Previously:

1. Introduction
2. Treecat Trilogy
3. A Beautiful Friendship
4. Young Honor and Elizabeth
5. Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances
6. On Basilisk Station
7. The Honor of the Queen
8. The Short Victorious War
9. Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble
10. Field of Dishonor
11. Flag in Exile
12. Honor Among Enemies

Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order:

• “Changer of Worlds” by David Weber (Changer of Worlds anthology)
• “A Whiff of Grapeshot” by S.M. Stirling (More than Honor anthology)

“Changer of Worlds” is another story concerning the treecats, told from the treecats’ point of view—and is currently the only such tale apart from the three stories in the “Treecat Trilogy” above (plus the novel A Beautiful Friendship), It’s also the only story where we actually get to see Nimitz and Samantha (or “Laughs Brightly” and “Golden Voice”, as they name themselves) as other treecats see them.

The story forms a sort of companion piece to the much earlier treecat stories, as in those stories the treecats decided to conceal how clever they truly were. Now, after their experiences in the humans’ war, Nimitz and Samantha have concluded it is time for the treecats to end their charade and expand, with the humans’ help, to form colonies on other worlds. The question is whether the older and wiser treecats at Nimitz’s home clan can be convinced of that.

The story brings out a number of revelations about the ‘cats which the humans in the story don’t get to learn until several books later. For example, Samantha is an extremely unusual treecat in more ways than just being an adopting female. She’s also a memory singer, one of the treecats who is gifted with an extraordinary memory and psychic projection abilities that she can use to pass on accumulated treecat knowledge.

As with the other stories, treecats’ psychic conversations are rendered as idiomatic English, which some may find a trifle unrealistic given how treecat communication is presented from humans’ point of view. But it helps to demonstrate the treecats’ distinctive personalities, and even rendered into English the treecats still speak differently than human characters.

From an action standpoint, not a lot happens in the story: it’s basically one long psychic conversation. But the decision the treecats make is an important one, and the first direct result is seen in the next novel, In Enemy Hands. It’s not strictly necessary to read the story to understand what happens the novel, of course, given that Honor pretty correctly pegs the reasoning behind it at the time. Still, it’s interesting to see it from the treecats’ point of view.

I wonder why there aren’t more treecat stories, or treecat points of view rendered in the novels? Perhaps it’s because a little goes a long way, and Weber doesn’t want to dilute the specialness of treecats in his stories—or doesn’t want to annoy further the people who find treecats annoying enough already.

(And as an aside: I think that the story collection Changer of Worlds has one of the most awful covers of any of the Honorverse novels. It does have the starships at least roughly correct, but on the other hand it has a couple of rather awful depictions of treecats, not to mention Honor Harrington’s giant…blue face in the background. What a mess!)

The other story, “A Whiff of Grapeshot,” represents the first chronological appearance of Esther McQueen, another one of those characters who is a direct analogue of a historical figure from the French Revolution. McQueen shows that, despite giving Pierre, St. Just, and Admiral Lester Tourville similar names to their historical antecedents, Weber does have some sense of restraint—otherwise he would have named McQueen “Esther Bonaparte.”

Indeed, the phrase “a whiff of grapeshot” harks back to Napoleon clearing the streets of an angry mob in 1795 by firing cannons into it. (It was coined by British historian Thomas Carlyle, not said by Napoleon himself.) And that is essentially what happens in this story, albeit scaled up to futuristic military levels.

Rob S. Pierre and his Committee for Public Safety are under assault by a huge mob, prompted by a group of anarchists that wants to unseat them in a coup. With its communications paralyzed, almost every unit in the Havenite navy is unwilling to act lest the rest of the navy think it is taking part in the coup. It’s left up to Admiral Esther McQueen, already under suspicion from the Committee for her demonstrated ambition, to rescue the Committee and disperse the angry mobs with her own form of “grapeshot”—much more lethal than anything the original Napoleon ever had.

McQueen is shown to be very clever—perhaps too clever for her own good, as she demonstrates to her political minder Erasmus Fontein that she had a squad of marines on call ready to charge in and rescue her on a moment’s notice. But Fontein (and his superiors in the Committee of Public Safety) soon have ample reason to be glad she did.

This is the first story, chronologically, that goes into any real depth concerning Pierre and cohorts in their tenure as the rulers of the People’s Republic of Haven, which means it is a sort of introduction to the politics that characterizes subsequent books in the series. The events covered here set up some changes in leadership that come during In Enemy Hands—as well as certain climactic events further down the road.

