and this is just rad:

]]> http://chamberfour.com/2010/02/24/wednesday-links-2-24-10/feed/ 0 http://chamberfour.com/2009/10/30/halloween-reading/ http://chamberfour.com/2009/10/30/halloween-reading/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:00:56 +0000 Sean Clark http://chamberfour.com/?p=4856 Happy Halloween boys and ghouls. Here’s some quick suggestions for spooky reads:

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

This is one of my favorite books of all time. It’s not like anything you’d expect from seeing Karloff flicks, rather it’s steeped in pathos and haunting characterization. Read my mini-review here, and download a free copy here.

.

The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe.

He’s the master. Enough said about that. Download for free.

.

.

Pretty much anything written by H.P. Lovecraft

He’s a lesser know master, but a master nonetheless. I’m expecially in favor of “The Call of Chutlhu” and “Herbert West: Reanimator.” Some of his work is public domain as well.

.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Another great book eclipsed by offshoot Hollywood and pop culture iterations. This book is original and great and old enough to be free.

.

Night Shift by Stephen King

He’s gotten a little redundant in recent years, but I had to include Stephen King on this list.  I happen to love some of the stories included in this collection, however I almost chose Pet Sematary instead, and you can’t go wrong with that choice either.

.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Swartz

Remember these books from the Scholastic book fairs? They provide a nice collection of spooky tales and lore. The real draw though is the incredible, creepy illustrations. They seriously gave me nightmares when I was little. Read online.

• This could be cool: LG showed off their new solar-powered ereader, well, sort of. Amazon released the Kindle in Oz, and added a boatload of public domain ebooks to their store. They also hiked up their prices in the UK.  The new WikiReader only reads WikiPedia entries, but it’s pretty adorable nonetheless. The Barnes & Noble eReader could be unveiled as early as next week, and will supposedly run Google’ Android OS, which is certainly and exciting development–if true, it will make for the strongest firmware on a dedicated reader yet.

• Disney’s got an ebook service up and running, so you can read all the Pooh Bear and Hanna Montana ebooks you want for $90 a year. Penguin and Eggmont have signed a deal with EA to bring children’s books to Nintendo’s DS handheld. Wynken de Worde has a nice piece up about the building wave of ebooks. This book’s cover art is hilarious, as is the existence of this toy.

• And for fun, check out Between Two Ferns with Zack Galifiniakis. Pirate Bay has a legal, CC licensed movie up for free download, and it’s not that bad.

For those of you who actually have the day off and some spare time to read, here’s some suggested literature about ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide:

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave by Aphra Behn

Actually one of the earliest British novels. Behn is more open minded and sympathetic on this subject than many who would come after her.

Extracts from journals by Christopher Columbus

Not sure which text this orginated from, but I feel all right in trusting Fordham’s sources. An interesting read, and although he wasn’t as outright murderous as I had assumed, the man was undoubtedly a egomaniac with a God complex.

What Is The What by Dave Eggers

An excellent and harrowing “novel” tha will remind you that humans really aren’t all that different than we were 517 years ago, or 517 years before that.

The Sneetches by Dr. Suess

If only more people would actually listen to Dr. Suess…

Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

An excellent inside out allegory every bit deserving of the Nobel prize it received.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Haven’t read this since high school, and all I remember is that yams were really important to daily life. Thanks public high school.

Other suggestions: Kim (Kipling), Heart of Darkness (Conrad), The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (Anderson)

Author: Lord Dunsany

Public Domain, 1912

Best ebook deal: free

Filed under Literary, Fantasy, Short Stories

It’s always great when a book turns out to be nothing at all what you were expecting, and all the better for it. I’d never heard of Lord Dunsany (aka Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany) before, but apparently he’s a big deal in fantasy. This collection is ecclectic and creative, with stories that delve into many wonderous locales and involve a wide spectrum of characters and situations. Though there are centaurs and man-eating gibbelins and fantastical locales such as The City of Never, the fantasy Dunsany presents is not of the sword and sorcery variety I expected to encounter.

In fact, the creativity of the different fantasy worlds this books offers is to credit for most of the book’s charm. You can draw a direct line from stories like “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap” and “The Wonderful Window” to contemporary fabulists like Steven Millhauser. The stories are original, unique, and mostly devoid or typical fantasy tropes. And are quite delightful for it.

