Since it’s so long since I wrote about what I have been reading, this can only be the briefest of lists.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Hardcover, my own collection

This historical novel about Thomas Cromwell won the Man Booker Prize last year. I enjoyed it a lot – the historical period is endlessly fascinating (Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey and Anne Boleyn), and in the hands of Mantel, Cromwell comes across as a very sympathetic and interesting character.

But there are some puzzling quirks. The novel is written almost entirely in the present tense, which does lend a sense of immediacy to the work, making it seem less like an historical tome, but also gives it an odd flavor. And Mantel also mostly refers to Cromwell only with the impersonal “he”, which makes for many, many sentences which are deeply ambiguous and which take time to puzzle out (phrases like “He handed him the reins of his horse”).

My biggest puzzle/gripe is the title – “Wolf Hall” is the name of the seat of the Seymour family. Jane Seymour does appear as a character in the novel, but fleetingly, so why use this name as the title for the whole work? And the novel ends with Henry (and Cromwell) about to set off on a precession around the country, to include a visit to Wolf Hall. Bang, end of book. I can only assume that this is really only half a book, that the coming sequel will fill it out and complete it.

Nevertheless, well worth reading.

The Sun Kings by Stuart Clark

Hardcover, my own collection

Interesting enough non-fiction about a British Astronomer who observed and explained a huge solar flare impacting the Earth in the 1800s.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Alison Hoover Bartlett

Hardcover, my own collection

OK but not terrific story about an habitual book thief and the bookseller who tracked him down.

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie

Audiobook on my iPhone

This was the first Rushdie book I’ve read. Slightly weird. Best parts are about the tragic history of Kashmir, obviously deeply felt. But there are some silly plot quirks to do with the supposed one-time American ambassador to India, and one outright totally unbelievable moment. Can you imagine an ex-Ambassador, whose life has been threatened already by terrorists, would be allowed to appoint as his body servant and personal chauffeur, on a whim, a man who has a known record in terrorist activity and the very man whom the Ambassador had cuckolded in India?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

E-book on my iPhone

Not quite as strong as the first two books in the Millenium trilogy, but still a really good read.

Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card

Hardcover, my own collection

Another in Card’s long series about Ender Wiggins and his associates. This one links the story from the close of the Bugger Wars and Ender’s role as Speaker for the Dead. Good stuff, if not fantastic. But the Ender canon is all so really good that it’s hardly surprising that these later additions and fill-ins aren’t knock-outs. But they do usefully expand the picture.

The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G.Wells

E-book on my iPhone

Well worth re-reading. Timeless works. I’m currently re-reading The Invisible Man, also as a (free) e-book.

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

Audiobook on my iPhone

Really gripping thriller. I can see why it was turned into a movie, as the writing is cinematic throughout. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’ll be looking for other books by this author.

Larklight by Phillip Reeve

Hardcover, my own collection

Fun science fiction for younger readers. By the same author who wrote the Mortal Engines series, but much less grim. In fact, designed to amuse and entertain.

The conceit of the books is that Isaac Newton, through his alchemical researches combined with his study of gravity, invented space travel in the late 1700s. So these books are set in the Victorian Era of this alternate history, with the British Empire reaching out into the Solar System, which is populated by a wide variety of creatures and intelligent species. Even the vacuum of space isn’t a vacuum in this alternate world, but ‘the aether’ which is partly breathable.

A lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to reading the sequels.

Currently Reading

I’m currently re-reading, or rather re-listening to The Song of Fire and Ice by George R R Martin, having given up on waiting for Martin to finish the next book in the series.

Also reading:

• The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (paperback)
• The Invisible Man by H.G.Wells (e-book)

And I have a bunch of other e-books lined up waiting for the arrival of my iPad.

The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
– Oscar Wilde

This is a meditation on the price of things in general; but in particular, the price of digital things such as software, games, music and e-books.

It goes without saying we always want to pay as little as possible for whatever we buy. Ideally, we would like everything to be free. But in the real world – at least in the real, non-digital world – we acknowledge that things must have a cost. We still prefer to pay as little as we need to, but we are usually prepared to pay more than the minimum in order to obtain a desired level of quality or value. For example, rotten tomatoes may be selling at 50c for a 5-kilo bag; but we would rather pay more, if we can afford it, to get good quality tomatoes.

