Category: Kindle

Free Science Fiction

It’s a great time to be poor, tight or miserly because there’s lots of free science fiction offerings on the Internet.  Heinlein was wrong about that free lunch deal.  Just subscribing to two web sites, SF Site and SFF Audio via RSS feeds will keep you informed of more good free SF&F reading and listening than you can handle, even if you’re out-of-work or out-of-school.  All you’ve got to do is read the regular posts and these sites will spot the goodies for you. 

Hell, a couple months ago Tor let people sign up to get 12 free ebooks novels from them, in PDF, HTML and unprotected Mobi formats, which is good for the new Amazon Kindle.  I socked them away for a rainy day when I want to try out some new authors, but I especially appreciated getting a copy of Old Man’s War by John Scalzi because I already bought and listened to it on audio.  Audio books are the best way to fully experience a book, in my humble opinion, but audio books are not so good for reference and study.  eBooks are great for snagging a quote.  I wished all paper editions came with ebook editions for reviewing purposes – but I digress from my main topic.

I don’t know why there is so much free reading and listening on the Internet.  I do know there’s a theory that a certain amount of free promotion helps with sales, but currently there’s enough free promotion to exist completely without buying.

Some writers like Cory Doctorow even offer their latest novels for free, such as his new book Little Brother.  Read the intro in the HTML edition to see just how far his generosity extends.  I’m waiting for the audio edition to show up on Audible.com to buy.  I’ve read Cory’s stories in anthologies I’ve bought, but his name has stuck with me because of his free work on the Internet.  Finding his brilliant “Anda’s Game” made me remember his name as a standout writer.  The same thing happened with Charlie Stross, because of free stories on the net, or stories in anthologies, I’ve gone on to buy his books.

A good way to dip your toe in the free story waters is to read BestScienceFictionStories.com where Rusty reviews standout SF short stories, many of which are on the net to read for free and Rusty provides the links.  He even offers a guide to finding free stories, “Nine Secrets For Finding Your Favorite Science Fiction Short Stories Online,” as well as “The 10 Best Web Sites for Free Online Science Fiction Short Stories.”  When I was a kid I had to haunt musty used bookshops all over Miami to find classic SF stories to read.  Now story hunting is as easy as a mouse-click away.

And these stories aren’t submissions from would-be writers, or trunk stories from published writers, but award winning stories, stories that have appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies, and stories that have appeared on lists like The Top 100 Sci-Fi Short Stories.

For the last decade I’ve been doing far more listening to fiction than reading.  At first audio science fiction was rare, but in the last year there has been a boom in SF&F for your ears, including free productions.  At first free audio featured amateur readers no better than the best student you’d hear when we had to take turns reading aloud in class.  The best professional readers today act out audio books in performances I often find better than those I see in Oscar winning movies.  Free audio productions have a long way to go to compete with professional productions, but surprisingly, they are evolving fast!

The granddaddy of SF audio is probably Escape Pod, currently broadcasting it’s 159th episode.  You no longer have to mess with podcast software to listen to the shows, so go sample its stories with the on-page sound controls.  The production quality is now equal or better to many of the commercial stories I buy at Audible.com.  Escape Pod offers a lot of quality for free.  Again, these aren’t just third-tier stories, but stories that have appeared in professional story magazines like F&SF, Asimov’s, Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Jim Baen’s Universe, and other magazines that SF writers love to sell to.

Also, the above linked magazine sites often offer free stories to read from their for-sale magazines, especially during award times when they want to promote their nominated authors.  Just following the links on this page will keep you up-to-date with what’s going in with the genre of science fiction.  You’ll learn who the famous authors are as well as the new and upcoming writers.

Free audio book novels are showing up but most of them are read by amateur readers, something not to my taste, but if you like free and are patient and forgiving, you might find a lot in these offerings.  I expect this category to grow in the future as amateur actors discover audio books are a way to audition their talents and get their names known.  Digital recording equipment is relatively cheap, but producing a ten-twenty hour novel is quite a commitment, but they are appearing.  Keep an eye on SFF Audio.

And if you want to know about classic science fiction, visit Feedbooks, where you can get ebook novels for free.  Their Science Fiction page offer books from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to George Orwell’s 1984 to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, the new book mentioned above.  And all the books are nicely formatted for a wide range of electronic reading devices.  Teachers and professors could offer a class on science fiction and their students could get all their textbooks for free on this site.

