San Francisco, 6:54 PM
Sat Dec 5
18 posts in the last 24 hours
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want want! since i read little brother i've been absolutely obsessed with DIY projects, even if it's taking a little bit longer to get some stuff started myself. (i've been hacking consoles and the like.) but i've asked for a soldering kit for hanukkah, and will probably starte making some simple robots.
Anyone read a good time travel novel in the past year or so?
You wouldn't think there would be much newness that could be done with the topic but I love those type of stories and the twists involved.
I think the last one I read was "Cowl" by Neal Asher.
I recommend it highly.
@Hotscot: "The Accidental Time Machine." Haldeman is always a good bet. Lately, he seems to be trying to recreate Heinlein's juveniles but that's not a bad thing.
About half way through and really enjoying it. Favorite line so far...
"The typical ROI for a Kodacell unit in the old days was about four percent. If you put a hundred dollars in, you'd get a hundred and four dollars out, and it would take about a year to realize. Of course, in the old days, they wouldn't have touched a new business unless they could put a hundred million in and get a hundred and four million out. Four million bucks is four million bucks.
"But here, the company put fifty thousand into these dolls and three months later, they took seventy thousand out, after paying our salaries and bonuses. That's a forty percent ROI. Seventy thousand bucks isn't four million bucks, but forty percent is forty percent."
I haaaate ebooks. There's just something about printed books that can't be captured digitally. People say it's easier to carry an ebook around, but really? Who takes more than one book with them at a time? (Normally, not a lot of people. I may read several things at home at once, but I have one primary 'take it with me in my purse' book.) Plus, would you take your expensive Kindle with you to the pool? Hell no! And I looooove reading at the pool. Or at the beach. Or anywhere, really. That's the thing about a printed book-- you don't have to worry about it getting ruined. It doesn't cost a lot, and if you spill something on it, it's still readable. A Kindle? Not so much.
As for fanfiction, I've read some truely amazing works over the years. Sure, most of them are crap, but you run into some gems. You really do. As for getting them published, well... that's a legal clusterfuck, and I don't think it will ever happen.
It's a really long time since I had involvement with fanfic, and PNH has it right about how it was in those days. It took real cost and effort to publish a fanzine, or any sort, and you could even get edited. Effectively, somebody screamed "Do I have to type this drivel!"
What I'm doing now is different, something that could be published without copyright problems. The setting, a PD shared world, was around in a fanzine, but it's now all web, all the time. And I think the quality os writing is lower. Nobody seems to be editing.
I do hear of things happening with fanfics, with systems of critical readers, but right now we need the filtering and editing supplied by publishers. And somehow that has to be paid for.
As for ebooks, they make sense for the fanatical reader. But a lot of people read very few books in a year. How does an ebook reader make sense for them? A quick scribble on the back of an envelope suggests that I could cover the capital outlay on the reader before it became obsolete, but it's sensitive to the difference between print and ebook prices. Some publishers charge the same price, which isn't good for ebooks.
@QimatElephant: That's what I said down there -- we had editors back in the paper zine days. At a minimum, the spelling and punctuation would get fixed.
Nice to "meet" someone who remembers the old days. I still have piles of zines I edited, wrote for, or bought. I miss those days, though I don't miss the smell of rubber cement and white-out.
'An editor of science-fiction books that I know fell in love with the Pilot when he realized that he could put an entire manuscript into a box that weighs 4.7 ounces and fits into his jacket pocket. "You really have to have spent a decade of your life schlepping 600-page manuscripts around to understand how attractive this is," he says. He admits that he wouldn't use the Pilot's tiny screen -- it's smaller than an index card -- for major editing. But, he says, "An enormous amount of what an editor has to do day in and day out is just reading. These days, if I can get an e-text version of a big document I have to read, the first thing I do is hot-sync it onto my Pilot."'
I'm not sure I'm convinced about digital books.
Yes, the access to vast libraries of works and the potentially low cost of individual e-books does seem impressive, but I'm increasingly finding that many of these files are poorly formatted, mis-spelt, and generally make my eyeballs ache after around fifteen minutes.
Plus, I'm concerned about durability. I know with a book that I can drop it down the stairs, in a puddle or leave it with a two year old for an hour and it will still be readable; how would a digital book hold up?