In the non-digital world, it costs the farmer something to plant and raise tomatoes, to pick them, and to transport them to the shops. The shops have other costs such as the cost of labor, electricity, rental, the costs of marketing, and so on. These are real costs borne by real people.

All of this means that we basically accept that we have to pay a reasonable price for our tomatoes.

In the equally real, but digital world, the same logic ought to apply to our buying behavior, but there’s an important fact which puts a significant spin on it: the costs of duplication and of distribution of digital items are essentially zero.

Note that I specifically do not say that the costs of production are zero in the digital world. That is far, far from being the case.

The developer who writes a shareware program; the artist who paints a beautiful digital wallpaper; the musician who records a song; the author who writes a book; all supply their labor at the cost of their time, and they also have other significant costs such as equipment, Internet access and electricity. These too are real costs borne by real people.

The big difference between these creators and the farmer is that supply of the digital items they produce is infinite. The cost of duplication is essentially zero, and so is the cost of distribution. A million copies of a song – once it has been created – can be made for the same cost as making one copy, and distributed for essentially no cost to a million computers.

Some people have considered these latter facts to justify paying nothing for such items. But this is clearly unrealistic and unsustainable. The copying and distribution costs may be zero, but the cost of production is not. Some creators may be in a position to donate their labor and subsidize their own costs in order to make their creations available for free; but it is hard to imagine a culture in which this is the norm, unless creators are fully supported by the State (not a healthy situation).

So, sellers must set a price on their digital items. The question is – and this is really the point of this meditation – what is a fair price to set?

E-book prices are in the news because of the recent contretemps between Macmillan and Amazon, with Macmillan winning the battle (but probably not the war) to push up the price of some Kindle books to $14.95. So let’s look at e-books.

I have seen all sorts of calculations on the Internet about what the price of e-books should be. I have even done a few calculations myself, based on reasonable assumptions about the flat costs (the flag-fall, if you like) of producing a book, together with the variable costs (the costs per book sold). Given an accurate estimation of these sets of costs, the only variables which remain in determining whether a book is profitable are the retail price of the book, and the number of copies which are sold.

Anyway, here are two sets of figures based largely on guesswork, but not too far from reality, I think. In each case I have used Goal Seek in Excel to come up with the number of copies which need to be sold to ensure a 5% return to the publisher. In the case of the e-book, I have allowed a small percentage for duplication and distribution (rather than making them zero).

Unless I’m completely out in my estimates* (perhaps in the percentage that the online retailer will take), it seems to me that an ebook should become profitable at a smaller number of copies sold, even at a much lower retail price point than the physical book. And once you have paid for the flat costs, the low per-sale variable costs of e-books mean that you rapidly start to make a lot of money once you are past the break-even point.

The number of copies sold depends enormously on the elasticity of demand. If you halve the price of a book, will you sell twice as many copies? Perhaps not quite. But it does seem reasonable to suggest that you will certainly sell more copies if you discount the price.

But in the current commercial world, publishers seem to be pricing ebooks at ridiculously high prices. For example I just bought Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, the current Man Booker Prize winner. I bought it from Amazon in hardcover. It’s a beautifully produced book, really nice to hold and to look at. A Kindle version is a sad, ephemeral thing in comparison – it’s only advantage at all over the hardcover is that it is more portable. Yet have a look at the Amazon page below, and note the comparative pricing. $15.79 for the hardcover, but $21.10 for the Kindle version.

When an e-book costs far more than the hardcover version, something is badly wrong. More to the point, who in their right mind would buy the e-book version of Wolf Hall at that price, when they can buy a ‘real’ book for less?

If $15.79 is a fair price for the hardcover, you cannot convince me that $21.10 for an electronic version is a fair price point. That price has been determined not by the economics of the situation (because a lower price for the Kindle version would mean the e-book sold well, maximizing profit and return to the author) but by the publisher’s misguided sense of the value of their work.

The digital economy has some way to go yet before it works properly.

* Feel free to correct my assumptions!

The Grail Quest by Bernard Cornwell

Audiobook on my iPhone

Amazon link

This is a trilogy of historical novels, set during the Hundred Years War between England and France (mid 1300s), and centered on the exploits of Thomas of Hookton, an English archer. In those days, the English longbow, en masse, had the devastating impact on opposing armies that the machine gun did during World War I. Arrows from such bows, plied by men trained from youth to have the strength to draw them, could pierce even plate armor.

