Comprehensive (?) list of e-readers

I came across this list of e-readers/tablet things that people read on. And as a big fan of lists, I thought I would pass it along. I haven't even heard of a bunch of these and will have to look them up.

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Adam (Notion Ink)
AS 100 (Toshiba)
iPad (Apple)
CherryPad (Cherrypal)
Cruz (Velocity Metro)
Cybook (Bookeen)
Galaxy Tab (Samsung)
eDGe (enTourage)
Eee Pad (Asus)
EliteBook (HP)
IdeaPad (Lenovo)
Inspiron (Dell)
Kindle (any version)
Kobo (Borders)
Kyros (Coby)
LifeBook (Fujitsu)
Navigator (Netbook)
NOOK
NOOKcolor
Pavilion (HP)
PlayBook (Blackberry)
Protégé (Toshiba)
PC Tablet (Archos)
Skiff Reader (Hearst)
Slate (HP)
Sony Reader (any version)
Streak (Dell)
ThinkPad Tablet (Lenovo)
TouchPad (HP)
TouchSmart (HP)
WISEreader (Hanvon)
ViewPad (ViewSonic)
XOOM (Motorola)

On the subject of dual-screen ebooks

There are seriously a lot of new ebook options coming out for Christmas. They've got wireless, they've got lending library capabilities, they've got touch screens and cute leather covers and color screens. You can even get a bendy one!

Personally, I want my eventual Perfect E-Reader to have all of these things. Except maybe the bendy bit...that's silly. But one thing that a lot of developers seem to be toying with is this dual-screen idea. Because it's more like a real book, y'know? With two facing pages?

So one of these has finally come out. The Entourage Edge. It is really very cute, and holy wow does it have a fun website. I mean, it's not the Mini Cooper website, but it's good times.

The cool thing about the Entourage reader is that it's got one side that's color/touch, and then the other side is the e-paper screen. So they solve the problem the Sony Reader's been struggling with of how to combine these types of screens without losing the best aspects of both.

But I am dubious-verging-on-absolutely-displeased about e-readers shaped like books. The two-page thing is actually my least favorite thing about books, and the thing I've been happiest to change since I've gotten my Kindle. I've always found the page on the right is perfect. It lays flat, you can curl the other page around to form a handle, it's just great. But the left page is curly and hard to hold and you're limited in how you can sit to hold it open and read. I realize this sounds really pathetic..."woe is me, holding open a book is so hard!"...but really, it bothers me. It's always bothered me. And it makes my arms hurt.

So count me in the one-screen camp. I don't need it to look like a book as long as I can read off of it!

Kindle sample chapter reviews

I was lucky enough to take a little vacation in the States last weekend, and of course I brought the Kindle along to witness the glory that is the Full Kindle Wi-Fi experience. And, well...wow. I mean, I adore my Kindle, Wi-Fi or no, and I already have more to read on it than I'm going to be able to manage in half a year at least, but all of that is just base logic...the truth of it is, I fell in love. You can order books. All the books. From. Your. Bed. Or from the car mid-roadtrip. And then, because I get motion sick and can't read in the car, you can have it read your new acquisitions to you. I took out a sample subscription to the New York Times, because we were in New York, and it downloaded to my Kindle each morning as I had my tea in the hotel cafeteria.

Oh! And we saw an ad for it in the subway. That was neat.

Okay, so I won't front - the wi-fi is an insanely amazing thing. But I also don't have an iPhone, so maybe it's just because this was my first exposure to handheld 3G anywhere-internet. Though to be fair, the connection was a bit lousy - I had to log into facebook again every time I did anything, so log in, type a wall post, log in, post the wall post...sigh. So the iPhone would probably win that battle. But still. You can Beam Books Out Of The Sky. It's like heaven.

