Summer is almost here, and it's time to find some light vacation reading. If you're a fan of light fantasy and haven't tried The Iron Druid series by Kevin Hearne, I'd suggest you give them a look. The basic premise is that the main character, Atticus O'Sullivan, is the last Druid, and he's 21 centuries old. He's hardly an old fogey, though. He uses his herb lore to brew a tea that keeps him young and looking about 21. He's got a sidekick, an Irish wolfhound named Oberon, and the exchanges between Atticus and Oberon are among the best parts of the...

I stumbled across Blood Song by Anthony Ryan from a Books on The Knob post. She said it was at the upper end of her "bargain" category, and at $4.99 I had to agree with her. However, I was in the mood for an epic fantasy, and I decided to give it a look and check the ratings. Holy Stars, Batman! The book had over 700 reviews and an average rating of about 4.8. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen something like that. Of course, I read a selection, and they didn't sound like sock puppets. Suddenly $4.99 was...

We've all heard by now about the success of the latest e-book indie darling, Hugh Howey—when his self-published Kindle series became a Kindle best-seller, he made a deal with the big publishers—but in a ground-breaking twist, the deal included only the print rights, and Howey continues to sell the e-books himself. Howey is also notoriously anti-DRM and I dig that, so I finally picked up the Wool Omnibus to see if it was worth the hype. And for the most part? It is. The book is split into five novellas, each taking place in an apocalyptic future where the remains of humanity survive in an elaborate community...

I recently reviewed The Passage by Justin Cronin, the first book in his Passage series. As I said in my previous review, I had enjoyed the first book and was eagerly awaiting the sequel, The Twelve. I'm happy to report that the second book is every bit as good as the first. The e-book version is well done; formatting is good. I saw a few typos, but not enough to detract from my enjoyment. Each major chapter heading had a picture and quote. The image displayed well on both my Nexus 7 and Kindle Touch. The quotes in the image were...

So you may have read my review of How to Format your eBook for Kindle, NOOK, Smashwords, and Everything Else. You remember that one, where I sort of missed that the book was no longer for sale? The author was kind enough to send us a review copy of his revised book, The eBook Design and Development Guide, and I will make up for my goof by reviewing the revised version. I prefer the new title. It's more professional and will, I think, clue potential readers to the fact that this a serious book which goes beyond e-book formatting. Salvette has added...

Sometimes a book comes along that is so good you know it'll stay with you forever. Tears in Rain is one of those books for me. I found it by accident. It showed up on my Kindle with Special Offers earlier this month. I saw it was about replicants and was Prime Lending eligible. I wasn't expecting much, but hey: Free! Now I intend to go back and buy it. It's that good. The story is a thriller. The main character is a replicant private detective who has been hired to investigate some gruesome murders. Bruna Husky is well drawn and three-dimensional. She's...

I read this one back in 2010, when it was first published, and I enjoyed it then. The sequel recently became available from my library in e-book format, and I decided to re-read the first one while I waited through the hold period for the second one. I read Justin Cronin's The Passage as an e-book, and I'm happy to report that the Kindle version is just about perfect. I saw few typos and no formatting errors. The table of contents worked as expected, even with all the sub-chapters. It contains real page numbers, and is a long one, at more than...

If you're a do-it-yourself kind of author, you've probably encountered the "fun" of formatting your book for the various sites. I had no problems uploading my fiction book to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I created a clean HTML file and followed all the prompts. Presto! Published. My non-fiction book was similarly easy to upload to Amazon. But Barnes & Noble stopped me. No matter what I did, I couldn't make the bulleted lists display properly. Being stubborn, I refused to pay someone else to do it for me, so I went in search of a good e-book formatting guide. After reading...

This is Not the End of the Book is a fascinating and intriguing find that I browsed at the bricks-and-mortar bookstore—and then came home and bought for my Kindle. Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, both authors and academics of note in their native countries, spend the book in breezy, gentle dialogue about books, publishing, literature and media. They cover some questions which were new and different, and they cover other questions (such as 'is the book really dead?') which have been debated elsewhere, but seldom by two such educated, erudite bibliophiles. One thing I liked about the dialogue is that Eco and...

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I still mean to get the whole series reviewed so it’s time I got around to another one. As with prior reviews in the series, in each review I’ll include spoilers for previous books or stories but not spoil the ending of the current one. (Too much, anyway.) Remember that if you should want to read this or other books in the series based on my reviews, all the books up through Mission of Honor are available as free e-books via the Fifth Imperium Baen CD site, from...

As I mentioned in my review of Honor Among Enemies, with In Enemy Hands the Honorverse series changes from a pure space navy series to something more politically-based. While there are still plenty of naval battles in the offing, at times the space combat takes a distinct back seat to all the political maneuvering. I suspect that this is why a number of readers seem to feel it “jumped the shark” at this point—they started reading it because they liked space battles, and suddenly it turned into something very different. This book begins a phase of the series expressly...

Next up, chronologically, in the Honorverse are a pair of short stories. Although they have nothing to do with each other, they both cover events that become important in the next book. And they both involve events of great change to their respective worlds—one not violently, but the other very much so. Previously: Introduction Treecat Trilogy A Beautiful Friendship Young Honor and Elizabeth Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances On Basilisk Station The Honor of the Queen...