As I continue my series of Honor Harrington reviews, in the hope of eventually reviewing the entire almost-completely-free e-book series from start to finish, I notice some news from David Weber has popped up lately: Weber and an unnamed CGI/3D movie studio are in the process of finalizing negotiations over the movie rights (Baen Bar link; free registration required) to the Honorverse series. Weber is very optimistic over the studio’s intentions to be as faithful to the books as possible (especially since they’re also fans of the series), and has been doing a lot of consultation with them on how best...

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 The Short Victorious War Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble Field of Dishonor Continuing my review of Honor Harrington stories and novels in chronological order: Flag in Exile by David...

Previously: Introduction Treecat Trilogy Young Honor and Elizabeth Prince Michael rescues and Honor dances On Basilisk Station The Honor of the Queen The Short Victorious War Irresponsible captain, itinerant noble 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...

Baen Books and the National Space Society are hosting a writing contest in memory of the late Jim Baen. Entries must be prose and less than 8,000 words, showing “the near future (no more than about 50-60 years out) of manned space exploration.” There is no fee to enter, but only one entry is allowed per person. Entries are to be submitted in RTF format via e-mail. WHAT WE DO WANT TO SEE: Moon bases, Mars colonies, orbital habitats, space elevators, asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, nano-technology, realistic spacecraft, heroics, sacrifice, adventure....

Found via a post on the E-Book Mailing List today, a fantastic blog post by writer Sarah A. Hoyt, that links to an equally fantastic blog post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (which is of related but not identical subject matter to the blog post by Rusch we covered back in March). Rusch’s post, made back in May, is intended to be an eye-opener, a clarion call to the publisher-bound writers that Michael Stackpole analogizes to Roman “house slaves”. Traditional book publishing, Rusch warns, is traveling down the same road that rock music has. She points to examples from music-industry...

Sometimes it can be fun to watch expert prognosticators go back and recount the mistakes they have made. Mike Shatzkin has a post like that, focusing on two predictions he made that, in retrospect, turned out not to be valid. Shatzkin got into e-books at about the same time and in the same way I did: reading them on his Palm Pilot back in the late 1990s. He watched the first few waves of dedicated e-readers fail miserably, and concluded that people simply wouldn’t be interested in reading on a device too large to fit in a hip pocket....

In the Guardian books blog, Damien G. Walter takes a poke at military science fiction in general and Baen in particular with an article entitled “Military science fiction shouldn’t simplify the complexity of war.” The thesis of this article seems to be that military science fiction unnecessarily glorifies war and the military-industrial complex, while in real life war is nasty and evil and therefore stories about it are perpetrated by the same sort of neo-conservatives who are getting us into war in real life. He seems to base this thesis on the back covers of one or two of...

On The Bookseller, Philip Stone looks at the sales performance of a novel, Those in Peril by Wilbur Smith, that was sold in e-book form by Apple and Amazon for £5.99 ($9.79) while bookstores sold the hardcover for £13.30 ($22.07)—30% off its list price of £19 ($31.07). The novel sold remarkably well in paper, becoming Smith’s seventh consecutive hardback number one bestseller. One would think, Stone remarks, that such an inexpensive e-book should surely cannibalize the print sales—but that does not seem to be the case. Stone suggests that Smith must have gained more print readers than he lost...

On the subject of libraries getting rid of books, Mike Shatzkin has written a blog post following up some comments of his that were quoted without much context in a Toronto Globe & Mail article. The comments had to do with how difficult it would become to find public libraries in the future. Shatzkin notes that the infrastructure for e-book distribution is currently sketchy by comparison to that for printed books which has grown up over the decades—but that won’t always be the case. And when that infrastructure for e-books arrives, the state of the world will look very...

The Digital Reader is carrying an article by Eric Landes, a technical writer dabbling in fiction, looking at the question of e-book pricing from an outsider’s perspective. Landes considers the changes that are taking place across the publishing industry, how the industry is responding by pricing its e-books, and how the industry ought to price its e-books. Landes starts off by noting that the mainstream print publishing world has two major sales factors that account for most of its money—hardcovers and bestsellers. Hardcovers cost little more to manufacture than paperbacks but retail for twice (Landes is being conservative here,...

Yesterday, my local Borders kicked over into 50-70% off mode, and this morning I stopped by to see if they might possibly have anything I wanted. To my surprise, I found about $25 (which is to say, $50) worth of stuff I didn’t mind snagging in paper: the first two Kencyr omnibi (okay, “omnibuses” is more correct, but “omnibi” sounds neater) by P.C. Hodgell, Carousel Tides by Sharon Lee, Jumper by Stephen Gould, and Kitty Raises Hell by Carrie Vaughn. And buying them gave me some interesting insights into my reading habits. I had read all of these books...

The Fifth Imperium’s Baen CD repository has posted another CD. This one is bound into the release of the Mercedes Lackey superhero “braided world” book Invasion: The Secret World, an outgrowth of a podcast audiobook project inspired by playing and writing fanfic about the MMO City of Heroes. As with past CDs, the contents are DRM-free and free to distribute non-commercially. More than any other Baen CD, this one has personal meaning for me. I was playing City of Heroes at the same time and in the same role-playing/writing guild as Misty and all our friends, many of...