The characters are finely constructed and complex. At times we find them in familiar situations, yet they sometimes arrive with compelling motivations, or approach what might seem like mundane situations–albeit in an imaginary land–with unique approaches.  The excellent play with narrative scope helps accentuate this. Perhaps this falls on my lap as a relatively inexperienced reader of fantasy, but I expected a lot of tidy, “once upon a time” stories with clearly marked beginning, middle, and end points. Instead most of them begin in medias res, and usually in a different and unrelated universe as the previous story.

My favorite stories are those based in a more fabulist mode, like the two I mentioned above. There is also fare here that falls slightly more in line with what you might expect from a collection of fantasy stories, such as “The Bride of the Man-Horse” and “Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance.” In general I found the titles charming, even if they are a bit too much to the point, as is the case with “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men.”

Though at times the language can feel a bit dated and dry, it is on the whole a strong collection of stories by an author who those readers not versed in classic fantasy may never have heard of. The stories are quick and interesting enough to capture anyone’s attention long enough to tickle their imagination.

Other books: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Burton, trans.), Dangerous Laughter (Millhauser)

The presentation is top notch. Texts are far more readable in Eucalyptus than in the other reader apps I’ve tried. On top of this everything is well organized, intuitive and easy to navigate. They’ve included plenty of animations and graphical touches that give the package a decidedly professional flair. This does wonders negating the fears of buyer’s remorse I had when I first agreed to spend $10.

The creators of Eucalyptus have taken the time to create little card catalogue pages displaying each book’s publishing info, and the page turning and book shelving animations do a lot for the aesthetic. My favorite touch is a Staff Picks section, which arranges top choices for the user like a display shelf at a book store, and includes book synopses in case you’re choosing from books you’ve never read or heard of before.

I dig the presentation.

The text itself is far more readable due to the excellent formatting. The app uses nice fonts, more akin to hardcover typesets than the typical Courier/Times fonts seen in most other apps. The contrast between font and background is finely tuned as well. Best yet, the actual formatting (tabs, indents, punctuation) looks professional.

I didn’t come across any wonky spacing, jumbled sentences, or any of the other problems too common in many public domain ebooks. These books appear to have been actually proofed, and that adds a lot to the experience. Oh, and the formatting adjusts with text resizing (which you can do with pinch and push gestures). All this makes the experience feel much closer to reading a book than a computer screen, which I appreciate.

Noticably lacking are text search and highlighting features. They aren’t things I use all that often on mobile readers, but it would be nice to have. The library search functions work well though, as do the contents tables. A great touch is an anonymous feedback feature, which allows you do send a screenshot with comments about technical problems or text copy to the Eucalyptus support. This not only shows a commitment to the customer and to the quality of the product―something lacking in many apps―but also nicely represents Project Gutenberg as a community of readers dedicated to perfecting this electronic library.

Properly formatted public domain text on an iPhone app!

If you want to buy and/or import your newer ebooks to read on your iPhone, go with Stanza or the new Barnes & Noble app. However, if you’re primarily into reading older books on your iPhone–maybe you are someone like me who doesn’t want to pay bookstore prices for a reading experience mostly relegated to the daily commute–Eucalyptus is clearly the most readable and attractive option.

$10 is a tad steep, so Stanza is still a great option for the thrifty reader of classics, but hopefully a price drop is in the future. I should note that 20% of proceeds go to Project Gutenberg, which makes the purchase a little easier to swallow.

To see it in action, check out the video below. It really does look good.

This month I’ve got just a few quick items to share. First, I’ll draw attention to “Creating the Mark Twain Project Online” by Lisa Schiff. The MTPO is a neat little project I had never before heard of. Its aim is to make free to the public a wealth of the great author’s personal documents and correspondence by “providing access to more than 2,300 complete texts, over 28,000 records of other known items, and almost 100 facsimile images.”

The case study linked to above isn’t about Mark Twain itself, though it will provide an interesting bit of reading for those interested in digital archiving and techie site creation stuff. Readers interested in getting into the Twain papers made available by this ambitious project should check out the Mark Twain Project directly.

“E-Books or Print Books, ‘Big Deals’ or Local Selections: What Gets More Use?” by Robert Slater provides a nice comparison of the changing ways in which people access books. Researchers at Oakland University tracked several hundred books and compared the usage of ebooks versus that of their deadtree counterparts.

Right off the bat, it is interesting to note that

Similar comparisons of print and electronic book usage have shown that overall electronic book usage is comparable to print book circulations. However, some specific subject areas do tend to be used more in one format than the other. Over time, there has been a trend towards e-books receiving more use than their print counterparts.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that humanities subjects such as linguistics and history tend to get more paper usage while the math and science see higher ebook numbers. The researchers also determined that locally selected ebook collections (by, say, librarians or a department) see much more popularity than those that were offered through “consortially selected collections.” The best news of all, however, is that scholarly ebook usage remains on the rise, and is perhaps accelerating.