Rob S. Pierre makes an interesting contrast to Weber’s usual run of villains. Unlike the rest of the cavalcade of self-important idiots or scheming manipulators, Pierre always struck me as something of a tragic figure—spurred into taking out the Harris government by the death of his son in a military action, he started out thinking that he could make great changes and rescue his society from the rut it was trapped in. But when he got to the top, he found the seat of power was as much prison as throne, because the old system simply had too much inertia to allow the reforms he wanted to make—Haven’s citizenry might well turn violent if he tries, and as this story shows there are those who will try to unseat him no matter what he does.

Pierre seems to be a decent person trapped by circumstances, unlike his fellow rulers—the sociopathic Oscar St. Just, the psychopathic Cordelia Ransom. He is often troubled or even horrified by their excesses, but there isn’t much he can do except continue to ride the tiger and hope he doesn’t fall off. But even if Pierre manages to survive the mob attack in this story, it’s pretty clear that things are probably not going to end well for him.

Of course, both the Committee and McQueen will see much further action in the next Honor Harrington novel, In Enemy Hands—as will the treecats. I’ll have more to say about that in the next Honorverse review.

Previously:

1. Introduction
2. Treecat Trilogy
3. Young Honor and Elizabeth
4. Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances
5. On Basilisk Station
6. The Honor of the Queen
7. The Short Victorious War
8. Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble
9. Field of Dishonor

Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order:

• A Beautiful Friendship by David Weber

For this book, we actually jump back to the beginning of the chronology, because this novel is an expanded version of the novella of the same name, which I reviewed as part of the “Treecat Trilogy”. In fact, it also serves as a partial sequel to the second story in that group, “The Stray”, as well. Unlike most books in the Honor Harrington series, A Beautiful Friendship is not free to read—yet. I expect it will be bundled on the CD that will probably accompany A Rising Thunder next year.

The first third or so of the novel is a slightly expanded version of the novella. It is mostly the same, but has a few infodumps added—mostly in the form of Stephanie’s or the treecat Climbs Quickly’s internal monologues.

The second part picks up where that story left off, with Stephanie Harrington and her family fighting for treecats to be accorded the respect they deserve as the autochthonous sentient race of Sphinx. The problem is that Sphinx developing sentient inhabitants would cause a great deal of political trouble, particularly to land speculators whose options would suddenly become worthless.

This second part also incorporates Dr. Scott MacDallan and the other main characters from “The Stray”, as Stephanie seeks them out in the hope that they might prove allies in her quest for treecat recognition. In the meantime, she has to deal with well-meaning anthropologists who might potentially harm treecats’ cause in the name of studying them—and with one individual who turns out not to be so well-meaning after all.

The story is kind of what we’ve come to expect from Honorverse stories: heroic character must contend with well-meaning but naïve supporters, outright idiots, and a villain with nastier motivations. People who find the Honor Harrington books a bit repetitive in that regard will probably find this one about the same, but those who enjoy the formula in general will enjoy it here too. There’s a rather blatant tuckerization in the latter half of the book that I find just a wee bit too twee, but Weber will be Weber.

The book’s biggest problem has to do with “The Stray”. The story is heavily referenced, and its events are of direct consequence to what happens in the last part of the novel. The fact that the story itself is not actually there can leave new readers scratching their heads and wondering how they missed something. Ideally the story should have been reprinted within the book between the first and second parts, but since it was written by another author that would undoubtedly have led to complications.

With that being said, I’m not so sure how well the story works as a jumping-on point for new readers. It will be a treat for existing Honorverse fans who might have wondered what happened to the characters in “A Beautiful Friendship” and “The Stray”, but I’d suggest even those fans might want to revisit the free-to-read “The Stray” in between the two parts of the book.

A Beautiful Friendship is ostensibly a young-adult novel, but it’s one of those novels that gains the label simply because its protagonist is a teenager. There’s nothing about it that should turn off any adults, especially any adult Honorverse fans.

Perhaps the worst thing about the story is that we know that, no matter what Stephanie and friends do, treecats won’t get the true respect she wants for them until “What Price Dreams?” 170 years later, well after Stephanie is dead. I would rather like to see a novel expanding that story.

Coming Up: Getting back to the chronological reviews with Flag in Exile.

At the moment there is no structure in place that allows review copies to be delivered directly to the reviewer as an eBook. Publishers rightly furrow their brow over DRM and how files can be passed around too easily, but was this not always the case? NetGalley provide a service that is most likely to give us what we want, but it is still unchartered territory in this country. And emailing files directly to reviewers’ Kindles is now done more frequently, as it was for this year’s Booker Prize judges, but the spectre of DRM still lurks.

Though Harvie doesn’t mention this, a lot of publishers have been trying e-review copies, but in such a way as to turn off the very reviewers they should be courting. Witness John Scalzi’s annoyed reaction to the hoops publishers expected him to jump through to read e-ARCs.

