andygates

Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout: Ragnarok happening now, played straight -- yup, it's un-Whedonised despite having a female lead and plenty of invitations to slide that way.  There are goats.  There are ravens: those two frame many chapters with a literal overview.  There is some really lovely scene-setting and occasional kennings that are bang on the money: "a hole made of wolf" is one that will stay with me.  Or how about this: "Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent. It lies on the seafloor, its hide camouflaged with crags and volcanoes. Whenever it twitches in its sleep, tidal waves kill hundreds of thousands. It opened its great red eye once, and fish took to land and evolved lungs and legs, just to get away from it."

I liked Greg's gods and scenes a lot, but found his humans and plot a bit thin.   It carries along nicely without captivating, and the twisty turny bits are, well, yeah, twisty turny bits.  Come for the scenery and brooding eyeless gods, stay for the Ragna-puppies.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest:  YA steampunk with glowing plaudits from the steamophiles, but you know what? Steampunk is best as an emergent property.  Steampunk that happens because the author and world and story are going somewhere awesome and bonkers and weird - that works, that's great.  Steampunk that has airships because steampunk should have airships, that's more like Etsy jewelery with glued-on cogs, and that's how Boneshaker felt to me. 

The story -- in alt-history Gold Rush era post-mad-science-Oops Seattle, nearly-estranged mom and teen son struggle for survival when separately thrown into a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and must face the Family Past as well as sundry gribblies -- is decent fare, but I kept on being annoyed by the clip-on steaminess.  If the idea of moving an airship using steam thrusters makes you smile, you'll like it; if you immediately think about thrust moment, and ask yourself where the hell an airship would carry all that water reaction mass, it'll annoy and distract. 

Both are available in pdf'd epub and pdf from Books On Board and elsewhere, and in dead tree too. 

Since I've had my reader for a while, and gorged on half a dozen novels and a pile of science PDFs, here's some bearded sagacity for the future:

The successful vendor must be format-agnostic.  Offer the book as a download, then give the customer a choice.  Write a little app to detect the platform, rememer it in their profile, and offer the best option, otherwise give a pick of the standard (EPUB) and the proprietory (Kindle, Mobi, Spaceflaps).  If your store doesn't allow me to buy an ebook, I'll go elsewhere to buy books in general, and then you've lost my treebook sales too.

PDF blows goats.  Seriously.  Make it reflowable and resizeable or go home.  If you think your page layout matters more than being readable, you're dead wrong. 

E-newspaper subscriptions are dead.  C'mon, it's a crippled version of a feed aggregator (there's a market niche there for an "RSS-to-EPUB" converter in there - Feedbooks, Zinepal, TeleRead et al come close but it hasn't had its ipod moment yet).  Definitely not worth the premium, on which note...

Downloads are worth less than paper.  I can't give a download as a present, I can't hug a download and remember its smell, I can't find a blade of grass from that camping holiday in a download, a download isn't bent by my lover's hands.  Downloads are commodity pap: it is ridiculous to charge as much or more for them.  Tenner for the book, fiver for the download, that's about right.  DRM makes a download worth even less, because it can't be shared and is subject to the whim of technical gremlins.  

Let me down and I go to BitTorrent.  Why isn't your full catalogue available online?  Don't pad it with the Gutenberg stuff, you big fakers.  If it's out there, you should be selling it.  If the vendor gets in the way, it's torrentin' time.

Trilogies and partworks rock.  Without the bulk of treebooks, downloads are perfect for epic series.  Bundle 'em up: all the Harry Potters in one go?  An easy sale.  And if you want to keep readers coming back, the partwork format is super-easy to do without all the physical overheads (and stock risk on series that tank).  A fresh Glass Books or Dark Tower novella every couple of months? 

Fat Zines.  Paper zines and current electronic zines are choked on layout and limited in size.  There's nothing to stop fat zines from rolling up big chunks of material.  A monthly Nanowrimo 'reader's digest' with half a dozen of the best novels, along a theme?  Technically trivial.

Scribd, the ebook host, has started doing a profit-sharing downloads-for-sale deal with authors.  Given that their previous entry into my thunkosphere was "waily waily, some ass has uploaded my magnum opus" from minor authors, this sounds pretty cool.  Anything that isn't device-locked and fitted with a killswitch is a big win in my (e)book.

Would you writery folks use it?