I don’t understand how all this generosity works.  It’s a hippie dream – a commie’s philosophy come true.  Feedbooks doesn’t even have ads on their page.  It’s a mystery, like WordPress, how do they make their money?  There are even radio magazine shows like StarShipSofa.com, that appear to be the work of energetic individuals unmotivated by capitalism.  It’s like the old days of fanzines, creating a new generation of online fandom, fashioning an audio genzine.

Like I said, it doesn’t take much to join this community, just add the RSS feeds from SF Signal and SFF Audio.  Having online access allows web surfers to join a never ending science fiction convention, again for free, without having to buy a membership or pay for hotels, cabs and airline tickets.  If you follow SFF Audio, links to panels and con speeches often show up too.  And again, it’s all for free.

This makes me wonder about the financial health of the little audio book publishers and small press publishers.  Is all this free competition hurting them?  SF Signal and SFF Audio also link to these commercial sites, so if you want to see them succeed, patronize their online stores too.  The commercial SF&F magazines have been losing paid readership for years – is the Internet partially at fault – either through free offerings, or just a diversion from old fashion pastimes?  It’s all too hard to know, but we do know there were a lot more short story magazines on sale at newsstands before the advent of television, again a system that offered content for free, usually paid for by ads.

The science fiction short story may go the way of poetry – moving out of the realm of commercial sales to exist and be supported by love of the art form and its fans.  I hate to see that, but I sure do love the fact that the art form of the science fiction short story seems to be growing on the Internet.

Learning to adapt to this free medium takes a bit of training and equipment.  Listening to audio via on-page controls is the easiest way to join in.  Just play a story and kick back.  They are nice company for doing the dishes, or pursuing hobbies like modeling or knitting.  Next up is learning to subscribe to podcasts in iTunes and take the stories with you when you run or walk.  If you like to read on your phone, PDA, notebook computer or ebook reader, find you favorite reading software and learn where the best places that offer that format for free.  I’ve barely touched on the free sites available. 

Like I said, I mostly listening to books because I’ve found so many ways to integrate audio books into my routine.  It’s quite wonderful to be walking down the street while classic novels are whispered into my ear.

Jim

Rethinking the Kindle

Tonight I was reading on my Kindle and I decided I’m not completely happy with it.  I love reading on the Kindle, that is, seeing the large print, reading screen by screen with a press of a button, and having a narrow line width to scan with my eyes.  What I don’t like about the Kindle is the Home directory.  I also discovered I no longer like reading Time magazine on the Kindle, although this might not be completely the fault of the Kindle.

For my personal use and taste, I’ve decided I like the Kindle best for reading a single book at a time.  The Kindle is great for reading on a book you’re hooked on and you’re ready to sit and do some serious reading.  I can read screen after screen with little eyestrain.  The Kindle is a comfortable magnifying glass.  Whenever I used to try to reading normal books and hold a magnifier it was never comfortable.  For me the Kindle has become a tool to make reading easier on the eyes.

I don’t like managing books on the Kindle.  The computer makes for a much better librarian.  I wished the Home page only had unread books on it, and I could hide all my read books in another directory.  Really all I want is to turn on my Kindle and start reading where I left off, so I’m not even sure I wouldn’t be happy leaving my library of books on my computer or on Amazon.

The whole thing about carrying 2,000 books around in one little device isn’t as interesting in practice as it was in theory.  In other words, I like the Kindle as a book replacement, but not as a library replacement.  The Kindle’s software and hardware interfaces are clunky when it involves more than reading.  PREV PAGE and NEXT PAGE are perfect concepts for reading – all those other buttons, not so much.

I could handle a much simpler Kindle, but I don’t know if my tastes would make other Kindle users happy.  Amazon should sell two kinds of Kindles – a streamline reader with few buttons, no broadband connection, and have it managed from a computer, for about $100, and then the more expensive Kindle with all the bells and whistles for $399.  I would be happy with three buttons: an On/Off switch, and a Next and Previous page buttons, along with a USB port.  Yeah, and it would need some kind of home button with a trackpad or other cursor selector device – but ultimately I’d prefer a touch screen.  I wondering if something like the iPod player control would work with ebook navigation. 

I’d like this simple Kindle to be super hardened so I wouldn’t be afraid of taking it places, include the bathtub or beach.

My 4gb iPod Nano can hold many unabridged audio books but if I put more than a few on it then it becomes a pain to find things.  My iPod and Kindle just need room for 1-3 books – at least that’s how I feel.  I’m trying to simplify my life.  My iPod Nano is the perfect tool for listening to audio books.  The Kindle is still too swiss-army knifey to make me happy.