As I see it, there are a couple of easy options publishers have for sending review copies electronically. One such option would be to forego the DRM and send the e-copy unencrypted. I’m pretty sure Baen does this already, but the idea gives most publishers heartburn. But I would be inclined to ask: if you trust this person enough to want him to review your book, why are you treating him like a possible criminal who will scatter it to the digital winds?

But that being said, I think another option should be pretty obvious: send the reviewer a gift certificate code to let him “buy” the book himself from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or whatever other e-book store the publisher wants to use. (This is how Jenna Moran made a review copy of Nobilis 3rd Edition available to me for my review of it here.) The publisher would probably have to cut some sort of special deal with the store to make the e-book available “early” to such would-be reviewers, but it handily avoids the DRM hoop-jumping problem—the reviewer need jump through no more hoops than he would if he bought the thing for himself.

And the way that Amazon is partnering with Overdrive and libraries suggests another alternative: instead of “buying” the e-book, reviewers could be allowed to “check it out” from a very private section of Amazon’s e-library. The book evaporates after the review period is over, and isn’t left cluttering up the reviewer’s own e-book library.

The problem of getting an e-book from the publisher to the consumer has already been solved. Getting an e-book from the publisher to an early reviewer should really just take a minor adjustment to that process.

On Friday from 9am EST-8pmEST, stop by the PubIt! Facebook page. We’ll post as status updates the blogger’s call for submissions.

Under each blogger that’s a good fit for your work, post 2 sentences describing your book. Be sure to include your genre, length of work, and your pen name if it is different from your Facebook identity.

Please note that you can only pitch books already published through PubIt! Please include the link to your product page.

Bloggers interested in your work have been asked to reach out to you directly (through a direct message on Facebook) by Tuesday. At that point you can learn what materials they would like to receive for review. Please respect the bloggers’ selection process and don’t be discouraged if you don’t receive a response this time.

Via eBookNewser

You should read the full post for details, but here are three general categories I found interesting:

• Technical issues – The EBM is great when the glue has been pre-heated, all the parts work correctly, and you’ve got a customer who actually wants one of the 3,000,000 mostly very old public domain titles available. Anderson writes, “We knew this going in, but it’s still been a bit disappointing that more current content hasn’t been added more quickly to the database. (On the other hand, one of the great strengths of the EspressNet book database is its depth: shortly after installing our EBM, we were able to find and print an obscure 300-year-old German text for a faculty member who had been trying, unsuccessfully, to find a printed copy of the book for years.)”
• Content, search, and bad metadata – Publishers seem slow to add content, and the search interface for finding books is clunky. Worst of all, though, is “the abominable quality of its metadata, much of which comes from Google Books. At this point in time, searchers cannot assume that their results are accurate, which is hugely frustrating. Inflexible search is a problem, but bad metadata in a 3,000,000-title database is an enormous problem, one that can’t be solved without significant expense.”
• Customers are unpredictable – You can never predict what people will want, and so far Anderson’s library has found that its biggest revenue generator is a blank, bound journal, with a printed cover using images from the library’s digital collections. Other promising services: self-publishing and small print runs for a scientific society’s annual proceedings. ” The lesson we’ve learned here is that just as expected opportunities may fail to materialize, unexpected ones will almost surely crop up if you’re watching for them.”

The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy: Our Espresso Book Machine Experience [The Scholarly Kitchen]

(Photo: TheCreativePenn)

Liszewski also explains how you can access the hidden sudoku game:

If you go into the ‘About Kobo Touch’ section of the device’s main settings, on the last page you’ll notice that one of the names in the ‘Special Thanks To’ list is actually very, very small…

It’s not a formatting error though. Tapping on Richard Penner’s name will bring up a secret Sudoku game that has 4 levels of difficulty, as well as the ability to put ‘temporary’ numbers in each space as you work through solving the grid. I can understand why it’s not exactly a selling feature and why the company makes no mention of it in their PR for the Touch, but I think a lot of users would be happy to see it moved to a more accessible place in future software updates, because it’s actually quite playable.

The pros of this program are immediately apparent: the interface is rather DIY friendly, the icon design seemed crisp and best of all the creation of the TOS (Table of Contents) couldn’t be simpler. One merely highlights the chapter heading as an h1 or h2 (or any ‘h’, really) for each chapter, then hit a button and “voila!” the beautifully-linked chapters appear in a list on the right hand side, glowing in their success and all ready to be tested. This contrasts to the more involved, coded approach that users of Calibre have struggled with, sometimes abandoning their TOS altogether.

I was also pleased to see that Sigil forms all the files necessary for an ePub file (the epub, the cover image and the metadata file) into one easy-to-upload unit, which consumers likewise can download in a less-confusing fashion than juggling three separate files.

