(1) SUPERGIRLS. Carrie Goldman writes “An Open Letter To Supergirl Stars Melissa Benoist and Chyler Leigh, From An Adoptive Mom” in Chicago Now.
Her relationship with her younger sisters is complicated. They are our biological daughters, and this creates deep and unavoidable conflict for her. No matter how much we reassure her that we love her the same as the younger girls, she tests us.
During the scenes in Supergirl where Alex and Kara explore the painful aspects of their relationship as sisters through adoption, our whole family absorbs every word, every expression, because seeing this dynamic on mainstream television makes our family feel less alone. The fact that both Alex and Kara are kickass, strong, smart, flawed, beautiful women who work hard, cry, laugh, yell, fight, and make mistakes has been an incredible model for all of our girls.
(2) READING RESOURCES. The 1000 Black Girl Books Resource Guide database includes several sf/f titles.
[From Marley’s Welcome.] Welcome to the #1000blackgirlbooks Resource Guide. I started this campaign because I wanted to read more books where black girls are the main characters. With your help we have collected over 4000 books; many of them are have the same title, but we do have lots of unique ones as well. This guide includes 700 of those books and more is coming.
I believe black girl books are really important because when you are young you want to read lots of books, but you especially like to read books with people that look like you. While I have books at home about black girls, the books at school were not diverse. Children do most of their reading in schools or because of schools. Teachers assign books that you must read. If those books are not diverse and do not show different people’s experiences then kids are going to believe that there is only one type of experience that matters. Also, if books are not diverse then kids will not learn about the experiences of other members in their community.
(3) BELGIUM CALLING. Nicholas Whyte checks in from Brussels, in “Losers” at From the Heart of Europe.
I finally made it to the office at 1022, those last two kilometres having taken me 90 minutes to drive, to find most of my colleagues gathered ashen-faced in the lobby, greeting me tearfully – I was the only person who was unaccounted for, due to my phone being out of order – and giving me the headlines of what had happened. It’s nice to feel appreciated, still more so when I logged on and saw many concerned messages from friends and family, and even more so when people responded to my posts confirming that I was safe. One of the great things about the interconnectedness of today’s world is that we can often catch up with our friends quickly – Facebook’s check-in system in particular is a source of reassurance.
The horror has hit very close to home. I have flown out of Brussels airport in the morning five times this year, and was originally due to do so again on Friday to go to Eastercon in Manchester (in fact my plans have changed and I’ll take the Eurostar to London for work tomorrow and travel on up by train). My wife was flew out on Monday for a funeral in England and was due to fly back last night; her flight was cancelled and she will now return by Eurostar this evening. Maelbeek metro station (the four-pointed star on my map) is in the heart of the EU quarter, and I go past it almost every day and through it several times a month; a former colleague was actually on the train that was bombed, but fortunately escaped without injury; another former staffer (from before my time) was in the departure hall of the airport, and is recovering well from minor injuries.
… This happened because they [the terror movement] are losing. Less than a week ago, a major figure in the terror movement was arrested in Brussels; perhaps yesterday was revenge for his arrest, perhaps it was rushed into because they were afraid he would start talking (or knew that he already had). On the ground, their allies and sponsors are losing territory and resources in Syria and Iraq. I wrote a week ago about violence as story-telling, in the Irish context. This is an attempt to write a story about the weakness of our interconnected world, attacking places where people travel and meet, where many nationalities and cultures join together and build together.
It is a narrative that must not and will not win…
(4) MIND MELD. SF Signal’s current Mind Meld, curated by Andrea Johnson, asks —
Q: What non-mainstream Scifi/fantasy Graphic Novels do you recommend?
The answers come from: Matthew Ciarvella, Sharlene Tan, Taneka Stotts (Full Circle), Stacey Filak, Carl Doherty, Myisha Haynes (The Substitutes), Pipedreamergrey, Christa Seeley (Women Write About Comics), Martin Cahill, Larry Gent, and Jacob Stokes.
(5) VERICON. Ann Leckie has captioned a set of photos of Ancillary cosplayers from Vericon.
It’s obvious what’s going on here, right? That’s Hamilton/Breq in the middle, and she’s recruited Agent Carter, Lieutenant Peepsarwat, and Translator Zeiat in her search for the Presger gun. That case Agent Carter is carrying?
(6) INHUMAN PASSENGERS. “More ancient viruses lurk in our DNA than we thought” reports Phys Org.
Think your DNA is all human? Think again. And a new discovery suggests it’s even less human than scientists previously thought.
Nineteen new pieces of non-human DNA—left by viruses that first infected our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago—have just been found, lurking between our own genes.
And one stretch of newfound DNA, found in about 50 of the 2,500 people studied, contains an intact, full genetic recipe for an entire virus, say the scientists who published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Whether or not it can replicate, or reproduce, it isn’t yet known. But other studies of ancient virus DNA have shown it can affect the humans who carry it.
In addition to finding these new stretches, the scientists also confirmed 17 other pieces of virus DNA found in human genomes by other scientists in recent years…
(7) LUNAR POLE DANCING. “Earth’s Moon wandered off axis billions of years ago, study finds” at Phys Org.
A new study published today in Nature reports discovery of a rare event—that Earth’s moon slowly moved from its original axis roughly 3 billion years ago.
