Archive for the ‘ Reading & Books ’ Category

Five Books at Once…

Author: JoshMiller

Mar 22

At any given time, I am reading, something like five books at once.  This has the side effect that I feel like I am plodding slowly through everything (which I am).  This feeling is not helped by my wife who reads all the time and goes through like five books a week.  Thanks for making me feel illiterate…

Anyway, these five books stem from the 5 different means that I consume them.

Traditional Print Books

no-hero-jonathan-wood Probably the slowest form of consumption just because I feel like I don’t have time to actually read them, though I feel that Is should make time.  This is probably my least favorite type of book these days for one simple reason.  I buy then used and cheap, and now I have a stack of hem sitting there, staring at me, saying “Why aren’t you reading us you jackass?”

Basically, they make me feel guilty by existing, not being read.

Currently Reading: No Hero by Jonathan Wood, a book I picked up from a closing Borders for cheap because the cover looked interesting.  It’s a sort of modern day set sci-fi paranormal magic involved book.  It’s ok, though the pacing feels a little off and the whole “main character is lost all the time” thing is getting a little old.

Lined up next: Star Trek: Federation

eBooks: Nook

Machine-of-Death cover You know, I like ebooks, I like my nook, I don’t use it quite as much as I want to.  I think my main beef is that organizing all of the ebooks I have on the nook is an absolute chore.  Also I get frustrated by the odd and inconsistent page numbering, which is kind of minor.  I’ve been officially working on the same book for ages, though I occasionally open up something else.

Currently Reading: The Machine of Death.  This book is really dang long, so it’s been taking me a while to get through it.  I want to say it lists as being 800+ pages and in the Nook, it’s something like 3x that number.

Lined up next: The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

ebooks: Phone

200px-American_gods I also have started reading some ebooks on my phone via kobo and Nook apps.  This has the nice benefit of being portable.

Currently Reading: American Gods by Neil Gaiman.  I have heard some good things about it being decent and it came up cheap on B&N on some sort of anniversary release special.  I’m not too far into this but it has kept me pretty interested so far.

Graphic Novels & Manga

I’ve started reading quite a few collected comics and manga.  Mostly I’m sticking to what I know.  For example, I’ve been hitting the Transformers comics pretty heavily.  I’ve always had a love of the toys but not so much interest in the actual mythos.  I want ot change that.

My Manga choices are pretty limited as well.  I have little interest in anything released in the past, ten years or so.  Currently I’ve been working my way slowly through the Sailor Moon rereleases.  I also have some Evangelion books.  If I get around to it I may look into some Ranma or Tenchi collections, if they are available.

Audiobooks

the_girl_with_the_dragon_tattoo-large Probably my main way of consuming books.  There are arguments as to how much of this constitutes “reading” but that mostly depends on if you define reading as “translating text to mind” or if you define reading as “consuming books”.  I have a decent drive to and from work and sometimes have time at work while doing work that allows me to listen on my headset.  I also find it keeps my interest better to listen rather then read, and I remember the story better.

Currently Reading: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.  I picked up this book a long while ago in print but couldn’t get into it.  So I went with audio.  I’m really close to wrapping it up.  I want to do The Girl who Played with Fire next but I plan to take a break from this series. 

Lined up next: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

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Complaining About Free

Author: JoshMiller

Feb 20

I found a new App recently which is pretty neat.  It’s called Overdrive Media Console.  It’s neat because, I can hook it up to my Library card and get library books delivered digitally.  I am of course, limited to using this app to consume the media due to DRM and the whole “it expires” thing of a Library.

I’m actually not interested in this at all from a text perspective.  I may be in the future but right now, I have a huge backlog of eBooks and Paper Books and whatnot.  I also don’t care to read text on my phone, though I have been doing it on the Kobo App as sort of a test.  What I like is that Overdrive gives me option for Audiobooks. 

I do not buy Audiobooks. They cost too much, for the most part.  Paperbooks I buy in paper or used, eBooks i get on sale or with a coupon.  Audiobooks, I check out CDs from the library.  I probably should just get a subscription to Audible but I have issues with the idea that my books are DRM trapped in a system that may or may not exist in the future.  If Audible were DRM free, I’d be all over it.

I love me some Audiobooks.

Overdrive has Audiobooks, delivered digitally to my phone.  I have a single complaint and one worry.  First off the worry, can I check these books out more than once?  I tested the waters with a book I own and have previous read, Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor.  It has been years since I read it in paper and I kind of felt like rereading it recently.  (Nevermind that I should be instead working on reading more of Haunted by the same author instead).

