First up, Kay Kenyon has a book currently available for free on the Kindle: Bright of the Sky, the first book of her Entire and the Rose quartet. I am not a Kindle owner, but I do have the Kindle app on my iPhone, so I figured what the heck, I’d check it out!

Meanwhile, B&N is handing out a slew of their B&N classics for free for a while, and this week they’re handing out ones who’ve been made into movies. Including:

• Beowulf
• Cyrano de Bergerac
• Emma
• Great Expectations
• Ivanhoe
• Pygmalion and Three Other Plays
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Last of the Mohicans
• Phantom of the Opera
• The Three Musketeers
• War of the Worlds
• Sense and Sensibility

This brings the count of books acquired this year up to 208! Fairly sure I’ll blow past 300 before the year is out.

Basically, there are two reasons for this. One is that my beloved solarbird and I will be a bit short on rent in the month of August, as we’re doing a shuffle of student tenants prior to the new school year. The other is that I do have nearly 600 things on the To Read shelf (both the physical one and the virtual one), so it ain’t like I’m lacking for things to read!

So from now until the tail end of August I will be trying to get caught up on many of these tasty, tasty things I’m behind on reading. This includes the new naominovik, katatomic‘s last before her next one drops, some blackaire, the two books of mizkit‘s I’m behind on, reading the three books I’ve got by my fellow Telgar Weyr alum Deby Fredericks, and a jaunt through my accumulated works by desperance. Time permitting, I will also be eying rachelcaine and jpsorrow!

Please however do feel free to use this post as a means to recommend to me forthcoming new books I should be getting as soon as the hiatus lifts! (And yes, I’m already intending to buy Kit’s Truthseeker as soon as I can! :D )

jimhines

Now that Jig’s become “Jig Dragonslayer”, if anything, he’s almost more miserable than he was before. It is nifty that he’s gotten the ability to heal his fellow goblins of their injuries, but oi, the singing they’re doing about him! Not to mention how he’s coming perilously close to being chosen as chief. One goblin, though, is convinced that Jig’s not all he’s cracked up to be: Veka, who’s adamant that SHE is far better hero material, and who is bound and determined to win the acclaim that ought to be hers. Jig would quite cheerfully let her do her thing–only their lair is threatened by a pixie invasion, and it becomes the job of Jig Dragonslayer to go do something about it. Even if he’d much rather run the other way.

All in all this was a lovely followup to Book 1. I very much liked the character of Veka, her almost-a-romance with the hobgoblin nicknamed “Slash”, her struggle to master magic–and ultimately, even though she’s not about to admit it, to live up to Jig’s example and become a true hero. She gets significant point-of-view time, making her plotline as important as Jig’s all throughout the book, and her character arc does not disappoint.

Other high points of the book are Jig’s developing relationship with his god Tymalous Shadowstar, and the “duh OF COURSE” giggle-worthy way Jig finally wins the day. Four stars.

• In the Bleak Midwinter and A Fountain Filled With Blood, by Julia Spencer-Fleming. Mystery. Y’all may recall that I had previously acquired these as free PDFs, and I liked them well enough that I wanted to actually buy copies. So this is me officially adding them to my purchased library. I’ll swing back in a bit and get more of this series, since I want to know where it goes.
• The Smoke Thief and The Dream Thief, by Shana Abe. Historical/paranormal romance.
• Death is Forever, by Elizabeth Lowell. Romantic Suspense. One of the Lowells I like better than most.
• And last and very, very definitely not least, Tongues of Serpents, by Naomi Novik! Fantasy, sixth in the Temeraire series, and I’m thinking this is what I’m going to read next now that I’m done with Jim Hines!

Thus the year’s total comes up to 195.

Picked up in print:

• Red Hood’s Revenge, by jimhines (Jim Hines). Fantasy. The latest in his Princess series, which came out just as I was finishing book 2, and I am now working my way through this one! Score!
• Rift in the Sky, by Julie E. Czerneda. SF. Read this as a library book when it came out, and this is me getting my paperback copy, since Ms. Czerneda remains on the Must Have in Print list!

And, picked up electronically:

• Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord. Sort of fantasy/magical realism, from what I’ve been hearing from the buzz this book’s been getting lately. There’s a nice Big Idea piece about it over on John Scalzi’s blog, which is a nifty source for new books for me these days.
• Exit Light, by Megan Hart. Urban fantasy/paranormal romance, one of my new purchases from Carina Press. DRM-free epub files FTW! This one’s featuring interactions in dreams as the paranormal aspect.
• Song of Seduction, by Carrie Lofty. Historical romance, another Carina purchase. This one sold me for being centered around a gifted musician and the composer she adores, and I’m looking forward to reading it.
• Fatal Affair, by Marie Force. Romantic Suspense, third Carina purchase of five. Political and suspenseful stuff set in D.C., I believe.
• Love and Scandal, by Donna Lea Simpson. Another Carina historical romance. The schtick of this one is that the heroine’s been writing scandalous novels–but OHNOEZ, a notorious rank is being accused of writing them, and won’t believe that sweet little ol’ her is the actual author! Sounds like fun.
• Captive Spirit, by Liz Fichera. One more Carina historical, and I’m looking at this one since it’s featuring a non-white heroine, so looking forward to that.
• Dark and Disorderly, by Bernita Harris. Urban fantasy/paranormal romance, the last of the Carina purchases for this round.

