TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘book review’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Standard disclaimer for the FTC: I received a free review e-copy of Golden Girl, as I did all of Mr. Melton’s e-books except for Emperor Dad (which I bought). Also, Mr. Melton, his wife Mary Ann, and his dog Sissy stopped by my apartment for a couple of hours the other day, and they gave me a nice print of one of Mrs. Melton’s nature photographs. Of course, even without the FTC I would have said so anyway.

That being said, I’m giving this book a positive review because I like it, not out of any sense of obligation. I do realize I’ve reviewed an awful lot of Mr. Melton’s books here, but on the other hand I feel that as a small-press publisher he needs all the publicity he can get—and for writing such good books, he deserves it, too.

A Foreign Country

L.P. Hartley said “The past is a foreign country,” and most time travel stories seem to take that literally: they treat it as just another place that happens to be separated by years instead of miles. Far too often, time travel is used as a cheap device for exposing characters to “future shock” (or “past shock”) without thought to the consequences that should occur from someone being displaced out of his own time.

Stories that give serious consideration to the issues of paradox and causality in time travel are few and far between. After all, just thinking about that kind of thing too much can make your head ache. Far easier just to sweep it under the rug like Doctor Who, Quantum Leap, or the later Star Trek series’ time travel episodes (though the first time travel Trek story, “City on the Edge of Forever”, is considered one of the greatest time-travel stories ever).

But Henry Melton’s latest young-adult book, Golden Girl, is one that treats time travel the right way. It starts from an interesting premise, adds a unique time travel mechanic, and puts a teenaged girl at the center of an interesting dilemma—with nothing less than the survival of the entire human race at stake! (Minor spoilers below the jump.)

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By Court Merrigan

Earlier this week, I took my family to get a seasonal flu vaccine. We waited in a line that extended to the sidewalk with hundreds of others, eyeing every cough and sneeze and sniffle with suspicion. This in my unassuming hometown (pop. 14000), where everyone knows everyone. Imagine such a scene in, say, New York. 

In American Fever: A Tale of Romance and Pestilence, Peter Christian Hall does, and doesn’t stop there. The story of a flu-obsessed blogger who predicts a flu pandemic and then records its ravages, Hall taps into a deep literary vein of paranoia. Having previously ventured into the epidemic-as-apocalypse genre myself, my expectations were high. True to form, this novel-as-blog soon had me wiping down every surface in reach with disinfectant. 

Hall grapples with a thorny problem: how to create a live novel. The “hypernovels” of the 90s were dismal failures, I’m not sold on e-book chapter mashups, and Vooks manage to be both unreadable and unwatchable. American Fever is by far the best stab at the future of the novel I’ve seen. It also makes clear that live novels (livels?) have a ways to go. Someday when we’re reminiscing fondly on the dawn of e-books, American Fever may very well occupy pride of place among the original innovators. Its sophisticated approach, however, is not is not always backed by prose equal to its packaging. 

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By Paul Biba

It’s not only books that are going “e” but reviews as well. Publishing Trends has a series on how book reviews are changing and adapting to the digital world. This little excerpt is from the first article, and if you go there you will see a links to five more articles in the series. All of them are worth reading.

Today, worries about vanishing newspaper book review sections—and vanishing newspapers—have only accelerated the pace of gloomy headlines. But it’s unclear whether a golden age of book reviewing ever existed.

Then again, with the emergence of sophisticated online book reviews, the golden age could be yet to come.

These reviews aren’t like Amazon customer recommendations. “The best advertisement for a book has always been word of mouth,” says Steve Wasserman, Managing Director of the Kneerim & Williams New York office and a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “The internet only makes more formal the rumor mill that had always served to spread the good news about this or that book. [But] that isn’t exactly criticism, it’s the enthusiastic acclamation of ordinary readers who don’t want to keep the news of something worth reading to themselves.”

