Barnes & Noble’s Nook ereader is out of stock, according to the company’s website. They expect to ship it to customers who pre-order the device on the week of January 4th, and Nook gift certificates are available.
From Independent.ie:
Plans by Google in the US to scan millions of books into a giant digital archive have prompted fresh opposition from authors and publishers ahead of a court battle.
Opponents and supporters of the internet giant’s scheme are lining up for a legal fight over a complex deal agreed last year to fix royalty payments to authors.
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York will decide in October whether the payment offer made by Google is fair.
The article goes on to note that Google has already scanned seven million out-of-print books. Full story here.
The Guardian has a story today suggesting as much:
Everyone’s looking at the pattern they’ve seen in music and video - an old medium changed radically by technology - and waiting for it to hit the book world. But the chances of that happening right now are very small indeed. Why? It’s fairly straightforward.
The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn’t because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod (it didn’t launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead.
SF Signal has a page collecting links works from this year’s Hugo nomination list that are online for free. This is a great chance to read some of the year’s best speculative fiction - nearly all the nominated novellas, novelettes and short stories are online, and Harper Collins has even put up a substantial preview (71 pages) of Michael Chabon’s alternate history novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
Out of the stories I’ve read so far, I particularly enjoyed Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (time travel, Arabian Nights style - also available as a free mp3 podcast episode from Starship Sofa) and Nancy Kress’ The Fountain of Age, a clever and affecting piece of science fiction.
Joel Rickett writes:
Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.
The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.
It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.
The stories - which can be read online at wetellstories.co.uk - will feature clues that point to a seventh story hidden on the internet, culminating in a competition to win a £13,000 Penguin Classics library.
Link to the Guardian article
Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo has a great article up about book-buyers’ rights in the age of ebooks and licensing.
If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the “first sale” doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?
In the fine print that you “agree” to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you’re not paying to own ‘em, in spite of the use of the term “buy.” Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn’t take away your purchases. Still, it’s a license you can’t sell.
But is this claim legal?
Link (via BoingBoing)
Paul Graham Raven of Futurismic writes:
Regular readers will be familiar with the Friday Flash Fictioneers from Futurismic’s free fiction round-ups. We’ve teamed up and collected over sixty of our best flash stories from the last nine months, and yours truly has edited them into ILLUMINATIONS, all profits from which will be donated to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children here in the UK.
ILLUMINATIONS is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence - the stories are already out there in the magical tubes of the internets, so we thought we’d like to set them free formally at the same time as making them available in one convenient and attractive package!
ILLUMINATIONS will be available in book form from Odd Two Out Publishing after 25th March 2008 (or from the authors themselves) for GB£6.99, or as a downloadable PDF for an as yet unannounced price.
Link to full announcement at Futurismic.com
Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:
Vernor Vinge has put the entire text of his magnificent, prescient, mind-alteringly good novel Rainbows End online as a free download. This was one of the best books of 2006, a book that practically defines what “post-cyberpunk” really means: stories about what happens when the world (and not the street) finds its own use for technology.
The book is in html format, which means that it can be converted to any number of formats (.txt, .pdb, .pdf…) and read on any open platform - palm pilots, phones, computers, ebook readers et cetera.
