Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

I recently found myself in a position where the only practical solution for me to enjoy ebooks I had legitimately purchased (would have been) to engage in the highly illegal pursuit of using a drm removal too. The cause was a clash of software upgrades and activation limits with a healthy dose of misunderstanding from me thrown in. I am not a lawyer and the law on drm circumvention is pretty confusing at the moment. There is an EU treaty from 2001 which appears to makes it highly illegal to even think about anti drm but it hasn't been transcribed into my own countries national law yet and I believe there is still some discussion over possible exceptions (ie fair use provisions).  Well I am not going to admit to breaking the law but I will say that Google informed me that there was a very easy to use open source, community supported tool available to perform drm removal  (if I felt so inclined). I quickly realised that this tool (if I were to use it) would make the wh...

This: http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/06/13/game-of-thrones-reaction/ reminds me of why I love Martin's Song of Ice and Fire so much. I was also as shocked when I read the book. He can't do that can he? He just did.  Welcome to the roller coaster ride that is Ice and Fire. Thanks to  Wilhelm the Ancient Gaming Noob for pointing this out. Now if only the series would come to a channel I can actually watch on my crappy cable service.

Another interesting observation from my visit to the local library last night is that the shelf space dedicated to fantasy and science fiction is growing. I have also noticed the same thing happening in my local bookshops. A few years back I was concerned to see that  my favourite genre seemd to have fallen out of favour and what little shelf space was dedicated to fantasy was given over almost entirely to Harry Potter and the deluge of Teenage Vampire novels. While some of the young adult stuff is very good I don't want to spend the rest of my life reading about teenagers so it is very refreshing to see George Martin, Ian Banks, Alastair Reynolds and their ilk being displayed prominently again and pushed heavily. Patrick Rothfuss appears to be the current ascending star and I am half way through "The Name of The Wind" myself. Perhaps the millions who grew up on Harry Potter have grown up and are looking for more mature fantasy? PS. Originally the post title referre...

I brought my kids to the local lending library last night and I was struck by how wonderful it is to stroll through aisles of books. Seeing them, touching them, smelling them and browsing through them. I have been something of an e-book evangelist for the last few months so it was a grounding experience to be reminded just how much pleasure can be got from physical books. Apart from the tactile sensuality of it all I was also struck by how much better the browsing and selection process is with physical books than with the crude tools that online booksellers have managed to come up with to date. Choosing books online is a narrowly focussed activity. I tend to know exactly what I want before I start and the search tools quickly (or not so quickly in some cases) bring me to it. Browsing physical books on shelves is a much more open experience tempting one to pick up and read the most unlikely titles. Last night for example, among my usual selection of Fantasy and SF novels I also borrow...

Hot off the presses from Paid Content: http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-book-business-twists-in-to-new-shapes-to-face-its-first-digital-challen/ Selected Quotes: “ The entire publishing industry is going down the drain ,”    "In the current e-book Top 50 on Kindle, there are only five titles priced at £5 or above. " “ We’re facing stiff competition from individual self-publishers and potentially giant technology companies with deep pockets,”

There is a great graph in this article from Paid Conten t showing how ebook sales are on an exponential growth path. The US is ahead of the field but  Europe and the rest of the world are sure to follow. Having recently been won over to ebooks myself this comes as no surprise to me but speaking as a consumer I remain convinced that two things have yet to happen for the market to really mature: 1. The ebook market needs standardisation. The fragmentation of the market into incompatible formats and incompatible readers has to go. 2. The pricing of ebooks has to get realistic. The production and distribution costs of ebooks are only a fraction of that of a paper book. Pass these savings onto the customer please. These two issues are not unconnected. Holding onto incompatible proprietary formats allows publishers and booksellers to enjoy a price premium. I suspect that competition will eventually force publishers and booksellers to embrace the new economic reality. Smart phone...