Cornwell has an excellent sense of period, and has clearly done his historical research thoroughly. There are several battles in the book which – if they were fiction – would seem to strain credibility: the Battle of Crécy, in which the English army in France under the command of Edward III, hugely outnumbered, desperate, out of supplies, and exhausted, nevertheless managed to wipe out a vast proportion of the French nobility and escape; the Battle of Durham, where again a greatly outnumbered English contingent destroyed the flower of Scottish arms and captured the King of Scotland; the Battle of La Roche-Darien where Duke Charles of Brittany thought he had a cunning plan to destroy the English archers, but was in fact defeated and captured. All of these are true stories, but Cornwell brings them vividly (and bloodily) to life; and it’s perfectly credible that his protagonist would be at each of these events, which happened within the span of a few years in the 1340s.

The character development of Thomas, his loves and friends, is all excellently handled, particularly the conflicts between Thomas and his one-time friend, the Scot Robbie Douglas in the last book.

And then there’s the plot device of the search for the Holy Grail. No Arthurian (or even Monty Pythonesque) romance here, but a belief that the relic exists among the powers of the Church, and a connection through Thomas’ family which holds out the tantalising thought that the Grail might really exist and be located. It’s this hope which drives the characters.

Really entertaining reading. And very well narrated by Sean Barrett.

Almost Perfect by W.E. Pete Peterson

E-book on my iPhone

Interesting history of the word processing software which for a time was the best-selling product in the field.

The book could have been subtitled “The Rise and Fall of Word Perfect”, I guess, for the product is now long gone, swept away by the ubiquitous Microsoft Word.

This e-book is a fascinating look at the early history of computing and word processing in particular. Since I am someone who cut their teeth on a dedicated Wang word processing system, and who has seen the introduction and rise of Microsoft’s products, it was particularly interesting to me. But it would be equally interesting, I think, to students of business dynamics and interpersonal relationships in business, as the company grows and grows and relationships get stressed. Peterson eventually gets shafted by his long-time partners, and a fair bit of his resentment and self-justification comes out in the book.

This is only available as an e-book these days as the original is long out of print (if it ever was in print, not sure).

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library) – yes, I’m still reading this – it’s a long book, and I find it hard to find time to sit down with a physical volume these days.
• Ruled Brittania by Harry Turtledove (Ebook)

South! by Sir Ernest Shackleton

E-book on my iPod

Amazon link

This true story of Antarctic adventure in the early years of the 20th Century starts a little slowly, as Shackleton recounts the slow and frustrating progress of the expedition on the ship Endeavour as they vainly try to find a way through pack ice to make a landing on the Antarctic coast.

But it really takes off as a story of almost superhuman endurance and struggle when the Endeavour becomes permanently frozen into the ice, and is eventually crushed and destroyed, leaving nearly 30 men stranded on the shifting ice floes, hundreds of miles from the nearest land and with no hope of communicating with the outside world to seek rescue.

They float with the ice for many long months, unable to do more than hope that they will drift far enough north that they can become free of the pack ice and launch the ship’s boats which they drag with them from floe to floe. The long, long struggle to reach land is harrowing. Finally they manage to struggle ashore on Elephant Island, a desolate crag with barely any shore – and no people. From there, Shackleton and another five men set out in the strongest boat to try to reach the nearest outpost of civilization – the whaling station on South Georgia. Amazingly, they manage to do it, only to find they are on the far side of the island from the whaling station, and so have to trek across mountains and glaciers to reach help.

Even when they do reach the station, it is many months before a ship can successfully reach the stranded men on Elephant Island. It is astonishing that despite all the privations, not one man was lost on the expedition. And grimly ironic that most of the men, once rescued, set off for home to join up with those still fighting in the trenches in World War I, where many of them are then killed.

Real – but true life – Boy’s Own material.

The Appeal by John Grisham

Audiobook

Amazon link

This is a bleak indictment of the power of corporations and their disdain for the common person, as Grisham looks at the fall-out from a courtroom success against a major chemical company. The little guy – the community devastated by pollution of their water supply by the company – has won! But has he? Not if the billionaire running the company has anything to say about it. Quite gripping reading, but ultimately pretty depressing.

