My To Be Read pile has gone digital. Here’s what I’ve currently got waiting from me on my Sony:
- Apollo’s Angels by Jennifer Homans (a history of ballet I heard about on NPR)
- Becoming Queen Victoria by Kate Williams (a bio of the young Victoria, and overview of the death of Princess Charlotte TB eread as research for Marissa Day series)
- Best Food Writing 2009 Ed. by Holly Hughes (research for Vampire Chef series)
- Bohemians of the Latin Quarter by Henry Muger (the stories that inspired the opera La Boheme)
- Clubs and Club Life in London by John Timbs (more research for Marissa Day)
- English Pleasure Carriages by William Bridges Adams (ditto)
- Letters from England by Robert Southey (ditto)
- Master of the Moon by Angela Knight (entertainment)
- Resteraunt Service Basics by Kurt Kahl (Vampire Chef research)
- Secret Suppers by Jenn Garbee (ditto)
- Sphinx’s Princess by Esther Friesner (entertainment)
- The Summoning by Kelly Armstrong (ditto)
- Threads and Flames by Esther Friesner (ditto)
- White Cat by Holly Black (ditto)
So, what’s in your virtual TBR for the new year?
I love e-readers for the access to books I used to have to hunt up in dusty university libraries.
Right now? Four works on Talleyrand (since my French is too crappy to read his memoirs) all written around the time of his death in the 1830s, Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin of the Ancien Regime before the Revolution (interesting to compare those to Madame Junot’s),
1830s novels–Catherine Grace Gore, Lister, a couple of others.
The Tatler. (I actually have Spectator in crumbling copies reprinted in the later 1700s.)
Next up? A reread of Fanny Burney’s Evelina.
My husband bought a Kindle and happily ordered lots of e-books at Amazon.
However, we happen to live in an unimportant little post-Soviet country, so Amazon sent us a pile of letters saying ‘sorry, this item isn’t available in your region but we can sell you the paper version’. Shipping dead trees halfway across the planet is easier than transferring a file?
Someone is having trouble perceiving reality. I’m not sure whether it’s us or Amazon, though.
(The . . . um . . . peer-to-peer-acquired .doc, .pdf, .lit, and .txt files on our regular computers work perfectly well. We’ll be buying many of these books as soon as someone condescends to sell them to us.)
ganna, Book View Cafe books are available as PDFs. Can you use PayPal to buy books? (I have the feeling that PayPal doesn’t work everywhere.) If so, you can buy ours and read them without a problem.
My e-list includes the Mark Twain autobiography, Dan Gillmor’s Mediactive and Karen Joy Fowler’s recent collection from Small Beer Press.
Don’t forget http://www.manybooks.net as a vast source of free public domain books in many e-formats including Kindle’s. Well done and free of the formatting errors often found in other free book sources.
I’ve got access to one of the great academic libraries, but a lot of the books I need are so old that I’m not comfortable toting them around, and of course, I can’t make notes in them, so one of the big advantages of my Sony is just that, being able to read really, really old books without having to worry about harming the physical books.
one of the big advantages of my Sony is just that, being able to read really, really old books without having to worry about harming the physical books.
Another advantage is font control. I was just reading some Klopstock this morning, and whee-yew, that fraktur of the 1800s!
Nancy Jane: I know. I’m just waiting for the next paycheck right now. (Those fiction translator’s paychecks can be nice but they don’t come often.)
I prefer the computer to the e-reader anyway. And I . . . uh . . . somehow like the good old dead tree books: they’re relatively bath-safe, kid-safe, and drunk-safe compared to e-readers.
Ah! The “reading in the bathtub!” Actually, as it turns out, e-readers are _better_ for the tub or beach than paper. All you have to do is put the e-reader in a ziploc bag, and voila! You can read it fine, turn the pages easily, and drop it in the water, multiple times, and it will be fine. This is more than can be said for a paper book.
Drunks I can’t help you with.
Sarah makes an excellent point, especially since I need reading glasses for these old eyes, but they steam up in the bath. So dunkable reader + adjustable font sounds wonderful.
Now to sell enough books to afford one…
Oops. The glasses, not the eyes, steam up. Odd image there. One must be careful saying such things around science fiction writers.
ganna – you can also download the Kindle version (.mobi file) of any BVC ebook to your computer, then load it onto your Kindle with the USB cable. Just put it in the “documents” folder. Easy.
I am currently reading War and Peace, which I would never have touched if I couldn’t have it on the Kindle. I really dislike holding huge heavy books in my lap. Now, don’t have to!
Ganna, it’s mostly a rights situation — who has licensed them, and whether the publisher chooses to use them, and which territories the license is good for.
One good thing about Book View Cafe is that since the authors own their own ebook rights, we don’t have to limit territories.
You can check out two samplers and a free ebook (Starfarers) at http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/Free-eBooks
Happy New Year!
Vonda
There’s a paperback of Starfarers on my bookshelf. Some good books make it across the world to our second-hand stores and I know how to forage for them.