TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘discounts-or-freebies’ Category

By Chris Meadows

I am delighted to announce that on Sunday, January 27th at 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific/10 p.m. Universal (GMT), I will I will be conducting a live call-in talk radio interview with Phil and Kaja Foglio on my podcast The Biblio File.

The interview will focus on the Foglios’ decision to cease publishing print issues of their popular comic book Girl Genius in favor of posting it for free as a webcomic: why they did it, and what effect it has had on the comic’s popularity. Also covered will be such general questions about the Foglios’ other body of work, including Buck Godot and What’s New With Phil and Dixie, as the Foglios have time to answer.

After I finish my prepared questions, I will open the lines to callers to ask their questions.

Anyone who wishes to call in to the show to listen or participate will be welcome to do so. Questions do not need to be only about the Girl Genius webcomic, but can cover anything about their career that you’d like to ask (though I can’t guarantee I’ll get to everybody’s question).

I’ve written a comprehensive page on the various methods of connecting to TalkShoe at http://terrania.us/talkshoe/ that covers in detail all the ways to listen or participate, but I will summarize after the jump:

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By Chris Meadows

At GenCon last weekend, I encountered a couple of independent paper role-playing game publishers who are making an interesting use of PDF versions of their books. Not simply selling them as additional versions, these publishers are actually using the PDFs in conjunction with the paper versions.

One of these is Evil Hat Productions’ Spirit of the Century, a role-playing game of the pulp adventure genre. Spirit of the Century uses the FATE system, loosely based on FUDGE, and has won a number of awards, including the Independent Game Awards’ Indie Game of the Year and the Ennies’ Best Rules. It is available at a cost of $15 for the PDF, $30 for the trade paperback—or $35 for both. The PDF file is actually two non-encrypted PDFs—one featuring each single page in portrait orientation, and another featuring facing pages in landscape for easier screen reading. As the book is trade-paperback-sized rather than the 8 1/2 x 11 inch size of many gaming books, even the landscape version can be read without undue eyestrain on a decent-sized screen.

Spirit of the Century is released under the Open Gaming License (OGL). Under the terms of the license, permission is granted for “perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive” use of the system’s mechanics—everything except for the text of the introduction, examples, characters, scenarios, and setting material—by anyone who wishes to build a new game around it. A System Reference Document containing this material is available on-line in HTML, and will also make a good reference for players who haven’t picked up the book.

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By Robert Nagle

Update, 11 a.m., July 9: Read comments on this post. Did ID thieves hack the company site? Skepticism about this claimed offer is growing. Perhaps the offer is legit, but hold off on pursuing it until we find out for sure. - David Rothman.

MobileRead reports a new offer: Get a Sony credit card, buy Sony Reader for only $49. Next question: how soon before next gen Vizplex-equipped Sony Reader displays hit the market? It’s a race between NAEB Bookeen and Sony; who will win?

Peter, a Sony Reader newbie, is blogging about his experience. Highlights: how Rastifarian utility improves contrast on PDFs, reading comics on Sony Reader.

If you browse the MobileRead forums, you notice a lot of intercontinental envy. Europeans can’t take advantage of US-only promotions. Americans get screwed on VAT and the dollar’s fall against the Euro. Americans pray to get their hands on Hanlin devices for the domestic China market or tablets that are becoming popular in S. Korea or Japan. I pay $20 for 1.5Mbps in Texas; woe is me! Look what they have in Asia. We may be speaking the same language (English), but doesn’t mean national borders don’t affect our consumer choices.

Look on the bright-side. At least all of us here use languages with recursion.

Related: Louisville newspaper’s article on Sony Reader and books available for it. Also see Bob’s MobileRead post on the joys of reading books together with a significant other. With two separate e-reader devices, I’d hope. Oh, here’s to the cause of shared annotations!

By Robert Nagle

(June 7 Update: Today’s special is $10 on ewallet and Listpro; $5 on Newsbreak RSS Reader for PDA. I strongly recommend Ewallet and Listpro–I haven’t yet tried Newsbreak. The great thing about both ewallet and Listpro is that it’s relatively easy to sync both with PCs–My expectation is that the special will be valid for only today).

From Aximsite, I see that Ilium, maker of high quality software for PDA/pocket PC devices, is offering some software specials to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

Today’s special is listed on this page. It’s for the Newsbreak RSS Reader software (list price at $19, compared to today’s $5). I use and love both eWallet (personal password keeper) and ListPro (list + checklist) creator. Apparently the site discounted prices for eWallet and ListPro in the last few days, and hopefully this will be repeated. (Normally the software has 30 day trials periods.)

Now that Dell has stopped selling Axims, the people who run Aximsite branched off into another portalsite called mobilitysite.com . It looks as if they haven’t set up their forums on the new site yet, but that should happen soon.