- …With Fairy Tales For All – Heather McDougal — of Cabinet of Wonders — provides a wonderful overview of the best fairy tale books she’s read. I primarily love fairy tales because they’re usually accompanied by a wealth of great illustration — as the samples in the post make clear. The illustrations by Margo Tomes in _Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folk Tales_ look especially enticing.
- The Changing Face of Publishing – Science Fiction author Charles Stross provides some anecdotal evidence of ebook use by editors in the publishing industry and notes that ebooks aren’t the only format enjoying more availability. Personal note: I _love_ audiobooks and I’d probably _love_ ebooks, as well, if I had a capable reader (like a Kindle). I also _love_ well-designed printed material… but, honestly, the latter starts to lose its appeal when you have to move hundreds of pounds of it.
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The best experience I’ve had with ebooks so far is reading them in my web browser after they’ve been converted to HTML. Especially a novel like Spook Country – Gibson includes so many references to things I don’t know about that I usually don’t fully understand his books until I’ve read them for ten years, unless I can just highlight some text, right-click and “search google for …”
It’s like “blah blah blah Girbaud jacket looking like something out of Blade Runner” – you can imagine what he means by that, but being two clicks away from http://www.girbaud.com/eng/?starthere=PDV makes reading the novel a much richer experience (and there’s other stuff, like Volapuk, which isn’t at all what Gibson explained it as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volapük )
Of course, no one publishes that way unless you’re getting ancient texts from project Gutenberg, or, as Gibson loves to say, you’re the street finding your uses for things.
Whoops, about to eat my words – This is what Gibson was referencing when he was talking about Volapuk – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volapuk_encoding – and I can totally understand why you’d need a hard-core translator for that.
“To provide nearly everyone on the planet with a liquid crystal display is utopian. Are we not, therefore, in the process of creating a new elite, of drawing a new line to divide the world between those who have access to communication and knowledge, and those who are left out? . . . [The book] is practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate.”–J.M.G. Le Clézio.
The Guardian observed that Le Clézio, in his Nobel Lecture, “looked to the wider world . . . warning of the dangers of information poverty and calling for publishers to increase their efforts to put books in the hands of people around the world.”
(ps that whole thing was a quote, though i failed to revise quotation marks to reflect that.)
@em – Thanks for posting that quote. I think Le Clézio makes a good point, but he appears to assume display technology will always remain too expensive for everyone to own. Isn’t it possible such technology could be cheaper, more flexible, more durable, and more eco-friendly than printing paper in the future? Maybe he discusses the contrary argument in his speech. I’ll look it up.
Another concern is the DRM associated with ebooks. DRM makes it impossible for me to give away a copy of a book I’ve enjoyed, for example, as I could the analog version. If digital music sales are any guide, though, DRM should go away as more options appear on the scene, the ‘authorized’ ebooks become much richer in scope, and everyone starts to make out like bandits.
Famously, the Baen Free Library has been publishing ebooks without DRM since 2000. Eric Flint’s essay on that decision is a great read and proposes a good model for others to follow — if they’ll listen.
@saintneko – Totally agree about needing the search functionality… fortunately, that’s a pretty easy thing to provide if you’ve got a good ebook platform (as the Kindle has demonstrated).