Cool, thanks! Can anyone comment on the quality of the StoryBundle? Here it is, any must-read here?
- Hopscotch, by Kevin J. Anderson
- In Hero Years...I'm Dead, by Michael A. Stackpole
- On My Way to Paradise, by David Farland
- Santiago, by Mike Resnick
- Swarm, by B. V. Larson
- The Disappeared, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
- (bonus) High-Opp, by Frank Herbert
- (bonus) The Stars in Shroud, by Gregory Benford
I've read Swarm and the others in that series. They are fun pulpy summer time military-adventure-scifi reads. Good page turners without a lot of depth or complexity. I felt a little guilty for enjoying them, but they must have some redeeming qualities as I just keep buying them as fast as they get published!
I think the B.V. Larson books are particularly interesting to programmers as the protagonist is a computer science lecturer who draws a lot of parallels between his challenges "programming" alien technology to meet his needs and programming computers before everything went upside down.
Good question, and another one, is there a website focusing on reviews of ebooks ? And I'm not just talking about contents, but also evaluating the ebook presentations and formats available?
If not, it would be a good idea if someone made one :) There's a market need.
Buy the bundle if you can possibly afford it. Not only are you getting six ebooks for a great price (that you set!!!!), but you're also striking a blow against DRM by proving that people pay for quality digital content.
Also, if you've never read The Last Unicorn, it's actually really funny and self-aware. You may have seen the animated movie some years ago, but IMHO, it's even better as a book!
>Amen friend. I started them again a couple weeks ago and popped through the first three in a week!
A bit off-topic but how long does it take you to finish an average length book? Whenever I try to improve my reading speed I feel that I'm missing about 50% of what's happening in the plot not to mention I can't really get a feel for the quality of the prose at that speed.
I know I've been down the same road before, learning how to speed read and all that without actually getting any satisfying comprehension. Though, I would rarely get any satisfying comprehension at normal or slower reading speeds either, cause my mind would just doze off to sleep after about a page or two. Something about the internal conversion of written symbols to language has always been a bit of a bottleneck for me (and I'm not dyslexic), but it took me a while to put my finger on what it was that made reading such a chore for me, since I have always loved learning and absorbing information in other ways (I.e. talks/lectures). It didn't really click for me what the problem was until I started giving audiobooks a chance. It may seem weird, but prior to that, I had always felt like resorting to audio would be a bit like cheating, and would somehow make my experience of the material less 'genuine' than someone who could pick it up directly from the original source. Not to mention that speed reading seemed a lot faster/efficient than having somebody read to you.
Luckily, I got over that and realized that I could actually retain a miraculous about of information even when listening at 3x normal speeds, making my whole experience of the material a lot more vivid. Now I 'read' like a book or two a week using text-to-speech on my phone, and it's pretty awesome.
In retrospect, it's kinda funny cause I've always had auditory inclinations, like the fact that I had been a musician for almost 10 years when I realized that I'm not much of a visual learner.
I did have a day in there where I was left alone with the book for about 6 hours. How much can you read in 6 relatively uninterrupted hours?
The novels I'm talking about are about 300 pages in paperback. The reading level is not Peanuts, but it's also not Shakespeare.
By comparison, I read the World War Z book over the course of about a week, in bits. I found it very boring and wooden though. Motivation makes a big difference.
Yeah, but he has some interesting recommendations (apparently, just followed the link from here now).
Here in Norway, I'm fairly confident that quite a few great books will be "indefinitely" (at least as long as I would be able to care for my own books) available in libraries. And I see no pressing need to "own" such books -- unless they are truly close to my heart in some way.
But there are some great books, that are unjustifiably rare, and hard to get hold of -- four examples:
* Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling)
* The man who walked to the Moon (Howard McCord)
* Last Chance to See (Douglas Adams)
* Literary Machines (Ted Nelson)
The three first I've bought second hand, still looking for a reasonably priced version of the last one. Such books I enjoy having on my wall, if for no other reason, after recommending them to someone, I can lend them a copy.
But while I have a nice romantic, fuzzy attachment to dead tree books, I'm looking forward to moving towards a digital library. Still waiting for reasonably sized full colour (preferably e-ink) reader that has > 250 dpi and is suitable for both reading comics/graphic novels and books though...
Was coming in here to post about Spin as well. I don't like most sci-fi anymore because most of the books i seem to come across don't have enough of the science feel (I grew up on stuff like Asimov) so Spin was a breath of fresh air.
At some point I should try the sequels for myself but I've also heard they're... not great. Which makes me sad after how much Spin hit the right buttons for me.
This is such a great concept; really glad to see how Humble has expanded to support all kinds of media.
I only wish, as I do for the Android bundles, that Apple would step up its game and allow this kind of thing to be easily supported.
iBooks-native redemption would be great for this and only help keep me in the Apple ecosystem; why the company limits redemption token generation is beyond me.
Its just that I really don't have much incentive to actually buy those... I usually buy books based on recommendation or similarity to something else i like/liked (movies, authors that are the inspiration of something I like, etc).