Finally, interested in seeing just how important and far-reaching systems such as Google Book Search have become? Check out this Google Book Search Bibliography.

And here are a few quick links that aren’t free to access but may be of interest to some readers:

• “Unless Otherwise Indicated: A Survey of Copyright Statements on Digital Library Collections” by Melanie Schlosser
• “Describing Digital Objects: A Tale of Compromise” by Jessica Branco Colati, Robin Dean, & Keith Maull
• “The National E-Books Observatory Project: Examining Student Behaviors and Usage” by Lorraine Estelle & Hazel Woodward

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.

The choice between Classics2Go and Classics should probably come down to how the presentation catches your fancy.

The readability is nice enough, featuring a larger font over a parchment colored background. These settings are not modifiable, as in Classics. In fact, the only feature within each book is a table of contents that allows quick jumping to different chapters. Also as in Classics (noticing a pattern here?), when you return to the shelf, a fancy red bookmark appears on the screen, though it doesn’t look quite as natural as that of its inspiration.

What you buy is what you get with Classics2Go, as you cannot load new books. In the two weeks I’ve had this app they have added to the library and offered big fixes through updates (at first the book spines overlapped in a weird, broken mind trick kind of way), so that is good. This is an app for the more causal public domain ebook readers who use Apple devices. If you want to manage a library unimpeded, try Stanza. If you want the freedom to choose your classics library while featuring an improved interface, consider coughing up the $10 for Eucalyptus (full review coming in two weeks).

However, if all you’re looking for is a collection of great books in a readable, pre-organized package, consider Classics2Go or Classics. Personally, I find Classics to be a bit more appealing to the eye, but I can appreciated the larger library of Classics2Go. Your best bet is probably to skim the list of titles and check out screenshots of the text displays each app provides, and decide which is best from there.

Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes 1943

Remember this one? You probably read it in 5th grade. It’s a great depiction of Revolutionary Boston, and the book takes its readers through all the major historical factors: the Boston Tea Party, the Sons of Liberty, Paul Revere’s famous ride, etc. Johnny had been a silversmith apprentice, but in a (sort of) accident his thumb and fingers are fused and he becomes a social outcast. This positioning gives Johnny a nice vantage point for objectively watching the many characters in Boston (some now legendary) as war looms and sides must be taken. Johnny Tremain is a kid’s book to be sure, so more mature readers should consider reading this book for nostalgia’s sake more so than stimulation.

But don’t forget, he’s deformed! In the words of the oft-wise Bart Simpson in my favorite ever episode, “Whacking Day”: “Deformed! Why didn’t you say so? They should call this book Johnny Deformed.”

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain 1884

Twain is widely considered to have been the first writer to capture the “American voice” in literature. This is perhaps his most famous instance of this, and it is an excellent and timeless book, and another one that we’ve probably all read, but not since grade school. Twain captures the rebellious innocence of youth beautifully, and thus Huck’s tale is a neat little microcosm of America. Yet it also turns its gaze inwards, exposing and at times satirizing the stubborn and righteous South. Considering the time and place it was written, Twain’s take on racism in this book is reason enough to read it. Huckleberry Finn is, in so many words, America in a nutshell and that’s why it’s on this list. (This book is in the public domain, read it free here.)

Profiles in Courage, by John F. Kennedy 1955

JFK may or may not have actually written this book (it’s claimed his speechwriter did most of the work), but nevertheless it is an engaging read. At times it serves a bit of a reminder of the aristocratic nature of the US Senate, and many would argue there are more courageous things to be done than vote against party lines. However the book manages to serve as a condensed history of the United States of a sort, as well as provide political insight to some important moments in history, something I find pretty interesting.

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut 1973

This probably should have been first on this list. I love this book, it is my favorite of Vonnegut’s. Breakfast of Champions is uproariously funny, and Vonnegut’s unsurpassed satirical eye is pitch perfect in this book. The commentary he provides on America through Dwayne Hoover, a down-and-out used car salesman, and Kilgore Trout, his recurring, sci-fi novelist failure character,  is interesting indeed. Even if the satire’s not your thing, it’s a pretty wacky book that provides plenty of fun. Vonnegut also includes his own scribbled illustrations, which are very funny as well.