Heartfelt apologies for blatantly plagiarising my title from an insightful piece by an anonymous member of the Wattpad community . Wattpad is an online community for authors and reader to share books.It is a kind of Youtube for books. If like me you just stumble across it on the internet while looking for some e-reading material you might be forgiven for assuming you have stumbled into the worlds largest selection of teen vampire novels. It seems that Wattpad has had some success among female readers of a particular age. Neverthless if you ignore the preponderance of werewolves and doomed romance and think about Wattpad for a minute, you have to admit it just might be the future of creative writing. For some time now I have been wondering about the future of books and publishing. I am a relatively recent convert to electronic book reading but my brief foray into the world of e-books and e-books sellers has convinced me that none of the current models is sustainable in the long run....

How to download and read adobe epub books including library books using Aldiko reader on your Android phone. In a previous post I described how I have become an e-book convert and my reader of choice is Aldiko on my Android phone. One of the big advantages of Aldiko is its support for Adobe drm epub which seems to offer a wider choice than Amazon's kindle format and is also the format supported by many e-book lending libraries. Sadly using Aldiko with Adobe drm is not as easy as Amazon's one click purchase and download. In my last post I described a complicated process involving downloading the book on the PC first. Unfortunately this process let me down when I tried to borrow an ebook from my library because library books seem to have an even more restrictive form of Adobe drm which restricts reading to the device the book is downloaded to. Happily I have now discovered that you can download Adobe epub books directly into Aldiko from any website. Here is how: I use Aldiko P...

Yesterday I dropped into a bookshop on my way home from work and it was wonderful. The shelves, the covers, the readers, the smell of paper, the tactile pleasure of picking up a book and riffling through the pages, all of these things seduced me once again. I have been in love with bookshops almost as long as I have been in love with reading. In my youthful poverty I spent days trawling the streets of Dublin looking for little known second hand bookshops. Regular book shops seduce with the magic of pristine new writings while second hand books shops lure with the promise of forgotten legends and ancient magics. My recent bookshop visit was wonderful but it was also traitorously bitter sweet. There on the shelf I found the next volume of the trilogy I am currently reading. It was new, it was beautiful, it beckoned. With head hung in shame I placed the tantalising volume back on the shelf and slunk out of the bookshop. I will buy the e-book later for my smartphone. Its not a matter...

EDIT: I have discovered a new way to do this which allows you to download books directly to the phone. It also allows you to read ebooks from libraries on your phone without using Overdrive reader. For the updated instructions go here . If you are an avid book reader reader who has an Android device then the really big news last month was that Google is adopting Adobe's content Manager DRM solution for ebooks . Even though you may have mixed views about drm I think this is very good news because with Adobe drm already being supported by Random House, Sony, WW Norton, OverDrive, Ingram Digital, Kobo, British Library, Waterstones and others the choice of digital reading material is even wider (for European readers anyway) than with the Amazon Kindle client for Android. Even better though is the fact that many public libraries already use Adobe drm to allow readers to "borrow" eBooks for a limited time. How cool is that? I haven't tried it yet but I assume that it work...

Just back from a very enjoyable two week family vacation in France. We managed to pack in Paris sightseeing, several Loire chateaux, much pool time, quite a bit of fine dining and even a few days in Disneyland. That didn't leave much room for gaming or blogging but a few thoughts did come to mind about the practicalities of being a gamer on the move and I will try to cover them over the next few posts. By the way I struck it very lucky with my choice of holiday reading. Joe Abercrombie's "The Blade Itself" is a great fantasy read and Harold Sinclair's "The Horse Soldiers" turned out to be a terrific piece of historical fiction based on the US civil war. More details here .

I have discovered a new use for my phone. It allows me to listen to audio books while travelling to and from work on Public transport. Struggling to read a real book while trying to maintain your balance in an overcrowded rocking train carriage can be a challenge so audio books make an excellent alternative. Of course listening to someone reading a book is quite different to reading it yourself. You cannot choose you own pace. It is not easy to flick back and forth at will. You cannot quickly glance back at a just read sentence to clarify its meaning. This means a good audio book needs to be punchy and plot driven. The narration adds a whole new dimension. Writer and reader both contribute to your enjoyment of the tale. When it all comes together, when you get a good tale read by an good narrator it can be an extremely satisfying experience as any child clammering for a bed time story will tell you. I know there is a bunch of controversy going on at the moment about audio books on the ...

