Spontaneous ∂erivation

I remember LexCycle’s Stanza mostly as Just Another Ebook Reader, not something that could be placed on a mobile device. I was impressed with the number of formats it reads (and, in many cases, writes). However, I soon learned its limitations on links and table of contents, which is to say, it had none at the time.

After that unpleasant experience, I was done with Stanza.

Some time later, apparently Stanza as an iPhone app is very tricked out—a lot of cool functionality, and, finally, tables of contents functionality. I personally didn’t know about all that, not having an iPhone.

After watching the video on Feedbooks’ iPhone/iPod Touch help page¹, I’m pretty happy about the situation, present and future, of Stanza on the iPhone.

Stanza on the Desktop though? While it’s great that it enables remote sharing of books with the iPhone Stanza, the desktop app is still not the most useful of readers. I don’t know if it’s even in LexCycle’s best interest to make Stanza Desktop any better reading-wise, since the iPhone application has taken off.

Conclusions: Stanza iPhone, spectacular. Stanza Desktop, still dead to me.

1. It’s also available from LexCycle’s movie page, but not as an embedded video. [↩]

The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
A Fancy for Christmas-Time
by Charles Dickens • Feedbooks

The Victorians had odd ideas about Christmas; for them, it was a sort of Halloween without the kids/costumes/candy, and with the trees/wreaths/holiday trappings. Spirits abound in the older Christmas stories, which we recall in Dickens’ more famous work, A Christmas Carol (also available over Feedbooks).

What many don’t know is that Dickens wrote other Christmas novels—The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain being a Christmas novella. The story involves a ghost that haunts Professor Redlow, a chemistry teacher who wallows in the troubles and tribulations of his past and, like Scrooge, though for different reasons, just can’t get the holiday cheer up.

Lesson for the wise: be merry over the holidays, lest ye be haunted by apparitions with Freudian analysis intentions.

You can also check out these other lesser-known Dickens Christmas fantasy novellas, both for young adults:

The Cricket on the Hearth
Feedbooks

A cricket watches over two families and a mysterious lodger. No ghosts are involved, only sentient crickets.¹

The Chimes
Feedbooks

A poor misanthropist worker is shown through nightmare visions bestowed by Goblins² that anybody can become evil through the wrong circumstances, so cheer the hell up.

What did I tell you?

So be of good cheer!

S∂’s full 2008 Advent Calendar.

1. Okay, it might be a ghost. [↩]
2. Spirits. Dickens treats them as ghosts. [↩]

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
by L. Frank Baum • Feedbooks

The biography of Santa Claus as written by L. Frank Baum, the creator of The Wizard of Oz series, also available on Feedbooks.

For those who want a little more bite in their story, there’s also this short story:

A Kidnapped Santa Claus
by L. Frank Baum • Feedbooks

Santa Claus is kidnapped by demons.

Sometimes I think Baum is a bit wonderfully twisted.

S∂’s full 2008 Advent Calendar.

This review is a little different from most. Here I’ll just be talking about the enhancements to the *echo* Special Edition *echo*, as opposed to the actual book content, but they are fascinating all by themselves, too.

I was checking out Tor.com today, and I found Patrick Nielsen Hayden mentioning an article about Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End in the New York Times. Vinge’s name had also came up with praise in Jo Walton’s post, A Deepness in the Sky, the Tragical History of Pham Nuwen. Thus reminded, I decided to fulfill my desires for instant gratification and checked out the Kindle Store.

A Deepness in the Sky is actually a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, but I never let that sort of thing bother me. And it shouldn’t bother you, either, since it was published after A Fire Upon the Deep (just as A Fire Upon the Deep was published after a novella for which it was a prequel itself). Both Deepness and Fire are available in the Kindle store, but I noticed a very interesting thing.

There were two versions of A Fire Upon the Deep in the Kindle Store. One was a “Special Edition” from St. Martin’s Press, while the other was a “regular” edition from Tor. And it wasn’t just a “Special Edition” with extra introductions and retrospectives, but a “Special Edition eBook“.

This intrigued me, so I bought them both. I know. I take this upon myself so you don’t have to.

So what makes a Special Edition eBook so special in this case? Especially since you’re paying, as of this writing, $1.60 more.

