56 thoughts on “DisCon III Hugo Voter Packet Available”

1. Speaking as someone who is not an awards voter, so I feel my opinion is unbiased and useful, the various awards packets are, like, the best idea anyone ever had. I’m glad it has become a continuing tradition.

2. Yaaayyy!!! ::Kermit arm flail::

3. Yes, best Hugo innovation in the 21st century.

4. Huge thanks to the finalists and their publishers for providing all of us with this great packet! Also thanks to the DisCon III Hugo Admins for all the work that went into it.

   And really special thanks to the finalists and publishers that provided the full length books in various categories, espcially Series! Wow – entire series from Seanan McGuire, S.A. Chakraborty, R.F. Kuang and Mary Robinette Kowal.

5. Not the entire series from Kowal, Lorien — I didn’t see The Fated Sky under Lady Astronaut Universe, just The Calculating Stars and the short stories (as well as a pointer to get The Relentless Moon from the Best Novel folder).

   Also, is it just me or are Sheila Williams’s PDF files blank except for the one issue of Asimov’s included? (Not sure if the epub/mobi files are blank, too).

   I think the Novik and Little Badger books are also extract/excerpts, too, but not currently listed as such in the main post.

6. @David H – Ah, you’re right about the Lady Astronaut series. I was distracted by getting all the shorts and didn’t notice The Fated Sky was missing.

   And, yes, there are some finalists/publishers that just provided excerpts of full length works. But that’s not unexpected. I’m always pleasantly surprised when I get the full book.

   You’re right about problems with Sheila Williams’ submissions too. The epubs and PDFs are blank, and while there is content in the mobi files, I can only get a short glimpse before my Kindle ap crashes. There must be some kind of bug in there.

7. As a note, there are full playable copies of both Hades and Spiritfarer available as well in the Video Game category but they’re limited. The packet contains instructions on who to email to be sent a copy.

8. Thanks for documenting this.

9. Many, many thanks to the creators, publishers, rights-holders, etc.! 😀 Much appreciated!

   @Lorien Gray & @David H: Thanks for the info. I found that converting the MOBI files to EPUBs gave me readable EPUBs. (For 1-2 page lists like this, I prefer PDFs, actually, but no biggie.) Have either of you let the con know? (I don’t have time to find the contact at the moment, but I can check later if no one else does.)

10. This is an impressive haul. Nice to see Dramatic Presentation getting some packet love.

11. I’m the voter packet co-ordinator and I’m following this thread. We do have stuff that we converted in Calibre and none of the team are particularly Calibre experts, so if you identify problems in this thread I’ll have a look. Please note that I’m running a convention this weekend so I may have limited time this week.

12. @Kendall – I did send an email to the [email protected] email address.

13. (Too late to edit my last post.)

    Hi, Alison. Thank you, and please thank everyone else who helped out with the packet. It’s great! I’m sure there’s no rush on checking out Sheila Williams’ submission. We have tons of time for voting this year.

14. @Alison Scott
    A big thank you for the work you and your team did on the packet this year.

15. Anybody successfully download the graphic story file? It’s the only one that I can’t get to download. I’ve tried several times and I’ve never gotten above thirteen percent of the file before it stopped downloading.

16. I always remind myself sternly that the packet is a gift and not an entitlement – and it is chock-full of some very good stuff indeed, so I’d like to express my gratitude to both the creators and the curators for making it available.

17. @Cat Eldridge – I’ve successfully downloaded it but haven’t taken a close look at it yet beyond checking that there was data there.

18. Thanks, @Lorien Gray! 🙂

19. @Alison Scott: Many thanks to you & any other packet wranglers! 😀 I should’ve said that in my initial comment.

20. FYI. I sent a short note to hughhelp (thanks for the address, @Lorien Gray!) about what seems like a redundant PDF. “Once & Future” has two PDFs, but they have the same page count and the contents seem the same. Since the files are very different sizes, I’m guessing one’s higher resolution.

    (ETA: Given the size of the Graphic Story .zip file, it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of the download size, though. Not a big deal.)

21. Now that there’s, what, a decade or so worth of data, has anyone looked to see whether participation in the reader packet correlates with awards won? For example, in this year’s novels, there are four complete novels and two excerpted ones. Does this fact alone put Jemisin and Clarke at a disadvantage compared to the other four authors?

22. @Bill

    Jemisin’s been an excerpt author every time, iirc (waiting for a correction now…), so it clearly can’t completely defeat an author’s chances – although she’s rather an exceptional case.

    But if she’s an exception we’ll have to wait longer for good data – she’s too much of the sample size of winners!

23. I’m really surprised that Emily Tesh’s two Tor.com novellas weren’t included in EPUB and MOBI formats, since Tor.com has always been very generous with their finalists.