Oh, so I downloaded some sample chapters. And by "some" I of course mean "every one I could get at before my battery ran out." Now that my pet rat has gotten old and his greatest joy in life is to be read out loud to, I've been reading him a whole variety of NYT bestsellers, and he seems to be quite enjoying it. To date:

Swimsuit: I was relieved that this ended when it did. This man does many things I never would have allowed as an editor, plus I'm not really big on the whole "gruesome murder" bit. Benji enjoyed it.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: Is that right? This one was a big hit all around, and even the Manfolk, who pretended to be playing video games and not listening, let out a couple of good chuckles over it. I would definitely accept this one as a gift, if I have any admirers.

Twilight: Ah. I see.

Finger-Lickin' Fifteen: Um...maybe I just wasn't in the mood? I'm rather pleased that there's this huge series of popular books with a Latina heroine, so we'll give this a thumbs up, but...meh.

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll: Now, this one actually takes advantage of the sample chapter setup. Unlike stupid James Patterson, whose fancy "publisher" apparently didn't have enough time to look and see that 60% of his sample was the table of contents, this here book gives a big fat juicy sample, unhindered by massive quantities of front matter. I'm only a few pages in (Benji was dissatisfied by the lack of dialogue), but the narrator seems like a sweetheart and he's saying all those smart things about Blues music that always make me go all weak in the knees.

Stay tuned for a guest post from that boy who downloaded all the sci-fi sample chapters.

Kindle 2 in Canada: the definitive update

Since I seem to be getting a lot of my search-hits from people looking for information about getting a Kindle Reader in Canada, I thought it would be good to summarize what the deal is with that. So here you go! Hope it helps, e-book seekers.

1. Kindle is not officially available in Canada. They won't ship it here, and the wireless doesn't work here. You can't get wireless delivery of books, newspapers, blogs, or any of that.

2. However. If you can get a Kindle (by having somebody in the US order it for you and mail it or bring it to you, or getting it delivered to your hotel when you're on vacation, or whatever), there are a lot of things you can still do with it.

• If you have access to a credit card from a US bank that's registered to a US address, you can register your Kindle. You can order books from Amazon.com and transfer them, via USB, from your computer to your Kindle. You can also use the free conversion via your registered Kindle email address for documents under 5 MB. You still can't get newspapers or blogs though, I'm pretty sure, since these are only delivered wirelessly. I'm not positive about that last bit though, I haven't tried it.
• Even if you don't have the US credit card and can't register your Kindle, there are a lot of things you can do with it. There are programs available on the internet that let you convert documents all by yourself. You can download free and not-free books as .mobi files from an increasingly large range of websites, including the Gutenberg Project, and Smashwords. You can also, via a particularly wonderful internet-available program (which I shall not name because I hear Amazon comes after blogs that make this kind of information available...tyrants) download newspapers, journals, blogs, and other goodies to your computer in Kindle-compatible formats.

In conclusion, I'd say if you want a Kindle in Canada, and can somehow get one, it's worth it even without all the bells and whistles that come with the American service. Honestly, I've only used Amazon a couple of times to put content on my Kindle, and I've been using it extensively for months.

Free online content, plus the newspaper/blog feed program that downloads the Chicago Tribune, Le Monde, the Utne Reader, and my Google Reader feed for me every morning and transfers them to my Kindle in seconds, has kept my Kindle full of readable goodness without having to pay another cent.

How popular are e-books?

Well, I just got a spam email whose subject line offered me free e-books.

Iceberg ebook application

This is cute. Instead of something as crass as the "progress bar" the Kindle shows to let you see how far through the book you are, this thing for your...(iphone? Is that an iphone?)... actually shows you a picture of a book with your spot marked. Awww.

Also, how obvious is the Photoshop job? Or does chapter one of Twilight really extend to page 146?

Book Reviews

I admit it - writing is hard for me. I think it might be just that that I'm out of practice, but it's really an uphill battle. I admire authors immensely for being able to produce pages and pages of words, when I totally struggle to string together...like...two. Words.