By Chris Meadows

A while ago, I bought Henry Melton’s young-adult novel Emperor Dad, and enjoyed it enough that I reviewed it here. Since then, I requested and received free review e-copies of four of his other books, and finally got around to reading the last of them.

In the info box, I have linked to several places the books can be purchased. If you are planning to buy the dead-tree version, I suggest purchasing direct from the author; he will autograph it for you, and will make more out of the deal than from an Amazon sale. Alternately, if you buy one of the DRM-locked e-books and send Melton proof of your purchase, he will e-mail you a DRM-free version.

Rather than review each book individually, I’m going to cover each of them separately, then talk about what they have in common.

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By Chris Meadows

If anybody has street cred to talk about “piracy” and youth culture, it is probably Matt Mason. He started out as a pirate radio and club DJ in London, and later founded the grime culture magazine RWD. With that experience to build on, his book The Pirate’s Dilemma is an interesting tour through the disruptive effects youth culture has had on society through the last few decades—starting earlier than you might think.

There are a number of people who complain at the use of the term “piracy” to encompass the illicit downloading of mp3s and other digital media—because they feel it muddles the issue with the street vendors who sell knock-offs for profit, or even with the predatory ships that still ply the seas around Asia and Africa. (I try to avoid using the term as much as possible myself.)

Those people may not be pleased with this book, as Mason extends the definition of “pirate” to cover anyone who carves out a new niche outside of established markets, threatening the models of businesses already in those markets. This includes the punk music scene, graffiti artists, disco, rap and hip-hop artists, pirate radio and rave clubs, the Free Software movement, peer-to-peer, flash mobs, and others. In fact, as often as “piracy” is thrown around to describe peer-to-peer these days, readers may find it pretty surprising that peer-to-peer only gets a fairly small portion of the book.

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By Chris Meadows

The recent post about book scanners that can process 3,000 pages per minute reminded me (and at least one other person) of the Vernor Vinge novel Rainbows End. Since it had been a while since I had read that novel, I decided to take another look.

For a while, the novel was posted free in its entirety on Vernor Vinge’s website. It has since been taken down; however, the Internet Archive still has it available in its entirety in the Wayback Machine’s archive of the page.

I’m actually surprised nobody reviewed it here back when it was newly published, but I can only find a few references to it on TeleRead. E-books—and some modern issues relating to e-books—actually play a pretty prominent part in the book’s plot, in a number of ways.

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By Chris Meadows

In a way, we have already given copyright zealot Mark Helprin’s anti-public-domain screeds far more press than they deserve—we covered his New York Times column here, reviews of his book Digital Barbarism here and here, and even his website here. But Helprin’s book is so over the top in its extremism that it carries the same sort of appeal as a bad train wreck: although you really really want to, you just can’t look away.

And so we turn to the review of Digital Barbarism that Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson has just turned in. It is clear from the very first line (“Some books beg to be read; others beg you to stop reading them”) which way this review is going to go, and it goes there with gusto.

I don’t have a lot new to say about this subject—it has all been said already in the links from the first paragraph. But Anderson’s review is just as enjoyable in its way as anything Mystery Science Theater ever did to an Ed Wood movie, and I highly recommend checking it out.

By a TeleRead Contributor

Press release:

FiledBy has added a new pre-publication website feature to its growing list of online marketing tools for authors.  Writers publishing a new book now have a low cost, effective tool to pre-launch their book online.

The new feature allows both first time and published authors to quickly and inexpensively build a pre-publication web presence on FiledBy.

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By David Rothman

Related: “Writing Historical Fiction,” Paula Berinstein’s Writing Show interview about my novel The Solomon Scandals, is now online. – D.R.

A Chicago-born writer named Isaac Rosenfeld could have been a Saul Bellow. Michael Dirda tells how Rosenfeld was “a front runner in the race to produce the Great Jewish American Novel.”

Instead, however, Rosenfeld, the subject of a new biography by Steven J. Zipperstein, too often forsook GJANs for talking, drinking, partying, and writing notebook entries.

