daughters of Promise series where some other author wisely she left off, writes competantly, but as if she’s on auto-pilot, merely filling in the blanks between mandatory plot points.

To be fair, I am clearly not the ideal reader for this book. To be honest, if not as fair, I find it hard to believe there is an ideal reader for this book. Judging from the jacket copy, Amish-centric stories are a burgeoning sub-genre in the Christian romance section of whatever bookstores have Christian romance sections. But I’m hard pressed to buy that even the most vacuous readers (if there are such things) will find something to enjoy in reading multiple versions of drek like this. I got this book for free from the somewhat dubious Booksneeze.com. They offer free copies of their faux-religious books if you agree to post your review on a commercial site like Amazon. So I’ll be posting this review there as well; I hope it drives sales up.

…
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Author: Ninni Holmqvist, translated by Marlaine Delargy

Other Press, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Sci-fi

Broadly, The Unit is relatively straightforward science fiction about a fascist society in which logic and a sensible bottom line are prized more highly than quality of life. The title—which sounds military to me—actually refers to the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological materials.

In this society, if you are not a solid cog in the economic machine and if you have no children, you are designated “dispensable” and are conscripted into the Unit. For women, the deadline for becoming a productive citizen is age 50, for men, age 60. For all, the fate of residing in the Unit is grim: your organs are harvested and, in the meantime, you’re used a human guinea pig for any number of physical or pharmacological experiments.

Let me put on my nerd glasses for a moment and nitpick one aspect of the premise: when we live in a world becoming more overcrowded by the second, the idea that a government would threaten people’s lives in order to make them procreate makes the whole novel feel a little bit out of date.

There, now that’s done, let’s get to the rest of what is a quite interesting and mildly entertaining, not dazzling, novel. …
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Author: Kate Cary

2005, Razorbill (Penguin)

Filed Under: Young Adult, Horror

I know, I know. Young adult vampire novels swirl around in a genre flooded with quick-to-press garbage. To be honest, I have no idea how this book wound up on my shelves. But when I found it while looking for a book to take on the subway, I figured I’d give it a shot. And I’m actually pretty glad that I did.

Bloodline is not the typical teen vampire novel the cover design might suggest it is (assuming the typical teen vampire novel these days is a Twilight doppelganger). In fact, this book borrows a lot more from Bram Stoker’s classic novel than it does from glamour-chic undead romance of contemporary vampire fiction. This is a book with plot, structure, and language that leans more toward classic horror than toward YA. …
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I’ve noticed a mini-trend in the past week or two. First, in the Millions, I saw Confessions of a Book Pirate, an interview with a real, live ebook pirate, code-named “The Real Caterpillar.”

He does a little defense of piracy, which I’ll leave alone in this post, and he also has a few interesting things to say about DRM. Most importantly, he says he would pay more for an ebook without DRM and, when asked what would make him stop pirating books, he says:

I guess if every book was available in electronic format with no DRM for reasonable prices ($10 max for new/bestseller/omnibus, scaling downwards for popularity and value) it just wouldn’t be worth the time, effort, and risk to find, download, convert and load the book when the same thing could be accomplished with a single click on your Kindle.

Caterpillar also lays out the excruciating process he goes through to upload a single book, a process that involves scanning a hard copy page by page, and then proofing the scan by hand, which can take “5 to 40 hours.” Damn.

So, for pirates like Caterpillar, DRM has no stopping effect on their piracy (Caterpillar started years ago, when he couldn’t find digital copies of the books he wanted, so he’s used to scanning), and instead it’s actually a reason to keep doing it, because publishers still don’t offer “clean” copies.

And Caterpillar isn’t the only one who scans. In this summary of a panel at Digital Book World, Peter Balis says the majority of pirated ebooks are scanned galleys, manuscripts, or hard copies. This means DRM is powerless to stop widespread piracy.

From other corners, there have come cries of falling sky, from Macmillan president Brian Napack (and we all know Macmillan isn’t afraid to go to the mattresses), and from music industry group IFPI, whose latest report claims “95% of music is pirated.” That’s a grossly misleading stat, since IFPI also says that the industry has shrunk by only 30% since 2004. Evidently IFPI means 95% of albums are pirated by at least one person—and they don’t seem to know how much revenue loss piracy actually causes. Ars Technica does a pretty thorough examination/dehyperbolizing of the report here.

Still, piracy is a problem. So stipulated. But, as I’ve said for a long time, DRM is not a solution, and providing media in DRM-free formats is actually an incentive to buy it and not pirate it. The argument against DRM-free is that piracy will be easier and more widespread since pirates won’t even have to scan the books. That may be, or it may not (it didn’t happen with DRM-free music). But one thing’s for sure: DRM does not help paying customers in any way. With the iPad coming out soon—along with a whole new slew of DRM headaches—it’s a good time to remember that lesson.

If publishers (and content distributors) continue to fear a potential future threat more than they care about their present, spending, legal customers, I’m afraid I’m not going to shed many tears when major houses tell sob stories about lost revenue.