Anyway, I've been writing book reviews for the website Self Publishing Review, which I've been quite enjoying. It's really fascinating to read the books that people have self-published! It must be terrifying to send your book off to be reviewed, especially without the buffer level of knowing that a publishing house accepted/edited/designed it. That way at least you can blame the publisher for any mistakes, and know that even if the reviewer didn't like it, at least the acquisitions editor did!

With the kind permission of Henry Baum, the mastermind behind the Self Publishing Review, I'm going to be going into a little more depth on the editing angle of the books I've been sent for review. I've made a few remarks on editing in the SPR reviews, but I'd like to talk more specifically about what another edit could have done for each book. It'll be a paragraph-structure adventure! But not right now, because I'm sleepy.

For the time being, you may revel in the glory that is my SPR reviews:
Daywalker, by Rebecca Rock (Vampires)
The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue, by George LaCas (Literary fiction)
Fairy Senses, by Frances Ruiz (YA Fantasy)

Kindle 2 has arrived on my couch!

March 30th, 1:00pm - Kindle is here! It was a ridiculous matter to get it - my mom had to buy it, have it sent to her in California, and then mail it to me herself. Because Amazon refused to ship it to Canada. But now, a mere half-day after my birthday, it is arrived.

1:05pm - It is so cute! Soooo cute. The packaging is cute too. It opens like a book!

1:25pm - I think I'm figuring it out. The instructions (in an ebook that opens when you turn it on) are really easy and quick to read, and most of the buttons make a lot of sense. I'm still not quite familiar with the note and clipping functions, but give me time.

1:27pm - Also, when it goes into sleep mode, it shows portraits of famous authors. I think the greyscale has 16 levels, so the pictures look really nice. Same or better than the quality in a lot of books, really.

1:35 - I have uploaded a book onto it! No whispernet, obviously, because I'm in Canada, but it also accepts .txt files, so I just converted a book that a friend sent me in Word, drag-and-dropped, and voila! There are no tabs because of the formatting, but despite that it looks nice and promises to be easily readable. And it remembers what page I get to... I'm a disaster with bookmarks so that's a nice touch.

More to come...

Authonomy dramaz report

Hellfire broke loose this evening on Harper-Collins's Authonomy author-networking website, when it was determined that the "glitch" that was keeping the site slow or crashing all day was none other than a tech-savvy author who posted a youtube video asking his wide network of friends to join the site and vote for his book.

The video itself, by an Irish writer, vlogger, and Starcraft afficionado, is strikingly harmless. He sounds like a nice enough fellow, and it's actually super funny to hear somebody walk you through the Authonomy process in that friendly tech-support style. But as it happens, this fellow has a lot of friends, and they're gamer friends with plenty of time to spend fiddling around on the computer, and they've come out in droves to visit the site and comment on his book.

Together with totally crashing the site all day, the concept of doing this, and being sucessful at it (the book in question has shot up the rankings and is already #1 on the weekly chart), has raised some ethical questions. Which are all being expounded, in greater or lesser degrees of coherence, politeness, and rabid fury, by pretty much everyone who's on the site right now. The author started out trying to defend himself, but faced with the onslaught of hate he's pretty well been reduced to calling everyone "jealous" and pretty much looking like a big ol' douche. But to be fair, everyone is so furious at him he'd have to be a saint to make himself look good at the moment.

The book itself... well, the first couple paragraphs were so bad I didn't keep reading, but a few people who did say it improves a lot after the first couple pages.

Anyway, he's a gamer, and he's gamed the system. Certainly, this kind of behaviour will totally sink the site and the community behind it if more than a couple people do it. But on the other hand, it's legit - he has a Starcraft-centered fanbase and he can ask all those people to vote for him, just like everyone is always asking all their Facebook friends to vote for them in whatever contest they're involved in. It's taking the contest into a whole other league, and I can really appreciate why the people who've found a really nice community in Authonomy would object furiously to this first advent of spam-warfare.

What will happen? Will the interloper be chastized? Banned? Shot?

Stay tuned.

This "web-comic" xkcd has figured out the Kindle. Now somebody please get me one!