And that’s 189!

On a related note I finally decided that I have so many ebooks that it was high time I yoinked them all into Calibre. This is a super-helpful tool, both for organizing your ebook library and for converting ebook formats (as long as they’re DRM-free). It’s also clever enough to communicate with both my Nook AND the Stanza app on my iPhone so I can do a pretty decent job of keeping track of what books I’ve got where.

It may amuse you all to know that I have a total of 426 ebooks now. Of these, 140 were acquired from various free sources: the big ebook giveaway that tor.com did when they came online, the Baen Free Library, the Suvudu Free Library, assorted authors doing promotions of their releases by giving away older releases, some acquired from Drollerie as free short pieces, and one that I won from Carina!

Of the books I bought, 63 were purchased from Barnes and Noble, 7 from Amazon, 176 from Fictionwise, 11 from Carina, and 16 from Stanza. Small presses represented in my purchases are Drollerie, Small Beer Press, Cobblestone Press, and the Book View Cafe. (Carina, being powered by Harlequin, is NOT a small press. Just so we’re clear on that!)

My next purchase is going to be naominovik‘s sixth Temeraire novel, because this is pretty much NOT OPTIONAL. But once I get that, I’m thinkin’ I’m going to take a book buying hiatus for a bit and actually READ some of these things I’ve been purchasing! Place your bets now on how long I’ll go before I buy something else!

The ebooks in question are from Baen, so they’re DRM-free, and you can read ‘em on whatever device or system you damn well please. Which is also awesome. ^_^

Go check it out, y’all! And if you blog about it, you can share your link for it to get into a drawing for a Barnes and Noble gift certificate.

Picked up in print:

• Idlewild, by Nick Sagan, which I got when Third Place was having a used books sale last weekend. SF.
• Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith. I follow her via the Outer Alliance, and was pleased to discover that she’s got some queer SF and thrillers; queer SF starring women is pretty thin on the ground, and I’m looking forward to reading her work.

And, picked up electronically:

• The rest of Jessica Andersen’s current series: Dawnkeepers, Skykeepers, and Demonkeepers. Buying Dawnkeepers for the first time although I’ve already read it in ARC form; the other two are new to my collection and I need to get caught up! Paranormal romance.
• Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald. SF. Was pleased to see his work finally showing up in electronic form on the B&N store, since most of his current stuff is available only in trade size and it’ll be easier to read on the go electronically.
• The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry. I’m honestly not sure what genre this is supposed to be, but I’m thinking general fiction?
• Blood, Smoke and Mirrors by Robyn Bachar. Picked up because the ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books positively reviewed it. Paranormal romance.

Last but not least, bought in both print AND electronic:

• Pure Blood, by blackaire (Caitlin Kittredge). This is book 2 of her Nocturne City series, the next one I need to read–and I actually wound up buying it in both forms because I’d been bitching about it not being available for the Nook on the B&N forums, but had not gotten any movement on that for a while. So I caved and finally re-bought it in print. But then one of the forums admins finally notified me that they’d posted it at last with the rest of Kittredge’s work and he was very prompt about it, so I felt like I had to really buy it electronically on principle!

Which brings me all the way up to 180 books acquired for the year so far. Meanwhile I’m working on the last of my jimhines marathon since Red Hood’s Revenge is about to come out and I want that too–but I’m eying both desperance AND mizkit for my next marathons. I am open to argument as to who ought to go next. ;)

Here’s the backstory. The other day, as y’all may remember from my (endless, I know) reports of what books I buy, I grabbed an ebook copy of Jessica Andersen’s Nightkeepers. When I pulled it down from B&N, though, I noticed that when I tried to open it up in my Mac-side eReader app, I was prompted as per usual for my name and credit card # to unlock it, and then the program immediately crashed. All subsequent attempts to open the book failed, showing me nothing but a blank page 0, and not prompting me anymore to unlock it. I noted as well that three other books purchased on the same day worked correctly.

Note also that this very same book worked absolutely correctly when I tried to open it in three other places: on my Nook, on my iPhone in the B&N app, and when I pulled it into Windows to open it on the PC version of the B&N reader program. This told me, okay, the book itself is not corrupted, it’s readable by other programs. So something about the wrapping on the book just happens to be confusing the hell out of the Mac version of the reader.

