Category: books

25 Sites We Can’t Live Without – TIME magazine

On By Rick McIn books, movies, music, product endorsementsLeave a comment

Amazon.com

The uber-e-tailer that never forgets its bookstore roots.

The new print-on-demand service means customers can now order out-of-print, backlist and large-print books from several big publishers.

Soon it will start selling DRM-free MP3s (meaning you can copy the songs for personal use and download them to any device) from EMI and other labels out of its new music store (iTunes already does).

And, if the rumors are true — that Amazon is in talks to buy Netflix — before long it could own the market on movies, both digital downloads (through its Unbox service) and rent-by-mail.

Amazon.com – 25 Sites We Can’t Live Without – TIME

I just used Amazon for several purchases. Awesome, as usual.

Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

On By Rick McIn audiocasts, books, governmentLeave a comment

GREAT podcast. I listened to it several times:

Lawrence Wright spent five years researching the history of the events leading to the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers in New York City.

His book about the subject, The Looming Tower won the 2007 Lionel Gelber Prize, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. In this public lecture, Wright analyses the forces that created Al-Qaeda, and adds to our understanding of what we must do to fight them.

Download File – 24.3 MB or Listen To This Podcast – CBC’s The Best of Ideas Podcast

Or if you have time and money to spare, get the book:

Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Salt Lake City Public Library

On By Rick McIn books, travel, travelogues1 Comment

Wow.

This place is gorgeous.

I write from the main library, a five-story tall, wedge-shaped building faced top to bottom by a curved glass wall.

Outside is a huge landscaped plaza.

450px-salt_lake_city_public_library_intern.jpg

A rooftop garden completes the structure. It is planted with trees, grasses, flowering bulbs and various perennial plants.

The whole library depends on natural lighting, reducing the need of lights in the library. A huge five story glass wall is where most of the light comes from.

Salt Lake City Public Library – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Having won Library Journal’s 2006 library of the year award I feel it’s even better than the new Vancouver Public Library.

Hey — same architect. How about that.

450px-vpl1.jpg
Vancouver

World Fantasy 2008 – Calgary

On By Rick McIn books, McCharles familyLeave a comment

My brother is a key organizer for the biggest Sci If Fantasy Writer’s convention of 2008.

VIPs scheduled already include David Morrell, Barbara Hambly, Tom Doherty, Todd Lockwood and Tad Williams.


Our theme for 2008 is “Mystery in Fantasy and Horror”.

Much of our program will look at how the mysterious is used in fantasy and horror storytelling. Be it occult detectives, Holmsian dragons, or Who Stole Frodo’s Ring? How does mystery play out in fantastical fiction?

World Fantasy 2008

convention-2008.jpg

Amazon – do you want my money?

On By Rick McIn books, product complaints, product endorsementsLeave a comment

images.jpegI love Amazon.com, but it lacks some really basic features. For example:

I like certain authors (William Gibson, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, etc.). I’ll basically buy every new book from about 7-10 different authors. Give me a better way to track new books from a favorite author.

At one point in the past I created Amazon email alerts for new books from a few specific authors, but then you started sending me emails for “related” authors. As far as I could tell, there was no way to get alerts about new books without getting the unwanted “you might also like this author” emails. If you let me watch specific authors, I’d buy the new John Brockman book from Amazon instead of stumbling across the book in a bookstore.

While you’re at it, provide an RSS feed for that “new books by this author” info instead of as an email.

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » Five tweaks Amazon needs to make

The Amazon search function is poor, has always been poor, and seems never to improve.

Why not use Google?

Kurt Vonnegut farewell

On By Rick McIn bad news, booksLeave a comment

Ron says it well.

200px-vonnegut12.jpg

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” – Kurt Vonnegut

One of my literary heroes died yesterday at age 84. Today’s New York Times has a good obit.

Vonnegut’s dark wit, playful voice and humanist values helped me and millions of other teenagers live through the 70s with our sanity intact. He was funny, imaginative and, above all, outraged to the core at the cruelty of war and the absurdity of existence.

He was a snarky, charming athiest; the Mark Twain of his time.

His work is probably one of the main reasons I became a writer, and when I think about it I realize that he’s with me every time I string a sentence together.

Goodbye, Mr. V.

Hi ho.

For Your Approval: And so it goes

official website – Kurt Vonnegut

locations published in books

On By Rick McIn booksLeave a comment

The Inside Google Book Search blog has posted maps of the Earth populated with dots representing locations referenced in books.

A Welsh View: Earth Viewed From Books

For your great novel you may want to choose locations that have not been over written.

world-maps.jpg
original source – Google

book – In Tasmania

On By Rick McIn books, product endorsements, traveloguesLeave a comment

The best book I have read in years: In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare.

I knew Shakespeare as the biographer of the most celebrated travel writer of all time, Bruce Chatwin.

Shakespeare fell in love with Tasmania after a holiday hiking the Overland Track. He promptly moved there from England.

By chance discovery of family correspondence, Shakespeare learned he was related to the “founding father” of Tasmania, a con-man named Kemp.

His book — a fascinating, personal history of the island from Kemp’s penal-colony Van Diemen’s Land origins to modern day — has many parallels with the work of Chatwin. It’s eerie at times.

My conclusion: Shakespeare is an even better writer than Chatwin. This is a fantastic book.

In Tasmania

In Tasmania

This is the last post on the Australia travelogue.

book – John Hodgman

On By Rick McIn Apple, audiocasts, books, humour, miscellaneous, product endorsementsLeave a comment

Rockin’ tipped me off to the hilarious John Hodgman book, The Areas of My Expertise.

An Almanac of Complete World Knowledge Compiled with Instructive Annotation and Arranged in Useful Order by Me, John Hodgman, a Professional Writer, in the Areas of My Expertise, which Include: Matters Historical; Matters Literary; Matters Cryptozoological; Hobo Matters; Food, Drink, & Cheese (a Kind of Food); Squirrels & Lobsters & Eels; Haircuts; Utopia; What Will Happen in the Future; and Most Other Subjects; Illustrated with a Reasonable Number of Tables and Figures, and Featuring the Best of “Were You Aware of It?”, John Hodgman’s Long-Running Newspaper Novelty Column of Strange Facts and Oddities of the Bizarre.

The Areas of My Expertise – Wikipedia

Very original.

Actually, I downloaded it for free (email address required) from iTunes as an audio book with accompaniment by frequent collaborator Jonathan Coulton.

The Areas of My Expertise

book – Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party

On By Rick McIn books, product endorsementsLeave a comment

On a long drive to Saskatchewan I was rapt with a book on CD: The Lost Men: The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party.

I knew well the story of Shackleton’s miraculous escape with no lives lost. I thought.

What I didn’t know is what happened to his second ship. The 10 men he sent to the other side of Antarctica to lay out his stock pile provisions for after he crossed the continent.

Shackleton never even reached Antarctica in 1915. His Ross Sea party crew had a horrible experience. Three died. In vain.

The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton\'s Ross Sea Party