I still think the up-take will increase, if not as explosively as the digital music formats have then at least with the same inevitability
Here are all the reasons why an ebook might not be available: The author doesn't want the book to be available ; the author is having a dispute with the publisher who holds the ebook rights and is waiting for the contract to expire so they can revert the rights and convert the book themselves or have their new publisher do it ; the author is dead and there is no estate ; the author is dead and the estate doesn't want to convert to ebook ; there is a despite over a deceased authors estate and control of the rights is in limbo ; the author wants better terms ; the estate wants better terms ; the agency repping the author wants better terms ; the author hasn't signed an amended ebook rights agreement ; the agent hasn't signed the amended ebook rights agreement ; the agent or the author haven't returned the signed, amended ebook rights agreement to the publisher ; the publisher can't find the contract to determine if ebook rights have been established ; the book has formatting that the publisher doesn't feel would look good on the current available ebook readers ; the publisher has a lot of books and simply hasn't gotten around to converting that title you are looking for yet ; there are no files to convert the book from, and no hardcopies can be found to scan ; the title is a translated title and the overseas publisher hasn't granted the rights for the title to be published as an ebook in your country ; the publisher is too small and can't afford the costs of conversion ; there are pictures or additional materials in the book which the author and the publisher do not have permission to reprint but which are essential to the comprehension of the book ; the people running the ebook program are idiots and don't know what the hell they are doing ; the people running the ebook program work for idiots at higher levels in the company and are barely maintaining their sanity ; the ebook is being converted, it just isn't available yet.
One brief note to everyone: It's not "Mr. Hayden," it's "Mr. Nielsen Hayden." It used to be "Mr Hayden," but then he married Teresa Nielsen, and now both of them are "Nielsen Hayden."
"We don't want to let one player become choke point; we don't want to be a hapless manufacturer in the thrall of Walmart or something."
Well, a lot of you are doing _exactly_ this at the moment with Amazon only books, etc. So you have a serious disconnect between your heads and your actions somewhere.
Seriously? Boycott digital books? I hope this is tongue in cheek.
Your rant about the problems digital creates for you reveals an inability to understand and move forward with the changing times. Things WILL change, and its really up to you to keep up with it. I don't oiwn a digital reader yet, but I will as soon as they make one I like enough. (Hoping the apple tablet will fit the bill.) The nonsense about "hard drives failing" is just that, solid state drives are incredibly durable, and while they have a limited number of write cycles they can be read almost to infinity. Beyond that, good digital stores keep records of what you own so that in the event of a theft, loss or accident you can easily re-download your collection.
I used to hate the idea of e-books with a fiery passion. I'd get into all sorts of arguments over how stupid they were and the importance of artifacts and all that.
That changed when I realized that e-books don't mean the Death of Print, that's just nonsense. They may mark the end of mass-market trade paperbacks, but that's not a bad thing. Instead, they could mark the time where if you WANT a physical book, you get something that's really fancy and nice.
Books may become more expensive, but they'll become more fascinating and even more of an artifact than they are now, possibly going back to gold leaf inlays and gorgeous binding. I'm definitely not opposed to such a thing.
I imagine that books could become what records are now, something for collectors that is fascinating to have and show off.
It took me a while to come around to ebooks but now I think they're the greatest thing since grits. I've read over 100 books on various PDAs (latest is a Dell Axim x51v). I can carry my PDA in my pocket and read while stuck in a check-out line or while waiting for my wife to come out of the scrapbook store. Sure I still love my hard-copy books (I'm looking for some of the World's Best SF volumes from the SFBC) but the convenience of having a book in my pocket and getting books for free (you would really be surprised at what's on Project Gutenberg) is FTW for ebooks.
At this point I havce such a huge library that I do not care what happens to the masses out there.I personally own around 800 rare 1st ed. scifi's and around 100 1st ed. hardcover world war 2 books.Total books around my home are around 1000.
I personally will never ever buy a digital book or a book reader.How can I resell one ? What about a company deleting your books like the Amazon 1984 thing.What are we never gong to sit down and hold a book again ?
I HATE DIGITAL NOW !!!
With all this stuff and more going digital I am sick of thinking of this.