I seem to be carrying the flag for my home town today but coincidentally I have just finished "The Inferior" by Peadar O Guilin another Dubliner. I may have been somewhat biased in my recent recommendation of WAR but I need no such incentive to heartily reccommend "The Inferior". It is a great piece of Science Fiction. Thoroughly entertaining.

My instant book review sidebar was threatening to grow off the page so I have shifted the whole lot sideways to a new blog called http://mbpbooks.blogspot.com/ . There should be a feed in the sidebar which will take you there. I like the idea of using multiple blogs to organise stuff. If this works out I may well spawn a new "instant game reviews" daughter blog.

RPGDot's massive archive of news, reviews, guides and forums was "the place" to go for computer rpg information back in the days of Morrowind and Gothic. I was dismayed therefore to discover that the site and its daughter sites closed down completely earlier this year. Like many others I have more or less abandoned any effort to keep private copies of information, trusting instead that I can get the information I need when I need it from the internet. My precious book collection was a long time hold-out but even that has become disposable . The closure of a well loved site is a jarring reminder of how impermanent the internet really is. Is it time to panic? Should I go looking for my books back? Of course I am not the only one who worries about the loss of digital information. The following article by Susan K. Soy of Univertisty of Texas asks "Will Permanence Exist in the Digital Age" . Susan's article led me to the Internet Archive , a project which at...

I have three problems with this book the second in Conn Iggulden's "Conqueror" saga a fictionalised account of the life of Ghengis Khan. 1. For some reason the publishers chose to put no indication that this is actually the second book in a series. Had I known I would probably have read the prequel "Wolf of the Plains" first. It is a minor gripe but this seems to be a worrying trend. Alastair Reynolds novels don't give any indication of the sequence either. 2. It is a given in historical fiction that authors will make up stuff to pad out the known historical facts in order to weave an interesting story. Iggulden goes one step further though. He actually changes known facts, particularly relating to characters and the timing of events, all to make a better story. Iggulden does add historical notes which explain what he has done and why but I am still uncomfortable with this. I didn't like it when I read Iggulden's "Emperor" books about Ju...

Start of clever space opera series by a new to the scene Scottish SF writer. The central theme of the novel revolves around a simple premise that has profound implications. Good Stuff.

I am off on holidays for 10 days, yippee. I have docked my internet spaceships and my continuing fumbling efforts to make sense of EVE's lawless 0.0 zone must wait till I return. Looking for some suitable reading material for the holiday I spotted that the 7th episode of Kevin Anderson's awesome Seven Suns saga has hit paperback. Large size paperback unfortunately but for Seven Sun's I am prepared to make an exception to my usual " wait until I can fit in in my pocket " rule.

Lately I have been lax at updating the "Recent Reading" sidebar partly out of laziness but also because I feel I should really try and do some kind of review of the books I read. To try and reconcile these conflicting feelings I am going to try something different. For the next while I am going to try and do an ultra mini book review (one or two sentences) on every book I read. These will typically include a single sentence description of what the book is about and also a very quick statement of whether I liked the book or not. These will purely be my own opinions and I make no claim to any expertise in literary criticism. Nevertheless some folk might find them useful. Feel free to let me know if you agree or disagree with my view.

A quick look at Kevin Anderson's bio reveals a catalog of "written to order" novels based on well known licenses. Many of these are collaborations and for much of his career he has churned out three books a year. Oh and did I mention that he has been linked with what is (in my opinion) the nuttiest religion on the planet (who's name I won't mention for fear of being sued). I have to admit, that track record doesn't inspire me with confidence but please put any past prejudices you have aside and give Seven Suns a try. The series is absolutely terrific teeming with plots, subplots and a varied tapestry of characters. It is Anderson's own original work and I suspect it is more of a labour of love than many of his "written to order" novels. This is not high science fiction. This is pure space opera and the only science is of the di-lithium crystal variety. Nevertheless it is a great great read.