You can only buy Wolf Hall and other Macmillan books through third-party sellers at Amazon.com (click for full-size)

Sony's Reader Store still stocks Macmillan books, and for the controversial $9.99 price point (click for full size)

[UPDATE: Amazon gave in, and will sell Macmillan books via the "agency model" Macmillan laid out. Which means Macmillan ebooks will cost $13-$15, even at Amazon. I'm putting the over/under on the date of Amazon's next major Kindle screw-up at March 15.]

So Amazon has barred all Macmillan books (print and digital) from its U.S. website after the publisher insolently disagreed with Amazon’s stringent pricing policies. Macmillan asked for either a different pricing structure or “windowing,” i.e. delayed ebook releases (Macmillan CEO John Sargent claims Amazon will make more money, and Macmillan will make less under the new structure, which confuses me). Amazon responded with the Macmillan ban.

You can still find Macmillan books at the Sony Reader Store, however, and you can find many selling for the $9.99 price point that started all this. I’m assuming either higher Macmillan prices or windowing is coming to Sony, but at least you can buy the books.

For the record, I think the entire hardcover pricing system is greedy and predatory; it’s essentially publishers milking their biggest fans’ excitement to make a few extra bucks. I think Macmillan’s making a big mistake in trying to preserve hardcover pricing, and refusing to fully embrace ebooks.

However, this Amazon move is thuggery of the first order, and it doesn’t feel like the stalemate will be resolved very quickly [UPDATE: Or maybe it will, what do I know] (or that it will be the last of its kind). The Macmillan ban combined with Amazon’s continued refusal to allow library ebooks on the Kindle makes one thing clear: Kindle is simply not the best ereader for book readers. If you read mostly books, get a Sony Reader or an Astak Pocket Pro. If you read mostly newspapers or magazines, get an iPad. [UPDATE: Amazon's cave-in brings the Kindle back to the realm of relevancy for book readers. But it still comes with too many questionable corporate decisions for my taste.]

I’m just not sure who the Kindle is for.

[More Macmillan/Amazon analysis by Edward Champion, E-Reads, Ars Technica, and the Guardian.]

Quick item here. Lauren Conrad is a reality star or something. She’s (ghost-)written two novels, both about being a reality star (the second, pictured, comes out Tuesday).

So Lauren Conrad talked to Entertainment Weekly about books (I’m surprised that sentence didn’t cause a black hole). Good news: the discussion is as vapid and pointless—and as absurdly funny—as you might expect.

My favorite part is when she calls The Great Gatsby “a fun story.”

No, wait, it’s when she says she likes Chelsea Handler’s books because “it was like she was telling the story herself.”

Wait, my real favorite is when she says the fictional character she identifies with most is Jane from her own books, “because she is me.” Whaaaa?

[EW piece here. Gawker mocks it quite well here.]

Hi everyone. So we’ve been at it a year and we’re still going strong. As a matter of fact, judging by our stats, we’re going much stronger than we expected when we started this whole shebang. Thanks a lot to all our readers for sticking with us, and welcome to all the new readers who join us in 2010. We’re planning a lot of change for the coming year, and our birthday seemed like as good a day as any to share with you all what we’re getting up to.

The state of things to come

When we started this site, we had two goals in mind: to help sort out ereading news, trends, and pitfalls for casual users; and to share book reviews and reader-centric book commentary. We wanted to establish a site for reader advocacy, where books (no matter how they are consumed) are thought of as art and entertainment, and not as a sales vessel. We’ve passed up making money and getting free stuff in order to remain unbiased for our readers. We think we’ve been quite successful in this.

When we started the ereader portion of this site, it was largely because we couldn’t find a good entry point into digital reading. At the time, we were ereader novices ourselves, and useful information on ereaders was fragmented, confusing, and spread out all over the place. Just a year later, we’ve learned a lot, and the landscape of digital reading has certainly changed a lot.

Not only is everybody following ereaders, but it seems everybody is making them too. There are so many (most with ridiculous names and more or less the same feature set) that we can’t keep up with them all in-depth, and, frankly, most don’t warrant the attention.

We’re revising our ereader comparison to guide you toward our picks for best ereader in several categories (best book ereader, best magazine ereader, etc.), and we’ll provide links to a few other devices, but we’ll no longer be maintaining a comprehensive listing of every ereader available. If you want full coverage, try TeleRead or Mobileread; both are excellent, comprehensive sites for ebook fiends who can’t get enough ereader news. We will continue to share book and ebook news for more casual fans through our Wednesday links, however as of February they’ll be posted every second Wednesday.

Additions for 2010

In the coming year, we’ll be moving toward more book coverage. We’ll still weigh in on ereader issues when major ones come up, but we won’t be linking to every unboxing of every ereader that comes down the pipe. Instead we’ll be focusing on book reviews, and opinions about books and book trends (not necessarily publishing trends, except from a reader’s perspective).