It turns out that whoever assembled the special edition of A Fire Upon the Deep is an eBook maker after my own heart. I’ve discussed the interesting aspects of putting the Shadow Unit Season One eBook together here and here, as it’s a hyper-linked work.

Turns out that Vernor Vinge did similar things, except with grep, plain text files, and comments embedded within his draft that started with ^ and had special tags. These comments and annotations expanded over time and developed as the work progressed, even ending up as conversations between Vinge and his consultants.

(Which brings up one question in mind: what did he mean by consultants? Editors? His agent? Writing friends who were thick as thieves with him? No idea, but it’s something special to have a recorded, ongoing dialogue as a writer shapes his or her work.)

As a result, when you go about making a special edition of one of Vernor Vinge’s Hugo Award winning works, you have a lot of material to work with. Maybe a bit too much. If we were talking about a paper book, there’d be so many footnotes scattered about that either they’d need to stack at the end of chapters or, heavens forbid, the end of the book in one big mess. The alternative is to stack the notes up at the bottom of the text, which is disturbing in its own way, though this method preserves locality of reference to a single page.

And that’s what people usually do in these super-annotated works. I’ve seen a footnote in the Annotated Sherlock Holmes stretch across four pages. In the middle of a story. It’s quite informative and usually illustrated, but assumes you’ve already read the stories in question, so you would not mind being disturbed for a fireside chat about Old White Men Holmes/Moriarty Slash.¹ And it’s not just once that you get disturbed, even if you have columns on the left and right to preserve, as much as possible, the flow of the main text. Special annotated editions are not for first-timers.

Ah, but a Special Edition eBook can make use of the hyper-linking idiom. You can jump back and forth between a note and the work, or simply continue reading the work undisturbed if you’re a first-timer. And even a first-timer could even look at the notes without being lifted too much out of place. And being able to jump from note to note easily also solves the otherwise navigation-troubling note-that-refers-to-the-sixth-note-of-chapter-xvii.

Enough of that, though. Time for some real screenshots to illustrate what I mean, under the cut.

Click here to read more »

1. And that’s a post for Holmesian Derivations some day, let me tell you. [↩]

Sandkings by George R.R. Martin

Do you hate bugs, especially if they are ants? I do. Do you hate vicious, cruel bullies? I do. Sandkings, a Hugo-winning and Nebula-winning novelette, will satisfy both hatreds in one pleasingly, creepily wrapped story.

I’m really starting to like novelettes. There’s just enough story for a really satisfying bite.

Sandkings at the Kindle Store for $1.59

After the Coup by John Scalzi

If you’ve ever had the chance to enjoy the Old Man’s War universe, then this bite-sized story is like a wonderful Lindt truffle. If you’ve never read any OMW book, this is a great taste of the humor and down-to-earth character of Scalzi’s series.

A short story; Mobipocket edition available from the link below; just hover over “Download” in the left column of the story page.

After the Coup at Tor.com for FREE

Down on the Farm by Charles Stross

For those of you who only know him from works like Accelerando and Halting State, Stross has a wonderful humorous series about “The Laundry”, where geeks do battle with the forces of evil and bureaucracy. Another Lindt truffle, and if you like this story, you’ll love The Atrocity Archives, available in Kindle edition.

Another short story, Mobipocket edition available at the link down below.

Down on the Farm at Tor.com for FREE

For Solo Cello, op.12 by Mary Robinette Kowal

If you’ve ever been a musician, you know there’s something obsessive about the profession. Nowhere is this more poignantly illustrated, I think, than this story by Mary Robinette Kowal, who won the 2008 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

This and four other stories available in Mobipocket format.

Five stories from Mary Robinette Kowal for FREE

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow

You may know him from Little Brother, and you may not. This is a fun post-apocalyptic tale for nerds, and I say that with all the joy of a former systems administrator who doesn’t like post-apocalyptic tales, but loved this one.

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth from Feedbooks for FREE

My Boyfriend’s Name is Jello by Avram Davidson

This is the first Avram Davidson story I ever read, and also apparently the first Avram Davidson story ever published. It’s a delight of a tale, an amalgam of humorous weirdness that seems to be Davidson’s style. A rather short story, but a great one.