Planetary scientist Matt Siegler at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and colleagues made the discovery while examining NASA data known to indicate lunar polar hydrogen. The hydrogen, detected by orbital instruments, is presumed to be in the form of ice hidden from the sun in craters surrounding the moon’s north and south poles. Exposure to direct sunlight causes ice to boil off into space, so this ice—perhaps billions of years old—is a very sensitive marker of the moon’s past orientation….
“The moon has a single region of the crust, a large basaltic plain called Procellarum, where radioactive elements ended up as the moon was forming,” Siegler said. “This radioactive crust acted like an oven broiler heating the mantle below.”
Some of the material melted, forming the dark patches we see at night, which are ancient lava, he said.
“This giant blob of hot mantle was lighter than cold mantle elsewhere,” Siegler said. “This change in mass caused Procellarum—and the whole moon—to move.”
The moon likely relocated its axis starting about 3 billion years ago or more, slowly moving over the course of a billion years, Siegler said, etching a path in its ice.
(8) INDICATION OF TOR. John C. Wright still has one last book on the way from Tor – The Vindication of Man. Rather a dim-looking cover on the preorder page. The release date for the hardcover is November 22.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born March 23, 1952 — Kim Stanley Robinson. The other great sf writer born in Waukegan!
(10) HE WRITES ABOUT THEY. Although John Scalzi’s post about gender-neutral pronouns is interesting, I found his personal demonstration in the comments even more so:
Also, for the record, my stance on pronouns, as they regard me:
He/him/his: My preferred set. Please use them in all things involving me.
They/them/their: Not my preferred set, but I don’t mind them being used for me.
It/it/its: This is a non-gender construction but generally isn’t used for individual humans (excepting, from time to time, infants), and is mostly used for animals and objects. Please don’t use them for me; if you do I’ll wonder why you are, and also wonder if you see me as an object, which would make me wonder if you’re a sociopath of some sort.
She/her/her: Not my gender! Be aware that in my experience when someone uses these for me, they’re usually trying to insult me in one way or another. So unless you want my default impression of you to be that you’re a sexist twit, please don’t use this set for me.
Other constructions: Really, no. “He” or “They” is fine. Thanks.
(11) DO YOU FEEL LUCKY? Claire Rousseau’s series of tweets ends on a rather optimistic note, considering the 2016 Hugo ballot isn’t out yet.
The Sad Puppies are way less threatening now that we've avoided the nuclear arms race of everyone making slates. (13/?)
— Claire Rousseau (@ClaireRousseau) March 23, 2016
(12) GEOMETRIC LOGIC.
lol – B/C being called worse than Nazis is apparently worse than actually being called a Nazi. #caring https://t.co/pjW2SGb4iZ
— finger chomper (@sadrbtpuppies) March 23, 2016
(13) A SELECTED QUOTE. Sarah A. Hoyt takes time out from moving to post at Mad Genius Club.
And after being selectively quoted by Jim Hines who pretended I was calling anyone not with the puppies worse than those who abetted the holocaust and the holodomor, by cutting out the part where I addressed those who destroy lives and reputations for a plastic rocket, we have at least established what Jim Hines is. He’s not duped by those destroying reputations and lives. He’s one of the principals. I have only one question for him: But for Wales, Jim?
(14) PUPPYING WITHOUT UMLAUTS. Some of Declan Finn’s days are better than others. “The Evil of the Puppy Kickers” at A Pius Geek.
But last time I checked, Vox Day has really never dismissed his enemies as being subhuman. Nor has he suggested murdering any of them. Not even NK Jemisen, who has her own little war with Vox going that stretches back at least two years. He’ll still debate, or reason, or scream right back at her, but he’ll at least reply to whatever is thrown his way.
You may not like what he says, but he at least acknowledges that she’s someone worth having a fight with.
Can’t say that for the Puppy Kickers. They like being the ubermensch of their own little Reich, and it’s getting tiresome, really. The ones who are really in charge rarely, if ever, acknowledge any argument outside of their own little echo chamber.
(15) KEEP BANGING ON. Michael Bane, the producer of Outdoor Channel’s Gun Stories hosted by Joe Mantegna, announced Larry Correia will appear in an episode.
Did I mention that the MAIN MONSTER HUNTER HIMSELF, LARRY CORREIA, will be joining us on GUN STORIES WITH JOE MANTEGNA this season? The MONSTER HUNTER books are modern classics. I just finished reading SON OF THE BLACK SWORD, the first book in his newest series, and it was excellent.
(16) CROWDFUNDED CON. The Museum of Science Fiction in Washington, DC is running a Kickstarter appeal to fund guests for Escape Velocity, a convention it plans to hold July 1-3. At this writing, people have pledged $14,348 toward the $18,000 goal.
Something special is coming to National Harbor, Maryland – a science fiction convention on a mission. This July 1st to 3rd, the Museum of Science Fiction will be launching ESCAPE VELOCITY, a micro futuristic world’s fair where STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and mathematics) and science fiction will collide to create a geeky-fun, educational, and above all, fascinating spectacle for kids and adults alike!
A couple of the guests they expect to have are —
Rod Roddenberry, recently announced executive producer for the new Star Trek TV series for 2017 will make a keynote presentation to celebrate Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary and discuss his work with the Roddenberry Foundation.
Adam Nimoy, son of Leonard Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock on Star Trek, is coming to Escape Velocity to discuss his father’s legacy and his new documentary film, For the Love of Spock.
