Megatheriums for Breakfast

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Predator’s Gold by Phillip Reeve

Paperback from my own collection

Amazon link
This is the second volume in a quartet of sf novels aimed at young adults, a series sometimes dubbed “The Hungry City Chronicles”. In any case, the sequel to Mortal Engines. The basic premise is that hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now the Earth has been all but destroyed in “The Sixty Minute War” and the remaining cities have found that to survive they have to become mobile. Mounted on vast traction engines, cities like London prowl the devastated world, hunting down and consuming smaller cities. It’s a wonderful conceit, and Reeve really brings it to life with both humor and pathos, and some very interesting characters.

In this second novel, the main (surviving!) characters from the first, Tom and Hester, find themselves aboard the city of Anchorage, facing many perils. Their relationship is severely threatened, and the danger ratchets up as the book goes on. Hester is a really interesting character, horribly disfigured and tormented, but fiercely determined to get what she wants. A really strong female character, going right against the grain of most female stereotypes you find in novels aimed at this age group.

Really very superior teen fiction, in my view. I’m looking forward to reading the other novels in the cycle.

One minor note – the Scholastic editions are attractive, but the cut-outs in their front covers are unlikely to survive much handling before they rip.

The Great War:American Front / Walk in Hell / Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove

Audiobook

Amazon link
I finally completed listening to Turtledove’s “Great War” trilogy, a total of some 72 hours in audiobook format, goodness knows how many pages in hardcopy.

Brilliantly done alternative history, starting with a seemingly trivial change in events early in the American Civil War, leading to the failure of the United States to prevent the southern states from seceding from the Union. Turtledove deals with the Civil War itself (or the “War of Secession” as it is described in later books) only very briefly at the start of How Few Remain, a 24-hour long prequel to the current series, mainly devoted to the “Second Mexican War” in which the Confederate States again defeat their northern neighbour in the 1880s over the issue of the CSA acquiring two new states from the Empire of Mexico.

This work basically covers the period of World War I (“The Great War”), as the United States finds itself allied with the Germans and Austrians against the Confederate States allied with Britain, France and their colonies. The USA is thus fighting the CSA to the south, and Canada to the north. A war which bogs down as it did in Europe in trench warfare, with mustard gas, tanks and aerial dog-fights.

As someone who is not an American (I was born in England, emigrated to Australia in my teens) my knowledge of the actual American events (and particularly geography) is a bit restricted, and this perhaps limits my understanding of what is going on, but I didn’t find this a major problem.

Turtledove’s historical alterations are done very subtly, all of them very logically deriving from his original premise. His writing technique is based on episodically featuring the lives of a variety of different individuals, perhaps a dozen or so, to whom we keep returning as the general flow the story proceeds. In this way he makes the events of the time very personal and moving.

Among his cast of characters, he follows a couple of African-Americans in this trilogy (in How Few Remain, he followed Frederick Douglass) and it is clear that he is very sympathetic to their plight of their race. In this alternate world, of course, slavery takes its time to be abolished, and blacks are still treated appallingly in the South and not much better in the North as the novel opens. The use of the ‘n-word’ is extremely frequent, but is perfectly in context and it would have been absurd to avoid it. I do also wonder whether in this new history there is a single word ‘damnyankees’ because ‘yankee’ is never used without the adjective.

There’s some very tragic material in here, but also a good deal of humor – the bumblings of the 75-year old Lieutenant General George Custer (who never got to Little Big Horn and so survived) and his head-to-head confrontations with President Theodore Roosevelt (still in office in 1914, Woodrow Wilson being President of the CSA) are just a delight.

Absolutely fascinating stuff, though, and really well-done characterisation and story-telling. I expect eventually to move on to his American Empire trilogy in the same timeline which deals with the period of the Second World War.

Die Trying by Lee Child

Ebook on my iPod

Amazon link
I’m a sucker for thrillers (as you can probably tell) and I thought I would try this author, who has a whole series based around his ex-Marine character Jack Reacher.

I couldn’t get hold of the first novel in the series (“geographically restricted“, grrr!!), but was able to buy this one.

Reacher finds himself caught up, literally, in the kidnapping of a female FBI agent. For a long while, the reason for the kidnapping remains obscure, but all is of course eventually revealed. There’s a lot of violence – if I ever read again about someone’s head ‘exploding into a pink mist’ when shot I shall be sick – and some interesting plotting.