You can read all of this short story, plus some nice introductory material from Robert Silverberg and Grania Davis about the man, from the free sample from the Kindle store.

And who knows; maybe you’ll like it enough to buy the whole thing. I think it’s worth it.

My Boyfriend’s Name is Jello in the FREE sample from the Kindle store; get a huge book of Avram Davidson stories for $9.99

Please say a small prayer for my car.

Alright already, I’m late to the party, review-wise. Cory Doctorow’s fantabulous Little Brother has been praised to the skies by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Scott Westerfield, Jo Walton, John Scalzi, I could go on, but I’d run out of breath. And really, Little Brother leaves you breathless.

I’m not sure what else to say. Except that Cory Doctorow hit every note right. It was amazing—as a reader, writer, and geek, just absolutely amazing. Little Brother shows how the awe in science fiction and fantasy is not achieved merely by universe-spanning flights, nation-devouring wars, aliens on tripods, or dragons. It’s achieved by encountering that which is bigger than you.

The big terrorist attack at the beginning of Little Brother is bigger than you or Marcus. But as it turns out, the coerciveness, betrayal, and terrible power wielded by a corrupt government branch of a country you grew up to know as being free—that is even bigger. The odds are bad, the risks are high, and romanticism doesn’t fly—except when it gives you the strength to go on in the face of the dragon.

Combined with the personal, driving need to see the back of the dragon, is the heady state of being a teenager and growing up. It’s a little like mixing adrenaline and speed. But it’s not a careless combination; being a teenager is about being rebellious, and about being seen as rebellious even if you’re not. A lot of being a teenager is also about learning to pick your battles. All that comes to a head in Little Brother.

Marcus does so much growing up. As it all turns out, he’s a Hero with a capital H, for all the right reasons, and none of the wrong ones. The ending is pitch perfect. It’s a difficult ending to get right, but Doctorow nails it.

Little Brother is also a brilliant example in how to make the technological interesting and relevant, even when it’s being dropped in as information dump in the middle of adrenaline and speed. And no wonder, because everything in Little Brother is relevant to us now, to these times post-9/11. We’re some steps away from Marcus’ world, but it’s an easy slide downwards if we’re not careful.

Of the books I’ve read the last few weeks on my Kindle, none have been so driving as Little Brother.

And, you know, I gotta give cred to a book that touched off a new Linux distribution.

• Little Brother on Feedbooks: it’s not just Kindle-licious — Mobipocket/Kindle, ePub, Sony Reader, iLiad, PDF formats here. The Feedbooks version of Little Brother is the best formatted.
• Little Brother: Hardcover
• The Big Idea: Cory Doctorow
• Little Brother news, a blog full of interesting stuff. I read it for an hour before I realized I needed to get through some reviews tonight…
• The Onion Ring is real! And has a tutorial!

The Kindle was essentially a blind date.

A friend of mine dared me to, basically. During month-long bout of reliably late ferries and thus painfully extended commutes, and after some trepidation as I looked over little pictures of a very un-iPod-cool device, I bought one.

Even so, it seemed stupid at the time. An eBook reader can never replace a real book—a real book can be read anywhere, and the feel of turning real pages could never be aped by any eBook reader, much less something as homely and clumsy-looking as the Kindle.

At least I could return it if I didn’t like it.

The Kindle made a bizarre first entrance.

Photography: robertnelson

Oh, so that’s how it is, I thought when I unpacked the Amazon box to reveal this “book” box. It was large enough to hold almost all of a deluxe hardcover version of George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords. Obviously an attempt to say “I am just like a real book, but I can be more than that.”

I was beguiled anyways, as I opened the mammoth thing and revealed the little Kindle inside (with its USB cable, cute power adapter, and little manual). Introductions were thankfully brief; just plug the Kindle in and go. There was a little tutorial manual in it as well. If only all our life partners came with little manuals on them.

The e-ink was surprisingly readable. There was no backlighting, nor did I expect it from the Kindle (I know other eBook readers have it), but the page was easy on my eyes, which I need badly. I was downing extra Advil while reading the Hugo novels on my laptop, let me tell you.