In 1956 Rosenfeld died of a heart attack at the not-so-ripe-old-age of 38. His friend Saul Bellow—who’d lived just blocks away and even written for the same high school newspaper—went on to be Saul Bellow.

“According to Hemingway,” Dirda aptly says of Papa, “more writers fail from lack of character than from lack of talent.”

How Paula can help you avoid being Rosenfeld

Enter Paula Berinstein, host of The Writing Show, an ever-informative and -inspirational podcast, who recently self-published a short book called Unlocking Your Creativity: 52 Exercises for Writer (e-book available for $2.60 from Lulu and Amazon). Might her book unlock and unblock many kinds of writers, not just the GAJN variety?

By way of disclosure, I’ve been listening to Paula for many months; in fact, probably years. I often played her show on my iPod when I drove over to see my mother, who was dying in an assisted living center. So I was thrilled when, out of the blue, Paula invited me to discuss The Solomon Scandals and TeleRead—the latter show will be online in late July.

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By Chris Meadows

Found via BoingBoing: In the Huffington Post, Lawrence Lessig reviews novelist Mark Helprin’s new non-fiction book, Digital Barbarism. Helprin posted an editorial in the New York Times in 2007, calling for perpetual copyright, and was roundly denounced by contributors to Lessig’s wiki. As Cory Doctorow writes on BoingBoing, “The essay was so ham-fisted and odd that a lot of people assumed that it was a joke,” and judging from Lessig’s review the book suffers from the same problem, only more so.

Lessig proceeds to demolish Digital Barbarism at great length, in terms of both argument and writing style. He points out that Helprin apparently did not research his book at all beyond reading blogs and the Internet, and makes a number of errors and fallacies that stem from this lack of research.

The review makes for interesting reading, especially if you have an interest in copyright term lengths.

By Court Merrigan

There has been a decided uptick in interest in Mark Twain recently. All to the good: the great satirist deserves as large an audience as he get in this and any other time. Now HarperStudio is getting in the game with its release of Who is Mark Twain?, a collection of 24 previously unpublished essays by him. And if you buy the hardcover, you also receive the DRM-free e-book.

While I can’t see why anyone would buy both a hardcover edition and an e-book, if HarperStudio is giving it away and it’s DRM-free in the bargain, I don’t see how you can lose. And not just any old e-book. This one features possibly America’s greatest satirist wondering if “Jane Austen’s goal is to ‘make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters?’” And:

Twain plasters the city with ads to promote his talk at the Cooper Union (he is terrified no one will attend). Later that day, Twain encounters two men gazing at one of his ads. One man says to the other: “Who is Mark Twain?” The other responds: “God Knows—I Don’t.”

Be sure not to miss John Lithgow reading a selection wherein it is revealed how Twain determined which manuscripts to publish, and which to burn.

I’ve read pretty much everything Twain has written up to this point, and as a writer, I’ve taken his 19 Rules of Literary Art much to heart. I don’t usually buy hard covers, but this one comes in at a reasonable $19.99 and with the e-book to boot, I think I’ll make an exception. Maybe I can give the hardcover away …

One thing I’m very curious about: All Twain’s writings have long since passed into the public domain. So can Harper Studio hold a copyright to these 24 essays? They’re handpicked by Robert Hirst, General Editor of The Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley, so possibly they’ve been edited. If so, does that mean they can be copyrighted?

By David Rothman

Could e-books and related tech help Quinn Bradlee, the son of two famous Washington journalists? And how? Speak up. Meanwhile, below, is a review of Quinn’s new hardback, A Different Life: Growing Up Learning Disabled and Other Adventures—also available for the Kindle, the Sony Reader and, let’s hope, other formats. iTunes, Audible and eMusic.com offer audio editions. Check out a CNN video of Quinn and Diane Rehm’s WAMU radio interview. – D.R.