In addition to screening parts of the documentary, Nimoy will join Rod Roddenberry on an Escape Velocity discussion panel moderated by screenwriter and Museum of Science Fiction advisory board member, Morgan Gendel, who wrote the Hugo Award-winning Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “The Inner Light.” “I’ve known both Adam and Rod for years and it’s fascinating to see how each has found a way to celebrate the work of their famous fathers,” said Gendel. “I expect the panel to be a very insightful look into the lives and legacies of two Trek icons.”
(17) BALLARD REMEMBERED. Malcolm Edwards will guest on The Guardian’s live webchat about JG Ballard on March 25 at noon (UK time).
Malcolm Edwards was JG Ballard’s editor for several years and worked with him on Empire of The Sun, among other classics. He should be able to give invaluable insights into Ballard’s working methods and the wonderful books he produced – and so is uniquely placed to talk about this month’s Reading Group choice, High-Rise, not to mention the recently released film.
(18) NOT WORTH THE PAPER THEY’RE NOT WRITTEN ON? Max Florschutz takes a deep dive into the value of ebooks at Unusual Things.
You don’t see articles from music sites talking about how MP3 downloads are worthless and shouldn’t cost more than ten cents. You don’t see game review sites asking how dare Steam or Origin have a digital game on launch day cost the same as its physical compatriots.
So why in the book industry is this such a problem? Why is it that a person will look at a digital MP3 download from their favorite artist and buy it without a second of remorse, but then look at a digital book from their favorite author and send them an angry message about how that ebook shouldn’t be more than a dollar?
I don’t actually have an answer to this question. All I have are theories based on what I’m reading and hearing from other people around the internet. Maybe you’ll agree with some of these, maybe you won’t. But all of these are things I’ve heard expressed in one way or another….
1A- Physical books have physical difficulties that imply value to their purchasers. Yes, this much is true. While the story inside the pages remains the same, the trick with an ebook is that it’s hard to compete with an observation of value when looking at one. A physical book? Well, for one, you can pick it up and feel the weight of it, which, to most people, does imply a value. But you can also flip through it, jostle it, check a few pages, see how long it is.
You know what’s interesting? We can do all these things with an ebook. You can flip through it and read a sample. You can see how many pages there are. You can even check reviews—something you can’t do at a bookstore.
And yet … people don’t value that either. And why? Because it’s easy. It’s fast.
(19) GOTHIC INSPIRATION. Paul Cornell starts watching all the Hammer movies in order: “My Hammer Journey #1”.
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
The first thing that strikes one is how much of a Val Guest movie this is, and how much, therefore, as a director, Val Guest establishes the Hammer ethos. Guest’s forte is a kind of poetic modernist postwar British craft, a deceptive air of understated hard work that nevertheless not only gets everything right, but elevates, through the little details, the whole thing into art. (Again, that reminds one of the best years of Hammer all in all.) ….
(20) FURY FURIOUS. This was new to me, although it has been making the rounds for several years…
[Thanks to James H. Burns, DMS, Mark-kitteh, Andrew Porter, Michael J. Walsh, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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Good morning to the “Comrades in scrolls”
And to the Destroyer of Reputations, we bow down before your essential Jim-ness. Apparently it’s all the mirrors fault, not the person asking.
Over on JCW’s blog, he announces that Iron Chamber book with the sex robot on the cover, and then gives three quotes “from the reviews” without linking or even identifying these reviews.
Googling the three quotes gives hits only on his blog and Beale’s. The quotes themselves are barely literate:
“There are few authors who can maintain extremely high 5-star quality in every single piece of work they produce. JCW is one of the very few grand-masters who manages to pull this off consistently.”
I think inconsistently managing to pull off maintaining extremely high 5-star quality in every single work they produce would be a better trick.
“It was a roller coaster ride, and I mean that in a great way. Few works have affected me like this novel. I quit reading it twice in order to think about things.”
This actually sounds as if reading the book made the reviewer ill.
@Niall
How so? It sounds to me as if the book provoked some new ideas for the reader in a way that caused the reader to want to spend some time mulling those ideas over.
Others might choose to re-read the book at a later time, but why shouldn’t an individual set a book down in order to consider an idea that the book presents?
—
Regards,
Dann
@Niall McAuley:
That sounds more sad than anything else.
When Microsoft first starting thinking about eBooks (twenty years ago or so), Bill Gates asked for a presentation on the concept, and he invited Douglas Adams (“Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”) to speak.
I learned about it the night before when I got a call at home to tell me that I had to put together a presentation for it (on the state of the art in handwriting recognition). The organizer made sure I knew he didn’t want me there at all, but Gates had insisted, so keep it to 15 minutes and get off the stage.
As a result, I was nervous for several reasons, and showed up in the hall around 1PM for a 2PM meeting. There was only one other guy earlier than me, so I said hello to him. He turned out to be Douglas Adams, and we had a nice chat for about 30 minutes before anyone else showed up. (Pity I didn’t bring a book for him to sign.)
In his speech, he predicted that electronic books would eventually replace the paper kind in the same way that automobiles replaced horses–for all the reasons that we’re all used to hearing.
During the Q&A after his speech but before the presentations, someone said, “So what? An ebook will never feel or smell like a real book, and that matters to people.”
I piped up and said “That’s what they said about horses.”
Everyone laughed–even Gates. After that, I wasn’t nervous anymore, and when it came my time to present, everything went well. It was an afternoon to remember.