I may try Lee Child again – if this is only the author’s second book, it wasn’t bad. But there’s some awfully weak or silly plot points – why Reacher isn’t killed and disposed of by the villains at least five or six times in the novel is pretty well inexplicable. The kind of plot which only works because most people involved act like total idiots and against their own obvious interests.

Double Star by Robert Heinlein

Ebook on my iPod

Classic 1950s science fiction from a master of the craft. Quite a lot of fun to re-read this kind of book, but there’s not a lot to say about it.

An actor is recruited to play the double of a leading politician (on Mars) because the politician has been kidnapped. Then the plot thickens, but not much. It’s also the kind of sf which really doesn’t take much advantage of the genre – nothing about the plot requires the science fiction, planet-travelling background, but could almost just as easily have been set in the modern day.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• The Appeal by John Grisham (Audiobook)
• South by Sir Ernest Shackleton (E-Book)
• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library)

My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.

Again, although I’ve been reading a fair bit over the last fortnight, I have completed very little in the period, in fact, only one book.

Last time I also complained about a change Lexcycle had made to their e-book reader Stanza. They’ve now fixed it; or at least, made it possible to adjust the delay before bringing up their new Dictionary feature. The problem for them is that in the interval I explored the Palm eReader app from Fictionwise and have decided that I like it more. I may do a comparative review of the two pieces of software shortly here or on www.Teleread.org, a great site I recently discovered which deals with news and opinion about e-books.

I’m also uneasy that Lexcycle have now been bought out by Amazon, producers of the Kindle and also owners of Audible. What this means for the future of e-books, I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s good and I am rather concerned. More on this another time.

In what follows and in all my writings about audiobooks, the word ‘read’ also includes the sense ‘listened to’. Pity there’s no English word which covers both.

Trunk Music  by Michael Connelly.

Audiobook from Audible.

I’ve been reading and enjoying the series of novels based around Connelly’s hard-boiled L.A. cop Harry (Hieronymous) Bosch for several years now. The problem is that, what with getting hold of them erratically either from the local library or as they are made available via Audible (or not, see my post Divide and Conquer), I’ve read them completely out of sequence, which has made my understanding of the life-story of Bosch a backwards-and-forwards kind of thing, making me feel a bit like Vonnegut’s character Billy Pilgrim who ‘had come unstuck in time’.

However you piece together Harry Bosch’s story, he’s a fascinating character who seems generally on the side of the good guys, but has an occasional unpleasantly violent streak and a strong tendency to break the rules and go his own way.

Connelly’s stories about Bosch are full of lots of local L.A. detail which I can only presume to be authentic (never having been to that city). And he certainly knows how to spin a yarn.

This one starts with the discovery of an abandoned Rolls Royce with a body in the boot, and the trail leads to organised crime figures in Los Vegas. Typically, however, that’s not where the story ends, as Bosch both tries to unravel the details and to cope with his re-encounter with an old flame.

It’s this relationship which threw me into Billy Pilgrim territory, because I’ve read later novels in the series where this relationship has developed in an unexpected direction, and I feel I’m still missing several pieces of the jigsaw.

I highly recommend “Trunk Music” and the rest of the Bosch series, though with a warning that you have to have to occasionally have a strong stomach for violence and descriptions of gore.

Our present world has been shaped by many historical accidents which have become entrenched in boundaries which now make little sense.

In 1494, Pope Alexander VI settled an argument between the great exploring nations of Spain and Portugal by ruling a line down the middle of the Atlantic. All newly discovered lands to the west of this line would be owned by Spain, those to the east of this line could be owned by Portugal. The native inhabitants of these places, of course, were not to get much say in this.

At this time, two years after the return of Columbus, very little of what we now know as the Americas had been discovered; the Pope was not to know that a large part of the landmass of South America bulged well to the east of the line he had drawn. But the Portugese quickly discovered that fact and colonised what is now Brazil.

So it is that today the people of Brazil speak Portugese, while all the rest of South America speaks Spanish. It is hard to imagine that situation ever changing.

Another example is the modern city of York in the north of England. Its winding streets, and even the property lines dividing modern-day houses and shops, are shaped by historical decisions going back to the days when it was occupied by the Vikings or even earlier. Unless there is wholesale buying up and clearance of those properties, those boundaries may last for another thousand years.

