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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Here’s a book I should be reading: Hans Rott, Change, choice and inference: A study of belief revision and nonmonotonic reasoning. It will be directly thesis-relevant, and judging by a couple of papers by the guy I’ve read it might be something I’d like to own myself. Except for one leetle teeny detail: it costs [...]
Het Martyrium bookshop has a pretty fine collection of “ramsj” (new books that aren’t selling well, at severe discount). Olga tipped me off; between us we’ve picked up biographies of Bakunin and Perec, essays on Russell, a collection of Harold Bloom‘s criticism, and a selection of recent papers on philosophy of logic and knowledge. The [...]
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Good news: Waterstones (Amsterdam branch) has a pretty fair selection of “graphic novels” (read: comics). Bad news: Waterstones (Amsterdam branch) is fairly pricey. Good news: Said “graphic novels” are on a 3-for-2 sale. Bad news: In fact only about half of said “graphic novels” are on a 3-for-2 sale. Good news: One that I want [...]
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Another story collection as CC-licensed download. It’s The Ant King and Other Stories, by Benjamin Rosenbaum (it’s been up a month or so, apparently, but I just came upon it now). I haven’t read any of it yet, but he’s pretty good at snappy first sentences. “Sheila split open and the air was filled with [...]