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By C4 Staff, on April 18th, 2012 As some of the more observant of you may have noticed, we quietly added a podcast section to the site a couple months back. This is because, for some crazy reason, we galoots at Chamber Four decided to sit around and record ourselves talk about books.
 The third episode is live today, and if you’re brave enough, you can give it a listen; braver, you can hear all three. Episodes of The Page Count are available (for free of course) on iTunes here, if you hit the subscribe button, you’ll get a new episisode every month, plus a few bonus episodes, like the upcoming book/movie club (not-sucky name suggestions welcome) on The Age of Dragons, which is a B-movie fantasy interpretation of Moby Dick. You can even click the handy star rater and judge us on the spot. If you hate iTunes, there is a direct RSS feed here.
We’ve had a lot of fun making these, and we hope you enjoy them. There are still plenty of kinks to work out. It won’t take you long to discover we don’t have any sound engineers amongst us. We’re also still trying to gauge just how much beer consumption is acceptable while recording a podcast. But we do talk a whole lot about books, and it’s going a little smoother with each successive episode. We hope you’ll join us.
For more information and detailed show notes about each episode, check out http://chamberfour.com/podcast/
By Nico Vreeland, on April 13th, 2012 We’ve gotten a bit behind over here at C4 HQ. We’ll be back next week with reviews and a new episode of the podcast. In the meantime, here’s a good ol’ fashioned links post.
- Amazon is secretly supporting a number of literary organizations. But, they’re also turning up the heat on major publishers, so egregiously in fact that several of the major publishing houses are refusing to renew their Amazon contracts. This might just be the end of Amazon’s deathgrip on retail book sales… but I’m not holding my breath.
- Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is bringing charges against Apple and five of the Big Six major publishers (all except Random House), over whether their agency-model pricing agreement violates antitrust laws. Most of the publishers are settling (which will likely mean ending agency pricing), but Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin are going to fight it out in court. Macmillan, we should remember, is still run by John Sargent, the slightly reactionary CEO who both hates and doesn’t understand libraries. I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think setting strict retail prices should be illegal—this battle might have big ramifications.
- Apple believes in that agency pricing model so completely that they are the only major U.S. ebookstore that has refused to sell Harry Potter ebooks, because J.K. Rowling wants to set her own prices for them, but isn’t using agency pricing. Does that make sense? No, not really.
- Lastly, remember how Random House isn’t being sued by the Justice Dept.? Not only were they the only major publisher to refuse the agency model, they were also the only publisher to continue to sell ebooks to libraries with no restrictions on the number of loans those libraries can make. Then—drama! Libraries were organizing to boycott the exorbitant prices Random House was demanding. Or… maybe they’re not. Sounds like Random House is still the best major publisher, but this library ebook situation is one to keep an eye on.
OK, that’s it for this roundup. We’ll be back with lots more stuff next week, so stay tuned.
By Eric Markowsky, on March 12th, 2012  Author: Gary Shteyngart
2010, Random House
Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Set in a near future as absurd as it is familiar, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a narcissistic America, drunk on credit, obsessed with youth, and largely ignorant of its relationship with the rest of the world. The government is run by the monolithic Bipartisan party, and no one much cares what the military does in Venezuela so long as the never ending stream of hypnotic information keeps scrolling across their “äppäräti.” It’s funny the way Russian literature, blight, or accidental death can be funny.
I’d call it dystopian literature except that in many ways Shteyngart’s novel doesn’t go far enough in reimagining our world to qualify. “Äppäräti” are juiced up smart phones, new fashions are obscenely revealing, and everyone loves shopping. Dystopian literature shows us our world is stranger than we imagined by drawing out similarities with a world that appears unrecognizable on its surface; Super Sad True Love Story pretty much shows us our world exactly like it is, only worse.
For all the elaborate trappings of its near future setting, Super Sad True Love Story is less affecting as satire than (like the title suggests) as a oddly simple love story. Lenny Abramov, an aging, balding book addict with dreams of immortality falls for Eunice Park, a twenty-something Korean-American beauty and a true product of her times, image obsessed, outwardly confident, inwardly self-loathing. That Shteyngart manages to cut compelling characters from these types is a testament to his talents as a writer; that Lenny and Eunice manage to find consolation in each other is a testament to the strangeness of intimacy. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on February 15th, 2012  Every time Amazon makes the news for predatory business practices or just downright meanness, independent booksellers call on the general public to rebuke them. It’s about time we held publishers’ feet to the fire, too.
Here are a few things publishers have been screwing up recently, whether through incompetence or greed.
