Here’s a nice setup. John Holbo and Belle Waring write a book about Plato: translations by Waring, commentary and illustrations by Holbo.1 They reserve e-publishing rights, so as well as the whole ink-and-paper business they can put it online, where you can read it in the surprisingly functional flash interface at issuu.com. You can download [...]
Small Beer press have an insane Buck a Book sale on. They have to clear out old stock to avoid having to pay for longterm storage — that must really suck given the state of the economy… So go help them out and score some great books really cheap! (I particularly recommend Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa [...]
China Miéville has a new book coming out.
In stores four days before my birthday.
Not that I’m hinting at anything, you understand.1
For those who don’t like spoilers, there’s a post on Suvudu with some details, plus video of the author not giving away the central conceit. For those who like spoilers, Publisher’s Weekly lets the cat [...]
The BLDGBLOG Book has become a reality! Can’t wait for this one, and Amazon is selling it for only $20 (even the list price of $30 is less than I expected — it’s pretty illustration-heavy). You can see some spreads on Flickr (adorably photographed on what I presume is the author’s floor, with what I [...]
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
If I’m understanding aright, all these books were typeset using TeX. They’re humanities texts that were judged as having excellent design or production; so they’re not heavy on mathematics and they don’t look anything like the LaTeX standard classes (the site gives a pdf sampler of a few pages for each one). Nice to see [...]
Apparently it’s read-an-ebook week, and has been since… nearly a week ago. Some publishers are offering extra freebies in honour of the occasion, although I must say many of the offerings look pretty hopeless to me. I’m going to let the occasion provoke me into posting, since otherwise I’ll never get those half-baked thoughts out [...]
Oh boy. This started as a small exercise in venting and turned into a full-scale rant. At this point I don’t even know if there’s any content left to it except “Grr, big publishers only sell ebooks in formats I don’t want.” It would be a shame to waste all that typing though, so here [...]
The sixth and final volume of Narbonic has finally gone to print. I couldn’t wait and read the end of the story in the archives, but it’ll be great to get it on paper.
Now we start agitating for the Astonishing Excursions (aka Victorian Narbonic to the Moon! And Venus!). (Apparently the format will make this [...]
Friday, February 20, 2009
I didn’t know.
Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is the first of his books I read, and it sent me on a frantic search for anything else of his I could get my hands on. It’s the first half of a diptych, the second to be titled The Splendor and [...]
Thursday, February 19, 2009
For the first time in ages I’ve bought a book newly printed, all unknowing of its contents. Well, not quite, but I got probably more excited about The Manual of Detection than might seem justified by the sparse reviews and basic lack of hype to be found online. Below the cut, my anticipation and purchase, [...]