I love that the Kindle is Green and I can go paperless, but I’ve decided that general magazines aren’t suited for it.  My fiction magazines are okay, but modern magazines have too much content, with lots of little sidebars and snippets of facts mixed in with the articles.  That busy layout doesn’t translate well to a pure reading layout of the Kindle.

Jim

Going Paperless 4 – Alternative Methods

I’m not sure how many people are interested in the topic of going paperless since it gets few hits on the stats page – but I’m enjoying exploring the idea.  And I did get an email from Adam Kadleck suggesting I try out Zinio, an online magazine service.  Since he works for the company he also provided me with a sample subscription to Saveur Magazine, a colorful periodical about cuisine.

A huge shortcoming of the Kindle is its lack of ability to show photographs and color graphics.  I remember reading an early complaint about the Kindle from a Slashdot kid who whined the Kindle couldn’t handle comics and porn -reading material that Zinio can handle. 

A magazine is not very magazine-like on the Kindle.  Zinio sells magazines and has a custom software reader so magazine pages look exactly like they do in their paper form.  It even fakes page turning with graphics and sound.  Zinio is paperless but with more of the natural features of paper.  Saveur Magazine would not work on the Kindle.  Without the appetizing photos of the food it would lose much of its appeal.

The Zinio software reader works very well on my 19″ wide-screen LCD monitor showing two full page at a time.  However, I need to zoom in to read the content.  Zinio makes this a breeze, but I wonder if I had a 22″ monitor if I could read without zooming.  The height of my 19″ monitor is about an inch less than the height of a standard magazine after you take into account the Zinio menu.  The screen view on 22″ monitor could well be the same height as a paper magazine.

Right now Zinio has a decent selection of magazines, but far from the selection of a good bookstore.  And like ebooks, the issue of the pricing of e-magazines is still questionable.  Why pay the same subscription price for a paperless magazine when the publisher isn’t covering the overhead for paper, printing and postage?  It’s not uncommon to see $5.99 and $6.99 mags at the bookstore – I would think going paperless and using Zinio they should sell for $1.99 at most.  PC World is $19.97 a year on Zinio.  I’ve gotten better offers than that in the mail.  Science is $99.00 – and that seems way too much for electrons.

The photographs on Zinio look pretty good but nowhere near the quality of a slick paper print.  Strangely enough the quality reminds me of the new paper used in Sky & Telescope, a big step down from their old paper.  You can magnify Zinio photographs but they break up.  It would be great if the Zinio photographs offered quality features over print magazines, like larger hi-rez popup views.

The feature I would want the most from Zinio is full text indexing.  I have several years of Sky & Telescope on my shelves, but finding an article means lots of flipping pages.  It would be great if I had a library of Zinio magazines that I could quickly query for instant data.

There is an online company Press Display that offers reading newspapers online in the same way Zinio works for magazines, but their reader is browser based.  Even though many of these newspapers offer free online editions, the ability to read a newspaper that looks like the printed edition does have value, maybe even value worth paying.  The New York Times offers the Times Reader for $14.95 a month.  It’s not a system for seeing the paper as printed, but a online viewer to making newspaper reading better than reading through a web browser, so its yet another alternative to paper.

The problem with these solutions is being tied to your monitor for reading.  Now I don’t mind reading off a monitor – screen resolution is now better than newsprint and fonts can be enlarged to beat tiny magazine typefaces.  What I’d like is to read in my La-Z-Boy, but to do that will require waiting for an ebook reader with a hi-rez color screen the size of a standard magazine page.  I expect such a Star Trek like tablet in the next few years.

I don’t think it will be long before we’ll stop murdering millions of trees just to let people read a couple headlines and do the daily crossword.  Going paperless means changing habits but I think there will be technology to help us to keep our old addictive reading behaviors while adding new features that help us process knowledge.

Going Paperless 5

Jim

Going Paperless 3 – Do I Have A Word Addiction?

I’m learning a lot about myself through this simple experiment of trying to go paperless.  I buy probably 100 times as many words as I actually read – and that guess might even need to go as high as a 1,000 times.  After buying my Kindle I decided to only purchase Kindle reading in a just-in-time-to-read fashion – no stocking up.  I’ve known for years my eyes are bigger than my reading habit stomach when it comes to buying books and magazines. 

I could have immediately filled up my Kindle with hundreds of free classic books by going to the elegant web site Feedbooks.  I could have jammed it with blogs, magazines and newspaper subscriptions.  Instead I bought two books, subscribed to Time Magazine, bought a few issues of my favorite SF&F magazines, and download a couple dozen sample chapters of books I was considering buying.