After downloading a sample and then buying a book online (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), uploading some of the free Tor e-books, and even emailing word documents to it (I was a 2008 Hugo voter, so I got in on the electronic versions of the Hugo novel nominees), I was satisfied with our first date. I put my Kindle to sleep.

Photography: jblyberg

The e-ink shifted into a picture from the classic huge coffee table art book, Audubon’s Birds of America.

Oh, hell no, I thought, but another part of me thought, Oh, hey cool. That’s some smart thinking on their part.

At first, I wanted my Kindle to dress in snazzier clothes, something other than the dour, default cover it came with. Something slinky, like the ones from M-Edge. Really expensive, though, and they had problems (black markings on my pure white Kindle? Perish the thought!). Fortunately, I found out just how valuable the original cover was.

But once I understood the physical side of my Kindle a bit more, at least that part of our relationship went smoothly. I never read my Kindle without its prim little black/gray-lined cover. I didn’t know if our relationship would move past this casual stage.

I’m not quite sure when I started seeing my Kindle as more than something to read. Certainly real books can be read, and also used as stacking material, paperweights, and (especially with tomes from J.K. Rowling, George R.R. Martin, and of course the great J.R.R. Tolkien himself) defensive weaponry. A Kindle would be hard-pressed to fulfill those extra functions.

But my Kindle could save notes and bookmarks. My Kindle indexed my books front and back so I could search them (handy when I started reading anthologies and collections). My Kindle let me buy more content for it, with as many free samples (which are much longer than what they let you have on almost any website) as the Kindle could fit. And after adding an 8GB Transcend SD card, no more worries about fitting more content on my Kindle.

My Kindle didn’t stop there, though. I could email PDF, HTML, Word docs to my Kindle’s email address and have them converted for free, then either download them and upload to the Kindle via USB, or whispernet them directly to the Kindle for 10 cents. My Kindle could read non-DRM MobiPocket files, so I could take advantage of random free eBooks.

But it was the FeedBooks Download Guide that showed me there were interesting things you could do with Mobipocket (and other e-book-specific formats like ePub, as opposed to plain HTML, PDF, or RTF). The Guide, itself an eBook, was hyperlinked like all get-out, including links to the web where the Kindle could download Mobipocket files to itself for free.

If you’d asked me how alluring an iPod for books could be, the week before I met my Kindle, I would have shrugged and told you that books are not anywhere near as ephemeral as music.

But it’s not about replicating the physical book experience. It never was, any more than digital music is about replicating the physical CD/tapes/vinyl experience.

It’s about enhancing interaction with the content.

And so I fell to learning how to make eBooks myself for my Kindle. I should have realized that I’d fallen at this point.

I knew I loved my Kindle when, one fine Saturday morning, I woke up and it lay beside me, displaying a picture of Jane Austen, and still charged enough to spend a quiet, absorbed weekend on the island, reading in quaint coffee shops and restaurants.

I knew I loved my Kindle when I spent a night writing perl scripts to massage 325 short stories from the SciFiction archives and blast them through the Amazon converter and into my Kindle (complete with a primitive table of contents).

I knew I loved my Kindle when I went through lengths to translate a long, hyperlinked work just for my Kindle.

I even learned a few extra functions for my Kindle. For instance, it finds restaurants and gas stations via GPS. And it tells the time. These are very important functions that a real book doesn’t give you. Although I find that I miss the spider-killing function. Perhaps the Kindle 2.0 can come with a small laser beam cutter.

The Kindle isn’t perfect. I can’t really think of many devices that are, even the iPhone. And perhaps it’s less perfect than it should realistically be.

But damn it. I love my Kindle. I use it for books and, well, to feed a bit of a geek scripting fetish when I figure out how to massage gobs of content into Kindle-readable form. I don’t use it as a PDA.

In light of what it’s done for my reading, the Kindle is very lovely indeed.

Updated 10/19 with the Kindle editions of Territory and Gospel of the Knife.
Updated 9/20 with the Kindle edition of The Servants.

The 2008 nominations for the World Fantasy Awards are here!

There are plenty of nominees, all of them good. There are life achievement and art awards, which can’t really be Kindle-ized. And Emma Bull’s Territory is up for best novel, and I love it.