1.my 2 bands never sells any CD's anymore
2.my job is getting to be a drag as work is so down i could do it all in 10 hours i bet.
3.what and were are you going to put or do with a whole library of "digital" things..............losers wait till your drive dies and you spend 1,000's to professionally recover data.
remember we may be smart on io9 and know how to work with drives but what ahout the average consumer....those folks won't understand all the digital tech.
my boss and i were just talking about digital yesterday.i told him i will never buy into it and i hope others wont.i said what do you think folks are just going to sit in the house and order things and never go out to a "store"
BOYCOTT DIGITAL BOOKS !!!!
Keep real bookstores and book compainies alive please
@gorehound: Wow, where do I start. Speaking as a textbook editor, I have to say that your comment is so short-sighted and reactionary as to be nonsensical. No one is going to come into your house and burn your collection if you want to keep it. Heck, you stand to benefit a great deal from the move to digital because I imagine traditional first editions will do nothing but accrue value as long as they're kept in good condition.
Digital books just make more sense to our society. Students that purchase my books will not break their backs carrying them and will save a bundle since we will have next to no production costs for digital editions. Open-source texts will be even more cost effective when they catch on and kids won't spend a fortune on that and tuition combined. And what about a bookstore is so beautiful and precious that you can't get the same feeling from your public library? If anything, you should prefer the latter since no one's trying to pressure you into making a purchase at ridiculously overpriced MSRP. Libraries will persist no matter what and will thrive from things like OverDrive's local library digital distribution initiative.
And authors will be able to directly market to their customers. If they want a little polish, they can hire a freelance professional editor to look at their work and a marketing guru to see how best to engage their readership. If they can't afford that, they can easily purchase podcasting equipment and start spreading the word through iTunes if they feel particularly assertive.
Sure, there will be drawbacks, but the potential here is amazing. It's like the creation of the Gutenberg press all over again.
What's saddest about your comment (besides the atrocious grammar) seems to be your blind love of Middle Men and Gatekeepers, and those folks will only tolerate you for your money.
11/24/09
This is what keeps me from reading Doctorow. His books always sound like screeds for his... fanciful... politics.
-Kle.
11/23/09
11/23/09
You wouldn't think there would be much newness that could be done with the topic but I love those type of stories and the twists involved.
I think the last one I read was "Cowl" by Neal Asher.
I recommend it highly.
I also enjoy HARD science fiction.
11/23/09
11/23/09
11/23/09
"The typical ROI for a Kodacell unit in the old days was about four percent. If you put a hundred dollars in, you'd get a hundred and four dollars out, and it would take about a year to realize. Of course, in the old days, they wouldn't have touched a new business unless they could put a hundred million in and get a hundred and four million out. Four million bucks is four million bucks.
"But here, the company put fifty thousand into these dolls and three months later, they took seventy thousand out, after paying our salaries and bonuses. That's a forty percent ROI. Seventy thousand bucks isn't four million bucks, but forty percent is forty percent."
Well more then a line I guess.
11/24/09
08/27/09
As for fanfiction, I've read some truely amazing works over the years. Sure, most of them are crap, but you run into some gems. You really do. As for getting them published, well... that's a legal clusterfuck, and I don't think it will ever happen.
08/27/09
What I'm doing now is different, something that could be published without copyright problems. The setting, a PD shared world, was around in a fanzine, but it's now all web, all the time. And I think the quality os writing is lower. Nobody seems to be editing.
I do hear of things happening with fanfics, with systems of critical readers, but right now we need the filtering and editing supplied by publishers. And somehow that has to be paid for.
As for ebooks, they make sense for the fanatical reader. But a lot of people read very few books in a year. How does an ebook reader make sense for them? A quick scribble on the back of an envelope suggests that I could cover the capital outlay on the reader before it became obsolete, but it's sensitive to the difference between print and ebook prices. Some publishers charge the same price, which isn't good for ebooks.
08/27/09
Nice to "meet" someone who remembers the old days. I still have piles of zines I edited, wrote for, or bought. I miss those days, though I don't miss the smell of rubber cement and white-out.