- Publishers are hanging indie bookstores out to dry. They control the prices of every book they print, and they allow Amazon to sell books for up to 50% off the cover price. Retail bookstores buy their books, wholesale, for more than that. Remember when the Big Six banded together to renegotiate the prices of ebooks? They fought tooth and nail to get Amazon to agree to an agency model pricing structure that actually made them LESS money than Amazon’s existing $9.99-across-the-board pricing scheme. They could do the exact same thing with Amazon’s regular books, and they should because Amazon’s prices are a greater threat to indie bookstores than $9.99 ebooks were to the future of digital publishing. But publishers will not fight Amazon over this, because publishers do not care if indie bookstores go extinct.
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By C4 Staff, on February 9th, 2012 Got an iPad? Want some awesome awesome stuff for free?
Super fancy iBooks 2 special editions of our first two issues are now available in the iTunes App Store, specially optimized for iPad multitouch controls. These editions have all the same great writing and poetry plus the original visual art that was previously web-only. And they’re still free.
Issue #1 iPad edition
Issue #2 iPad edition
If you don’t have an iPad, never fear, you can still download the ebook editions to any other readers for free here, or see the snazzy, full-color online editions that include the visual art here.
Both issues, along with the awesome Chamber Four Fiction Anthology are still available in paperback editions from The Harvard Bookstore.
By Nico Vreeland, on January 20th, 2012 Yesterday, Apple announced iBooks Author, a new Mac app that lets people create and distribute ebooks for the iPad. Immediately following the gleeful fanboygasms came the equally predictable backlash, like this piece in ZDNet that called the app’s end-user license agreement (EULA) “mind-bogglingly greedy and evil.”
 This reaction confuses me, because iBooks Author’s EULA says exactly what I expected it to say, namely that you can’t sell the books you make with iBooks Author through any distributor except Apple.
Why is this even a surprise? For one thing, iBooks Author is free. It’s obviously intended to ease creation of content for sale through iTunes, because Apple makes a ton of money on those content sales. Why would they make a free tool that would let users create content for other platforms? Why is not doing so “greedy” and “evil”?
On a more practical level, it’s frankly not that big a deal. If you’re formatting a traditional book (i.e. only words), then the process should mostly involve cutting and pasting those words from your .doc file. You will have to format your ePubs for other distributors separately, which is a drag mostly because ePub-formatting programs suck (when we publish books here at C4, we use Smashwords; it’s not perfect but it is better and easier than other formatting and publishing options we’ve tried).
So yes, Apple has not given you a free, easy, universal ePub creator. But iBooks Author isn’t geared toward creating plain old ePubs anyway, it’s specifically geared toward creating “Multi-Touch books for iPad.” In other words, this sort of thing. Because iBooks Author simplifies the formatting process, the rich-media interactive ebooks you make with it will almost certainly only work on an iPad. Even if you could export them to universal ePubs, they would look like garbage on all other devices.
Apple won’t own your copyright, your content, or the versions you make for all other platforms. You’re free to use that content however you please, even according to that reactionary ZDNet writer’s reading of the EULA. Claims that “only Apple can ever publish your work” are simply not true.
So everybody please calm down about this EULA. It’s not nearly as greedy or evil as they’d have you believe.
By Aaron Block, on January 20th, 2012 [At the end of each month, Aaron surveys the comics he read, celebrates the best, considers the rest, and takes stock of what it means to be a contemporary comic fan. Follow "The State of My Pull List" here.]
Spotlight
 Secret Avengers #20 In his 2011 mini-series The Red Wing, one of my favorite comics of last year, Jonathan Hickman uses time travel as more than just a plot device meant to complicate the narrative and give readers a fun puzzle to solve by the final issue. That isn’t to say that the plot isn’t so tangled that it can’t be untied, but simply that Hickman describes his concept of time travel in more poetic terms (aided, it’s worth nothing, by diagrams drawn into the scene by series artist Nick Pittara) and seems less interested in the mechanics of time travel than in its effects on the story’s emotional arc. By playing with our expectations of what time travel means Hickman brings some of the danger and volatility to that sci-fi trope. Warren Ellis does the same thing in Secret Avengers #20, but from the opposite direction – rather than eschewing the paradoxes and details of time travel, Ellis luxuriates in them, creating an elaborate puzzlebox of a story that doubles as a character study of Black Widow. …
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By Sean Clark, on January 9th, 2012 A year ago I put together a list of 10 video games worth playing for their stories. Here are 10 more (mostly) recent games for players really into narrative or strong dialogue.
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10. Cthulu Saves the World (Steam, XBLA)
This little indie darling came out of nowhere. You can get it for around one dollar, and that’s a steal. A send-up to 16-bit era JRPGs, this has the Lovecraftian “hero” break all convention and go on a quest to enslave the world’s minds. The writing is full of self-referential wry wit that really makes this worth your time. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 25th, 2011 [Updates: An alert reader pointed out that Kobo does do ebook previews---I think I just missed it. However, there's still no search and the page-turning/page number situation is still simply awful. On balance, I still think you shouldn't bother with Kobo.