And yet another example is the remnants of old empires, such as the British Empire. I am old enough to remember school atlases and globes with all of the countries belonging to the British Empire shown in red – the ‘Empire on which the sun never sets’.

The British Empire is, of course, now long gone, though in the shape of the Commonwealth – meant to be a loose, voluntary association of states – it still has some present day form. Australia, where I live, was part of the Empire and is now part of the Commonwealth.

But this relict of the past still has enormous influence in one area of modern life – copyright and publishing. Here the boundaries seem set as eternally as those of the language zones of South America or the property boundaries of York.

When an author sells a book to a publisher, he or she signs a contract assigning the publisher copyright – literally, the right to copy the work. Though that right is generally as broad as the publisher can get away with, it is spelled out to cover particular geographic areas of the world. And this is where those relict boundaries are still in place – the British Empire still lives!

I’m certainly speaking generally, and I know there are exceptions, but as a consumer the way I understand it is that a British or Commonwealth publisher has the right to copy and sell a book anywhere within the old Empire’s boundaries. An American publisher will be able to sell a book almost anywhere except within those boundaries. Between them, they divide up the English-language speaking world rather in the same way as the Pope divided up the world between the Spanish and the Portugese.

But in today’s ‘flattened‘ world of the Internet, these boundaries no longer make any sense, and in fact result in many very silly situations.

Here’s an example.

Let’s take Michael Connelly’s first novel about Harry Bosch, “Black Echo”. The UK publisher of the paperback is Orion Publishing Group, the hardback Headline Book Publishing.

The US paperback publisher is Grand Central Publishing, the hardback Little, Brown and Company.

So, living in Australia, I can only get to buy one of the UK editions, unless I use the Internet to buy a US edition from Amazon. This is frowned on by the British publishing companies, and by the Australian authorities in charge of intellectual property, but it’s not actually forbidden. If the UK edition is out of print, then the Australian authorities do allow me to ask my bookseller to import the US edition, thanks to some recent relaxations due to our consumer affairs authority.

There’s also an audiobook version, available from Audible.

But wait!! Can I buy the audiobook? No, because apparently it’s based on the US edition, and can’t be sold to me, who lives in the old British Empire. Is there a British audiobook edition available online? Not that I can find. Does this mean that I can buy the only audiobook edition available to me? Not on your life. I’m in the British Empire and so I get to buy – nothing.

Ditto with the e-book edition. There’s no UK version of this, but I am forbidden to buy the e-book from sources such as Books on Board or Fictionwise.

Now, in whose interests is this silly situation? No-one’s interest.

I am not wanting to do something illegal. I want to make a perfectly legal purchase of an item on the Internet. I want to give a publisher (and hence the author) my actual cash. Can I get the e-book any other way? No. So the old relict boundaries are preventing me from giving the author my money. What the…?

And this, of course, is only one example, in the book publishing world. Don’t get me started on other examples, such as the nonsense of DVD region coding (whose brilliant idea was it to put Hong Kong and China into two different DVD regions?).

These kinds of restrictions, as pointed out in this article, just create incentives to find ways around them, almost certainly ending up meaning that the original creator gets nothing.

If the world is flat, if this is the era of globalisation, these boundaries have to be broken up, history or not.

The Love of Books

I confess from the outset that I love books.

I mean by that that I love the actual physical look and feel of books made from paper and board and glue. What are sometimes now dismissively called ‘dead-tree’ books in the same way that we dismissively call physical post ‘snail-mail’.

My mother and father were reasonably keen readers, and so I grew up in a house which had a few shelves of books, though hardly what could be called a book collection. Our reading matter mainly came from the local lending library, and it was from there that I got my hands on many of my childhood favourites – a quantity of books we could never have afforded to buy.

But, as I say, we did have a few dozen books at home. My father was fond of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I had read my way through his copies of the ‘Tarzan’ series, and science fiction like The Land That Time Forgot by the time I was 12.

When I grew up and started to have some money of my own, however, I quickly developed the habit of buying and keeping books.

Over the years I must have bought and read many thousands of books, but regular purges have kept the collection down to a modest 3,000 or so volumes.

By the standards of true bibliophiles this is not excessive; but when the time comes to move house, or to renovate, having to move that many books becomes a major task.