Microsoft never did manage to do anything successful with ebooks, but I still think Adams saw the future correctly. It’s just a matter of time.
Peace Is My Middle Name: @Niall McAuley: That sounds more sad than anything else.
I would feel sorry for JCW, who is clearly desperate and scraping for positive mainstream reviews of his book — but he’s behaved so consistently horrible to so many people, and said so many hateful homophobic and misogynist things, that I’ll save my sympathy for people who are actually deserving of it.
@JJ:
I assure you, that was not sympathy.
Sorry, Peace, I didn’t mean to imply that it was; I was just following on with agreement that it does, indeed, just sound really sad.
(12) It’s really sad how viciously partisan the fandom has become. Who’s a nazi s vs who’s worse than a nazi? He’s a brown shirt! She’s a racist! Blahblahblah. Name-calling to counter more name-calling!
A pox on both your houses, I say!
Everyone seems to be forgetting the ONLY question about this list that really matters: “Are the choices any good?” This is an award for works of science fiction and fantasy. Quality is all that should matter.
I have just disposed of 6 or 8 boxes of books to clear space in my smallish home, with several heavily laden bookcases still to cull… I’m trying hard to migrate to ebooks for anything I don’t particularly value or anticipate reading again. Theoretically they should be a great boon, and in fact I don’t mind the ebook reader at all (Kindle in my case) but I regard them as definitely a second class format, for whatever reason. Like most of us, I suspect, I like physical books.
That quote may be from VD himself, he makes a point of referring to JCW as a “SF grand-master” and refuses to clarify when called out that he is in fact not a Damon Knight Grand Master.
I buy books in lots of formats.
I stopped buying mass market paperbacks almost completely when I got a Kindle and have slowly been phasing them out of my physical library since then. Just form factor wise, I, personally, find the size of the kindle to be easier to hold than the mass market paper back. So a lot of UF ends up being purchased as ebooks by default because the physical version only comes in a format I don’t like. The only ones I buy these days are as gifts for my niece who doesn’t yet have an ereader.
I love hardcovers, but I don’t always buy a hc over an ebook. Because I own too many books for my shelves and have run out of wall space in my library (even after sneaking shelves into two other rooms in the house – at which point my spouse caught on to my game). So that decision is often based on how much I like the cover or if I think I’ll want a signed copy. And I know I can get an ereader signed, but still.
Then there is audio. I tend to do audio either to re-read or to try stuff that I am not sure is my kind of thing. For example, I can make it a lot further into political machination heavy book in a road trip than I will in a format where I can easily swap to something else (Goblin Emperor, House of Shattered Wings). I’ll also pick up audio if I know I like the narrator (Plantefall, Dresden Files) or if I think my spouse will like it and we have a driving heavy trip coming up.
Trade paperbacks I’ll buy if I really like the cover, want an autographed copy, or am giving it as a gift and there isn’t a hardcover option.
And while I think comixology is a great option, I prefer printed pages for graphic novels and collections.
Then there are books like Something More Than Night which I own hc, e, and audio versions of. (This would be true of Archivist Wasp, but there doesn’t appear to be an audio version, and the one time I bought a physical copy of the paperback, I gave it to someone before I made it back to my house.)
That’s all on the purchasing side. On the reading side, though, it depends on what I’m up to. I read more ebooks than physical books in 2010 and 2011 simply because of the amount of time I spent on planes traveling for work. 2012 was more heavily audiobook than any other year since I started keeping track because I did a lot of driving for work and used “driving to Worldcon” as an excuse to visit several friends across the midwest. Last year and (so far) this year, where I have done very little travel, I’ve had nearly an even split between physical and ebooks, with very few audiobooks. And I read everything I give my niece, which means an uptick in physical books read right before her birthday and Christmas.
I’m in the middle of 3 different audiobooks right now. One reserved for road trips with my spouse. One for long drives/walks by myself. One for super repetitive tasks at work (not much progress on it, thank goodness). I’m also reading a MG title, two anthologies, and an ebook right now.
*sigh*
Fortunately, I seem to keep acquiring books faster than I can read them, so the different rates of buying and reading each format hasn’t caught up with me yet.
@Rev Bob Ebooks do at least one good thing: they allow many more authors to enter the marketplace.
Most of my comments were aimed at trad publishers as they do the high pricing and insist on DRM. I buy mostly indie works due to price and lack of DRM.
@Mark-Kitteh
This particular blogger takes pride in bashing people without being specific. He’s also very anti-self-publishing and loves to ascribe the behavior of a few to everyone
@David Brin
Really? I guess when you first make the switch it would be. I’ve been using they/their regardless of teacher disapproval since the 1970s so it’s natural to me. I find writing he or she or s/he painful as a child – word economy and laziness as well as they just made sense to me.
@Standback
Great additional points on 18/ebook worth.
@Jim C. Hines
Hoyt does have a strange way of looking at the world. Luckily you have a good sense of humor and logic on your side as well as others who can see the lack of anything resembling logic in her unwarranted attack on you.
Maybe he reviewed them himself? (or more likely Beale)
@zil
Ziplock(TM) bags. Just make sure you get enough air out you can press hard enough to turn the page. 😉
Ryan writes That quote may be from VD himself
That would explain why it is so poorly written.
Excellent points re: (18) from Standback et al.
