Books

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François
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Re: Books

Postby François » Wed Jul 05, 2017 6:22 pm

Librivox offers public domain books read by volunteers, so it's both DRM-free and actually no-charge free. The quality's uneven, but at that price, it's hard to complain too much about it.

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nosimpleway
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Re: Books

Postby nosimpleway » Tue Jul 25, 2017 9:37 pm

My wife's first book got published.

It's a contemporary fiction romance with a main character struggling with addiction and the difficulty of becoming a better person. If that's the sort of thing you'd find appealing, we'd really appreciate it if you bought a copy. Requesting your local library pick it up would be super rad too.

As the first book from an author published through an independent press, an optimistic outlook for sales is "a couple hundred". So every copy that sells is meaningful, in that pretty-good sales figures will make it more likely that her next book gets published too.

Amazon Link | B&N Link | Play Store ebook | Kobo ebook | Indiebound paperback

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beatbandito
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Re: Books

Postby beatbandito » Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:01 pm

Sorry, NSW, but I could only buy one book this month and how could I go for your wife's when this gem was being advertised in the corner?

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Joxam
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Re: Books

Postby Joxam » Sat Sep 09, 2017 11:50 am

So I've been mostly out of fiction reading for about a decade or more now. I still read, Roxane Gay is ony of my favorite current authors, for example, but haven't been keeping up at all with fiction. I'm looking for some good "new" (mind you I'm out of the loop by about 15 years so new to me might not be new to you) suggestions for fiction. Before I got out of it Haruki Murakami, Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman were some of my favs so there is that but again I'm pretty of the loop so any suggestions would be awesome.
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Mongrel
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Re: Books

Postby Mongrel » Sat Sep 09, 2017 12:06 pm

Joxam wrote:So I've been mostly out of fiction reading for about a decade or more now.


Huh, I thought I was the only one. I used to devour fiction like nothing else, but these days that's very rare. Like you I still read a lot, but it's pretty much all non-fiction and often history.

The only recommendation I might give is the Kingkiller Chronicles, which I have not read myself but seems to be popular with the Gaiman etc. crowd. The main character seems a bit Marty-Sue-ish to me, but apparently Patrick Rothfuss is an excellent writer, so I dunno. Maybe someone here who's actually read them can confirm/deny?
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Grath
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Re: Books

Postby Grath » Sat Sep 09, 2017 12:16 pm

Mongrel wrote:
Joxam wrote:So I've been mostly out of fiction reading for about a decade or more now.


Huh, I thought I was the only one. I used to devour fiction like nothing else, but these days that's very rare. Like you I still read a lot, but it's pretty much all non-fiction and often history.

The only recommendation I might give is the Kingkiller Chronicles, which I have not read myself but seems to be popular with the Gaiman etc. crowd. The main character seems a bit Marty-Sue-ish to me, but apparently Patrick Rothfuss is an excellent writer, so I dunno. Maybe someone here who's actually read them can confirm/deny?

A coworker of mine mentioned the Kingkiller Chronicles on Wednesday as being good, one caveat is that the third book of the trilogy isn't out yet with no publication date in sight yet.

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François
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Re: Books

Postby François » Sat Sep 09, 2017 12:54 pm

I quite enjoyed the Kingkiller Chronicles books released so far, and while I can see why some people might be inclined to think they star a Marty Stu, the main character goes through a lot of shit, he screws up badly about as often as he wins big, and even when he succeeds, the odds are so stacked against him to begin with that you still get the feeling he's just barely managing to keep his head above water.

It's overall a pleasant read, I recommend it with confidence.

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Joxam
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Re: Books

Postby Joxam » Sat Sep 09, 2017 1:07 pm

I know Rothfuss is a great follow on twitter and when he was on MBMBaM he was great, I'll check it out. However, I mostly dont like period fantasy. I like more sci-fi and contemporary fantasy, thats not to say a good fantasy book isn't something I'd read, I just dont really prefer it.
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Thad
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Re: Books

Postby Thad » Sat Sep 09, 2017 1:19 pm

I like Charles Stross. I'd say start with The Atrocity Archives, the first book in the Laundry Files series; it's a mashup spy novel/Cthulhu Mythos pastiche/workplace satire.

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Joxam
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Re: Books

Postby Joxam » Sat Sep 09, 2017 4:23 pm

Downloaded it on Kindle, thanks for the suggestion, keep 'em coming.
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Re: Books

Postby Newbie » Sat Sep 09, 2017 5:39 pm

Recentish works I've enjoyed include Robert Jackson Bennett's "American Elsewhere", a small-town cosmological horror/mystery story in the contemporary American south-west, and Ann Leckie's "Ancillary Justice", which is a sci fi revenge tale with an unusual protagonist. The fact that both books were published in 2013 is purely coincidence.
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hngkong
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Re: Books

Postby hngkong » Sat Sep 09, 2017 5:45 pm

I am also getting back into reading fiction! I'll throw out a couple of things I really enjoy, some of which are older.