Currently, only a few of the nominees can be digested (or easily made digestible) on the Kindle:

Territory — Emma Bull

One of the executive producers for Shadow Unit, an ongoing web serial that’s akin to The Sandbaggers meets Lovecraft. Tor.com is also offering a free eBook (Mobipocket format, Kindle-edible) of another of her novels, War for the Oaks, to registered members unto maybe next week (the offer started in the middle of September).

The Gospel of the Knife — Will Shetterly

His also a producer on the collective serial online work Shadow Unit, along with Emma Bull. Tor.com happens to also be offering a free eBook of another of his novels, Dogland, to registered users.

Both Dogland and Gospel of the Knife are available under the Creative Commons license as well, but the Kindle edition and the Mobipocket edition on Tor.com are much better formatted.¹

The Servants — Michael Marshall Smith

He’s a five-time winner of the British Fantasy Award!

Ysabel — Guy Gavriel Kay

He also blogged about his experience writing Ysabel.

Stars Seen Through Stone — Lucius Shepard

Also a 2008 Hugo Nominee for Best Novella.

The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics — Daniel Abraham

Also a 2008 Hugo Nominee for Best Novelette. Part of the excellent and Kindle-available Logorrhea anthology, edited by John Klima.

The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change — Kij Johnson

She also wrote The Fox Woman, an excellent Heian Japan fantasy novel with Kitsune—and available on the Kindle.

Singing of Mount Abora — Theodora Goss

Available as part of the Logorrhea anthology.

Wizards — edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

One of the few SFF anthologies available on the Kindle.

Logorrhea — edited by John Klima

Already mentioned multiple times in this article due to the great stories this anthology harbors.

I feel guilty for not mentioning everyone else—but I’m short on time, and this blog is pretty Kindle-centric.

Go ye, download, and enjoy.

1. The problem with many CC works on the web is that they often aren’t well-formatted; it usually takes the likes of Feedbooks, which can’t do all the works in the world, and ill formatting still slips through the cracks. [↩]

To Glory:

1. Find a story online to practice on.
2. Discover that the HTML is horrible, and strip it down and massage code via perl scripts. This is almost always the case.
3. Install CrossOver Mac because you have an Intel mac, and you really, really don’t want to open the work laptop.
4. Create a Windows 2k “bottle” (simulated environment) on CrossOver to put software in. Cute.
5. With CrossOver, install IE6 in the Win2k bottle. For some reason MobiPocket Creator needs it.
6. Download MobiPocket Creator and install with CrossOver as “advanced” edition.
7. Import HTML into the Creator a few times until you get it right.
8. Discover that Stanza (Mac only) is way better than any MobiPocket previewer for your new Mobi file.
9. Mess around with metadata and get the format for author name wrong for a while.
10. Not that it mattered, since you didn’t realize you had to hit the Update button allll the way down a long scroll of page, not the convenient “save” button at top. Note to self: GUIs continue to be stupid.
11. Several uploads over USB to Kindle later, you reach enlightenment.
12. Search around the web for the key stroke that makes your Kindle take screenshots of itself (it’s Alt-Shift-G). Marvel at lack of feedback Kindle gives you to tell you if the screenshot even worked. And good thing you have an SD card in, since the screenshots will only save to the SD card.
13. Connect Kindle via USB for the umpteenth time.
14. Download screenshots.
15. Post to blog via ScribeFire.

    Ta-da! Clicky for full size.

    
16. Now you have to figure out ToC, multiple files (or just one gigantic HTML file?), guides, images, and such.

Notes on the Home content list screenshot:

• Yes, I keep forgetting to delete my samples even after I buy the books (Dust in this case). It is possible to do so, but the Content Manager is slow, not easy to navigate, and I have a zillion books/samples on it now, so I keep putting it off….
• For some reason Farthing’s metadata doesn’t show Jo’s byline. That needs to be fixed before it goes into real publication, of course.
• Flatland is from FeedBooks.
• “Green” (by Jay Lake) is an upload via the Kindle email conversion service. Uploads that are converted (HTML for instance) stick your email in as the author. It’s one reason why I wanted to learn MobiPocket—so I could get the metadata right.