E-book Reader Matrix

Scroll down this Wikipedia entry to see a handy dandy chart (complete with pictures, prices and company reliability) of all the available E-book Readers.

Lynne

Jaki's What's Sex Got To Do With It Now Available

The long awaited new Jaqueline Girdner book, What's Sex Got To Do With It is now available from SynergEbooks. Jaki has finally committed E-book Fiction and where better to announce it than here? Can we call it Sex for short? Why not?

I was one of the lucky few to read the manuscript of Sex before publication. It's a romantic comedy disaster novel and I can testify that it is the funny and touching story of a couples counselor who has found the man of her dreams and is about to announce their engagement when all hell breaks loose...it's a fast-moving fun read. Here's where you click to find out more and buy a copy: SynergEbooks

Congratulations, Jaki!

Lynne

An Edible E-Book

This is a form of e-book we hadn't thought of.

At GeekSugar.com

TeamSugar user Lilpeapod strikes again with this totally awesome Kindle cake that she "whipped up" this past weekend.

"I've been jonesing for a Kindle for weeks now, and since I can't get the real thing just yet, I thought I would make a Kindle cake to show my love." says Lilpeapod.

Okay, so you can't turn the page, but you can't eat your Kindle and read it too.

--Lynne

Review of Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy

Whitethorn Woods reminds me of O. Henry...with a double twist. Set in and about the Irish town of Rossmore, the center of the story is St. Ann's Well, "a holy shrine of dubious origin," where petitioners come to ask for a great many things, including success in marriage, children, miracle cures, faithfulness, love, and more. The book begins in the third person, then shifts seamlessly to a series of coupled vignettes in which one person tells a story and then a second person tells more of the story. The second person is not always the person the reader expects. And each version ends with a twist. The amazing thing about Whitethorn Woods is the scope of issues Binchy manages to speak of through her characters, covering birth to death and everything in between. The human condition is dissected compassionately, often humorously, and always observantly. Binchy's "heroes" are unlikely: an aging woman on a singles tour; a simple-minded man whose simplicity may be more related to kindness than lack of intelligence; a deaf girl whose "hearing" of the heart is acute. And Binchy's "villains" are just as unlikely: a country doctor; a young woman in love; an infertile woman who comes to St. Ann's Well to ask for a child. Only Maeve Binchy can present even the villains so clearly that I found myself in sympathy with them. I was only sorry when the stories came to an end. But how can I object? Maeve Binchy has said it all in every voice possible in Whitethorn Woods.

--Jaki

Whitethorn Woods (2007)is available in six ebook formats including the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle. Ebook formats and seller links are shown at this Random House link
The sites that sell it are listed below.
BooksOnBoard.com
Sony Connect
CyberRead
Diesel-ebooks
eBookimpressions
eBookMall
eBooks.com
eBooks About Everything
eBookwise
eChapterOne
eFollett
eReader
Fictionwise
Franklin
Microsoft
Mobipocket
PaperbackDigital
Powells

Judging an E-Book by Its Cover

A book by any other name (for instance, an "e-book") might not smell as sweet, but it might be a joy to read.

What makes a book lovable? Some insist a book is defined by its sensory qualities: the texture of its pages; the smell of its binding; the colors of its cover. These people would argue that a book is like a good meal, that presentation is all-important. The red of bell pepper and the green of cilantro against an oversized white plate complement the entrée. For them, that makes the meal delicious!

But does it? What is on that plate anyway?

Beauty is as beauty does. At least that's what my mother told me. And I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a book beautiful. Is it presentation, or content, or both? Given a badly written book presented on a beautiful reading instrument, or a book whose prose soared served on a clunky reading device, which would you choose? Of course, your answer depends on personal judgment. And I've offered a lot of room for judgment here. For some, the e-book format is more aesthetically pleasing than the paper version. (Yes, really!) And for others, the prose that might soar for me, plunges into heavy yawns for them.

So what really does matter? C.S. Lewis said, "We read to know we are not alone." When I read something I really love, I transcend the physicality of the device I happen to be reading and join the author's sensory world. I don't smell the binding of the book, I smell the coffee the author skillfully brings to aromatic life. I feel the heat of the fictional sun on my skin, not the texture of the page. I see that well-described green of the African veldt, not the cover of the book. And I know I'm not alone. I'm with the author.

I'd bet some of the original bards objected heartily, maybe even musically, to written books. And there had to be people who found typeset works distasteful compared to the carefully hand-inscribed manuscripts.

As for me, I'll read anything that tells a good story, even a stone tablet.

Jaki

Rescuing History

Danish History was almost lost in the early 1500s.

This is the story of two rescuers. One man was Knute, a resistance fighter in Denmark during the World II. The other man was Christian Pederson, a Danish clergyman in the 1500s, who rescued an endangered medieval manuscript that contained history available nowhere else, and managed to get it printed for posterity,

The World War II hero, Knute, helped smuggle Danish Jews out of Nazi-occupied Denmark to Sweden. When I met him forty years later, Knute had just retired as a printer and he was living on a waterway with a rowboat tied up at the dock behind his house. He explained that he wanted a history written of "the real Hamlet" also known as Amleth of Juteland (pronounced “yute-land”). It bothered Knute that the most famous Dane in history was this melancholy guy, lounging around feeling sorry for himself in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet.