My favorite books are by David Wong. John Dies at the End is a good horror comedy, and I really loved Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, which is a near future humor book which I can't really describe, but I want a sequel. The third JDatE book comes out in October.

The Magic 2.0 series by Scott Meyer is a lot of fun. It centers around the idea that some people found a file on the internet that when they change it, it changes things in real life. So they decide to go back in time and pretend to be wizards. It's better than I can make it sound.

John Scalzi's Old Man's War series has been pretty good so far. It's set in the far future where the Earth has expanded out to the far reaches of the galaxy, but now find themselves fighting wars that we need new soldiers for... so we recruit old people from Earth.

The Dresden Files books that I've read so far are good, it's a wizard private eye kind of series set in contemporary times.

There's the Odd Thomas series by Dean Koontz, which is about a man who can see ghosts, and he tries to help them out.

There's also Christopher Moore's books. My favorite is Coyote Blue, which is about the Crow trickster god Coyote who decides to help out in a man's life, and does it like only a trickster could do. Other than that, any of his books that take place in contemporary times is good (maybe barring Island of the Sequined Love Nun, which I struggled to finish) and has crossover characters that make neat cameos.

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Blossom
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Re: Books

Postby Blossom » Sat Sep 09, 2017 7:31 pm

I can't remember where I first heard about it, but I've been tearing through Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence recently, and I cannot recommend it enough. Sort of a modern high fantasy kind of thing, hard to describe, but the kindle compilation of the first five novels is $12 on Amazon and drm-free so you can readily convert it to whatever kind of reader you prefer to use. Book six just came out, and I am excited.
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MarsDragon
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Re: Books

Postby MarsDragon » Sat Sep 09, 2017 8:15 pm

I didn't much enjoy The Name of the Wind myself, but others seem to.

One I did enjoy was The Steerswoman series, by Rosemary Kirstein. It starts off looking a lot like period low fantasy, but it's really not. I'd encourage you to at least hang around to the plot twist, unless you just hate the writing/characters. It was recommended to me as a good series about characters making scientific observations about magic, and it delivers that in spades. It's one of the few series I've seen that have a protagonist that consistently feels intelligent in a realistic way. The first four books are all available as ebooks on Amazon, and the fifth book is on its way....eventually.

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Blossom
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Re: Books

Postby Blossom » Sat Sep 09, 2017 8:28 pm

Oh my GOD the Steerswoman series is AMAZING. I love those to death and cannot wait for the last two.
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Thad
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Re: Books

Postby Thad » Sun Sep 10, 2017 12:58 pm

TA wrote:I can't remember where I first heard about it, but I've been tearing through Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence recently

Could have been me back on page 2, or you could have heard about it somewhere else; I'm guessing I'm not the only guy recommending it. (I checked it out because Stross recommended it on his blog.) I've only read Three Parts Dead but it was good; interesting take on gods functioning like big banks.

Thanks for the heads-up on the Amazon price; maybe I'll give the rest of the series a look.

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Blossom
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Re: Books

Postby Blossom » Sun Sep 10, 2017 5:23 pm

It's also worth noting that Gladstone is probably the first author I can recall seeing that actually gets ebook pricing? Book 6 in the series, Ruin of Angels, came out on Tuesday. It's 576 pages, not a short book by any means. The list price for the paperback is $25, the price Amazon wants from me is $16.37, whatever, but the ebook for the five day old novel is $3. Because it's a damn ebook, there's no printing or shipping involved so why should it be $13 or something?
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Mazian
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Re: Books

Postby Mazian » Sun Sep 10, 2017 7:00 pm

Because the cost of printing is not most of the cost of a book. Hardbacks are actually about $3 to produce, paperbacks about $1; beyond that, as a rule of thumb, about half the price goes to the publisher for breakdown between the various parties involved (author, editor, copyeditor, the works) and the other half goes to the bookstore or ebook distributor. The price disparity between first-run hardback and year-later paperback is conceptually identical to full price new games vs. their Steam sale at the next holiday - try to recover your sunk costs early with the people that gotta have it NOW, then ride the tail.

Any new volume at $3 is a loss leader sale to get readers into the rest of his books. Probably a good tactic, too! Taking it a step further, Baen's had free ebooks for many years now which are never more than a few from any given author, and they claim they've made up for the lost revenue there several times over with the extra sales on the rest of those authors' works.

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mharr
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Re: Books

Postby mharr » Thu Dec 21, 2017 2:20 pm

Got into reading through Shamus Young's archives recently, and discovered the novella adaptation of the first System Shock that he apparently wrote by accident. That's bed-time reading sorted for the week. https://www.shamusyoung.com/shocked

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