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Pandigital announced the release of Novel, an Android-powered, 7-inch touchscreen e-reader with wifi capabilities, and apps, selling for $199. This is the first real rival to the iPad, IMHO.

A Novel Idea From Pandigital: an Android-Powered E-book Reader

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There’s a new promotion from Barnes & Noble: bring your electronic device (The device can be an iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, BlackBerry, HTC HD2, PC or Mac laptop or B.&N.’s own electronic reader, the Nook) into the store for a code to redeem for a free e-book. The giveaway will run for five weeks, with a different free book each week.

The promotion began this past Monday (hmmm… I shop there *constantly* and this is the first I’ve heard of it, though. B&N, this is what I mean) with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

For more information, visit B&N’s promotion page.

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Review of: Dedication by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus
Washington Square Press (2008), Paperback, 288 pages

One of the best things about first love and your high school sweetheart is that when the relationship crashes and burns, as most tend to do, you generally get to walk away. Leave for college, move to a new apartment, start a new job. Sure, you’ll be bitter for awhile and then you’ll look back at it with rose-colored glasses later on, but right from the get-go, you generally get to leave. That helps. But imagine you couldn’t get away from the boy who broke your heart? Imagine his face and his voice, are everywhere, and he’s telling the world about you, over and over, every day?

Katie Hollis is a successful 30-something, but she still drops everything when her first boyfriend, Jake Sharpe, pays a visit to their hometown. Jake dumped Katie before the prom in Senior year, and went on to become an internationally-famous pop star. And his biggest hits? Are all about Katie.

This premise was what got me interested in reading “Dedication”, co-authored by the women who wrote “The Nanny Diaries” (which I have not read). I can relate. No, my ex isn’t a rock star, but anyone who has ever been broken up with has had the fantasy where we get to “make him regret his entire existence”, like Katie has spent the past decade and more planning to do.

The book has a lot to recommend it. The structure is engaging: we switch back and forth from the present to the past, year by year, from sixth grade through twelfth, watching Katie and her best friends turn into teenagers and all that entails. We experience Jake the way Katie does, from the never-to-be-explained behavior of boys who say they’re going to call and never do, just like real life, to the inexplicable discovery that he likes her back, despite how he’s acted all this time, and through to the end of their relationship, which is as painful and unfair as we all have lived through. Juxtaposed with Katie in the present, in the past we learn pieces of her life, bit by bit, unfolding the hidden layers of it all — Jake, her parents, school, and so on, in an engaging way.

Without giving away details, I suspect that it is the ending that throws some readers off from enjoying the book, though. Things suddenly get bumpy about four-fifths of the way through, and stay that way to the last page. While the resolution rings true, the way we get there is unsatisfactory, as is the abrupt, denouement-free ending. I felt as if there was, at one point, a different version of the last several chapters, one where the finale was the same but how we got there changed, and the authors made an unfortunate choice to scrap that for this. But even with that caveat, I did enjoy “Dedication”, and felt that the intriguing promise of the premise was delivered in the final product.

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So last month I was Ms. Spammy Spamerson with iPad posts (“It’s coming!” “It’s here!” “Here’s what it’s like!”) and I promised I’d talk more about the iPad as an e-reader in an upcoming post. Reading isn’t the only reason I bought an iPad, though it was a contributing factor. While I mostly use it for accessing the web, carrying my photo library around with me and for watching video, I do like the idea of being able to store & access books on it as well. I was curious. In other words, I was interested enough about e-reading to want to be able to give it a try.

In a nutshell: reading itself on the iPad is great. I recommend it to anyone who has the same level of interest in it as an e-reader as I do. Where there are problems, though, has to do with the managing of content, but that’s not idiosyncratic to Apple’s iPad, it’s a problem for all e-readers — and the iPad just might handle it best.

iBooks is certainly pretty.