What if your father is Ben Bradlee, your mother’s Sally Quinn, and you’re stuck with a learning disorder that disrupts even prosaic activities?

Never mind growing up to help expose another Watergate or skewer pretentious socialites. Suppose you have trouble understanding most books or face memory problems.

Just what to do, especially in a brutal, hierarchical place like Washington, D.C.? In politics and media, the generals and their families are expected to put on a good show for the troops. How to respond? Should your family hide you from the public or gloss over your shortcomings?

Luckily the parents of Quinn Bradlee, a plucky 26-year-old born with Velo-Cardio-Facial Syndrome, let him and a skillful collaborator tell the whole story or at far more than we might have anticipated. Ben Bradlee and wife had apparently envisioned their son writing a buttoned-down book without earthy language—perhaps a respectful look at the young man’s ancestors, since Quinn is a genealogy buff. But Quinn and his not-so-hidden ghost wisely avoided this PRish tack.

Much more than just the S word

The two paid due tribute to Bradlee and Quinn forebears, but kept in the S word. In fact, they even wrote a scene set on a Caribbean island, Saint Martin (photo), where Quinn loses his virginity to a hooker with skin "as black as the night sky and black curly hair that came down to her shoulder." Quinn’s hooker story would be mere titillation by itself; but A Different Life is full of, say, his reflections on women and life in general—naïve in places, but just the same, genuinely his. He does not merely share his triumphs at a boarding school for people with disabilities; he also tells of the vicious hazing there. Honesty is the salient trait of this work. What Quinn’s story misses in eloquence at times, he more than makes up in credibility of voice.

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By Court Merrigan

Password Incorrect is a truly zany collection of “tech-absurd” short stories by Nick Name, pen name for Polish author Piotr Kowalczyk, which only a networked world could have unleashed. It’s available for free from Feedbooks.

Start with the title story to see the absurd in action. My Kindle sat untouched for a couple weeks while I transitioned back to the U.S. from Thailand.  When I got back to my Kindle’s homepage again, I did a double take—Password Incorrect?  What password?  I never needed a damn password before!—until it all came back to me.  My reaction is strikingly similar to the befuddlement of the uniformly oddball characters of Password Incorrect confronted by the unexpected repercussions of their tech-doings. 

Nearly all the 25 stories are flash fiction; that is, under 1000 words.  My favorite was “Wishes Shovel Best.” 

On Christmas Eve Slawek Przekosniak received an SMS with these wishes: “Wishing yo good ping super new”.  He didn’t know who sent him that surprisingly enigmatic message. 

Inspired, he creates software to manufacturing randomly bizarre messages, starting an online phenomenon that makes him the 67th-richest man in Poland.  Until a curmudgeonly official is offended by an SMS which reads “Wishes shovel best” and turns him over to the Inquiry Board, the Board of Inquiries, and the Special Security Agency.  Black limousines appear at his house on the night he is to receive a lobbied-for Site of the Year Award.  In the Age (Moment?) of Twitter, this seems less a merely imagined story than another possible permutation of reality.

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By David Rothman

"Clearly e-books aren’t free—they are perhaps as expensive or in some cases more expensive than print—yet they do not create large, short term cash flow to cover their costs. E-books, if successful, will sink the trade publishing industry." – Evan Schnittman, Oxford University Press executive, expressing his personal views in his new blog, Black Plastic Glasses. (Via Reading 2.0 list.)

Update, March 31, 4:30 a.m.: Let me add that Evan, a big Kindle fan, is not saying that publishers should avoid e-books. Rather he wants them to modernize their ways of doing business. See Logan Kennelly’s comments.

By Court Merrigan

I’ve had a long continuous fist-fight
with death. People were merely pre-lims.