I did finish the book in the week given, but I wonder if I can recheck it out if I don’t finish within the week.  If I can, it’s not a big deal, though some of the books have a huge waiting list.

My real complaint?

There is very selection available.  I believe there were 190  books available, at least half of which were standard Public Domain books like Pride and Prejudice and Frankenstein.  Of the remaining ones, very few were anything I’d ever heard of.  I picked Survivor partially because it was available and I knew what it was.  The only other books I really already wanted to read were the Hunger Games Trilogy books, the first one had a waiting list like 30 people long.  I suspect these rotate around as well, which means those Hunger Games books will probably disappear once the movie drops out of the spotlight.

So, while this is great service, it does have it’s limitations.  Mostly, I find it funny that we have to apply physical limitations of a normal Library to Digital Media in order to allow the thing to exist.

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Filed under: 2012, Audiobooks, DroidBlog, Reading & Books, Technology | Tagged as: , , ,

Amazon and B&N, It’s Time to Open Up

Author: JoshMiller

Jan 13

Ok, so I’ve mentioned a few times, I own a Nook eReader.  I went through some flip flopping debate when I chose the Nook but I decided on the Nook.  It’s notable that, the only other option was the Kindle.  There are other eReaders but, frankly, I would only trust one of these two readers.

I chose the Nook because I prefer the design.  The Kindle’s main draw was better battery life, but it has this ugly keyboard mess on the bottom of it that the Nook does not.  Also, I like Barnes and Noble as a business even if I don’t shop there as much as I’d like to.  If I ever pick up a Fire or a Nook Tablet, I’ve pretty much already decided on the Nook Tablet.  Not because I have a small library of Nookbooks already, though that is a factor, but the Nook Tablet seems to be a superior device performance wise and, honestly, I’m going to root it anyway.

The real debate comes in with the eBook stores.  I’ve pretty much duped the idea of pirating things.  It’s a hassle, stuff doesn’t always work right, it’s full of offensive advertising, etc etc.  Also, I prefer to support people and businesses when I can.  This is not a piracy debate, so enough on that.  This is an eBook Store debate.

My preferred source of ebooks is Barnes and Noble.  They sync directly to my Nook, I like supporting B&N as a seller.  It’s convenient as it’s supposed to be.  However, Barnes and Noble makes this extremely difficult by almost never ever having sales or coupons for eBooks.  A sale is a very effective sales tool, and yeah, the per item intake is less but the volume has been proven though many models to pick up dramatically.  Hell, I have hundreds of Steam games I’ve never played that I bought because “oh man, 50% off”.  Would i have bought these games otherwise?  No.  Do I occasionally buy things like DLC and Sequels, at full price due to a sale on a game?  Yeah, sometimes.

Granted, I don’t want writers to start selling book chapters out piecemeal in DLC style anytime soon.  Though, this is a rather interesting idea.  Want more backstory on some 3rd tier character?  Buy chapter 10.5 for 99 cents and read about his past!

I wonder how well that would work.

Anyway, back on topic, Amazon, has loads of sales on eBooks.  They also have a larger number of exclusive eBooks.  Unfortunately, unless I want to use my Pc or my phone, I can’t read Kindle books.  If i could read Kindle books on my Nook, I’d probably already have spent more on Amazon than I have at B&N.  Granted, B&N doesn’t like this but hey, competition, get some sales going to bring me back.  Make me want to shop you more!

Then there are third party options, like Kobo Books.  Kobo comes in a format I can put on my Nook, which is great.  They also have pretty regular coupons.  Hell, the existence of Kobo all around makes the closed ecosystem of Kindle and Nook seem stupid.  Hey, you don’t care if I buy from this 3rd party but you care if I buy from your larger competitor? 

This is assuming there is a lock down because Amazon and Nook don’t want you to put 3rd party books on their devices, which clearly is not the case.

So the flip side of the argument is, they want you to buy their device.  They want you to buy the Nook and Kindle exclusively.  Except, I could read both on an iPad, or my phone, or any number of android tables, or even on my PC.  So that argument quickly becomes invalid as well.

The overall point here is, that this exclusivity lockdown is stupid.  The result is that people are just going to strip your DRM off and do it anyway, and now, you’ve got DRM free copies of your files floating around.  If you’re worried about losing customers, work harder to keep them interested in your side of things.  Work what you have got.  Amazon has their lending services for one.  Nook lets people get from libraries.

All I want here is a choice.

