The Baen Free Library offers one of my favorite reads ever!

I enjoy the adventure of Miles (and his parents before him) so much I actually own 2 copies of “Young Miles” so I can lend one and not be without. There are very few books that I have ever done that with. It is Trickster Space Opera and you don’t need to be a SF reader to have fun with it.

Available in more formats than is sensible, too. No excuse!

It’s starting to be a bit of a single topic this week - guess I have phases.
In a recent post I mentioned deciding to take the Mount TBR challenge to read some of the books I have owned a while and not yet read (or meant to re-read but never got around to).

I figure this won’t happen unless I make a list of the first few books to get publicly started. So these are the first five, chosen in part as they were in boxes here upstairs and therefore reachable.

The Robber Bride
The Derwish House
We The Drowned - not sure I can forgive what he did to that dog, strangely enough
Good Behaviour
an attempt to restart and finish The Lacuna

and for when I have to travel I have many ebooks I have had a long time

We’ll see if making even this tiny bit public will keep me on track. 25 books from the old pile should be easy

On picking open products, buying by feature not by brand or popularity, self limitation, avoiding DRM, and how it made me discover so many great books.

I spent 2010 travelling so much for work and spending a week (or more) at a time away, that I couldn’t carry enough books along. I tried watching TV but frankly I prefer a good book to much that is on TV.

I tried buying books when there and bringing them back, but this is wasteful - I didn’t have the time to go to a proper bookshop and airport selection is full of disposable clones… and it is not as if I need more random books!

Simultaneously I became aware how many books I already own and how many my technical books quickly became outdated clutter. Even when you are a keen reader with a big house (and planning some special bookshelves, but that is another blog post), it only makes only sense to own books you will either re-read in the future or lend to friends.

So I decided I’d been keeping the book-and-gadgetaholic inside me at bay for long enough, it was now more than reasonable for me to get an ebook reader. That way I could have hundreds of unread ebooks too

My rules for book versus ebook

Books versus ebooks is mostly resolving the conflict between storage and longevity. Paper lasts forever and can be shared. Ebooks take no space.

* Is it a technical reference book? ebook. They are too big and bulky as books and become obsolete too fast
* Do I already know I will lend it or reread it? book
* Do I already know I will read it once? library borrow, or ebook
* Is it an impulse or curiosity buy? ebook
* Is it available only with DRM? book or library borrow

I wanted a device using standard formats to be sure that in 10 years I still can read them in some way. I wanted to add any book in any format wherever I found it, through copying the file, not have to jump through hoops. I don’t particularly need an on-book shop (which seems to be important to reviewers, strangely) or a dictionary or some of the other bells and whistles.

It couldn’t be the Kindle. I’m not anti Amazon, by far, I buy many books from them for convenience and if they offered ebooks in open formats I possibly would buy from them some of the time - and if they made the Kindle more open I could have been tempted, its a lovely device - but the Kindle’s geography lock and the closed format are too worrying for me. I want to be able to buy french ebooks too, if I so feel.

And if I am honest I think it dangerous if too much is on Amazon only when it comes to ebooks - a monopoly on ebooks would be bad for authors, publishers and readers. So I won’t help it happen, even if it deprives me of many books.

I was not content to lock myself out of the Amazon ebook store and format by not getting a Kindle (I know there’s ways to convert files but I can’t be bothered and I don’t want to increase the monopoly anyways). No sir! I am also locking myself out of most of the other big stores as I refuse to buy DRM files.

DRM is simply a way to cripple the content to make it less yours and less reliable - I cannot trust that any DRM scheme will remain unlockable in 10 years time - after all I own a few games which I can no longer play as the “unlocking” server is long gone, or the deal between the publisher and the distributor has been severed in the last 10 years. Not to forget limited activations (i.e. you can only copy it to your next phone or ereader so many times, 5 most commonly!). I don’t want this to happen to books, which I am much more likely to want to revisit in 10 years than games.

DRM does not respect the user, and as a consequence I reject it.

My reader

So I did my research and settled for an Iriver Cover Story, and a year on I am still very pleased with it.

The screen is not as contrasty as it should be (only 8 levels not 16 like newer ones - one thing I do regret about it) but it is small and solid, has a touch screen, notes, supports many formats including for work documents, has an extension card port, wifi, email, and even supports audio. Battery life is long, recharged via USB. And it is, all in all, quite open.

And it doesn’t look half bad

So how did I manage?

I think the whole no kindle, no DRM could have gotten rather drab and frustrating, but I already knew of Baen and that and Gutenberg could keep me going for years, so I wasnt worried.

In the end it turned out to be a blessing, because I had to dig a bit and indulge in risk taking and curiosity, and found many books and authors I would not have read otherwise. And that only happened because I put these limits on myself.

I got the largest number of my books from Baen and Angry Robot - one because I knew they did open ebooks by design since the nineties (including a mountain of free ones to kickstart any reading) and I could finally now reward them. The other I found via a review and the first random books were so good I kept buying (and now subscribe). I also got subscriptions or issues of quite a few hard-to-find-in-europe magazines.

Are there many publishers and books I would get and try but cannot, because they are only on Amazon/Apple, or only available with DRM? Sure! But I found others instead, more interesting than what I would have bought on Amazon.