I’d like to add:
There are additional factors that may be at play, such as studies finding that reader retention (ie. plot recall, etc) is lower for ebooks, and there is mounting evidence that recall is partly physical in nature–by which I mean that you can’t necessarily remember the information you want, but you can remember that it was roughly this many pages into the book and about this far down on the left hand side, so you can wander around the region of the book indicated by physical cues before you stumble across the right passage. Not something that’s possible with ebooks, and one of the reasons “search” is not an acceptable substitute for being able to flip through a book (as students have been finding).
(There are also arguments to be made against the poster’s invocation of Amazon, which might be the single most toxic retailer operating in the developed world today, worse for tax avoidance and corporate responsibility than WalMart, every bit as bad to its lowest-tier employees, possibly abusive to its white collar workers in a different way, and wielding tremendous power over its suppliers–not just in the book category–to the detriment of bottom lines and jobs in a host of other industries… but people love it because it’s convenient and unsustainably cheap and makes you feel like you’re living in the future.)
Anyway. A few years ago I sat down with some book prices and the consumer price index. I chose the Everyman’s Library, trade paperbacks, and the Canadian consumer price index (because that’s my country and all the book prices I had were in Canadian dollars). I chose the Everyman’s Library books because they occupied roughly the same space in the cost/quality spectrum as trade paperbacks do today (cheaper and lower quality than standard hardbacks, and more expensive and better quality than pocket books, which would be equivalent to mass market paperbacks today). I found something interesting: when you adjust for inflation, the prices are almost exactly the same. Publishers’ margins have gone down significantly, and so have author royalties, but despite the common narrative saying otherwise, *book prices have not gone up*. Publishers have held the line on prices despite enormous financial pressure for them to do otherwise. You are absolutely not being gouged on book prices today versus decades past.
I spent a year reading almost nothing but ebooks, and at the end of it I found… that I was bored. I didn’t feel as engaged with the books. And, well, quality control from almost all publishers (and *especially* from self-published books) was dismal (ChiZine and I think Angry Robot seemed to be the big exceptions), and it was just a bad, bad reading experience all around. A lot of my friends don’t care about things like typography and gutters–they mostly buy mass market paperbacks when they buy paper books at all and have no problem reading a novel as a text file on desktop–but I would argue that most readers don’t fall into that category, and that’s one of the reasons we’re seeing a sales plateau–it’s still just a bad experience for a lot of people when placed next to an even middlingly-made hardcopy. Fiction and poetry are aesthetic experiences, even if you’re only talking about the content (I know, I know, some people get upset about *art*, but highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow, none of that matters, it’s all still just art), and I have a hard time trusting someone who doesn’t see how that extends to how those words are presented as well. (Which makes this a great place to plug ChiZine again, because their books are often beautiful as well as being stimulating to read.)
Anyway, I’m rambling, but I still think ebooks have a long, long way to go before they achieve anything like the cultural position paper books occupy–will continue to not be seen as having the same value, both expressed in market terms and not–and the reasons for that are legion.
@Simon Bisson
I see you are reading Roboteer; I read it some time ago, and not much has stuck in my memory. I should be interested to see what you make of it…
ETA
Perhaps my failure to retain much of it connects with August’s comment above.
I really don’t like ebooks. They take away the feeling of the reading experience. Holding the book in your hand, smelling the paper, the cozy feeling of a stack of books. You can’t hug an ebook. You can hug a kindle, but not the individual book.
Even when going on vacation, I bring paper books. Which can be a lot to carry and limits my backpack space as I only use backpacks of 40 litres and try to fit in 18 books in it apart from clothing and other stuff.
I like to have a library. To sit in it and feel good. Just going around and feeling content. There’s a feeling that the world is still a wonderful place when you are in a library. A place of peace and love.
I don’t like ebooks. I can read comics in eformat, but thats it.
Thanks all for the kind words on my ebook thoughts. They’ve had years to develop and be used. I’m extremely fond of ebooks (have over 5 or 6k) but I’m not blind to the problems with them.
My husband recently had his iPad break and they fixed it by giving him a new one. Amazon sees this as a brand new device (serial number) and has no way to download the books he had on his previous iPad to the new one. This blows my mind as upgrading your device in today’s modern world is a common occurrence. Amazon has no way to download all 5-6k of our books and if it did that would take up 50-75% of the storage/disk space of his iPad. They don’t have an easy way to port his collections over so if he’d thought to create a currently on iPad collection it might or might not do him any good. So he is expected to go through the 6k books to find the ones he wants now because a normal event hasn’t been thought of.
I have had this problem numerous times due to a problem iPad which we hadn’t put Apple care on as we were busy in the month after I was hit by the truck. My iPad regularly on kindle app updates wipes out my downloaded books. I just shrug it off and deal. Larry isn’t as laid back so he spent hours on the phone Sunday and I believe they were supposed to get back to him Monday.
I am in the process of getting rid of a number of our paperbacks. Giving books to the heirs early may be working as a line. The only room without books in it is the 2nd floor bathroom and that’s only because it lacks a shelf and the top of the toilet back is usually covered with other things although sometimes books are left on top of the tissue box.
The books which are strictly mine I’m working on getting on my kindle as they go on sale and then passing on to various niece/nephews/grandnephew or friends of the family kids. I never want to move over 5,000 physical books again. Never again.
(10) Speaking as the parent of a trans child, I really, really can’t encourage people strongly enough to read Scalzi’s entire essay. He really hits every single point about why using people’s declared gender pronouns is a sign of basic respect for them as a person, in polite but unambiguous tones. There’s not a word of this I would change or elaborate on, and it really is an important thing to discuss. If you only click through on one thing today, this is the one.