I was able to repro the problem again tonight, on three different purchases. Two of them came from the same publisher as Nightkeepers (since the first book I tried tonight was book 2 of that series, Dawnkeepers), which was Penguin. The third, Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald, was from Pyr.

Barnes and Noble is using the same eReader app, essentially, that Fictionwise uses and which Fictionwise in turn acquired from eReader.com. The main change that B&N has made to it, at least on the Mac side, is to make it able to load epub format books. The version I’ve got is 1.1, the latest version, and the Mac version hasn’t been updated in months. So I’m quite sure that isn’t the problem.

What HAS changed with B&N lately, though, is that they’ve started making all of their downloads be epub format, whereas before they were predominantly using PDB format. So this made me think, “hrmm, so what if I go back and re-download one of my earlier PDB purchases, see if it comes down in epub, and if I can load it correctly?” I was in fact able to do that with my ebook copy of mizkit‘s Demon Hunts, which opened up all nice and shiny-like.

So at this point I’m wondering a few things. One, who does the DRM wrapping? If that’s on B&N to do, it sounds like for some reason, some subset of the DRM wrapping they’re doing is breaking their version of the eReader. Two, what might have changed lately that this problem has only recently cropped up? If it’s because of the shift over to epub files, are there potentially different types of epub files they could be working with that could be breaking the reader app for some books, but not all?

I don’t know enough about the epub format to make a really solid guess, but I thought one of its major advantages was its universality. Anybody out there able to enlighten me on potential gotchas on epubs files produced by different sources?

Now I’ve got four books all exhibiting the problem, but since I’m able to read them on my Nook and iPhone, I’m way more intrigued than I am annoyed that they’re unreadable right now on my computer. It helps as well that really, reading on my Mac is maybe 10 percent of the e-reading I do, at most, so it’s not really an inconvenience, more just an intriguing problem to solve. Yep folks, if books are involved, I can even wear the QA hat when I’m not at work!

If anyone is interested in how I did it, I’ll do a separate post detailing the steps.

Meanwhile, because I wouldn’t be me without periodic updates of Books Recently Purchased, here’s the latest roundup, all electronic:

• The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog, one of the Amelia Peabodies by Elizabeth Peters, #7 to be precise. Bought because B&N had it at the low price of $1.99, and because I couldn’t resist–this is the one where Emerson gets amnesia. ;)
• Moving Target, by Elizabeth Lowell. Romantic suspense/mystery. Re-purchase of a book previously owned in print.
• Darkness and the Devil Behind Me, by Persia Walker. I’d actually previously acquired a free PDF of this, which I still have, but in the interests of Nook compability and because B&N’s selling it for only $1.99, I figured what the hell, I’d go ahead and buy it.
• Nightkeepers, by Jessica Andersen. Paranormal romance. Another re-purchase of a book previously owned in print, given up in print only for the sake of making more space on my shelves. I’ll be re-buying her Book 3 as well as buying Book 2 for the first time, since Book 2 was the one I’d won as an ARC and I still need to buy a copy of it for real!

And that makes 170. I have a whole LOT of things on the To Buy list for the Nook, although most of them are re-buys of things I’ve traded in print copies of, and quite a few are things I still actually do have print copies of. The latter therefore do not count as part of the To Read list. I just want ‘em electronically too.

Meanwhile, still left to do on the great WordPress 3 upgrade: figure out if I can adapt Tarski as a theme to support shiny new WordPress 3 menus. I’d like to have a proper menu bar.

Jig is the smallest, scrawniest, runtiest goblin in the entire goblin lair–and he’s nearsighted to boot. He’s constantly harassed by the bigger and stronger goblins, and made to do all the worst chores. So it just goes to figure that he’s the one who winds up getting captured by a party of adventurers, two human princes, a dwarf cleric, and a young elven thief, all of whom are looking for the fabled Rod of Creation. Jig’s fast-thinking claim that he could guide them deeper into the caverns keeps him from getting killed on the spot by the arrogant prince leading the party, and he has to spend the rest of the book frantically trying to find a way to keep from getting killed by not only the adventurers, but everything else they encounter and fight along the way. He’s even desperate enough to commit to following one of the Forgotten Gods, if that’ll keep him alive. And to his surprise, that Forgotten God is in fact listening.

This is pretty much a D&D adventure from the goblin’s point of view, and it’s quite charming. I especially liked Jig’s forming a tentative… if not friendship, really, than at least less hostile alliance… with the young thief who’s just as much a captive of the adventurers as he is. His partnership with the Forgotten God Tymalous Shadowstar’s also a highlight, since Shadowstar’s so desperate for worshippers that he’ll even take on a goblin, the lowliest of the low. And overall, the goblin society is just hysterical, refreshingly straightforward in all its backstabbing, cowardly chaos. Four stars.

ETA: Correcting the first sentence, since I’d said “can’t do much worse” when what I really meant was “can’t do much better”. PhrasingFail! Thanks to ariaflame for the catch.