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What’s on your iPhone—or Sony Reader, or other gizmo?
August 17, 2008 | 4:27 am
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By David Rothman
I enjoyed Joe W’s post asking, "What’s on your Kindle"—but should e-reading be hardware-linked?
So what e-books are you reading now, and on what machine?
My own choice is unavoidably narcissistic, The Solomon Scandals, which is due at the my editor’s on Wednesday. I’ve been proofing it and seeing how it looks not just in Word but also in Stanza on my iPod Touch (reminder for newbies: it runs the same e-book software as the iPhone).
Still, I couldn’t resist breaking discipline and downloading The Sleeper Awakes in eReader from Manybooks.net. You can also get Sleeper in my favorite format, ePub, from Feedbooks. The plot, as summed up on Manybooks:
"The story of a man who sleeps for two hundred and three years and wakes up in a completely transformed London. Because of compound interest on his bank accounts, this man has become the richest individual in the world. A fanatic socialist and author of prophetic writings, the main character awakes to see his dreams realized, and the future revealed to him in all its dystopian horror."
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Comments:
I’m in the middle of Looking Backward: 2000-1887, which is an interesting counterpoint to The Sleeper. It’s determinedly utopian and sometimes a little contrived but does have some spooky echoes of today. Amongst others a kind of telegraph age amazon.com and arguments and economics that sound like the Open Software movement. I’m reading it on an old LG cell phone, if you have internet connectivity and a java capable phone then you can install from http://mobile.booksinmyphone.com?list=book&id=bele01 otherwise from the www site – it’s PD so widely available.
Terrific, Nick. I read Looking Backwards eons ago, and via Gutenberg, here’s the passage I most remember:
“For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.”
That’s far too timely today when so many Americans are losing their homes and other assets—and when the 21st century is looking more and more like the 19th in terms of economic differences.
David
P.S. Best of luck with your booksinmyphone.com site!
Still working my way through the Tor giveaways. What’s taking me so long was I bought & read the rest of Drake’s _Lord of the Isles_ series from Baen.
Currently in the middle of Tobsha Learner’s _Soul_ on my Cybook Gen3.
– C
Thanks David.
Yes I recall that metaphor making a big impression on me also. Upton Sincair’s The Jungle is very timely also (there is specific parallel to today’s sub-prime mortgages) and all the more distressing for being a commentary on what is rather than a hypothetical.
On my Samsung i730 phone, I’m currently reading (in MobiPocket format) “Breaking the Spell:Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” by Daniel Dennett. In the queue are “Pyramids” by Terry Pratchett, “The Airlords of Han” (the second-ever Buck Rogers novel), “The Zenith Angle” by Bruce Sterling, and about 4 others.
This is why I love ebooks: I can have something for whatever mood I’m in. And since it’s on my phone, I almost always have it with me.
I enjoyed reading The Sleeper Awakes several years ago. One detail of the retro-futuristic Wellsian city described in the novel was especially intriguing. The hero clambers to the top of the metropolis and finds the following remarkable cityscape:
Wells envisioned a city whose primary source of energy was wind power generated by massive turbines placed on the tops of city buildings. One of the most powerful unions in this world consists of the engineers of the “wind-vanes”. The book describes “Wind-Vane Offices” and a “Wind-Vane police”.
So Wells was contemplating large-scale renewable wind energy at the turn of the last century. One-hundred years later T Boone Pickens is proposing enormous wind farms in the Midwest and a UK energy plan calls for large off-shore wind farms.
I too have been reading through the Tor giveaways. I’ve been converting them to ePub first, so it’s taken a tad longer.
I’ve decided to buy the rest of the trilogy started in The Outstretched Shadow, so that will slow me down a tad…