So, to start off with, there’s iBooks. It’s lovely, visually. The nice bookshelf with your covers so prettily displayed. Internally as well, reading the text itself, I found aesthetically pleasing. Holding the iPad in landscape format, you get the two-page format of a book, so it heightens the experience. You can turn pages by tapping or by swiping — with swiping the page “turns” with animation, like a real paper page does. Apple’s very proud of that. It’s cute, but in actuality, I mostly tap. It’s faster.

Everyone asks me if it’s hard to read on the iPad because of the backlighting, and when I say no, they express disbelief and tell me that I’m wrong, everyone says it’s more difficult. I don’t know what to tell them. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve read almost all of Freakonomics without thinking about it either way. Some people say it’s a strain on their eyes. Some don’t. YMMV. Practically everything I do all day is a strain on my eyes, and my eyesight is so bad I’m practically blind as a bat. For what it’s worth, I didn’t find reading on the iPad to be uncomfortable at all.

No, the main problem with iBooks is content. The good news is that you can import your own EPUB books, if you happen to have them (perhaps you’ve got some short stories in Word doc form: you can transform these into an EPUB using a program like Calibre, for example). The other good news is that you can download tons of free classics from Project Gutenberg, right from the iBookstore. This is great. Sure, Google Books has lots of free books too, but they’re shoddily scanned and horribly OCRd (that’s Optical Character Recognition, or how a computer understands that the black marks in the picture it just read are letters). Full of typos, misreads and formatting glitches, reading a Google Book is more pain than pleasure, imho. I love Google in many of its forms, but when it comes to Google Books, I think their attitude of “get as much done as fast as possible” stinks. Project Gutenberg texts, on the other hand, are nicely proofed scans, with almost all the typos eliminated, neat and precise. I’m glad Apple made a point of offering PG books in the iBookstore.

But for paid content, it’s highly disappointing. Apple made deals with some publishers, but not all, and therefore there are big gaping holes in the iBookstore’s offerings. There’s still no agreement on the table with Random House, for example, and that’s a biggie. No Random House means no Knopf. No Crown. No Del-Rey. No Doubleday. No Vintage. No Ballantine. No Pantheon. No DC Comics. No Bantam. And a whole lot more. Go look at your bookshelf and see how many of your books are from those publishers. None of those would be in the iBookstore. Now, hopefully Apple and Random House will strike a deal soon & that’ll change

However, there’s another problem. As Laura Miller pointed out in her blog over on Salon.com, “I love reading on my iPad, but that doesn’t blind me to the abject inadequacy of the iBooks store. By contrast, Amazon, which has 15 years of online bookselling experience under its belt, has largely figured out the key to helping people find the books they want. It’s a little thing called metadata.” Don’t think you know what metadata is? Yes, you do. To the layperson, simply put, it’s tagging. Tagged posts, tagged objects, tagged images. Amazon uses metadata, including user-added tags, which make it easier for customers to find things they  might like. Look up your favorite book on Amazon, and scroll down a bit. You’ll see a section titled “Tags Customers Associate With This Product”. Click on a few. You might find something else you like. But the iBookstore doesn’t have tagging, or any metadata at all, really, other than author search, and genre distinctions of their own divising.

The first book I downloaded was my personal favorite, The Mists of Avalon -- not available in iBooks, but through Kindle for iPad.

Luckily, there’s Kindle for iPad. The app makes your iPad function just like a Kindle, as far as software goes: you can buy books right from Amazon on the iPad, or from your desktop and they’ll be synced to the iPad the next time you open the app. Easy. And there’s a veritable plethora of content to choose from. Amazon’s ahead of the game there.

A new arrival on the e-reader scene is Kobo, available June 17, a product partnered with Borders bookstores. Lower priced ($149) but lacking wireless capability for download, I can’t say if the reader itself will make a splash, but whether it does or not, there’s a Kobo for iPad app out already. As with the Kindle app, having this allows you to enjoy any Kobo books you might happen to purchase, and read them on your iPad.

