"Lizbreath Salamander is young and beautiful. Her scales have an iridescent sheen, her wings arch proudly, her breath has a tang of sulfur. And on her back a tattoo of a mythical creature: a girl."

Funny.

Inevitable.

And not available in the US.

Thanks to Bill Crider for pointing this out in his blog.

Mike

Looks as though a UK TV series of Christopher Fowler's books about Bryant & May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit is in the works:

http://www.christopherfowler.co.uk/blog/?p=7251


Mike

Now you can toggle between one and two column display in landscape mode.  

Mike

I ran across a mention of the Backlist Ebooks web site on Lee Goldberg's blog:

http://backlistebooks.com/

As it gets more listings, it may become a great place to find out about electronic versions of those back lists of your favorite published author.

Mike

I have a laptop, iPod Touch, and iPad, all are WiFi with no cellular data capability. Today I received my new MiFi card that will allow me to use all three (even at the same time) on a cellular data network. It's nice to not be tied to a long-term contract (I pay monthly), and I only have to pay for one plan. And it's the size of a credit card!

I decided to get one of these for my geocaching excursions where I am out in the boonies and would really like to have access to some maps and real-time info. My needs aren't very data-intensive, and you can find plans that start at around $10 a month (not very useful, the $20 one is better).

I thought that some people might not be aware of this option, so I would post about it.


Mike

Contrary to statements on the developers website, they were working on an iPad specific version of Stanza. I just downloaded it from the iTunes store, and it's great!

This thing will let your set margins, justification, line spacing, hyphenation, select from bout 97 typefaces, in-app brightness control, send books wirelessly from Calibre, change metadata, set background and text colors, paragraph spacing, indents, set tags/groups from within the app, and more.

What's not to like? I have a new favorite book reader.  

Mike

This was a surprise. I had bought a book last week to learn REGEX (regular expressions). I'd been reading it in iBooks with no problem. I decided last night to read it on my K2 before going to sleep (just to see if the Kindle still worked), so I turned on the bedside light, hopped into be and started reading. Within a few minutes, I was completely confused by the sample expressions that were being given. I got up, went and got the iPad, and compared the two. It turns out the results of the expressions were being nicely highlighted in iBooks, but not on the Kindle at all, and highlighted in an almost invisible shade of blue on the iPad Kindle app.

I wondered why it didn’t seem to matter what expression was used, it always found nothing!

I shall continue my learning experience reading in iBooks.


Mike

I just discovered that in the iBooks app, you can tap on the footnote number in a book and it will take you to the note, then tapping of the number again will take you back to the text you were reading. That’s lot less trouble than running the cursor around with the K2 joystick.

Cool. Score one for touch screens.


Mike

I found a message over on Mobilread that quoted an email from Amazon which gives the URLs for the Amazon HTML to AZW generator and instructions. There's a version for both Mac and Windows.

"KindleGen is a command-line tool used to build eBooks. This tool is best for publishers and individuals who are familiar with HTML and want to convert their HTML, XHTML, XML (OPF/IDPF format), or ePub source into a Kindle Book. Please click the following link to download this application along with the User Instructions:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621

You can also find more information and instructions for using the KindleGen in our Kindle Publishing Guidelines document. Please click the below link to download the same:

http://snipurl.com/v632s "


Mike

I just noticed that there are now several of A. E. van Vogt's Golden Age science fiction novels available for the Kindle. These were ground-breaking stories in their day, and van Vogt's stories outsold those of Heinlein for a while. Not exactly a modern style of writing, but he throws out new ideas at an incredible rate.

Don't be mislead by the reference to the movie Alien on the cover of Voyage of the Space Beagle. You won’t recognize it.  

Quite reasonably priced.

If anybody is interested in a critical analysis of van Vogt's work, here is a pointer to a lengthy (but limited) excerpt from a history or SF written by a well-respected SF author/critic:

http://www.enter.net/~torve/articles/vanvogt/vanvogt1.html


Mike

Have I not been paying attention or is the "New Releases" sort feature a new one? It seems to filter things that are not from major publishers.

Mike

http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/02/05/why-do-people-want-more-expensive-backlist-books/

Look familiar?



http://www.epizenter.net/news.php?extend.503.1