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2011, A Year of Reading

Author: JoshMiller

Jan 2

So, 2011 was a weird year for my reading.  According to my Goodreads tracking, I read a pretty weak 17 books last year.  This is the second highest year on record, the problem is, I can’t find my 2009 list and I know I read like 30 books that year.

It was a weird reading year though because I developed a terrible habbit of reading multiple books at once.  I still currently have like a dozen books I started in 2011 that I have yet to finish.  I have had some issue with “getting into” a lot of books.  Like i started reading Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, a book that has been on my to read list for ages.  It’s boring.  At least i found it to be extremely boring.   I started skipping pages, then, next thing I know, I’m basically just flipping through my Nook without reading at all.

I’ve had a few cases like this.  Honestly, I think Audiobooks have ruined me.  I couldn’t get into The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in print but I’m really enjoying the audio version at the moment.

Speaking of the Nook, it has also exploded my backlogged book list.  Yeah, there are a lot of free books on there, but I actually and pretty selective on which free/cheap books I pick up for this reason.  If it’s some teen werewolf love fantasy, I don’t get it for example.  I’m never going to want to read that.

But some Dystopian SciFi story, sure, I’ll give it a shot.

I also actually bought several books I’ve been wanting to read Family of Secrets about the history of the Bush Family, Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World, Peter Hamilton’s The Dreaming Void, The first Discworld book.

The other problem I’ve been having, I keep picking ridiculously long books.  I’ve been pushing through The Machine of Death for a while now.  It’s entertaining but my nook tells me it’s almost 900 pages.

Though I don’t know how accurate this is, the Nook reads pages funny.

Anyway, I am going to continue to push myself to be better about getting through these books.  So far I’m starting the year light.  I have a few Manga am going to read through, they should be pretty quick.  I’m going to continue my Steig Larson audiobook tour and hopefully by the end of January I can wrap up The Machine of Death.

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Barnes and Noble’s Nook Ecosystem – Totally Broken?

Author: JoshMiller

Nov 29

Ok, so I have no idea how the Kindle works, it may have the same issues I am going to touch on here.  I have a Nook.  i like my Nook.  I like the interface with the little touch screen instead of the doofy keyboard.  I feel like Amazon, as much as I buy from them, is sort of the Wal-mart of the internet and may have dodgy overall quality.  I like supporting Barnes and Noble as a book seller.  i like that the Nook feels more open since I buy books from Smashwords and Kobo and other stores. 

I like my Nook.

I HATE the Nook Ecosystem.  It seems like something B&N could very very easily improve which would give them a strong edge in the market.  The main thing we need is easy syncing between devices.

I only own one Nook but I do have the B&N Nook software on my PC.  For reasons I can’t understand no matter how hard I try, I cannot create virtual shelves in the desktop software the way I can on the Nook itself.  I open Nook for PC and all I get is a massive grid of all of my books with tiny useless thumbnails.  Hovering over a book for a few seconds makes this ugly popup appear.

USELESS

Seriously, get some UI people on this software because IT SUCKS. 

My biggest complaint is the shelves, and doing a simple search on the subject shows I am nowhere near the only one with this problem.  At the very least, a lot of people us shelves for “Currently Reading” and ‘”Finished”.  I tend to get more granular but frankly, there isn’t any reason not to do user defined shelves.

Even better, these shelves should sync.  There is NO EXCUSE for this not being implemented this far into the life cycle of this device.  It is an extremely simple thing to do.  Sync one tiny file to and from the deceive/program as it loads up,  Easy.  Want to keep it simple, resolve any difference conflict with whichever is newer.  Yeah, once in a while someone may get screwed but whatever, it’s better than NOTHING.

The main reason this would be useful is that sorting on the Nook is an atrocious chore.  Not so much due to the interface but simply that the nature of the eInk makes doing anything on the device slow.  It’s great for reading which is a slow process.  When you’re trying to move 100 books around into sorted shelves, well, it sucks.

My only other real complaint, which is much much lower on the list, acknowledge that other places sell eBooks and let me lump them all together.  Preferably with the same synced shelves.  I realize you can’t sync my Kobo books but flipping between my B&N library and My Documents is a needless chore.

Barnes and Noble, I get why you do this, you want people to buy only from your store.  Great.  I kind of prefer to buy from you anyway for the fact that it’s convenient, though honestly, I also prefer NOT to because you still have DRM on everything and you still don’t allow your coupons to be used on eBooks.  Even if you threw your customers a bone once a month for 20% off I can pretty much guarantee my book purchases would increase 100% or more.

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