It quickly became apparent that even this light load was too much.  I read one of the books, started the second, read some of stories in the magazines, and a couple sample chapters.  I’m struggling to keep up with the magazine reading because I’ve already gotten six issues of Time. [By the way, for some reason I’m getting way more out of Time by reading on the Kindle than I ever did out of the paper copy.  I think photos and ads must be distracting.]  Because I have such a backlog of paper books and magazines on my bookshelves to read, I don’t read on my Kindle full time yet.  I wished all my reading material was on my Kindle because it’s easier to read E-ink over most of the paper formatted pages I have stacking my shelves.  Also, I could monitor my reading flow better.

People compare finding data on the Internet to drinking from a fire hose.  I think that metaphor is outdated.  I think it’s like lighting a cigarette from the exhaust of the Saturn V booster.  Trying to keep up my daily data input is like being the little robot, Number 5 from the movie Short Circuit.  I keep telling myself, “More data, more data,” but I can’t handle it.  I’m addicted to words and I need to get control.

So weeks ago I decided to go paperless as a start.  I’m tossing all my magazine renewals as I get them.  I’m cleaning out the stacks of back issues.  And I’ve begun to study the online editions of my favorite magazines to see how much I can practically read online.  (See my new Magazines section.) 

I’ve quickly learned that I actually don’t read as much as I want to, or think I do.  I’m like a squirrel that hides a thousand nuts for each one I eat.  I could save myself a lot of time and energy by breaking this compulsive habit.  This experiment to get rid of paper magazines and newspapers is teaching me I need to change my personality.  Reading is good, but wanting to read everything is bad.  Being God and knowing about every sparrow must be an awful stressful profession.

I need to find my reading Walden and channel Henry David Thoreau for awhile.  I have no intention of giving up on words altogether, but I need to go on a diet.  My first impulse is try to read only one short story or essay a day.  The idea was to daily meditate on one inspiring work.  Even this might be too much, because I’d like to read a really good story and then contemplate it by writing a blog post.  That would take several hours of work, and I don’t have that much time every day to spare.

If I can ever get down to such a contemplative reading habit I might find I can only handle one good work every three or four days.  Is it better to nibble on a lot of reading potato chips or to just have one good cerebral meal?

I actually get 40-50 books read each year by listening to audio books while doing other things, so I’m not worried about full length books and novels.  See “How Audible.com Changed My Life.”  I’m concerned with magazines, newspapers, blogs, RSS feeds, web sites, emails, and all the other sources of short lengths of words I gorged myself on daily while storing up even more thinking tomorrow I’ll be reading even faster than I do today. 

It’s like I’ve got my own rat race of digital consumption going.  Since pledging to go paperless I’ve been cleaning out my email inbox and unsubscribing to lots of newsletters, lists, announcements and web sites.  I started visiting LifeHacker but not subscribing.

Reading was much easier when I was a poor kid and I got all my books from the library.  I didn’t own books then, just had a stack of four or five sitting on my bedside table.  Then I grew up and got a job that financed buying all the books I wanted.  After that came the Internet with googles of free words, and I’ve reached a stage in my life where I’m drowning in reading.  Damn, I’ve got to find a way to manage that Saturn V exhaust of data addiction.

Going Paperless 4

Jim

 

 

 

 

Going Paperless 2 – Magazine Reading

I’m starting to learn just what I’ve got myself into since I had the bright idea of Going Paperless.  After I wrote that post I decided I’d focus on giving up newspapers and magazines and justified that the paper in books is different because books are meant to last and not be disposable.  Going cold turkey on buying magazines has turned out to be very hard.

I originally planned to go paperless to save on trees and the natural resources and energy that go into making paper.  I assumed digital is more environmental.  Since that time I’ve discovered other benefits to going paperless.

I buy a lot of magazines and subscribe to maybe twenty of them.  I love magazines.  I spent several years working in a Periodicals department at a university library.  To me each magazine represents a subculture.  After writing my original post I’ve been to my favorite bookstores a number of times.  I linger in the magazine section looking at the issues I’d love to buy and walk away feeling disappointed, empty, even sad.  Well, I am saving some bucks too!

So far I’ve only read Time, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Reader’s Digest and Analog on my Kindle.  I’ve only subscribed to Time and just bought single issues of the others.  Amazon.com doesn’t offer that many magazines yet.  I could get The Atlantic which I currently subscribe to, and over at Fictionwise.com I could get Interzone, a SF magazine I’ve always wanted to try.