The cons of using Sigil were not as clear as the pros, and unfortunately have proven–thus far–to be insurmountable. The program does not ‘like’ imports of text formatted in html and its ePub “validation” process creates a long list of errors to “repair” with very little information on how to find or fix said errors. After combing through various ePub-makin’ forums I managed to glean a few answers and apply them, but as of yet the ePubs I’ve made with Sigil still won’t work on either of the two devices I’ve uploaded them to. It could merely be my own inexperience with the newer program, but I noted that I had viable, readable ePubs using Calibre in less than half the time it took Sigil to generate its list of errors. I was saddened by all this, mostly for the loss of the svelte TOS for whose sake I embarked on a two-day quest for forum help. Hopefully, I can find all the errors and deliver another piece detailing what ‘worked’ but, for now–in my opinion-Calibre remains the top self-publisher’s open-source ePub creator.

Via Greene Ink

Among the good things Ars Technica found: The keyboard is easier to type on than the Kindle’s, because the “Symbols menu recasts each letter key as one of the symbols, meaning you don’t have to scroll around to include a period, comma, or exclamation point.” The directional button works well, and both it and the home/back buttons are nicely placed, at least if you’re right-handed. (The review doesn’t mention the left-handed experience.) It also offers reasonably fast page turns, “but not markedly faster than on the Kindle.”

As for what’s bad: There’s no way to search in or annotate books (although Basten noted in that earlier post that Google promises to add annotation via an update in the future). Customization options are severely limited, with no way to change margins or line spacing. If you have vision problems, you might be disappointed by the upper limit in font size on the Story HD when compared to what the Kindle can display. Visually, the back is “a weird, fallow shade of brown, of all the possible color choices in the world.”

Read the full review at Ars Technica.

Ars Technica reports that Google will release the first e-ink reader optimized for Google Books in about a week. The iRiver Story HD, apparently a revision of iRiver’s 2009 Story e-reader, will include wifi and a qwerty keyboard, and cost $139.99 suggested retail when it hits the street July 17th. I’m not so sure I like the look of the page-turning button being in the middle of the device, with no apparent turning buttons to left and right. Still, we’ll see how it goes.

Business Wire reports that, thanks to the Nook Color and Amazon’s current lack of a color reader, Barnes & Noble actually sold more total e-book readers than Amazon in the first quarter of 2011. Market research company IDC reports that media tablets and e-readers saw the usual post-holiday sales fall-off, but e-reader sales show growth of 105% over last year. It will be interesting to see if the putative two-faced Amazon Android tablet helps Amazon recover sales momentum.

Amazon.com has decided that Sacramento Book Review and San Francisco Book Review can no long post reviews books in the customer review section of Amazon.com and have removed three years of book reviews we’ve provided to authors. They feel it is a violation of their terms of service.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience this causes you. We’ve been posting our reviews to Amazon for almost three years now, without any issue, and Amazon were not forthcoming in the exact reason why they made this decision. This has also happened to several other companies that review books and post those reviews to Amazon (including Portland Book Review), so we don’t necessarily feel singled out.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We’re very disappointed in Amazon’s decision to remove all of our book reviews.

You can also send a comment about this decision to Amazon through their Help email system. You can find that by signing into your account and then going to Help (bottom right of the account summary page) and then selecting the Contact Us button on the right sidebar of the help page.

In addition to talking with Amazon about appealing this decision, we’ll be looking into new ways and places to post your reviews and will update you as we have something new.

Your review will remain always available on either (and, in most cases, both) of our websites: SacramentoBookReview.com & SanFranciscoBookReview.com

I was very surprised that a conglomerate–famous for its infallible consumer reviews–would delete three years’ worth of those self-same reviews but also that it would give no real reason for the sudden action. I replied back with an email of digital sympathy, wondering whether or not this decision was tied to the fact that 1776 Productions is a California-based company. I found out that several other book-review publications have had this occur, some of which are based in the other states where Amazon has closed its Affiliates Program.

Yesterday a source informed me that Amazon was actively searching out posts by book-review companies and websites that had some sort of sponsored review program and were removing their reviews (all of them, not just the sponsored reviews) as well as taking away their ability to post more reviews. Apparently, in each case no warning was given nor notification of exactly why this was happening… just the standard “you’ve been found to be in violation of our posting standards.”

Here’s the rub… it appears that Amazon only paints a few with this brush, seemingly ignoring the rest: Kirkus reviews are still posted, as are Forword’s Clarion reviews and Publisher’s Weekly. This is not even mentioning some of Amazon’s “top ten” reviewers that charge for their services. To be fair, Amazon’s terms of posting do clearly state that there can be no compensation for any review other than a copy of the book, a TOS that sponsored reviews violate.