24. The Astounding contents doc is incorrect; Emily Tesh’s contribution is an EPUB, not a PDF, of Silver in the Wood (a great novella!) plus an excerpt from the sequel Drowned Country, and A. K. Larkwood’s excerpt of The Unspoken Name is an EPUB, not a PDF.

25. It appears that many of the novel EPUBs in the packets are conversions from PDFs and are thus unreadable. I presume that the same problem exists with the MOBIs of those books.

26. Not the entire Murderbot in the best Series folder either. And only one of the Scalzi.

27. JJ

    It appears that many of the novel EPUBs in the packets are conversions from PDFs and are thus unreadable. I presume that the same problem exists with the MOBIs of those books.

    At a glance the mobis of Black Sun, Relentless Moon and Harrow The Ninth look good. Which were you seeing problems with?

28. Ah, Legendborn and Cemetary Boys…

    @Alison, if I were to tidy them up to produce more readable versions, would that be of any use to you? The only way I know how to do it is manually, and it’d be a few hours work for each, but I’ll probably be putting the work in to get reading copies for myself anyhow.

29. Just a small nitpick, there is a note saying in the Best Series folder for October Day, that Come Tumbling Down as a part of October Day can be found in the Best Novellafolder. If there isn’t a crossover I am missing, Come Tumbling Down is “only” part of another Seanan McGuireseries and has no connection to October Day.
    Much to read. where to start.

30. NickPheas: Which were you seeing problems with?

    All of the Tor books in the Novel packet, the Novella packet, and the Series packet are fine, as is Black Sun.

    These are the works which are PDF conversions that I’ve found problems with thus far (there is gibberish intermixed with the text):

    • In the Novel packet, the Piranesi excerpt
    • In the Series packet, all three novels in each of the Daevabad Trilogy and the Poppy War trilogy
    • In the Related Work packet, Beowulf
    • With the exception of T. Kingfisher’s novel, all of the novels in the Lodestar packet

    I stopped checking after that.

31. I’m just getting the headers and footers out of Legendborn right now. As Calibre conversions go, this really isn’t too bad. There was something about the way Catfishing on Catnet was put together last year that converted every lower case double L into L and a space. That was a mess and a half.

32. NickPheas: I’m just getting the headers and footers out of Legendborn right now. As Calibre conversions go, this really isn’t too bad.

    The problem is that the headers and footers change slightly on each page, so you can’t just do a “Replace All”. And I’m seeing the missing “L” problem, too.

33. The watermark on the Poppy War is really doing a number on the narrative.

34. @Meredith

    [Jemisin’s] rather an exceptional case.

    True, and in general, the Best Novel entries are probably the worst example I could have picked in that they tend to enjoy good name recognition, and I suspect that even if the relevant novels had been omitted from the packet, many voters will find a way to read them anyhow.

    If there is an effect here, it probably would show up most in the down-ballot awards. The statistician in me would ask, “How many Hugos have been awarded in the last decade to works which were not represented at all in the packet? Is that number less (or greater) than what one would expect from chance?”

    And I’d also try and correlate final vote totals with presence in the packet.

    Vote totals are available at the WSFS archives; the hard part would be finding details on voter packets over the years.

35. In the Series packet, all three novels in each of the Daevabad Trilogy and the Poppy War trilogy.

    Yeah, the .mobi version of The Poppy War is pretty unreadable. And the Daevabad .mobi files, I haven’t looked into how they read yet, but they are also ABSURDLY huge files.

36. @NickPheas I’m taking a step away from the packet (apart from urgent problems) until Monday, but after that, if you’re interested in helping on things where we have conversion agreement, I think we should be able to work on getting amended versions into the packet. For next year, one of my conclusions (this is the first time I’ve done this job) is that the packet team should recruit a keen Calibre person from the beginning. “A volunteer of high Calibre.” Can you email me (at my name @discon3.org) please?

37. Within Best Professional Artist, there are three different variations on Galen Dara’s name in use: her folder is labeled Galen Smith, as is one of the works within, this time in lower case as galen smith; also Galan Dara; the spelling that matches the artist’s web site is used on four files.

    This shouldn’t confuse any voters, but it also seems the kind of thing that a final check would correct.

38. @NickPheas
    Thanks in advance for any conversion help you may provide to the packet!

39. While I appreciate the Hugo Packet team’s efforts to provide us with EPUB and MOBI versions of the PDFs, and nickpheas’ offer to clean them up, I think it’s a good idea to take a step back here and think about what’s being proposed.