PS: Here are the places where I have bought good books in the past year. I will list the books with 1 line comments in a separate post, this is long enough

Directly from publishers:
* Baen webscriptions and the Baen Free Library. Now found at http://www.baenebooks.com Also have books from Nightshade Books from the Baen store
* Angry Robot - got so many good books from them I now subscribe to their entire output!
* Apex Books http://www.apexbookcompany.com/collections/ebooks
* Almost all computer and science/reference books publishers sell their own without DRM, I bought from dozens.
* wizard tower (genre) http://www.wizardstowerbooks.com/ also has some magazines and other publishers books
* rebellion http://www.rebellionstore.com/
* 1889 labs http://1889.ca/books/
* OR books (non fiction) http://www.orbooks.com/
* Ps publishing is starting to have ebooks and eshorts http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/ebooks-31-c.asp
Small ebook stores:
* Fictionwise http://www.fictionwise.com << also has some genre periodicals like Analog, Asimov's, Ellery Queen etc. awesome!
* Weightless books << http://weightlessbooks.com

From the author:
Also bought direct from the author eg: Cory Doctorow but these are few and far between.
Lynn Abbey, C.J. Cherryh, Jane Fancher at http://www.closed-circle.net/WhereItsAt/catalog

Please feel free to spam this with comments regarding any place where you found good DRM free ebooks

When I was a teen I managed to read 5 books a week, sometimes more. Now it’s maybe 1 a week, except in phases where I have a lot of travel or the occasional read-up weekend.

But somehow my appetite for adding books to my shelves or my wish list has, if nothing, increased. And finding more books that tickle my curiosity isn’t hard, since the publishing industry is printing and selling more books than ever, and there are so many blogs, groups on librarything and friendfeed, and magazines, and, right now, all these “best of the year” lists.

My catalogue on librarything has me owning over 1500 books. And, of these, there’s at least 100 I haven’t read (not counting the reference books you never exactly read!), and several hundred I want to re-read. Instead, I buy new books or get books from the library. Some books have been on my “to read” list for 3 years or more. Perhaps I should admit I won’t read them… or perhaps I should give them -and me- a last chance?

Of course that is what I said last year, that I would focus on reading what I already had. I did a few, but… not all that many. Instead I added to the unread books pile… so just wanting to is not going to do it. I need help. I need peer pressure.

And, just in time, here comes the Mount TBR challenge:

Challenge Levels
Pike’s Peak: Read 12 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Vancouver: Read 25 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Ararat: Read 40 books from your TBR piles/s
Mt. Kilimanjaro: Read 50 books from your TBR pile/s
El Toro: Read 75 books from your TBR pile/s
Mt. Everest: Read 100+ books from your TBR pile/s

The rules:
*Once you choose your challenge level, you are locked in for at least that many books. If you find that you’re on a mountain-climbing roll and want to tackle a taller mountain, then you are certainly welcome to upgrade.
*Challenge runs from January 1 to December 31, 2012.
*You may sign up anytime from now until November 30th, 2012.
*Books must be owned by you prior to January 1, 2012. No ARCs (none), no library books. No rereads. [To clarify—based on a question raised—the intention is to reduce the stack of books that you have bought for yourself or received as presents {birthday, Christmas, "just because," etc.}. Audiobooks may count if they are yours and they are one of your primary sources of backlogged books.]
*Books may be used to count for other challenges as well.

You’re on!

I will be aiming low, for the Mt. Vancouver 25 books to start with. And of course my librarything catalogue can vouch for the books owned before January 1st http://www.librarything.com/catalog/iphigenie

• Song for our Times

  I’m the bad-assed coyote sniffing at your sister.
  I’m the wild butterflies in your lover’s hands.
  I’m the salmon he brings to you as a gift.
  I’m the basket of sun she gives you one rainy day.

  I’m the gangly bachelor button thriving in the ditch,
  the summer ending like a long sleep in a slow swinging hammock.
  I’m the land that was created from mud and put on a turtle’s back,
  that fell from the sky, that was thrust from the roots,
  that was the heart of an Indian. I’m the song
  that will never be finished.

   

Read it at http://weirdtales.net/wordpress/2008/09/17/tom-edison-and-his-telegraphic-harpoon/
A bit of a steampunk alternate history, a bit loose but a fun read :D
There are quite a few more tales available on that site, worth a sniff through.

It just occured to me that 2 weeks ago when I mentioned several stories available online from Elizabeth bear, that I forgot to mention the intriguing, Hugo Winning story Tideline. It is a strange story and I certainly didnt know where she was going with it.
Strangely enough it has a similar setting to “Inappropriate Behaviour”, another online story I mentioned recently, in that it is an encounter on a beach between a human and a machine. Of course the particular characters, plots and resulting stories are very different, but both make you puzzle and think and possibly feel as well. Maybe there’s something to this beach setting, I wonder if I can find other story variations. Anyone know one?

Anyway, “Tideline” is on Elizabeth Bear’s site: http://www.elizabethbear.com/tideline.html

This is a rather quirky story which really made me ponder and wonder, even though the context seems a bit artificial. It reminded me a little of several books which have a psychologically different protagonist, and the challenges of communication and understanding in such a setting, where the perpectives are so alien to each other. In this story it is a matter of life and death…

It’s a rather long read: http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/murphy/murphy1.html