That being said, what about the other 90% of the reviews which do not? In the last three years I have penned hundreds of books reviews, only a handful of which were sponsored… but for Amazon that little fact didn’t matter. Many authors, myself included, use Amazon reviews as part of a larger publicity strategy. It is quite a process to get a book to be picked up by a publication, reviewed and have that review published in places where folks will see it. If Amazon was not popular in consumers eyes for relevant reviews on a variety of products, then it wouldn’t matter who they exclude or overlook.

As far as the publications affected are concerned the lack of warning seems to be the most irksome part. Given some notice they could have (and would have) taken down any problem reviews thus saving the majority from deletion. I realize that Amazon can do what it likes with its own website, and the state of California has long been known as being rather hostile towards businesses by stacking the shoulders of entrepreneurs with numerous regulations, extensive fees and some of the highest taxes in the nation… and yet, Amazon taking down years of reviews–and leaving those of other companies–strikes me as extremely strange.

Do you think, as many on my fellow reviewers and LinkedIN contacts do, that this move is simply a scare tactic, aimed at the hulking ship of California (and the other states Amazon has severed virtual ties with), in order to make it turn from its current course and cut Amazon a deal?

Via Greene Ink

(Photo: Chris Radcliff)

Perhaps as a result of the disorder brought about by his untimely demise, the copyrights on many of Piper’s works were never renewed. They now reside in the public domain, where they can be read for free on sites like Project Gutenberg, or the Baen Best Of Gutenberg Science Fiction CD.

Recently, writer John Scalzi looked at one of Piper’s books, Little Fuzzy, and started thinking about how he could "reboot" it in the same way that the recent Star Trek movie rebooted the franchise. And then he wrote that reboot, a novel called Fuzzy Nation. At the time, he did not actually have any expectation of publishing it—he simply wrote it as a writing exercise to get his mind off of a contract negotiation that had not turned out well. After he finished it, he took a look at it, thought it was pretty good, and contacted the H. Beam Piper estate for permission to publish it.

As Scalzi explained on his blog, even though Little Fuzzy is in the public domain, there were enough "fuzzy" legal areas to make publishing it without permission tricky, and since he meant it as a tribute to Piper he felt better about having their permission anyway. Happily, he got the permission, and the book quickly found a publisher. It has recently come out in print and electronic form, and I have read it. I am now going to compare and contrast the original Little Fuzzy, and the reboot Fuzzy Nation.

In an author’s note, Scalzi writes that "Fuzzy Nation is not intended to supplant or improve upon Little Fuzzy, which would be impossible to do." He calls Little Fuzzy a " wonderful book" and hopes that Fuzzy Nation will inspire more people to read that original book. I certainly can’t argue with that, and I’m happy to note that Fuzzy Nation is itself also worth reading.

Little Fuzzy

Written in 1962, Little Fuzzy is the story of Jack Holloway, an aging prospector on the frontier planet of Zarathustra, who happens to encounter a new sapient life form indigenous to that planet. He calls this life form "fuzzies", because they are small, fur-covered humanoids.

This discovery has the effect of upsetting the corporation that holds the charter to exploit that planet. If this species is confirmed to be sapient, they will lose the charter and their entire investment—and since Zarathustra is the only planet in the galaxy where rare sunstone GM’s can be found, the corporation’s executives have a significant stake in seeing that these creatures are not found to be sapient at all.

The matter escalates, until it ends up in a fairly unorthodox courtroom battle, a double headed murder trial with a clever twist: the court uses a device called a "veridicator", a sort of advanced lie detector that reliably displays whether the person speaking actually believes what he is saying.

Little Fuzzy is a fun book to read, especially if you enjoy fifties and sixties science-fiction in general. It is full of the same sort of generally hopeful themes that science fiction of that era had—see the original Star Trek for another example. It also features some of the standard male-female relationship themes of the 1960s, though it does subvert them a bit in that the main female character is a professional, fully competent in her field, and ends up making an extremely important contribution to the protection of the fuzzies.

A number of Piper’s works focused on the relationship between human colonists and native species of planets that humans had colonized. Sometimes Piper’s humans come across as a bit paternalistic—as in the case of his story "Oomphel in the Sky", which revolved around a human quelling a native religious uprising by explaining to the shamans that humans don’t have an afterlife and need the natives’ help to try to create one. But here, the story revolves around fuzzies’ right to self-determine, with the sympathetic humans firmly on the fuzzies’ side.

In the end, Little Fuzzy is a really fun book to read, and since it’s available electronically for free, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t start reading it right now. Go on, be my guest!

Fuzzy Nation

And now we come to the reboot. In Fuzzy Nation, Scalzi approaches the same situation—small, furry humanoids discovered on a profitable mining planet—from the point of view of a modern understanding of corporations. Whereas in the original Little Fuzzy, the Miners were all independent claim-stakers, like ’49ers in the gold rush days, in Fuzzy Nation they are all contracted labor who work at the behest of the corporation. And that’s not the only thing Scalzi changed.