08/27/09
[archive.salon.com]
'An editor of science-fiction books that I know fell in love with the Pilot when he realized that he could put an entire manuscript into a box that weighs 4.7 ounces and fits into his jacket pocket. "You really have to have spent a decade of your life schlepping 600-page manuscripts around to understand how attractive this is," he says. He admits that he wouldn't use the Pilot's tiny screen -- it's smaller than an index card -- for major editing. But, he says, "An enormous amount of what an editor has to do day in and day out is just reading. These days, if I can get an e-text version of a big document I have to read, the first thing I do is hot-sync it onto my Pilot."'
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
Yes, the access to vast libraries of works and the potentially low cost of individual e-books does seem impressive, but I'm increasingly finding that many of these files are poorly formatted, mis-spelt, and generally make my eyeballs ache after around fifteen minutes.
Plus, I'm concerned about durability. I know with a book that I can drop it down the stairs, in a puddle or leave it with a two year old for an hour and it will still be readable; how would a digital book hold up?
I still think the up-take will increase, if not as explosively as the digital music formats have then at least with the same inevitability
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09
Well, a lot of you are doing _exactly_ this at the moment with Amazon only books, etc. So you have a serious disconnect between your heads and your actions somewhere.
08/27/09
08/27/09
Your rant about the problems digital creates for you reveals an inability to understand and move forward with the changing times. Things WILL change, and its really up to you to keep up with it. I don't oiwn a digital reader yet, but I will as soon as they make one I like enough. (Hoping the apple tablet will fit the bill.) The nonsense about "hard drives failing" is just that, solid state drives are incredibly durable, and while they have a limited number of write cycles they can be read almost to infinity. Beyond that, good digital stores keep records of what you own so that in the event of a theft, loss or accident you can easily re-download your collection.
This is io9, not "Luddite hour."
08/27/09
That changed when I realized that e-books don't mean the Death of Print, that's just nonsense. They may mark the end of mass-market trade paperbacks, but that's not a bad thing. Instead, they could mark the time where if you WANT a physical book, you get something that's really fancy and nice.
Books may become more expensive, but they'll become more fascinating and even more of an artifact than they are now, possibly going back to gold leaf inlays and gorgeous binding. I'm definitely not opposed to such a thing.
I imagine that books could become what records are now, something for collectors that is fascinating to have and show off.
08/27/09
08/27/09
I personally will never ever buy a digital book or a book reader.How can I resell one ? What about a company deleting your books like the Amazon 1984 thing.What are we never gong to sit down and hold a book again ?
I HATE DIGITAL NOW !!!
With all this stuff and more going digital I am sick of thinking of this.
1.my 2 bands never sells any CD's anymore
2.my job is getting to be a drag as work is so down i could do it all in 10 hours i bet.
3.what and were are you going to put or do with a whole library of "digital" things..............losers wait till your drive dies and you spend 1,000's to professionally recover data.
remember we may be smart on io9 and know how to work with drives but what ahout the average consumer....those folks won't understand all the digital tech.
my boss and i were just talking about digital yesterday.i told him i will never buy into it and i hope others wont.i said what do you think folks are just going to sit in the house and order things and never go out to a "store"
BOYCOTT DIGITAL BOOKS !!!!
Keep real bookstores and book compainies alive please
08/27/09
Digital books just make more sense to our society. Students that purchase my books will not break their backs carrying them and will save a bundle since we will have next to no production costs for digital editions. Open-source texts will be even more cost effective when they catch on and kids won't spend a fortune on that and tuition combined. And what about a bookstore is so beautiful and precious that you can't get the same feeling from your public library? If anything, you should prefer the latter since no one's trying to pressure you into making a purchase at ridiculously overpriced MSRP. Libraries will persist no matter what and will thrive from things like OverDrive's local library digital distribution initiative.
And authors will be able to directly market to their customers. If they want a little polish, they can hire a freelance professional editor to look at their work and a marketing guru to see how best to engage their readership. If they can't afford that, they can easily purchase podcasting equipment and start spreading the word through iTunes if they feel particularly assertive.
Sure, there will be drawbacks, but the potential here is amazing. It's like the creation of the Gutenberg press all over again.
What's saddest about your comment (besides the atrocious grammar) seems to be your blind love of Middle Men and Gatekeepers, and those folks will only tolerate you for your money.
08/27/09
08/27/09
08/27/09