Voder-Vocoder

This week, I finally broke down and bought an ebook reader — B&N's $150 WiFi Nook (ISBN 9781400532629). It's a beautiful little device.

I got the Jonathan Adler Punctuation Cover (978161560062) since it's both very sturdy and cheaper than most.

I've already side-loaded 90 free books onto the device. These books have come from several places. In no particular order:

• The Lee County Public Library lets you borrow ebooks via Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) software. You can use ADE to side-load ebooks onto a nook.
• Project Gutenberg — the first place to go for books from the public domain. All of their books are now availible in ePub versions.
• Google Books, Some of the scans availible are in the public domain, and are therefore downloadable. Generally, the Gutenberug editions are a higher quality than the Google versions, since The Gutenberg tries to be an ideal textual copy of the book while Google tries to be a good representation a particular physical book.
• Many of the works of Cory Doctorow are availible as ePubs on his website, Craphound. I especially recommend Makers and Little Brother.
• The Baen Free Library — All copyrighted works which you may read for free, and all are availible as ePubs.
• The Baen CD Mirror — These files are also copyrighted but free to redistribute. The newer CDs have ePub files on them. The older CDs do not, but you can use a program like Calibre to covert file formats.

Places to buy eBooks:

• http://bn.com/ebooks — of course. Also check the Unbound Blog every friday for the name of a free book that can be added to your B&N library that week. [Update. Here, too: http://bn.com/freelibrary]
• Webscription — A store that sells unencombered ebooks, all of which are availible in ePub format. The prices aren't bad at all.

“I personally don’t buy ebooks with DRM on them, because I actually like to own the books I own.”—John Scalzi

Compare and contrast the mass-market and the hardcover covers of this book:

I like the mass-market (on the left) cover better.

(Here's a new feature on the blog: Judging a Book by its Cover. I'll present a book cover with no further commentary.)

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“Don’t worry about the sun dying! You and everyone you know will be long gone by then!” (link)

In the energy-efficient future:

Picture a Manhattan block in mid-December, crammed with high-rise apartment buildings full of lights, people, and warmth. Several thousand people live on the block. All of their electricity, the fuel for their daily lives, comes from a compact natural gas turbine running in an underground installation in the center of the blcok., The heat produced from the turbine is used to create hot water and warm the entire block. Each one of these people would have an energy footprint with an efficiency above 90%, compared with the current 33% Americans now live at.

From $20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rising Cost of Gas Will Change Our Lives for the Better by Christopher Steiner (9780446549547)

What have I read over the past year or so? Here’s a partial list:

• Eric Flint (et alia)’s 1632 series.
• Roger Zelazny’s Amber series (reread for the first time since college. They hold up well; I’m going to read more of him.)
• Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford series.
• David Weber and John Ringo’s Empire of Man series
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and three Earthsea books.
• Michael Williamson’s Better to Beg Forgiveness
• Jack McDevitt’s Seeker
• Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series
• David Weber’s Honor Harrington series
• Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father
• Norman F. Cantor’s Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World