Whereas in the original, Jack Holloway was at least middle-aged—a recapitulation of the stereotypical "miner ’49er"—in the reboot he is a much younger disbarred lawyer…and kind of an unlikable asshole. He is a self-centered, manipulative, smart-alec, and is more than once shown to be too clever for his own good. He’s on the outs with his ex-girlfriend because he lied at a corporate hearing, resulting in a black mark in her file. (Naming a hill after her and then having it strip-mined didn’t help, either.) A lot of Scalzi’s characters can be like that—more anti-heroes than heroes.

It’s tempting to cast this as a story of the rebooted Holloway’s redemption, in which he finds something more to care about than just himself. And to an extent, there is an element of that. But far more, it seems that this is just a story of Holloway finding a good cause that he can bend his natural, unredeemed assholishness in service of—he does not seem to be a significantly different person at the end of the story than he was when it began.

As might be expected from having its protagonist be a former lawyer, Fuzzy Nation has plenty of courtroom drama in it as well—though nothing like the original’s veridicator. Undoubtedly that was a far too innocent and optimistic idea for these cynical times—indeed, an important part of the story turns on some characters being able to lie in the courtroom.

There are some other similarities, as well, such as those having to do with discovery of the fuzzies’ method of communication. But there are also some important differences—and going too deeply into those differences would be to give too much away. Suffice it to say that readers of the original will be in for quite a surprise at the climax.

Scalzi puts the story together like a stage magician. There are enough loaded Chekhov’s Guns scattered here and there in the text to form a veritable mantelpiece arsenal—but part of the fun is that these guns are not always obvious until right after they go off. And then the reader is grinning, slapping his forehead, and laughing at what was so obvious in retrospect but he didn’t see it until that very moment. (Or at least, the reader is if he’s me.)

Even if the protagonist is a bit unlikable, and I think Little Fuzzy is the better book overall, Fuzzy Nation is a fun book to read. I’m not sure that I would say it’s worth the $11.99 that Tor wants for the e-book version, but the price will come down if you wait, and there are libraries in the meantime.

Now get out there and do some fuzzy reading!

Enter game journalist Geoff Keighley. Keighley had written a series of articles called "Final Hours” about the production of various other computer games in the ‘90s and 00’s for posting to GameSpot, most recently one on half life two in 2004. He had been following the production of Portal 2 for the last three years, this time, he decided to do something a little different: rather than write a piece it for a web site, he decided to try his luck with the new media: the iPad

Keighley explained that he feels there is a lack of good journalism about video games—a lot of potentially interesting stories simply do not get written.

So I thought I’d write another Final Hours on a new platform, iPad, and see if there is an audience for journalism like this.  I’ve spent a significant amount of my own money to build this multimedia story and really have no idea if it will make back its money.  But I thought I’d run an experiment and see what the market is for a Final Hours in 2011.

The Final Hours of Portal 2 is a $2.99 purchase from Apple’s app store. It incorporates a 15,000-word feature article, covering the inception, production, and release of Portal 2. It also includes pictures and multimedia, such as VR panoramas of rooms at Valve headquarters.

The application is essentially an e-magazine, locked in two landscape format and, like the daily, presented as images which do not allow for selection of text to copy and paste. It requires an Internet connection to use, in part because some of its features are Internet-enabled polls. It also includes a link to Keighley’s blog, Gameslice, and a link to buy Portal 2 from Amazon (undoubtedly earning Keighley a nice referral bonus on top of the 70% of $2.99 that comes from the Apple Store).

The material covered in the piece is interesting, especially for somebody who enjoyed Portal 2 as much as I did. There is a good section on Jonathan Coulton and the music he contributed to the game, for instance, as well as a host of other information about the game. (Did you know that one of the animators for Valve used to animate a Fraggle for Jim Henson?) There are some spoilers in the later sections, so it would be best to complete Portal 2 before reading that far.

The fixed format of this e-magazine does have the usual annoying disadvantages: you can’t increase or decrease the font size, or rotate it if you’re more comfortable holding your iPad in portrait orientation, and as mentioned before you can’t copy and paste material from the app to quote elsewhere. The requirement of an active Internet connection could also be inconvenient at times.

On the other hand, the $2.99 price is a bargain for the amount of information contained within the application. If you’re a Portal fan, buying it is basically a no-brainer. I am, and I highly recommend it.

This kind of application is basically the equivalent of self publishing an e-book through Amazon. Just as self publishing e-books has caused a revolution in the publishing industry, journalists publishing their own feature journalism could bring about changes in the magazine industry as well. Certainly it’s one way of getting quality video game journalism out to the public directly, rather than submitting it to a magazine.