    The works in the packet are there through the generosity of the Publishers and the Authors. Publishers already have professionally-produced EPUBs and MOBIs of these books. If a Publisher has chosen to provide only a PDF, it is because they are concerned about bootleg copies of their works being passed around. They’ve given permission for Worldcon to distribute PDF copies of their works. They have not given permission for Worldcon to distribute EPUBs and MOBIs of those works.

    What’s being proposed is to create bootleg copies of those works. And I think that’s a really bad idea. It’s a violation of the trust that Publishers have put in us, by giving us these works. And it’s likely to result in Publishers deciding just not to give us works for the Hugo Voter Packet any more.

    A better solution might be to use Acrobat Pro to trim the whitespace galley borders off the PDFs to make them more readable. I should think this would be a reasonable step to which Publishers would not object.

    And I strongly recommend that the EPUBs and MOBIs which are conversions from PDFs be removed from the Hugo Packet downloads.

40. Jo Van: Publishers already have professionally-produced EPUBs and MOBIs of these books. If a Publisher has chosen to provide only a PDF, it is because they are concerned about bootleg copies of their works being passed around. They’ve given permission for Worldcon to distribute PDF copies of their works. They have not given permission for Worldcon to distribute EPUBs and MOBIs of those works.

    That seems like a valid concern — DisCon III should be sure it has permission to distribute whatever versions are in the HVP.

41. Alison Scott said:

    things where we have conversion agreement

    Would depend on what that agreement actually allows I suppose. Better to have just the provided pdf if the agreement doesn’t allow cleaning up the conversions for readability.

42. @Jo Van & @Mike Glyer & @Laura: Not everything has EPUB or MOBI versions and @Alison Scott wrote “where we have conversion agreement.” So I don’t quite get the last three comments. (shrug)

    Anyway, my current Hugo audio listening: I’m enjoying Kowal’s The Relentless Moon. Ebook-wise this weekend, I’m not sure, but probably novella(s). 😀 Probably singular, but I’ll hope for enough time and focus to read more than one. Baby steps, self, baby steps!

43. @Kendall
    I agree that it sounds like they do have permission in cases where they have included the conversions. But if that doesn’t allow clean up for basic readability (as NickPheas was offering), then they might as well not bother. The unreadable mess that results from an automatic conversion from pdf isn’t doing anyone any favors.

44. I absolutely appreciate the concerns. I’m not for a second going to set up ay kind of alternative channel for distributing any cleaned up files. There might be an option for DisCon going to rights holders and asking permission to make cleaned up versions available, and only if they say yes, doing so. But it is their gift and their right to say no.

    Silly thing about all this though: I’m currently copy editing the Poppy War (for my own ease of reading only) and as an experiment looked for a pirate version. Took me one google search to find one, or at least something that looks like one. Making sure that no-one uploads from the Hugo Packet to The Pirate Bay won’t actually do anything useful.

45. On checking, the first 99% of the epub of The City of Brass was (by comparison with the .pdf file) the maps from the first couple of pages, chopped up very finely with a dot or squiggle or occasional leaf or camel on each line, for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Searching for the first text line of the story put me literally, not figuratively, 99% of the way through the book according to the e-reader.

    I expect I’ll be doing a lot of .pdf reading. Can anyone recommend how to trim margins down for people who do not have a copy of Acrobat?

    Still, I want to thank the Hugo Packet folks for a herculean effort. Including a video game. (I already own Hades, so I just asked for Spiritfarer.) Speaking of Spiritfarer, does anyone know what “limited” means? What’s missing from the games? Some levels, some gameplay, or is it just basic content with no DLC?

46. Cassy, I spent the day cropping whitespace borders from all of the PDFs in the packet, and I’ve sent the revised files to Alison. However, she’s got a convention this weekend, so is not likely to be able to make them available until next week.

47. Reconsumed THE CITY WE BECAME in audio this time and I think the audio version is even better than the print/ebook.

48. Thank you Jo Van!

49. Cassy, the Spiritfarer codes are for the full game, but the number available may be limited – we have a set of codes. Thunder Lotus will help us with more codes if they can, but they don’t have an unlimited supply. This is also true for Supergiant Games (Hades), who said that they can support a large number of requests, but again, not an unlimited one.

    My view was that a possibly limited supply of codes would still be useful for voters.

    Note that Blaseball is a completely free game, too.

50. Alison, thank you for the clarification.

    I was aware that there were a limited number of codes available, which is the reason I did not ask for a Hades code — it should go to someone who doesn’t already own the game. I’m glad to hear that “limited” only refers to availability and not content. And thank you for your remarkably prompt response to my email asking for the Spiritfarer code; the game is now installed on my Xbox and waiting for me to start.

    Please don’t take quibbling with minor issues to heart;I think we all recognize that you’ve done a Herculean job assembling this packet and getting it out to us. Thank you for your hard work!

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