All the Colors of Darkness by Peter Robinson

E-book on my iPhone

Amazon link

This is the latest in Robinson’s series about Detective Chief Inspector Banks, set in the North of England. And I think Robinson has finally jumped the shark with the series. What starts off as apparently a straightforward case of murder-suicide by a homosexual man blows out into a pointless investigation into whether the murder had been triggered by Iago-like whisperings from another party – pointless because it’s clear all through that no charges can be laid against such a person – and into fantastical stuff with the involvement of Britain’s spy agency MI6 (with apparently unlimited powers).

Definitely not the best book of the series, but possibly the last, as I can’t see where Robinson can go from here with any credibility. A great pity.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library) – yes, I’m still reading this.
• Almost Perfect by W.E. Pete Peterson (Ebook)
• Harlequin by Bernard Cornwell (Audiobook)

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)

The Jetty Journals by Ian Buchanan

E-book on my iPod.

This is a short novel aimed at teenagers, written by a good friend of mine and now published as an e-book through Smashwords.

Ian sent me an electronic copy of his novel a couple of years ago and urged me to read it; but what with one thing and another I didn’t get around to it. A large part of my reluctance, I think, was just that I hate reading anything of any real length on the computer screen. Reading for pleasure is part of what I call the ‘couch culture’. Reading stuff from the computer screen is part of ‘desk culture’ and too much like hard work.

Anyway, when he let me know that it was available as an e-book in a format suitable for my iPod Touch, I downloaded it and read it with pleasure in a few days.

The book tells the story of a small group of Melbourne teenagers who survive a global pandemic which kills off a very large percentage of the population. Well, it turns out, it didn’t actually kill everyone – some people survive, but unpleasantly changed…

The book is strong on the group’s desperate struggles to survive, and full of local color – set mainly on the Mornington Peninsula which runs along the eastern edge of Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay.

I found it very enjoyable, though I felt the ending was a little incomplete. Ian tells me, though, that he has a sequel in the works, which should satisfy that feeling.

Secret Asset by Stella Rimington

E-book on my iPod.

This is the second novel by the one-time head of Britain’s MI5, and as with her first novel, is full of convincing detail about the management of agents and the investigation of terror threats.

A terrorist plot is detected, but with insufficient information to track down the suspects; an old IRA member lies dying and reveals a secret vulnerability of Britain’s security forces; our heroine Liz Carlyle is delegated to investigate some of her fellow staff, looking for a mole.

I found the ending of this one to be a little unsatisfactory – perhaps not quite credible – as the mole is finally identified, their motivation discovered, and the terrorist plot revealed. But still, good page-turning stuff.

Current Reading

I’m currently part-way through:

• Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library)
• The Great War – Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove (Audiobook)
• South by Sir Ernest Shackleton (E-Book)

I’ve just finished reading Ken Follett’s massive historical novel, The Pillars of the Earth, and enjoyed it greatly. It’s a gripping saga of love and hate, emnity and friendship, ambition and humility surrounding the building of a cathedral in 12th Century England.

As I say, it’s a massive book: 973 pages in the hardcover version, two and a half inches thick, weighing about three pounds. Pretty hard to hold in the hand, or even to read in bed. A real pain to lug around on the train or the bus.

That’s the hardcover, of course, but the paperback isn’t much better, still weighing over two pounds, and two inches thick.

Yet the version that I read weighed only about four ounces and was so small that I could slip it into my pocket, carry it everywhere and could read it any time I had a few minutes to spare.

I read it as an e-book on my iPod Touch, of course.

I must confess that I hesitated a long while before buying The Pillars of the Earth from Fictionwise; it seemed slightly insane to attempt to read a nearly 1000-page book on the small iPod screen. But after a while, I gave in. After the “Micropay Rebate” which Fictionwise offers, it cost me less than $5. Half a cent a page seemed a pretty good deal!

After it was installed on my iPod it looked even more daunting. At the font size which I find comfortable, eReader told me that the book was some 3,332 pages (screens?) long. I was going to have to tap my iPod screen at least that many times. Wouldn’t that get exhausting?

The iPhone / iPod Touch is often denigrated as an e-book reader (particularly by Kindle fans) because of the small form factor of the screen. They certainly have a point when discussing newspapers and magazines or textbooks with formulas, illustrations and diagrams. But I think they miss the point when it comes to novels or even general non-fiction books. The fact is that for such books the form factor is close to irrelevant.

All that is needed for comfortable reading is an easily readable font size and style and enough words on the screen that you can read and grasp a typical paragraph or two at a time. Once immersed in the story, your brain stops paying attention to how the story is being delivered to it. Well, that is what I have found, anyway.