Luckily, I have about 12 feet of back issues to tide me over before going through total withdrawal.  You see, I’ve always bought far more magazines than I can read.  To be honest, I do way more flipping than actual reading – looking at photographs, cartoons, ads, reading tidbits and columns, and only sometimes getting down to reading the core articles.

Reading on the Kindle is teaching me to read differently.  The Kindle does not have photos.  Nor is it practical to just flip through the pages.  When I get out my Kindle to read a magazine it means reading – and reading only.  And that’s very different.  For casual scanning I’m going to have to use the web.

Nor do I have colorful covers, art and photography to seduce me into a particular article.  Geez, I might need to hang around the bookstore to get aroused and then run home and hope I can find that story my eyes are bulging to read.  The net has art and graphics but I can’t remember seeing a magazine site that entice me into reading a story like a magazine layout.

The latest issue of Astronomy Magazine has a stunning cover showing a bizarre image with the headline, “Is this the shape of the Universe?”  And sad to say Astronomy Magazine does not offer any freebies at their web site.  Going paperless will mean giving up this periodical.

Discover also has an eye catching cover with a lead story “Before the Big Bang: 3 Theories Explore the Backstory of Creation.”  Jumping over to the site gives no indication if I could read that article but there’s lot to read, with many entries on the same subject.  The DiscoverMagazine.com site is geared to provide reading material but it appears to have a web based structure.  It’s a busy site with lots of tiny print.  I’ll still offers lots to read after going paperless, it just won’t be easy to read.

Scientific American has a beautiful cover too that beckons me to read, “The End of Cosmology,” an article I can read online.  The SciAm.com home page is colorful, but still not as inviting as an actual issue.  SciAm also provides many full articles online, but reserves content on others.  After dumping paper I will have reading material here but not always the essay I want.

It would be great if these magazines offered a Kindle edition.  And it would be even greater if Kindle 2.0 had a nice hi-rez color screen.

There is another way to go paperless without considering the Kindle and the web, and that’s audio.  I already read 40-50 books a year via my iPod.  I can get Scientific American and The New Yorker in an abridged audio format.

Learning to read magazines with the Kindle means I need to change my buying habits.  It’s one thing to buy magazines and let them sit around on the shelf mostly unread, but it seems down right silly to buy magazines that go unread and unseen as bits and bytes on my Kindle.  To be practical I need to only buy what I can read.

Going paperless means learning to buy just the amount of words I can read on a regular basis.  Learning to do that will be difficult.  I’ve subscribed to the audio edition of The New Yorker before and like my paper copies many issues went unopened. 

Thus going paperless means changing a lot more than I previously thought.  I opened my Kindle last night and discovered I had four issues of Time queue up already.  I spent little over an hour and read many stories.  Without the photos Time really is a much different magazine.  The Kindle formatting tries to describe charts and graphs with words and that takes some imagination to see.

On the other hand I got a much better feel for the content of the magazine.  I flipped through an entire issue one screen at a time.  The Kindle tends to encourage speed reading.  There’s a delay in “flipping” pages, just enough that I still grasp some content I’m skipping past.  This causes two things to happen.  One I pick up tidbits just by flipping, and second I end up jumping back and reading stories I had planned to skip.

If I really have the guts to go paperless I’m going to have to change myself significantly.  Strangely enough going paperless might force me to focus on content and learning to read more efficiently.  I’ll end up reading more if I stick with the Kindle.  It will also force me to learn my limitations on how much I can read.

Moving away from magazines might mean spending more time reading whole non-fiction books, or watching more documentaries.  Nova (PBS) and The Universe (History Channel) have gorgeous visuals in high definition, far more stunning than magazine covers.  Magazine reading has always been the shallowest form of reading.  Ditto for newspapers.  Going paperless may also mean focusing on more substantial reading sources.

Finally, there are the Best American series of annual books that collect the best of the best periodical writing from the previous year.  These include The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Science Writing.  And I just got The Best of Technology Writing 2007.  I could easily give up magazine reading and just buy these volumes.  I might discover that the amount of time I spend reading non-fiction essays and articles each year might be equal to the time it takes to read a handful of annual best of anthologies.

By the way, I have thrown away a number of magazine subscription offers – some that made me want to cry because they were so cheap.  I love cheap magazine subscriptions.  That’s why I have so many magazines on my selves going unread.  Another reason going paperless is good for me.  It breaks a bad consumer habit.

Going Paperless 3

Jim