@August
Many of the ebooks I read have incredible interiors. Special formatting which breaks out things like poetry, lyrics, and other unusual text. It uses special fonts, symbols for scene breaks, special characters for first letters/paragraphs at the beginning of the chapter. This is from both trad publishing and indies. Maybe I’ve picked different authors/publishing houses/editors than you have?
One also has to make sure their ereader is not overriding the publishers settings. The default is set to override. I check every time I open a book to make sure I’m getting the best experience although occasionally a publisher will have chosen a font I find unreadable and I override their setting. I do increase margins and font size as my eyes have gotten worse over the years. This can make pretty poetry and lyrics look funny but it only takes a second to set it back to normal to read those and set it back afterwards. I love, love, love technology.
@Tasha:
Part of that may be my choice of ereader (I have a Kobo), because I can’t do iPad reading at all (I can’t read anything long form at all from something that emits light, or if I do, it takes orders of magnitude longer). And I don’t spend money at Amazon, which means no kindles.
However I should note that my quality control issues were not limited to things like leading and gutters; I found many more instances of typos and errors that looked like they were made by some sort of autocorrect than has ever been case in physical books (and those bother me significantly more than things like bad gutters).
Jake: Everyone seems to be forgetting the ONLY question about this list that really matters: “Are the choices any good?” This is an award for works of science fiction and fantasy. Quality is all that should matter.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your perception of “everyone” who is supposedly forgetting this. Pretty much everyone who comments here regularly on File770 has stated this in one form or another. Perhaps it’s the websites you’re reading that is the problem.
And perhaps you can understand why longtime Worldcon members and Hugo voters, who care a great deal about the Hugo Awards, and take nominating and voting very seriously, get angry and upset when people who don’t even understand how the Hugo Awards work come charging in, claiming that those longtime members are nominating and voting for reasons other than the works they personally believe are the best.
The difference is that most of the Worldcon members recognize that, just because the results don’t exactly reflect their personal preferences, it doesn’t mean that the wrong works are making the ballot or that the Hugo Awards are broken.
In any given year, I agree with maybe 50% of the fiction finalists. But you don’t see me screaming that the Hugos are broken, or that other people are voting for inferior works on purpose. People have different tastes — which is as it should be.
It seems to be a particularly Puppy attribute to believe that the Hugo Awards are broken because they don’t happen to like what makes the ballot.
I went through 3 of the early generation Kindles with physical keypads… they kept breaking and Amazon would send me a new one. The current Paperwhite touchscreen gizmo has worked fine. However I’ve only got about 120 items on it, including my F&SF subscription.
@August
I’ve been finding typos and errors that look like autocorrect in physical books for 5-10 years now. I’ll agree you’ll find more in ebooks. I find more in trad published than I do by good self-publishers which seems to be due to the process used to turn a book into an ebook in trad publishing – scan, proofread for newly introduced typos by OCR software, convert to various formats, possibly proofread again. Self-publishing tends to use the text file and convert it to all various formats so less errors are introduced by the process.
Some publishers may be using the text file for creating the ebooks by now. I don’t have any way to know what each house or individual imprint is doing. The more errors of the sort you dislike the more I assume the used the scan/OCR method rather than straight text conversion when it comes to trad publishers.
Self publishers so much depends on how early in their career it is or how soon they take their writing as a serious business and/or had money/talented friends.
Given the state of trad publishing over the years with typos, grammar mistakes, misprints, plot holes, changed names, wrong tenses, etc. I don’t hold my ebooks to a high standard as my standards dropped years and years ago.
The one eBook that I’ve read where I’ll quite probably go back to physical if/when I reread it was Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales. In the book, Christopher Tolkien uses a complicated (and varying) system of indentation, italics, font size changes, etc., to differentiate his father’s text from his father’s commentary on his father’s text from his own commentary on his father’s text. In the eBook version, that all got flattened out.
Also footnotes and endnotes can be problematic unless they’re set up correctly.
@Jake: Everyone seems to be forgetting the ONLY question about this list that really matters: “Are the choices any good?” This is an award for works of science fiction and fantasy. Quality is all that should matter.
We’re the choices ever any good? Pick any year going back to the very first and you’ll find people who disagree with the choices. The year they were made as well as future years.
Quality? Have you read the requirements for nominating in each category? It’s subjective. How do you objectively define quality? Least number of typos? No plot holes? Seriously how?
This is a Fan award. It’s a subjective award from start to finish which is obvious from the difficult to understand definitions of each category which are up to interpretation.
@Jake
Not everyone. I read and reviewed all the puppy short fiction for Rocket Stack Rank.
In terms of quality, the Sad Puppy stuff is generally pretty good. Almost all of it got recommended by someone, and even the lower-quality entries don’t appear to be malicious.
The Rabid Puppy stuff is a different story. It contains a few stories that appear to be included because they’re bad.
@Tasha: “Ziplock(TM) bags” and other stuff
Less-minor-than-you-might-think nitpick time: it’s either ziplock or Ziploc™, but not Ziplock™. This comes up in my day job when dealing with descriptions of older games; it’s even in our style guide. Ziploc™ is a brand name, but ziplock is a generic description. It is absolutely vital that I use the latter and not the former.
Regarding your husband’s iPad, the Kindle app in Cloud view should have an option to arrange books in last-accessed order. Not a perfect solution by any means, but it’s a place to start.