The Pillars of the Earth has been treated well in the conversion by Fictionwise. The structure of prologue, parts and chapters is all respected; and each major part has an attractive illustration which displays neatly on the iPod screen. It was, really, a delight to read. I wasn’t counting screen taps – after all, who counts the number of page turns you make when reading a hardcopy book? And I could take it with me all the time and read it whenever I had the urge and the opportunity.

Then I thought of an interesting connection in reading this particular book – much of it set in a mediaeval monastery where monks labour over their copying desks. I remembered an exhibition I went to last year at our State Library – a collection of beautiful mediaeval manuscripts. These gorgeous books came in all sizes – from the huge Bibles intended for use on a lectern, to the tiny Book of Hours which could be easily slipped into a sleeve or pocket.

While the screen of the iPod Touch in the eReader application doesn’t look as splendid as the beautifully illustrated Book of Hours, in terms of the number of words per page, it does pretty well, as the following comparison shows.

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.

While I’ve been reading a fair bit over the last fortnight, I haven’t completed very much in the period.

I’m part way through:

• Trunk Music by Michael Connelly (Audible audiobook)
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (Ebook on my iPod)
• Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol I by Edward Gibbon (Ebook on my iPod)

I confess that I’m reading Gibbon’s massive treatise on the iPod just to prove that it can be done, and how well the iPod Touch/iPhone works as an ebook reading platform, something I’m growing increasingly to believe. Even Gibbon’s extensive footnotes work pretty well thanks to intelligent formatting by Gutenberg (from where I sourced the book).

On the down-side, Lexcycle, who produce the Stanza ebook software I had been using to read books on my iPod, dropped the ball. They released a new version incorporating a dictionary lookup feature which manages to interfere with the comfort of reading (the feature pops up if your finger dwells a fraction of a second too long on the screen when you are turning pages). They have promised to fix it, but in the meantime I’m using the almost-as-good eReader from Palm.

Friend of the Devil  by Peter Robinson.

Ebook on my iPod Touch.

I grew up in what is now West Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. Robinson was born not far away from where I was born, and only a year before me. His series of novels about Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks are all set in this part of the world, so many of the places he writes about are quite familiar to me from my childhood. This, of course, adds to the interest I have in this series.

But even if you don’t know this area of the world, DCI Banks is an engaging and multi-layered character with a complex private life, and the cases he encounters are full of interest and mystery. In this novel, the 17th in the series, a young woman is raped and murdered in the town of Eastvale; and in what seems a completely different case, a woman quadriplegic is found murdered in her wheelchair at the top of a set of cliffs facing over the North Sea. How these two cases – one handled by Banks, one by his colleague and ex-lover Annie Cabot – are related only becomes clear as the book progresses. A really intriguing read, and the ending was not at all obvious for almost all of the book.

Various Blogs

Here are some links to a few of the blogs I read regularly:

Coding Horror  by Jeff Atwood

This is always must-read stuff for me. Jeff Atwood talks intelligently and interestingly about the craft of programming, and continually introduces me to new thoughts, and links to things I ought to know or to think about.

I, Cringely  by Robert X. Cringely

Cringely wrote one of the best, and funniest, books about the early days of the computer industry which I have ever read: Accidental Empires (or, How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date)

He writes regularly and very intelligently about technology. While he’s occasionally a bit too self-important and self-congratulatory for my taste, he’s never less than thought-provoking and well-informed.

Whimsley  by Tom Slee

This British-born Canadian doesn’t blog anywhere never enough so far as I am concerned. He writes very clever and amusing stuff, sometimes at great length, about the digital economy. For example, he dedicated dozens of well-thought-out posts to demolishing the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson; and he has written amusingly about the hidden flaws in the way that Google and Amazon work.

I hope Slee keeps on blogging, because I want to keep on reading his stuff.

Journal  by Sam Pepys

This guy blogs just about every day, and it’s all full of his rich life in London, all the stupidities and corruption of the politicians and bureaucrats that he has to work with, about all the women he bonks (he’s a very naughty man!), his long-suffering wife, and the renovations he’s having done to his house. Just lately, he’s been rather worried about the spread of a dangerous infectious disease in the city, seemingly on the rise every day. And about the progress of the current war with the Dutch, of course.

Fascinating reading. Oh, did I mention that this guy is writing in the 1660s?

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.