Barnes and Noble has the Nook, and an iPhone app for their e-reader. They still haven’t come out with their app for the iPad, though they keep saying it’s in the works. My advice? Move it along a little faster there, B&N, and not just the app. I know you’ve been king of the bookselling heap for awhile now, but as Ferris Bueller once said, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. In your case, B&N, you might miss the train. I love B&N but if they want to stay relevant, they should be the stars of the e-book revolution — and they’re not. The Nook is pretty darn clunky, imho, and their e-book promotion and selling is lackluster at best. Sorry, a little digression from me and I doubt B&N is listening, but I wish they were, for their sakes.

For me, there’s one big advantage to the iPad over the Kindle or the Nook, even aside from versatility: the touchscreen. Laptop touch pads have been frustrating me for years; both devices feature their version of a touchpad, and I fear I would have been stymied again. Another factor is my growing dislike for one-purpose mobile devices. I don’t want to carry around a bunch of somethings that only do one thing.

One caveat: I haven’t been able to spend as much time with either the Kindle or the Nook as I’d like, to be able to give either an in-depth review, because I don’t own them. Unfortunately, my little blog budget does not extend to endless gadget purchases. If I had access to either, or the Sony Reader or the Kobo, I’d be happy to give any of them a fair shake.

Back to the iPad, I should also mention that for comic books, there’s the app from Marvel Comics. Comic books and graphic novels obviously lend themselves ably to the iPad’s full-color screen. Marvel’s free app is a comic reader; you pay for content in-app, something that’s growing common on the iStore. I was always a DC girl, so I know less about what I’m looking at with Marvel but — it looked pretty amazing. I’m just not sure, though, that you’ll ever pry paper comics out of their collectors’ hot hands.

The Toy Story Read-Along app includes music, coloring pages and games.

There are a couple other options for reading various files on the iPad. Good Reader is an app you can use to transfer files from your desktop to the iPad (by syncing, within iTunes, or wirelessly, but that can be messier). PDFs, TXTs, DOCs, and so forth. I uploaded a doc file and a PDF, and you can read them just fine in Good Reader. It’s not as smooth or pleasant a reading experience, but it works.

Lastly, there are also standalone book apps. Some app designers are selling their books this way, one app per book, and those books are either in the public domain, or original works licensed to them. Some of these are unremarkable, but a few showcase just what the iPad could do with creative content. Disney is right in the ballgame from the start with their Digital Books site, and now their Read-Along apps for iPad. Toy Story is a free download in the App Store; Toy Story 2 costs $8.99. They’re also offering The Princess and the Frog, with Beauty and the Beast to be added soon and, coming in June, a 3D app for Toy Story 3. Other childrens’ books on the iPad as standalone apps include The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss’s ABC, How to Train Your Dragon, Miss Spider’s Tea Party, and The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg. A hugely popular app is the Alice for the iPad, with a Lite version available for free. Wonderful illustrations, graphics and interactivity:

Clearly, there are a ton of options for e-reading right now; all these companies competing with each other for our business with their hardware e-readers, their software e-books, their apps. Competition used benefits the consumer, but the one problem in this instance is that it makes file management very messy for us order-loving types. What I really want, after all, is all of my e-book files in one place, the way all of my music is in one place. In my house, my books are neatly arranged on my bookshelf, while yours might be strewn around the room. Either way, they’re not separated by which store I bought them from. I suspect Apple would prefer that I bought all my e-books from them, and therefore they would be all nicely organized in iBooks. But I suspect Amazon would like me to do the same in my Kindle app, and Borders would prefer I only use Kobo. That’s not going to happen, though, because the great thing about the iPad — and this is the crux of my review, and why my ultimate word on the issue is a hearty recommendation for it as an e-reader — is choice. I can shop at Apple, or Amazon, or Borders, or an independent company, and read all of it on my device. With a Kindle, or a Nook, or a Kobo, I’m restricted. Yes, all those devices can read DRM-free files you might have lying around. But the stores aren’t selling you DRM-free files. Why would they? They want you to use their product, their device, be their customer. Not someone else’s.