I have been using my new Kobo electronic book reader for a month now, so it is time for me to ponder what I do and do not like about it and how it compares with reading the old fashioned way from a book with paper pages.

Apparently the e-book reader has evolved from more primitive forms. I have been exposed to various e-readers which our e-book son has brought home over the past few years, and yes, they were more primitive. I cannot remember the names of any of them, but they were exceedingly unsatisfactory to use and hard on the eyes. When this same son brought home a Kobo, I read a trial Trollope story on it and immediately demanded, “Please buy me one of these!”

The print on the Kobo is just as plain and easy to read as the words on a paper page, and the user has the added advantage of being able to enlarge or diminish the size of the print—something not possible with paper copy. I have never seen a Kindle, but I believe that they are also as easy to read as print on paper.

The Kobo feels good in my hands. It is thin and handy to carry about at home or on outings. In fact it is less tiring to hold and read than a large hardbound book. And when I carry a traditional book about with me, I have one book. When I take the Kobo with me, I have a couple of hundred books. If I tire of reading “The Woman in White,” I can spell myself with a Sherlock Holmes story or two before going back to my novel. And if I am reading a more than one novel at one time, the Kobo keeps track of where I am in each book.

Now I must mention a few disadvantages that the Kobo has.

Obviously, being an electronic device, it is more tender and fragile than a book. When I rise from my chair to go to the bathroom or get a glass of wine, I usually leave my book in the chair, since if I accidentally sit down on it, no harm is done. With the Kobo, I must always put it in a safe place when no bottom will bash it or harm befall it. Also, there are certain places, such as judicial courts, where electronic devices are not allowed. When on jury duty, I cannot take my handy Kobo, but must carry a physical book.

It is impossible to “flip through” the Kobo, as one can the pages of a book. When bedtime approaches, it has been my custom to flip ahead to see if I am almost at the end of a chapter, which I might finish before retiring. This is slow and cumbersome with the Kobo, so I usually just stop where I am, not knowing whether the chapter will end in a page or two.

Another feat which is easy with a paper book but impossible or nearly so with an e-book reader is going to a specific page. It is easy to flip to page 247 in “The Way We Live Now” or go to the verse John 14:6 in the Bible when one is reading a physical book, but quite difficult on the Kobo.

What I find most inconvenient about the Kobo is the placement of the control buttons for Home, Menu, Shop, and Back. These are placed along the lower left edge of the Kobo. I believe that the typical person reading an e-book reader or a physical book holds the device in his left hand and turns the pages with his right hand. Certainly this is what I do. This means that the control buttons are at the exact spot a person holds as he reads. I am constantly punching one of those control buttons inadvertently and having my reading interrupted until I can get back to where I was. I cannot understand why the designer of Kobo did not place these buttons diagonally across the Kobo at the upper right edge, where no one would ever push them accidentally. Even if they were at the top left, they would not be in the place one holds onto the device as he reads. The placement of these four buttons is my main annoyance with the Kobo.

In spite of these disadvantages, I am wonderfully satisfied with the Kobo reader. I understand that the Kindle has more features, including a keyboard, but to me—an elderly avid reader—the simpler the better. I do not need more features, and I love my Kobo.

Out of curiosity, I peeked at the listing for the Blu-Ray versions of the movies on Amazon, and noticed something rather interesting. It seems that the 1-star protest review has spread beyond the realm of overpriced or windowed e-books, and is now being used to protest DVD-related “injustices” too. (Not that this is unexpected—they were being used to protest restrictive video game DRM before they were used for protesting e-book-related matters.)

And so it is that the Blu-Ray of the theatrical cut of the trilogy whose final installment broke Oscar records has 3,160 1-star reviews out of 3,749 reviews total, averaging a paltry 1.5 stars. Why? Because the studios are releasing two separate box sets, rather than combining both 3-hour theatrical and 4-hour extended versions into one. Writes one 1-star reviewer:

BOTTOM-LINE: The studios will make whatever argument they think will fly to convince us they can’t put both versions on one disc, because they want to double their income on this movie. Which has ALREADY MADE THEM A BILLION DOLLARS. Don’t play along—let friends know not to buy ANY LOTR Blu Ray that doesn’t have BOTH versions on one disc.

They do have a point: the “limited edition” DVD set included both versions through seamless branching. There’s no reason they couldn’t do the same for the Blu-Ray—except, of course, for wanting to milk that cash cow for all it’s worth. It’s unclear whether there even will be an equivalent to the branching limited edition for Blu-Ray—the exclusive extra documentaries from the limited edition set are being tacked onto the extended-edition Blu-Ray release due out in June. (Weirdly, all the extras in that set are being rereleased as DVDs, rather than Blu-Rays—I suppose it was cheaper to keep pressing the same discs than to remaster them to package them together on fewer Blu-Rays.)