We recently had the interior of our house painted and then re-carpeted. That meant that all of the books had to come off the shelves mounted on the walls and be packed away in a shed in our backyard for the duration. The physical books sitting modestly on shelves somehow seemed to expand endlessly as they came down and were packed into cardboard boxes. I ended up with some 75 boxes, in total weighing perhaps a tonne and a half. Moving that mass was no trivial task!

So owning physical books can definitely be a burden. And yet, and yet… I love the look of books on the shelf, and some individual hard-covers are so well-designed as to be a source of visual pleasure in themselves. To sit comfortably on a couch, handle such books and read their contents, is surely one of the great harmless pleasures of life.

But that pleasure does come at a cost. The resources required to make the paper and board – those ‘dead trees’ – and the cost of storing and shipping them about, taking them to bookstores, shelving them and selling them, all add up as a cost to the economy and to the environment.

Bits, not atoms

Surely there is a better way: surely we should be ‘moving bits, not atoms’ as Nicholas Negroponte said in Being Digital.

And so we come to e-books. Well, e-books and audiobooks, since the latter these days are also in digital, electronic, form.

I’ll talk about audiobooks in more detail some other time. Enough for now to note that I’ve long been a huge fan of audiobooks. Audiobooks are a great way indulge my passion for reading when my eyeballs are not free for ‘normal’ reading, such as when I’m out walking or driving. So much so that I have spent a lot of time and effort in developing shareware software which helps me (and many others) get audiobooks into a suitable form for the iPod.

But let’s look specifically at e-books, as these are a closer substitute for reading physical books. You have to have your eyeballs free and you have to have the time to sit and read them, just as you do with a physical book. How does the experience compare?

To me, it seems that it comes down to on what device you are reading the book, and in what circumstances.

Reading anything while sitting at a desktop computer seems to me far more like work than pleasure. I’ve talked in the past about the ‘desk culture’ and the ‘couch culture’, which are two very different things. Reading for pleasure surely has to fit within the couch culture. You need to be comfortable, relaxed, at your ease; none of which I feel while at my desk.

I subscribe to ‘New Scientist’ magazine in electronic form. I always used to enjoy reading the paper-based magazine, but the electronic version is far cheaper. However, to read the electronic version I’m essentially tied to my desk. This is one reason that I’m months behind in catching up with it.

So, equally, reading an e-book on my desktop computer is just not something I enjoy, and I quickly stopped trying.

Dedicated e-book devices like the Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader are the obvious platform for e-books. Neither of these devices are currently available in Australia, but even if they were I’m not convinced that I would buy one. While I am sure that sitting down on the couch with one would be comfortable and pleasant, I react a little against that concept ‘dedicated’.

The Apple iPod Touch

I recently acquired an iPod Touch. I have owned several iPods over the years – my justification being that I have to have the latest iPod so I can be sure that my shareware software works with it. The Touch, though, is a huge leap forward. It’s a device which I have quickly learned to love for its versatility, ease of use and convenience. That word ‘versatility’ is key.

I don’t want to get distracted by lauding the virtues of Apple and the iPod – I’m no Apple fanboy. But the iPhone/iPod Touch is essentially a pretty fully featured pocket computer, which means it can do a great many different things.

On my Touch, I can, among many other things:

• Store my contacts, calendar, notes, photos
• Check my email
• Use it as a calculator
• Use it an an alarm clock and stop watch
• Use it as a timesheet tool for freelance jobs
• Listen to music
• Listen to audiobooks
• Play games
• Watch videos
• Read e-books

If it was an iPhone, of course, I could also use it to make and receive phone calls.

The iPhone as an E-Book Reader

So, the iPhone/Touch is definitely not a ‘dedicated’ e-book reader. But how well does it work in that role? In my experience, pretty darn well.

Using the Stanza software I have read a number of novels on it now, including Randall Garett’s Lord Darcy, Stella Rimington’s At Risk and Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. I have found it a surprisingly easy and pleasant experience.

The small form factor of the iPod screen is something that doesn’t bother me much at all. At the font size which I find comfortable, there are about 150 words per ‘page’, which is maybe half of what you would find on a standard paperback page. So I do find myself tapping to turn the page fairly often, but not excessively often – not much more often than I would turn the pages of a large-print book, for example. The backlit screen makes the text bright and clear (in fact, I’ve adjusted the ‘paper’ colour so it’s a bit more grey than white to reduce glare).