On the subject of overriding publisher defaults, I came up with an arcane fix for that problem. I place a short section at the bottom of the copyright page (which is up front as God intended, not hidden away at the back), in a “hidden” class. If your device obeys defaults, you’ll never know it’s there. Otherwise, you’ll see this:
🙂
Someone else here observed that they like ent-books because they’re accessible when the power goes out. As “luck” would have it, a tornado went through my neighborhood a few years back, leaving me without power for a few days. Further complicating matters, I live in a cave. People think I’m kidding when I say that, but it’s as close as you’re likely to get with modern building codes; the apartment literally has one door and one window. My computer was useless, my bedroom was pitch-black even at high noon, and the driveway was blocked… so I grabbed my Kobo, went out to the parking lot, and started reading the Vorkosigan books in my car, pausing on occasion to move to a more advantageous parking space. (Well, I’d started the series a few days earlier, while visiting Huntsville.) The single charge lasted through several novels, until the power came back.
Rev Bob–
Now that is a happy story.
@JJ But so far the Puppies just have this list. And rather than talk about what’s on the list, how it was made, etc, the arguments here and elsewhere seems to be centered more on “Who’s the more terrible person, Hines or Hoyt?” When the question should be “Which, if any, of the items here are worth considering for a Hugo?”
I mean, we’re all readers here, right?
@Tasha Turner I’m actually quite new to this process. This is the first Puppy List I’ve really followed. Preferences are of course going to be subjective, and I would expect debate on the very tings you listed. But the thing is, I’m not. I’m seeing mud-slinging. he stories themselves seem to go mostly unremarked
@Greg Hullender Thank you for the link! I will check it out!
It’s really sad how viciously partisan the fandom has become. Who’s a nazi s vs who’s worse than a nazi? He’s a brown shirt! She’s a racist! Blahblahblah. Name-calling to counter more name-calling!
The only person in that exchange calling other people Nazis are the Pups. In that specific tweet, “Problematic Puppies” is saying that Hines is a Nazi, although the only possible reason would be that Hines quoted Hoyt calling other people Nazi’s and pointed out that this is the sort of thing that makes people not want to associate with the Pups.
As far as people pointing out the racism of some of the Pups: Is it “name-calling” if the things that those Pups have said or advocated for are, in-fact, racist? Because there is a copious volume of quotes that have been provided supporting this. On the other hand, the only thing Hoyt, Paulk, and so on have supporting their claim that non-Pups are Nazis is their fevered imaginations.
A pox on both your houses, I say!
“Both sides” is a mendacious false equivalence at best.
Everyone seems to be forgetting the ONLY question about this list that really matters: “Are the choices any good?” This is an award for works of science fiction and fantasy. Quality is all that should matter.
So the question of people being able to say they don’t want to be associated with a brand that has a history of toxicity and is run by a collection of jerks is completely irrelevant?
I got bonus points on my first Silicon Valley job interview that way – wasn’t even any of the people interviewing me, we’d just stopped to talk to some other engineers and they were discussing something that I knew was about 2/3 into Inside Mac, bottom of the page, set apart in a box. As the discussion was over whether it was even possible, they were impressed.
In college, in 1987, I took part in a study where we had both online and physical documentation, and they wanted to see which one we’d go to when given different kinds of problems. If it was something where flipping back and forth was important paper was more popular, if it was a one-time search then electronic was better.
All the talk about ebooks so far have been about ones we like, but there’s another advantage for p-books – you can sell them if you hate them. Or throw them with great force against the wall.
But so far the Puppies just have this list. And rather than talk about what’s on the list, how it was made, etc, the arguments here and elsewhere seems to be centered more on “Who’s the more terrible person, Hines or Hoyt?”
No, that’s not all they have done. They have three previous years of antics that people have noticed. And when some people on their “list” have said “I would rather not be on your list because of that history”, Hoyt and Paulk have reacted by screaming those people are Nazis and Marxists who hate their fans and want to destroy science fiction.
@August:
That’s very much in line with my experience. Recovery (or even discovery) is much more difficult for me in an eBook. As for the phenomenon, I have an actual real-world anecdote!
Many years ago I was a draftsman on a project whose engineering specifications changed frequently. We were required to memorize all the tolerances we worked with, while those tolerances were updated every few weeks – so that in practice you were not really helped by memorizing them. There was never any way to be sure that you were recalling the current tolerances unless you went back and looked anyway.
But it was very easy to remember exactly where in the manual a specification was. So that’s what I did. When I needed to check something I could riffle through the book to the exact page I wanted, see the current tolerance, and move on, regardless of how many times the information had changed. Mind you, I couldn’t say that’s what I was doing. But that automatic, nearly tactile memory was all I needed in order to work quickly.
And that’s exactly what I don’t have with eBooks. They’re great in many ways, especially for their convenience and portability. But they’re not so great in others.
By that logic, all we need is the right method of selecting the winners, and there would be no need for multiple sets of awards. I, for one, think such an eventuality is ridiculous, and not just because the Platonic ideal of a rating system so far eludes us.
Tasha,
18) 6. whenever I get a new Kindle, I connect my old one, drag and drop everything off of it into a folder on my desktop, connect the new one, drag and drop onto it, and VOILA! same books, with the same percentages read.
As for sharing, on Kindle, the wife and I share our libraries. There’s been a few times in which I go “I don’t remember buying this book but it sounds interesting” only to find that my wife bought it.