I’ve held in the past that 1-star reviews are a way consumers can make their opinions felt in a way that has visible effect, but I’m starting to wonder whether this is simply becoming yet another form of “slacktivism”—the idea that you can somehow “make a difference” by not doing anything more than clicking a link and posting vitriol to the Internet. If people see the Lord of the Rings trilogy rated at 1.5 stars, what are they likelier to dismiss: the quality of the movie, or the quality of the reviews? It doesn’t seem likely that movie studios are going to look at a few thousand 1-star reviews on Amazon and think, “Oh dear, we’d better change our ways.”

And by the same token, it doesn’t seem likely these reviews are going to change publishers’ minds. Though it seems equally unlikely that those who make a habit of posting them will give them up. A better strategy would be drawing attention in blogs and the media to these pricing practices, getting the word out into places that carry more weight than reviews on Amazon. (After one such overpriced e-book was mentioned prominently in a CNET article, the e-book price mysteriously dropped a few bucks.) Of course, that takes a bit more effort than posting a 1-star Amazon screed.

I’ve been using my Kobo reader for a while now, and will get into my own experiences with it soon. But for this review I’m going to concentrate on the experience of getting my Dad set up with his Kobo today. I went down to visit over the weekend, and took the opportunity to get it all set up for him.(He had already ordered a smart tough zipper case for it.)

Dad found the set-up instructions rather confusing—he said after reading them he didn’t know anything more than when he’d begun. But since he had me to help him, that didn’t become much of an issue. Most of it was just a simple matter of plugging the device in, anyway.

One nice point I found right away is that since it uses a standard micro-USB connection, he could use same cable he uses with his digital camera (the same way I do, in fact) and not use up another port. I showed him how to copy books onto it as a USB hard drive, and then played with the included Border Desktop software a little before determining it was totally useless.

How useless? The library display showed only five out of the 100+ public-domain books included with the device. (I’m still not even sure they were actually on the device itself; they might just have been included in the Borders Desktop software. But there wasn’t any way to tell!) Trying to “sync” the reader with it first required the creation of a Borders account…and then didn’t do anything. Bwah? It did download a software update for the device, which I suppose means it wasn’t completely useless, but it didn’t do anything else we wanted.

Given that my Dad wanted to get rid of some of the included titles, I didn’t really see much alternative but to install Calibre. I had wanted to avoid it, fearing that its complicated nature might be too much to handle, but I wanted something that I knew for a fact worked and didn’t feel like trying to play around with Adobe Digital Editions.

Fortunately, the process of installing and deleting books was simple enough that I could set up a library for him and show him how to get rid of the books he didn’t want and add new ones, and he was able to handle that much of the process. Since I associated Calibre with the EPUB file type, adding the files is just a matter of downloading them and then clicking on them in the download list to open them.

Dad eyed the pages of Project Gutenberg with all the avarice of a librarian/booklover who has just discovered he has an instant-delivery library card to one of the biggest public-domain libraries in the world. He browsed or searched on some of his favorite authors and reflected on how they’d written far more books than expected. He expressed interest in reading some of the titles that were bundled on the reader, too, but felt some of them were odd choices.

As for the Borders e-book store, he did set up an account, but I don’t expect him to make any purchases there. For my fairly frugal father, even $2.99 might be too high a price. He never buys even paperback books new—why should he when he can get most them used for 99 cents plus shipping from Amazon?

With that in mind, I find it unlikely he’s going to want to pay money for a new e-book he can’t then pass on to someone else. (Granted, he could also browse the selection of free books from Borders—but given that he probably won’t have the time to read all the free public-domain books he wants, it doesn’t seem likely he’d find much to interest him there.) Consequently, we didn’t bother to set up the wifi connection—it’s only useful for the Borders store, and he wouldn’t be buying anything there anyway.

One thing we noted was that this e-reader isn’t really going to be the most useful for Bible reading in church, however. In order to look up citations quickly, you have to be able to click on links within the text. You might go to “Matthew” from the table of contents, then click on “10” to get to Chapter 10. You can do that with the iPad, or iPod Touch. I imagine there are ways to do it with the Kindle, too. But you can’t (as far as I know) click on links with the Kobo. (If anyone knows of some way it’s possible, I’d like to hear about it.) This also means you can’t read footnotes with it, a slightly more serious problem when reading non-fiction works or the Discworld novels.

Still, for the novels that are 99% of the reading he’ll do with it, he expects it will work out fine. I hope I can get him to contribute a column with his thoughts after he’s read a few books on it.