Holding the Touch in one hand, I can tap to turn pages with my thumb, while sitting in comfort.

The huge advantage I believe that the iPhone/Touch has as an e-book reader is simply that it is so small. I always carry it with me in my pocket (inside a Belkin leather wallet), and so I can pull it out any time when I have a moment to spare. Unlike an audiobook, I don’t need to fuss with earphones: I can just pull out the device, make a couple of taps, and start reading. I can’t imagine carrying a Kindle with me so simply and easily. The iPhone/Touch is more portable than even the smallest paperback book; and yet it can contain literally hundreds of novels.

But it is not too small. Trying to read anything (for example, an SMS) from my Nokia mobile phone screen, for example, is extremely frustrating. (I know modern Nokia phones have bigger screens, but mine is an old one).

And I do think about the fact that if I had every one of my 3,000 physical books in electronic form, then I could have picked them all up in one hand and carried them out of the way of the painter and the carpet layer in an instant. That surely beats moving one and a half tonnes of dead tree.

On the Other Hand

But…

Yes, there are a few buts.

Firstly, there’s something unsatisfyingly impermanent about owning an e-book. Yes, I can back it up somewhere, but I still don’t quite feel that I possess it in the same way as I possess a physical book. I can’t easily lend it to a friend, or re-sell it.

Secondly, it just doesn’t have the look and the feel of a ‘real’ book. It’s not going to look good on my bookshelf; it’s not something I can admire for its design and its physical construction.

Thirdly – I don’t like the feeling of being ripped off. E-books are still ridiculously expensive. Sure, there are plenty of out-of-copyright free books, but I like reading modern mysteries, thrillers and science fiction. And these cost way too much for their actual value, in my view.

Think about it. Think about what it must cost to design and print a physical book. The cost of the paper and the ink and the machinery to print, fold, stitch and trim it. The cost of packaging. The cost of shipping. The costs of the retailer in employing staff, having the book on their shelves, doing stocktakes, and so on. These all add up to a very large percentage (I guess at least 80%) of the retail price of the book.

Now look at the e-book. Sure, you still have to pay the author his or her usual pittance, maybe still pay the publisher’s staff like editors. But you’d have all those costs anyway if you were publishing a print version. So if there’s a print edition already out, what are the incremental costs of publishing an e-book based on that? You probably got the manuscript in digital form; for sure it was turned into digital form before you went to print. Let’s be generous and say that maybe you have to spend say five hundred dollars employing a geek to convert the book into a number of different e-book formats. And that’s it.

So you could almost certainly make a handsome profit if you sold the e-book for say 25% of the cost of the printed book.

But that’s not what’s happening. This was brought home for me when I compared the cost of a few recent novels in e-book form with the cost of the print editions through Amazon.

In many cases the cost of the e-book is 90% or more of the cost of the printed paperback edition (eg Ruth Rendell’s End in Tears at $11.16 for the paperback, $9.99 for the Kindle version; Orson Scott Card’s Magic Street at $10.17 for the paperback, $9.99 for the Kindle version.

I’m not taking into account shipping costs, which for Amazon books sent to Australia can be significant; but look at it from the point of view of US readers who can often get free shipping from Amazon.

If you don’t have a Kindle, the cost of the e-book can easily be more than the print version, eg the latest Ruth Rendell novel, Not in the Flesh in ePub version (suitable for my iPod) through Fictionwise is $25.95, compared to $10.20 for the paperback. In other words, 250% of the cost of the print edition or more than double the cost of a version that would look good on my bookshelf, that I could lend out, that I could re-sell.

You are paying more for, really, considerably less. This is a rip-off.

Will it last? Well, it’s hard to see it changing. There’s no easy way, unlike music tracks, to get hold of an e-book version without buying it – much harder for an individual to ‘rip’ the content from an analog to a digital form and so much less need for the publishers to compete with illegal downloads.

So publishers of all stripes are going to see that e-books are far more profitable than print books and can essentially charge whatever they please, almost without regard to their actual production costs. I sincerely doubt (as a one-time author myself) that they are likely to pay more to the writers.

Unless there’s a consumer revolt, which I can’t see happening.

Or we all stick to printed books.