Lest I give the wrong impression, I’m not going to stop reading printed books. They’re still my preference. E-books are just another format to me, like audiobooks, and I wanted something to be able to access them with, like I have a CD player in my car or an iPhone jack so I can listen to podcasts while I drive. The iPad lets me read pretty much any e-book I might come across, and that’s why I like it. I use my iPad for so many other things, but it’s a big plus that it gives me the freedom to read what I want on it — and comfortably and pleasantly and enjoyably — as well.

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This morning I was catching up on listservs and came across a link to this article in The Chicago Sun Times:

The Sun-Times Preserves Its Photo Archive by Selling It
Posted by Michael Miner on Thu, May 6, 2010

It’s worth a read. The title isn’t misleading, but there’s more to the story. The paper’s archive was sold off to a private individual, John Rogers, who is digitizing the entire collection. When finished:

The Sun-Times retains “all the intellectual property, all the copyrights,” Barron said. What’s more, Rogers is obliged to re-create the “entire library in digital searchable form,” and make it accessible to the Sun-Times. This means Rogers is doing for the Sun-Times something it couldn’t afford to do for itself but dearly wanted to. “If we could have pulled it off,” said Barron, “it would have taken years and years and years and millions of dollars.” So the deal was a “dream come true.” And far from surrendering its photo archive, he says, once it’s digitized the Sun-Times will be able to exploit it to tap a growing “aftermarket” for copies of old news photos.

The items that are appearing on eBay are duplicates, Rogers clarified. Or “things I don’t want”, he also said, which I found a little too vague. Still it’s hard to argue with what this man is doing to preserve a unique collection. That is, assuming he’s doing it right, as opposed to the sloppy way Google is digitizing books (in my humble opinion).

(Make sure to read the updates at the end of the article, with further information. I’m especially glad they clarified the bit about the library who was “keeping their photos in the basement”, making it sound like they were in old fruit boxes next to the washer, as opposed to being carefully stored in an archive.)

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Earlier today I stumbled on Esther Freud’s top ten love stories in fiction. I’ve never thought of myself as a romance reader, but it’s true that many of the classics are love stories from the ages. Ms. Freud’s #1: Gone With the Wind.

“Rhett Butler’s slow, cool devotion to Scarlett through so much of the novel, and the terrible moment when he stops loving her, and she realises she does, in fact, love him, had me feverishly begging fate, or Margaret Mitchell to intervene.” I agree, and also with several entries on Ms. Freud’s list (I was particularly pleased to see Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth — beautiful!).

What would my own short list of favorite romances be? Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina would be at the top of it, I’m sure. Probably my favorite book, it contains two romances: one that ends happily, and one that does not at all — giving us a story about choices, about choosing a love that builds or one that destroys. And I would say GWTW as well, for the very reasons Ms. Freud gives. Another would be Sharon Kay Penman’s historical novel of Wales, Here Be Dragons; along the same vein is Susan Kay’s story of Elizabeth Tudor, Legacy, an unconventional love story but a powerful one.

Which of your favorite books contain the greatest romances?

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This is probably the coolest thing ever, and I say this as a girl who grew up ever-so-much in love with Superman, and a woman whose current lifelong dream is to have lunch with Tim Gunn — Tim’s critique of different looks for the Man of Steel.

Don’t miss the earlier installments, ‘Crazy Sexy Geeks: The Series: Super Hero Fashion with Tim Gunn‘ and ‘Crazy Sexy Geeks: Tim Gunn Strikes! Part 1‘.

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Review of: The God of Small Things
by Arundhati Roy

Every once in a rare while, I finish a book and still can’t say whether I liked it or not. Whether I was impressed with it or not. Whether I just finished reading something amazing, or I just wasted hours of my life on something that was ultimately disappointing. It should be easy to tell the difference, no?

With Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, I find myself experiencing that dilemma. A convoluted and language-rich novel, it seems at times too weighty with its own complexities, and other times quite lovely in its simplicity. A contradiction in terms throughout.

The story begins with a confusing cast of characters, unfamiliar names and places. Told backwards and mostly through the voices of two other-worldly children, twin brother and sister, there is less exposition and more visceral reaction. It’s best to not analyze too deeply and just absorb the tale as it unfolds, in the beginning.