The story of Amleth was one of many legendary tales told in The Danish History, the primary source of Danish lore, written in the twelfth century by Saxo Grammaticus. Unlike Shakespeare's Hamlet, Amleth was never undecided, although he did pretend to be mentally incompetent to mask his true intentions of revenging his father's death and taking over the throne. Hamlet sources.

But Amleth's story and all the others in The Danish History were nearly lost to us. Like all medieval books, Saxo's History was copied by hand by monks. Each manuscript was incredibly valuable and increasingly rare. About 300 years after Saxo's death, when Gutenberg's moveable type press became available to print books in large numbers, it was almost impossible to find a copy of the History.

Christian Pederson, the Canon of Lund, made repeated efforts to get a copy to take to Paris, an early publishing center, but it seemed hopeless "I twice sent a messenger … to buy a faithful copy at any cost, and bring it back to me," Pederson wrote. At that point it may have seemed that the work was lost forever.

Pedersen personally searched all over Denmark. "I visited and turned over all the libraries, but still could not pull out a Saxo, even covered with beetles, bookworms, mould, and dust. So stubbornly had all the owners locked it away." Those who might have a copy were not about to risk lending it for fear of losing the irreplaceable book.

At last, the Archbishop of Lund managed to find a copy, which King Christian the Second allowed to be taken to Paris on condition of its being wrought "by an instructed and skilled graver (printer)."

The first edition came out in 1511. After that it became distributed widely and was translated out of the original Latin into many languages including the 1905 English translation I read.

Flash forward to the 20th century, I wrote a book proposal about Saxo, how his History was almost lost and how Amleth of Juteland became Shakespeare's Hamlet, but Knute decided not to use what I had written. It was still a valuable lesson for me about rescue. Human life is fragile, and sometimes heroes like Knute will stand up to save lives when murderous evil threatens. Knute also wanted to rescue the reputation of Amleth/Hamlet as a legendary Dane. While, back in the 1500s, Christian Pederson rescued the very book itself.

Books can be extinguished, just as human lives can, the light they shed can be lost forever. As technology changes, books need to be rescued again and again. The ebook English translation of Saxo's The Danish History is now available online at the Gutenberg Project and also at Danish History for future generations to enjoy.

Lynne

Mrs. Gaskell and the Internet

And just what exactly could this Mrs. Gaskell, who wrote in the mid-1800s, have to do with the Internet? Thank you for asking, Dear Reader. The answer, in a word, is "communication."

I'd never heard of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell until my husband (also known as my favorite computer peripheral) downloaded Gaskell's final masterpiece, Wives and Daughters, onto my Sony Reader from Project Gutenberg. (Warning: This masterpiece was actually unfinished, although the intended ending of the story readily presents itself to the imagination.) Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters tells of the intertwined lives of a number of families in a British country village. Love, friendship, social position, and social responsibility are all dissected (think of a combination of Jane Austin, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens). But most interesting is her exploration of both communication and the comic/tragic miscommunication of an era in which the very most difficult issues were not discussed directly. Communication and miscommunication--does the Internet come to mind?

Mrs. Gaskell observed her characters from inside and out. There are no villains in Wives and Daughters. Just as you begin to think of someone as a villain, she zeroes in on the possible villain's point of view, and suddenly that reprehensible point of view becomes reasonable, given the limitations of understanding and sensibilities of the particular character. The Internet moves in tune with Mrs. Gaskell. On the Internet, you can find the varying opinions of more people than you'd ever want to meet. Certain posters can make some of their otherwise goofy, malicious, or even villainous ideas seem, if not reasonable, at least understandable from their peculiar points of view. On the Internet, we see straight into the thoughts of those who would convince us of their ideas, just as Mrs. Gaskell saw straight into the thoughts of her fictional characters.

The power of false rumor is also grist for Mrs. Gaskell's mill. Small town gossip can be the ruin of anyone, especially a young woman, in her village. Even if it's only gossip, not actual truth, it harms. The Internet, in turn, often publishes whatever a poster wishes to say without an editorial guard at the gate to question truthfulness. And just as often, these unquestioned opinions are repeated as expertise by others on the Internet. Small towns no longer own the gossip mills. The Internet does.

And then, there's Mrs. Gaskell's consideration of the irrational belief in words spoken by those we consider above us in rank. In Mrs. Gaskell's village, the lords, ladies, and squires are expert by virtue of their positions. On the Internet, celebrities of all kinds expound on subjects of which they know little, but hold passionate opinions. And the higher they are in the ranks of celebrity, the more weight their words carry. Just pretend I'm a really, really famous author. Does my opinion seem more plausible to you now?

Okay, then I'll tell you what I think. I think I've found Mrs. Gaskell's village more than a century later, a village filled with communication and miscommunication. I think it's called the Internet.

Jaki