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By Nico Vreeland, on May 20th, 2009 That’s actually not a joke. You might’ve noticed continuing wonkiness going on in the past few days. Something’s KOing our bandwidth and causing server errors, and my suspicion is it’s a batch of evil Slurp bots crawling all over us (that either made sense to 4 people, or I’ve been the victim of an elaborate IT wiki-ruse).
Anyway, sorry for all the chaos. Bear with us for the next few days as we work these issues out; we should have our robot defenses in place and everything clicking again soon.
By Nico Vreeland, on May 18th, 2009 Find the other parts of our Literary Beach Books series here.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be doing a series of recommendations for (semi-)intellectual summer reading. Each of these posts will suggest four or five enjoyable page-turners that won’t leave you feeling intellectually lobotomized like certain popular bestsellers.
So if you like thoughtful, well-written novels, but still want to relax with a ripping good yarn this summer, tune in Mondays for the next few weeks to load up on great summer reads.
Here’s the first installment.
 Serena, by Ron Rash
Serena is a straightforward novel about a logging camp in Depression-era North Carolina. Full of violence (both natural and man-made), betrayal, manipulation, and life lived ruthlessly, it features more than its share of can’t-put-it-down.
Rash doesn’t particularly try to be funny or entertaining, and he doesn’t use stylistic or structural gimmicks. Instead, he creates simple, serious drama and a driving, addictive narrative.
Suffice to say, if you’ve got a tolerance for violence and a fond memory of classic dramas like Lord of the Flies, this novel will drag you through its pages.
You can read my full review of Serena here.
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 18th, 2009 So we had some kind of server error over the weekend that prevented us from writing or editing posts, and also deleted the latest versions of a few posts. So that was nice.
We should be back on track by this afternoon, but if you noticed something wonky, that’s probably what it was.
By Nico Vreeland, on May 15th, 2009  So it’s been a little more than six months since the “historic” Google Books settlement, and there’s even more controversy lately than ever. (Hard to believe the Authors Guild screwed something up, I know.) Aside from antitrust issues, Google Books is still a frustratingly long way from fulfilling its potential.
The same goes for magazines in the Books database. Google has some interesting ideas about magazines in the pipe, but in the meantime, finding magazines is an aggravating experience at best. There’s no way to browse the archives, which means there’s no way to discover magazines you haven’t heard of. Instead you have to search, often fruitlessly, to find out if the database carries particular titles.
The selection is varied. New York, Popular Science, Cincinnati, Baseball Digest; essentially a lot of middle- to lower-tier archives. And the selection of truly bizarre magazines is sparse: for instance Log Home Design Ideas (which somehow went from quarterly to monthly in its ten-year run).
But there is a saving grace for the current state of Google Books magazine archives at Google Books, provided by Bat Boy, robotic Dick Cheney, and all manner of other freaks, geeks, and weirdos.
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By Sean Clark, on May 14th, 2009
 mockup image via Slashgear.com For the last few weeks the internet has been atwitter with rumors of Apple’s foray into the world of ebooks with a “Kindle killer.” Officially there is no such thing, but the rumors (which began with a BusinessWeek report of Apple shopping device prototypes to Verizon) seem to have reach a point of solvency, and it seems now to be a matter of when and not if. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 13th, 2009 Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
- Some various items about piracy and DRM. First, am interesting piece in Gamasutra about DRM on video games, including the interesting hypothesis that publishers use DRM to cut into the used-game market, not piracy. At Internetnews.com, a story about the Digital Hollywood conference—the consensus seems to be that, whether or not DRM is a good idea, it’s being horribly mismanaged. In Neoseeker, a quick post about the new DRM capabilities of Windows 7. TechCrunch thinks the Kindle DX will fail unless etextbook piracy becomes rampant enough to serve as a selling point. Ars Technica has a piece on the silly kerfuffle going on at the DMCA hearing. And the NY Times has a story out about the state of ebook piracy—as of two months ago (but there’s also Stephen King misspelling “Funyuns,” and Harlan Ellison being a jerk…so they’ve got that going for them…which is nice). Here’s Booksquare’s take. Also, the Guardian has a great piece on one potentially serious Kindle rival. Finally, O’Reilly’s publishing an ebook about file-sharing’s effect on book sales—price: $99. What are the effects on piracy of charging a hundred bucks for an ebook?
By Nico Vreeland, on May 12th, 2009  Author: Barry Unsworth
Nan A. Talese, 2009
Best ebook deal: Public library
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
When I first read the summary that claimed that Land of Marvels was “Historical fiction at its finest,” I was hoping for another story like Ron Rash’s Serena—which I really liked—that is to say, another vicious depiction of violent hardscrabble survival in an age whose relative recency (within the century) cannot mask its brutal primitivity.
I was disappointed. Land of Marvels is instead a tale more of premise than plot, frequently described in abstractions (it’s about “power” and “ambition”) because nothing much specific ever quite happens. …
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By David Duhr, on May 11th, 2009  Authors: Robert Boswell and David Schweidel
Cinco Puntos Press, 2008
Best ebook deal: Unavailable
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
We all know the traditional arc of a story: beginning, middle, end; goal, obstacles in pursuit of goal, attainment of goal; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back.
Same goes for any good treasure story. Boy discovers treasure map, boy seeks treasure, boy finds treasure.
The problem that Robert Boswell and David Schweidel had to wrestle with during the fourteen years it took to write What Men Call Treasure was this: how do you successfully tell a true story about buried treasure that doesn’t end with boy finding treasure? …
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By Sean Clark, on May 8th, 2009  Shortcovers is a sort of cross between the Kindle app and Wattpad. Like Wattpad everything is online, customization and formatting are limited, and a degree of user conectivity has been implemented (via sharing chapters via email or twitter, and posting comments). That it is web-based is really the main letdown, as it was with Wattpad, since users are left with little security in their purchases (there’s very little free content) because they are unable to download them, and need web access to read them. And if Shortcovers goes belly up, poof goes your library. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on May 7th, 2009  The Internet ate too much Kindle DX yesterday and threw up all over itself; there was instant analysis and little chunks of live-blogging everywhere. Now that things have calmed down a bit, here’s your guide to what everybody’s been saying.
As you might have heard, the Kindle DX—just announced yesterday—is Amazon’s large-screen version of their flagship product. Its specs are very similar to the Kindle 2′s feature set, except that the DX has a 9.7″ screen (instead of 6″) and costs nearly $500.
OK, those aren’t quite the only differences. The DX also sports an iPhone-like auto-rotate feature, which you can see in action in the first of a series of great videos from a MobileRead user. And the official DX page at Amazon crows about native PDF support; however, the new Kindle still doesn’t support any DRM formats other than Kindle proprietary. That means the DX still can’t talk to Adobe Digital Editions and still can’t borrow library ebooks, and all that has an Adobe exec, as TeleRead noticed, siding with Sony.
The bigger fish frying is how Kindle DX will perform as a textbook platform and as a newspaper reader.
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