- Norman Savage

Norman Savage’s life starts at 11 when he is diagnosed with diabetes. The whole anatomy of his life involves the disease. “Good diabetic control implies structure, work, planning, and deprivation, food deprivation. If you adhere to some rules and regulations, your odds are better of living a life relatively free of too many problems and complications. My gut instincts are to rebel against such a life.” And so he does, embarking on a 45-year odyssey of drugs, family, women and poetry. He chronicles them in his autobiography, Junk Sick, available for $4.99 as an e-book from Smashwords (in fact, it’s online for free through midnight Pacific Time today as part of an E-Book Week special).

It starts with his family: “The helix of fate sealed with genetic glue grows like mold in the dark; it is moist, responds to secrets or silences, and needs no nourishment, except fear.” In the 50s very little was known about diabetes. Though they love him, Savage’s parents don’t know what to with their sick son. His mother preens over his every move. His father, a “disappointed gangster at heart,” treats his son like breakable china and withdraws. Savage wonderfully describes him as having “a heart, a twisted, misguided, loving, manipulative, judgmental, critical, ambivalent, divided, bleeding, granulated, diseased by hurt and betrayal heart, but he had a human, a very human heart.”

Kicks—and friendships with Tom Waits and Allen Ginsberg

Fleeing his home in Brooklyn, Savage doesn’t have to search far for kicks. Introduced to heroin as a teenager, he is soon roaring full-bore down the substance highway, a junkie diabetic poet. Highlights: four amputated toes, a seduced and murderous socialite, knifepoint mugging in the Bronx, and friendships with Tom Waits and Allen Ginsberg. You wince at his drug-discombobulated days. When he passes out with a syringe in his arm, you think, how can he do that? The man is sick!

But the disease proves to be a deliverer. His ritual attention to diet and bodily functions, insulin shots, and close contact with the medical establishment keeps him alive. If he hadn’t been a diabetic, likely we wouldn’t be reading his memoir. But there’s no reckoning the price: “Even I could no more understand what my life was costing me than what your life really cost you.”

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By David Rothman

E-book review copies, or virtual versions of traditional advance reading copies, are not that common yet (although my own publisher, Twilight Times Books, seems pretty hip about it for the e-book/p-book combos it releases).

I was pleased to see Yen, author of the ever-useful Book Publicity Blog, appeal on Twitter to Galley Cat’s Ron Hogan to talk up ARCs in E. Here’s to their use to publicize books in all media! I’ll be the surrogate Ron for now and tell Yen’s employer, "Yep, take this stuff very seriously"—whether with DIY copies or arrangements from Net Galley or a similar service. Meanwhile give Yen a raise for her enthusiasm and savvy.

Granted, publishers worry about piracy of E. But then measures such as social DRM might be used. With or without social DRM, I doubt that many reviewers would want to pirate, especially if they might lose their future access. Furthermore, given the high costs of paper ARCs, a publisher would be crazy not to experiment with the electronic variety.

Court’s quest for the right books to review

In a related vein, here’s a reminder that TeleRead reviewer Court Merrigan is looking for e-books that fit his interests, especially literary fiction. See below. We’re also open to running posts from other disinterested reviewers, whose priorities may differ.

And now Court’s interests:

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By Chris Meadows

I happened across a mention of the “Worlds Apart” series in a posting on Baen’s Bar, from a reader who enjoyed them. Based on that reader’s description, I was intrigued—then I checked out the first book in the series, and was completely drawn in.

The “Worlds Apart” series by James Wittenbach currently consists of nine completed novels (out of a planned twelve) and three short stories, available for free download from the Worlds Apart website in DOC or RTF and PDF formats. Although Wittenbach has sold printed copies in the past, I have not been able to find anywhere on the site as it now exists that printed copies may be purchased.

The idea of space colonies setting out to discover what happened to their mother planet has been visited many times in science-fiction through the years—most obviously in Battlestar Galactica, of course. Nonetheless, when done well it has been one of my favorite SF themes—the rediscovery of lost knowledge, resumption of contact with lost civilizations, and solving of one of the greatest mysteries of the ages.

“Worlds Apart” could have been written with me in mind.

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