Rob_matic,
But I don’t understand why the newspaper man won’t write nice things about me after I accused him of being a member of the thoughtpolice and saying “at least Hitler had the redeeming quality of being able to paint”.
Greg Hullender,
That is a bad ass story.
Stephenfromottawa,
I went through seven of the Kindle Keyboards in a year. To be fair, that year I was in Afghanistan so…
As for waterproof e-readers, WaterFi will waterproof your Kindle.
And I was superexcited to find out that there’s a Sci Fi Museum in DC…
And then I went to the website and realized that it doesn’t currently exist, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a gameplan for when it will. 🙁
He has a whole series of them, all worth reading.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html
If only someone would build the Hugo-Matic 5000 that would automatically choose the objectively best books and stories every year so that we could put all these troubles behind us.
Could we repurpose the Frugen Dass Factfinder 2000 for the task?
@Aaron
I don’t think PP is calling me a Nazi, though I could be wrong. My read was that PP was referring to a comment made a while back by Irene Gallo, the one that stirred up the whole, “This person said something mean on her Facebook page, so let’s burn Tor to the ground” movement.
FWIW, while Sarah Hoyt’s commentary consistently makes me want to scrub my eyeballs with steel wool, I’ve also seen people who identify as puppy suporters groaning and expressing their frustration at the over-the-top, hateful rhetoric coming from folks like Sarah and Brad.
To me, it’s not that “The pups are horrible” so much as it’s “Hey, a couple of the official leaders of your group/movement/thing are making y’all look pretty horrible, and maybe that’s why folks don’t want to be on your list.”
@Jake
What gets people upset the most is the really bad stories, like “Space Raptor, Butt Invasion” which are on the list for the sole purpose of making the Awards look bad. Not only would someone have to read that title aloud at the ceremony, but it would be on the list of Hugo Nominees forever.
Last year, these same people were able to exploit a hole in the nominating process to sweep the fiction categories except for best Novel. After a few disqualifications, there were a couple more non-slate candidates, but the result was that fans had to choose among a set of mediocre to embarrassingly-bad stories and ended up giving out no awards at all in a number of categories.
That is the reason for the lingering resentment. Everything else flows from that.
Recently read The Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams. It was great, intriguing world, interesting protagonist. And when I finished it at eleven at night, I was able to instantly buy the next ebook and continue the story. (That one had a few too many speeches in the first half, but things got better later in the book.)
@Darren Garrison
Thanks! Unfortunately the article I was thinking of doesn’t seem to be in there, but if anyone’s interested then that set of posts is good in their own right.
The figure I recall seeing was $1 for (iirc) physical production of a MMPB including the publishers side of warehousing/delivery (but excluding non-physical activities like editing), but I can’t track it down right now so, uh, don’t quote me!
Tasha
I expect this will be what pushed me to completely digital eventually. Though I may still keep some shelves with HC’s around as potpourri.
When the original ($400, funny shaped) Kindle came out my husband and I had just moved three times in two years. We had easily two thousand books between us, and I had had back surgery (but was also the one without a job and therefore did most of the packing and unpacking.)
So my reaction was “books that weigh nothing and take no space. You have my attention. Tell me more.” And when my Christmas money and the tax return added up to enough to buy one, I ordered, and waited by the door on the day it was due.
Before I had a smartphone or GPS I used the Kindle’s experimental browser to go to mapquest and find my way around a completely unfamiliar city. When I was so sick that focusing my eyes to read made me dizzy, my Kindle Keyboard read to me for days. It was a robot reading–but it was my robot and it helped keep my mind off how rotten I felt.
I can tuck my Kindle in my coat pocket and leave for a convention and know that if I can’t sleep I have all the books I could possibly want, and if I want to write a song, my rhyming dictionary is there at my fingertips, and if I need to find my way to the bathroom in the dark I can turn the Kindle’s light on.
Paper format has advantages too (though how the *heck* do you read a *paper* book in the shower? Can you turn the pages of a paper book when it is in a ziplock bag?). I recognize that and I am not telling people what to use. Heck, sometimes I still buy paper myself. And I think competition is vital to spur innovation and customer service to I cheer people who read paper or use competing e-book readers.
But I love my Kindle.
I believe they’re from reviews posted on the Amazon listing, so yeah, not very authoritative.
I don’t think PP is calling me a Nazi, though I could be wrong.
Working through PP’s “logic”: Hoyt called people who she considers to be her enemies “Nazis”. You quoted her and said that this is why people don’t want to be associated with the Pups. She’s calling people Nazis, and he is saying that the people annoyed by this are actually Nazis. He may not be directly calling you a Nazi, but he’s heavily implying it. I think he’s also calling Valente, Reynolds, and a host of other people Nazis as well.
@bookworm1398
Metropolitan is an underappreciated book IMO. Did you know that the series comes to an unfortunate publication halt at the end of book 2 though? Story here. WJW has the rights back and is planning to write the third though.
My ebook reader (ancient Sony PRS-350 with the PRS+ mod–if I replaced it, it would be with a less battered Sony PRS-350) has multiple built-in dictionaries accessible by double-tapping on a word and a clock on the lower right corner of the screen. So whenever I’m regrettably reduced to reading something in deadtree format, I’m always catching myself starting to tap an unfamiliar word for a definition or flicking my eye down to the corner to get the current time.