So that’s my brief list. If you want a more intense compiling, you can find  pretty hardcore suggestions at Patriot Reading List. Happy Fourth and enjoy the hotdogs.

Copyright law is dastardly business, with more nickel-and-diming and squabbling over percentages than most people probably gather. The music and film industries have gone batshit with copyright law since the rise of the internet, as evidenced by all the tricky take down notices and bogus fair use violation actions taken against YouTubers and bloggers every day.

Imagine if everyone who contributed to the ingredients of a can of soup had a different stake in the overall profit of the can, then on top of that, the percentages paid out to the pea farmers and noodle makers changed depending on what side of the ocean the soup was purchased on. Same farmer; same soup. Once the soup gets old, and the farmers are dead no one can really claim the money anymore (unless they stick a new label on it and add a dash of salt). Books, more so than canned goods, have a tremendous shelf life.

I do not have Disney's permission to post this image.

Like with the music industry, the publishing industry is going crazy on trying to tighten up their copyright protections as they march timidly and reluctantly into a digital model. Also like the music industry, their main purpose of copyright is to retain as much money as possible for themselves at the expense (literally, and understandably) of their customers. The knee jerk reaction to this statement is “but the artists deserve to be paid for their work.” And indeed they do.

Authors make money from royalties on sales, say 5-10% per book for the average author. They get a (usually pretty meager unless your Stephen King) advance, and don’t collect on the royalties until their advance is covered. Once the book makes the transition from hardcover run to paperback, the author’s earnings drop significantly. (The Dear Author blog has a nice breakdown of how this works in a digital setting.) It’s an undertandable reaction to think that the rise of ebooks might cut into print runs and hurt authors, especially when companies like Amazon take a ridiculously large cut of the pie. But as we’ve mentioned so often on this site (and pulled straight from like minded thinkers) free ebooks and even internet piracy can help authors, perhaps more than it can hurt them. Many people, myself included, buy the stuff they want, and download a whole lot of stuff they wouldn’t otherwise pay for. I’ve discovered a lot of good artists, authors, musicians, and movies this way, and many of them have made money from me since. Expanded exposure can be invaluable, especially when compared to a $.32 (yes, cent) cut of a paperback novel.

This is why I find ebook DRM so silly. I want to own my books, I want to draw in their margins (or save my note files to them, whatever), to share them with my friends. Buying a DRMed book is like buying a book that self destructs if you take it off of your bookshelf and lend it to a friend. Read it and then it more or less has to sit out of sight. Books are meant to be shared. And while I’m on the subject, if authors are really that concerned about ebooks killing their royalties, why didn’t the Authors’ Guild sic their attack dogs on all those damn libraries that dare share books with the public for free?

This photograph of this girl's cool carp tattoo is licensed under Creative Commons.

Books are more important than just means of profits for authors and publishers. They are important to readers, they mean something to us. As does all art. This is why fair use is important for books as well as other media. Art remains an evolving concept, where each generation builds off (or builds against) what came before. There is, of course, a fine line between homage and plagiarism, and that’s were Creative Commons is stepping in and trying to evolve our notions of copyright and sharing.

A Creative Commons license allows an author or artist to decide the parameters of how his or her work is shared. Will you allow your song to be remixed, your book to be copied for free in writing classes, will you modify your license to require a percentage of the profits from anything that borrows from your work? It is flexible, and it makes sense, and it leaves the power in the hands of those who created the work, rather than those with the most lawyers on retainer.

Their mission is simple and straightforward:

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

[emphasis theirs]

In a mere 8 years they’ve already licensed over 120 million works, under the four main headings of Attribution, Share-alike, Noncommercial, and No Derivative Works. The license names are rather self explanatory, but you can read more here. This is building the internet into a broadening public domain, where art as business and art as a social right can coexist peacefully and without passwords. It’s not just for small fries either, with heavy hitters like Nine Inch Nails and writers such as Cory Doctorow seeing much success with these licenses. And it’s best for readers and users, who have un- or lightly fettered access to a wide variety of culture and art on the internet (not unlike visiting a library rather than a Borders).

This was the part where I was going to break down the basic differences between Creative Commons and copyright, but I then I came across this excellent example, so in the interest of sharing work, I’m going to point you directly their show at the end of this paragraph. Unfortunately, I can’t embed it (it’s a flickr slideshow-book-thing), but I’m going to have the link open in this window in order for the show to get full attention.

Watch the slideshow here: A Tale of Two Fish by Yiibu.