The language is beautiful, rich in tone, lush with unexpected turns of phrase. But is it too much? Will readers drink up each word in treasured amazement, or, as was my experience in the end, feel somewhat turned off by the density of phrase. Too much of a good thing, as they say, can ruin anything, and by the end of the novel I was feeling tired of reading about envy that is “delicate, purple-tinged” and sounds as they “mushroomed over the temple”. As the entire novel is essentially a tease for a tragedy that is alluded to in the first pages, as the story goes in reverse, I felt frustrated and put off by too many descriptive turns of phrase separating me from the resolution.

Roy’s novel is mesmerizing at times, and the story of the “two-egg twins”, Estha and Rahel, is compelling and strange. I can’t decide if this book was brilliant or just a brilliant exercise for the author. In the end, though, as a reader, I felt I had been more dazzled by language and less enlightened by meaning than perhaps would have been best, and this lessened my appreciation overall.

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How did I not know that Emma Thompson is married to Willoughby? I’m jumping in the middle of things, but I happened upon the fact that Emma is married to actor Greg Wise in a recent Telegraph article. I’m notorious bad about not paying attention to celebrity news. Well, good for her. I assume he’s nothing like the character he played, of course. Anyhow, back to the point at hand:

It’s not just about escaping back to the 18th century, to a land of petticoats and Regency toffs in breeches. Austen, like Shakespeare, still resonates because she tells us modern truths: that decent people end up in impossible situations through no fault of their own. And that if they are good (Emma Woodhouse), honest (Lizzie Bennett), and true (Fanny Price) there is a good chance it will all come right in the end. (Interestingly Claire Tomalin, Austen’s biographer, suggests she too may have suffered deep depression, which may have helped her to write so humanely about the complexities of emotional life.)

From the Bible onwards, people have looked to books to tell us how to live through adversity. And for those of us born prior to the escapes of YouTube, instant messaging and alcopops, medication through fiction was a habit we learned early. Comic novelist Jenny Colgan estimates she has read Little Women “something like 9,000 times”. “I use Little Women as a security blanket if I’m feeling down.”

There’s definitely a healing power to the escapism of reading. It’s taken me out of a lot of hard times, to the extent that I sometimes feel a little guilty about it, as if I’m burying my head in the pages in order to avoid harsher realities.  But to be kind to myself, I think we all need that kind of escape sometimes. The problems will still be there, after all, when you’re done reading, but you might be a little less stressed and anxious, and a little more capable of dealing with them.

Not all books make good “comfort reading”, in my opinion. Right now, for example, I’m very much enjoying Hillary Martel’s Wolf Hall. It’s spectacular and challenging, but it’s not great for when I need solace. My go-to comfort books do include Jane Austen, but more regularly, Anne McCaffrey. Yes, I like dragons. Also Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana. It’s not exactly happy, but it’s a completely different universe than the one my problems live in.

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Since the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last book in J.K. Rowling wildly popular series, the talented author has been rather firm in her statement that this was, indeed, the last “Potter” book. Surprisingly, Ms. Rowling may be softening on that point. From The Washington Post:

Though she said she doesn’t plan to write any offshoots of the Potter series, she didn’t rule it out “maybe 10 years from now,” depending on how she feels. But she told one child she does want to write more books.

“Yes, I do, and I am,” Rowling said. “I’m quite sure in the not-too-distant future I will bring out another book.”

Hmmm. Well, I’m definitely interested in anything else she’s planning on writing. And curious about a new book/series. But strangely, I’m not sure how I’d feel about more Potter, and I’m a die-hard HP fan. It’s just, isn’t the story done? Is there more to tell, really? Do I actually want to read “Harry Potter and the Hip Replacement of Doom” or, even worse, “Potter: the Next Generation”? The only thing I think I’d want to see her publish in the Potterverse would, I think, be a prequel.

What do you think? Is there a place for more Potter, or should the story rest in peace?

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