On a happier note (for iBooks fans), iBooks has adopted the Nook's hold-and-swipe highlighting feature, which was my favorite thing about the Nook app. Really, the only thing I liked. Definitely no reason to even try the Nook app now. Three years and counting until Barnes & Noble is bankrupt.
I'll try to keep this space updated with new features, but probably won't.]
Merry Christmas! Several thousand people at least will be unwrapping an iOS device today. Here’s a list of the major ereader apps, and their pros and cons. We’ll see you again on Tuesday, when we go back to regular programming.
iBooks: Perfect for iOS readers
 Pros: Buying books through the app store. Great highlighting, syncing, dictionary, and a ton of layout options. Two-page layout on the iPad, and fewer glitches than any other app.
Cons: Doesn’t work on any non-iOS device. Not your Kindle, not your Nook, not any E-Ink ereader. If you want to use one of those devices, you’ll want to use a different app. There isn’t even a desktop version of iBooks, you can only use it on an iPhone or an iPad. There’s also no real iBooks website, and navigating through the Books section of iTunes is a proper pain, so you’ll need to come to the app with a title in mind.
The gist: iBooks is also the only app that will let you buy books through the app store and your iTunes account—that ability is turned off for all other ebook apps. But that ease-of-buying-books is not what makes iBooks the best ereader app; instead, it’s the fact that all the others have significant downsides. iBooks has all the core functions—note-taking, highlighting, search, dictionary, and layout options—and they all work. If your iPhone and/or iPad is your main ereader, look no further for your new favorite app.
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By Marc Velasquez, on December 22nd, 2011 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their picks of the best books that came out in the previous 12 months--and we let a few older ones slip in as honorable mentions. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009 and 2010 while you're at it.]
Best Nonfiction of 2011
 Townie, by Andre Dubus III
Because, holy shit, I wasn’t expecting this book to be what it was. Yeah, I knew it was going to be about a street-tough kid knocking heads around an old mill town, but I didn’t expect the introspection, the redemption. Townie is a disciplined, well-crafted memoir. And at it’s core, under many gut-wrenching, heavy layers, Townie is a heart-warming tale about a father and his son.
Read my full review here.
 The Convert, by Deborah Baker
This is an unconventional biography about a Jewish woman from New York who decides to convert to Islam and move to Pakistan. Weirdly, I didn’t like it as much right after I read it as I do now, months later. This book got under my skin. The book’s central figure, Maryam Jameelah, is increasingly enigmatic. Her public life and writings have become a rallying point for radical Muslims, yet Maryam herself is a complex and troubled individual who shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. This book also highlights and questions the role of a biographer. Readers will be left with plenty to ponder.
Read my full review here.
 Patriot Acts, edited by Alia Malek
This book’s subtitle—Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice—more than aptly describes its contents. The narratives are puzzling. How did these acts go unnoticed? How is it that we accept them? How does a first responder, a Muslim-American EMT who died in one of the collapsing towers, get labeled a terrorist? Why must his mother suffer through those heinous allegations. Why must we detain a 16-year-old because of her religious head scarf? Now that Congress has decided it’s legal to indefinitely detain US Citizens, Patriot Acts is increasingly important. We were forced to make a choice between our freedom and our security. We chose security, and Patriot Acts shows us what we have ahead of us.
 Into the Forbidden Zone, by William T. Vollman
I don’t know much about William T. Vollman, but I know that he has many dedicated (cultish?) fans. After reading this, I think I could perhaps become one of them. Forbidden Zone falls somewhere between a long magazine article and a short book. For lack of a better term, it’s a nonfiction novella published by the good folks over at Byliner. The book is Vollman’s account of his trip to Japan shortly after the Earthquake. It opens with a search for a Geiger counter, a scene which is at first humorous, but throughout the course of the book it becomes eye opening, and then extremely important.
Late add from 2010
 Hellhound on His Trail, by Hampton Sides
Hellhound on His Trail is an in-depth account of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the manhunt for the assassin, James Earl Ray. In the afterword, the book’s author, Hampton Sides, balks at those who have described his book as a thriller. Given the weight and historical significance of the crime detailed in the book’s pages, I can understand his hesitancy. But this book reads like a thriller; it’s a fast paced, well constructed mystery. More importantly, it is a round portrait of King during his final days, and an only slightly less round portrait of King’s assassin (Ray’s motives remain still somewhat fuzzy, but hey, so do Hitler’s—some things will always remain a mystery.) If Sides isn’t ok with “thriller,” perhaps he’s more comfortable with what I feel is a more apt description: Masterpiece.
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