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By Nico Vreeland, on July 31st, 2009  I’m a book reader. I read some news on the web, the odd magazine, but mostly I’m a book reader. As such, the Kindle’s Whispernet has never really kicked me in the envy glands. I don’t need daily content updates, so I only connect my Sony Reader to my computer about once a month to stock up on ebooks.
For me, the Sony’s ability to borrow library ebooks far outweighs the Kindle’s wireless connectivity. (Almost every other non-Amazon ereader can borrow library ebooks, too. Check out our ereader comparison for more quick details on ereaders.)
But there’s one Kindle feature that I have envied: first chapter previews. There are many ebooks I would never have bought or borrowed if I could’ve read the first chapter beforehand, but until now there have only been a few feeble attempts from non-Amazon ebookstores to duplicate this feature.
The Barnes & Noble eReader, though, didn’t copy it—they just stole it, and that might have been the best decision their eReader team made.
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 29th, 2009 In the world of book and ebook news this week: prizes, rumors, debates, and highly anticipated book reviews.
- There’s a story in the Financial Times about the upcoming Apple tablet. 9to5Mac focuses on the news that Apple’s tablet might be out by the Christmas shopping season (which could be as early as September). Macworld, meanwhile, trumpets the news of Apple’s proposed new music management/interaction system. And that system might lead to Apple getting into ebooks. In the same device class is the Crunchpad, which will supposedly retail for less than $300 (!), and will be available any day now. The problem for both of these, from an ereading perspective, is battery. A few hours with a book is a whole lot different than a few days.
- The dustup about Amazon unselling ebooks appeared settled after Jeff Bezos wrote an apology to Kindlers (a purple paragraph about decision-making scar tissue). Not so fast! David Rothman at TeleRead explains in detail how and why this was a first-class Amazon pooch-screw. Even the New York Times is getting into the act, with a piece about how you can’t own DRMed media. The one defender of Amazon’s move is a law professor who says it was an efficient way to enforce copyright law. Orwell, author of the unsold books in question, died in 1950, so…. speaking of ridiculous, corporation-sponsored copyright laws, Ars Technica has a long piece up about the goals of the Pirate Party, and how a reduction of those ridiculous copyright terms might actually hurt copyleft. Here’s a piece in the Millions about copyright and remixed work. And, finally, file-sharing is still not fair use.
- Speaking of Amazon, Nicholson Baker’s grumpy Kindle article was largely dismissed as the tech-unsavvy complaints of a “print defender.” Yesterday, Kassia Krozser came to Baker’s indirect defense with a piece at Booksquare about bad ebook formatting (one of Baker’s big complaints) as a symptom of the more systemic problem of lack of quality control in publishing.
By Sean Clark, on July 28th, 2009  Author: Georges Perec, translated from the French by David Bellos and Andrew Leak
Godine, 1990
Best ebook deal: not available.
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Originally published in the 60s, these two short novels were written before Perec hit it big on the French literary scene with Life: A User’s Manual. Both are short―practically novellas at a little over 100 pages each. While both are quite different in delivery, they share common themes, brilliant control of language, and a common neurosis. And they are both excellent and quick reads.
I’ve really got to hand it to the two translators, as Perec’s language really shines in both pieces, and the linguistic consistency between the works is pleasing. Perec’s use of language is stellar, and interestingly he handles language a bit differently in each novel.
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 27th, 2009  Author: China Miéville
Del Rey, 2009
Best ebook deal: Sony’s eBook Store
Filed under: Fantasy, Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
2 |
On the one hand, The City & The City is a straightforward mystery about a murder that has (of course) ties to larger forces at work. On the other hand, it presents the mystery of the world in which it takes place. This second mystery has the potential to be philosophical, allegorical, and richly entertaining in the grand tradition of the best magical realists. Unfortunately, Miéville barely scratches its surface, and so the whole novel feels unsatisfying and frustratingly unrealized.
The two cities of the title are Besźel and Ul Qoma, city-state neighbors roughly somewhere near Eastern Europe in an alternate history version of the approximate present. At some point, evidently, something happened, and now there’s a stringent set of absurd fascist laws that make life tricky to say the least.
I’m not saying more because it feels like I’m giving too much away―and that’s not good. Evidently, Miéville requested that reviewers not spoil the “twist” of the novel; the problem is that that twist is actually the premise, and once you figure out what’s going on, there’s nowhere else to go, nothing further happens.
The real mystery of this world should be how these circumstances were established in the first place, and why the citizenry puts up with such an admittedly ridiculous way of life. Those are questions that Miéville doesn’t have answers for. If he had made the psychology of these people intrinsic to the murder mystery, this book could have been brilliant.
Unfortunately, the mystery doesn’t rely on or care why this odd relationship between the cities formed, only that it formed. The result is a Jerry Bruckheimer-ish novel: an interesting world wasted as merely a backdrop for a formulaic story.