You can expect to see some smaller, more casual posts that will focus on more minor and eclectic opinions and observations. Sometimes posts will be frequent, sometimes not. We’ll be posting more reviews, and seeking more reviews from our readers and from outside authors. We’ll be doing more themed series, not unlike our holiday posts or recent Best Books of 2009 and Literary Beach Books series. (In fact, this will be beginning in mid-February with our new, Drop Everything and Read This Book series–title subject to change.)

We’re also starting a category called Essays, where we’ll post longer, more in-depth thoughts on topics ranging from books to copyright laws, reading habits to technology preferences, and so on.

On the sidebar to the right, you will soon see a post handpicked each week to be highlighted with a sticky link. Sometimes this will be a post garnering a lot of discussion, other times it will be one our editors find relevant to something currently happening in the world, or just something from the archive we want to bring up for air.

The books reviews will be getting a home in the form of an archive page where reviews can be browsed by author and title (you can already filter by genre in our nav bar, or search for names or titles in the search box).

You may also have noticed that we have phased out the “Best ebook deal” line on our reviews, due to the general streamline of prices and formats in recent months. Check out our revamped The Best Ways to Get eBooks page for a guide on getting great deals yourself.

And finally, perhaps what excites us most is that we are finally making tangible steps towards launching our long-teased magazine. Every few weeks, we’ll feature a story, poem, essay, or other piece of creative writing, filed under “Creative Work” in the “Back Page” section. Eventually these will be compiled in the first issue of the Chamber Four magazine. We are also hard at work compiling an anthology of already published fiction from around the internet. We’ll certainly share more on this later, but we wanted to finally announce it.

As always, come back and read us, subscribe to our feed, comment, print, and share. Better yet, write us a review or an essay. And if you have a friend who might be interested in doing so, send them our url. We see C4 as a platform from which readers can speak, so we invite any and all to speak up. Thanks again for a wonderful year, we’re looking forward to an even better one in twenty-ten.

Amazon’s really hyping Kindle books in the wake of an iPad that (maybe) doesn’t have proprietary formatting [UPDATE: iPad does indeed have proprietary formatting. Take a breath, Kindle]. Still… Henry Paulson? You know exactly what’s in this book (this), and you know it’s not going to be all that riveting. So who’s staying up until midnight on Sunday to get themselves the newest Hank? I doubt even Paulson himself will.

Maybe Amazon has a rogue algorithm that gives anything looking vaguely like “Harry Potter” its own midnight release party. T-minus 82 hours!

Hopefully this ad stays front and center on Amazon’s homepage for all 82 of them.

Here’s the first batch of 2010 reviews, haiku digest style.

Dark Innocence

ending is insane

someone forgot to edit

novel does show heart

.

Behan, The Complete Plays

sharped tongued characters

two of the plays are top-notch

too much rally song

.

The Amateur American

typical spy book

main guy has charms yet lacks skills

voice, character: strong

.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, v.1

has an agenda

highly stylized; not fun

slavery is bad

.

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

a genre bender

Frankenstein pals with Shelley 

the ending is poop

.

Wetlands

abrasive word choice

swears like a nympho sailor

touching, after all

.

Tinkers

there is no plot here

but the writing is damn good

approach as if it’s verse

.

Soon I Will Be Invincible

not what you’d expect:

redefines superheroes?

can repeat, repeat

.

[UPDATE: It's confirmed that the iPad won't be compatible with Adobe ePub books. That means no library books, and it takes a lot of the shine off the new iBooks. For some reason, Apple hates Adobe, and Adobe hates them back.]

The new Apple iPad

A few short weeks ago, the Plastic Logic QUE ($650 WiFi/$800 3G) and the Spring Design Alex ($400 [EDIT--the Alex is now $360, I missed that]) debuted at CES, and immediately crushed my interest in them with exorbitant price points.

Today, Apple unveiled their new tablet computer, the “iPad,” (Gizmodo’s full coverage here) and made the QUE entirely irrelevant. The iPad is cheaper ($500 WiFi/$630 3G), faster, and more functional than the QUE, and it will actually be available earlier.

Not only does the iPad have a new, Apple-branded ereading program (iBooks), it can do video, internet, maps, and everything else that an iPhone can, on a grander scale. The only advantages the QUE has left are its ability to hand-write notes, and its E-Ink screen which makes for less eye strain and longer battery life. Still, the iPad has ten hours of battery life, so that last point is moot.

Basically, this spells doom for the $650 QUE, and if you were thinking about getting the Alex for $400 $360, or (God forbid) a $490 Kindle DX, how can you not scrape up a little extra for an iPad instead?

The iPad’s debut highlights the folly of “luxury” ereaders like the QUE and the Alex, which have gone in the wrong direction, trying to have an ereader that’s half laptop, with a price tag to match. Simple, affordable ereaders like the Kindle, Astak Pocket Pro, and Sony Pocket Edition are the only ones worth looking at now, at least until the Alex’s price drops by $150.

A few more tidbits, and links to more iPad coverage, after the jump. …
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