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 27th, 2009  Nicholson Baker has a harsh story on the Kindle in this week’s New Yorker, in which he doggedly eviscerates Amazon for their overinflated marketing, the garbled layout of many of their ebooks, and the Kindle’s lackluster build quality. He includes a little bit of Kindle history, a lot of his own underwhelming personal experience with the device, the odd anecdote, and a few other tidbits.
Some of those tidbits are quite odd. There’s a reference to a YouTube video (awkwardly detailed by name). There’s a long verbal unboxing. There are many quotes from reviewers and Kindle users. (In many parts, it feels like the piece would be better suited to a website where it could have links and pictures and other embedded media.)
If you passably keep up with ereading tech, there’s not much new information in this piece. However, for the rest of The New Yorker‘s audience, this is nothing short of anti-Kindle agitprop. I’d be hard-pressed to find one thing Baker says about the Kindle that isn’t stingingly negative. For example:
The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them—it kills their joy.
Baker wraps up with a strong warning to buy an iPod instead of a Kindle, and the distinct sense that the one (half a) book he read on Amazon’s device will be his last.
All this means that we could see a little bit of a brouhaha about the article, which should be fun to watch. It certainly comes at an inopportune time for Amazon.
Aside from a potential kerfuffle, the most entertaining part of this piece is the insight into Baker’s reading habits. Dragon fantasies and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Erotic Romance” go hand in hand with Calvino and Kipling. Weird.
Read the full article online here.
UPDATE: Here are the two best responses to the Baker piece: a technical response from TeleRead, and a temperamental response from Edward Champion.
By Sean Clark, on July 24th, 2009 With Barnes & Noble rolling out their new “largest ebook store” and a planned dedicated Plastic Logic device to go toe to toe with Amazon (read what Nico has to share about it here), I took the opportunity to download the companion app released on the Apple App Store. The app stands up quite well, especially in comparison to Amazon’s barebones Kindle app, and hopefully is the first step in a competition between the two giants that ebook consumers will really benefit from. …
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By David Duhr, on July 23rd, 2009  Author: Leif Enger
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008
Best ebook deal: BooksOnBoard
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Were I to lead off this review in the foreshadowing style Leif Enger overuses in So Brave, Young, and Handsome, I would write: “How could Enger have known that by the end of his novel, I would have decided that the constant narrative playfulness took away from my enjoyment of what could’ve been a very good book?”
Tacky, perhaps, but I couldn’t resist. And neither could Enger, a storyteller who has written a novel about a storyteller. It’s not a practice I’m drawn to, but in So Brave, Young, and Handsome, Enger almost manages to pull it off. In the end, though, his reliance on gimmicks, portents, and even horror film technique subvert his intentions, and I was left mildly disappointed. It’s a complimentary disappointment, however—if Enger weren’t such a fine writer, I would’ve been able to dismiss this as a simple entertainment.
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 22nd, 2009  News about books and ebooks from around the web.Site-surfers, hit the jump for links. RSS readers, scroll down.
On the menu this week: the “world’s largest” ebookstore—what does it mean for us readers? Some news in ebook tech, and some hope for DRM haters. A Shepard Fairey update. Would you rent an ebook? Beach books and bookshelves. And, my new favorite Twitterer (hint at right). …
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By Sean Clark, on July 21st, 2009  Classics2Go is a very similar app to Classics. It does some things better, and some not as well. Both apps are good for those who want inexpensive libraries of cleaned up classic books in a preloaded package on their iPhone or iPod. You wouldn’t want both though, as they draw from the same pool of public domain titles and offer similar packages.
Classics2Go has a bigger library (currently 47 to Classics’s 23). The cover art isn’t quite as nice as that of Classics, as all the art looks similar and slightly amateurish, though it’s still a welcome feature. Rather than a rearrangable bookshelf, Classics2Go features two rows: a sliding, navigable bottom row containing all the available titles, as well as an upper My Books row that allows you to set aside books for easier access. The touch detection is a little off for this, which can be momentarily annoying. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 20th, 2009  Last week, Amazon got in some hot water when they remotely deleted ebooks from customers’ Kindles without permission or explanation. From civilian interaction with Amazon customer service, it was unclear whether Amazon remote-killed the books because they were sold by non-copyright holders (pirates) or because a legitimate publisher “decide[d] to pull their content from the Kindle store.”
Information Week (via) has since confirmed that piracy was the reason for Amazon’s creepy move:
Amazon says that that the books in question were added to its catalog using the company’s self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books.
When the story broke last week, I guessed that Amazon wouldn’t apologize or reinstate the books in question if piracy was the culprit, and indeed they’ve done neither. They did, however, give this sinister sound bite:
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