I will be at Dragon*Con this year, but as an Attending Professional, not as a guest. Come join me this Labor Day weekend in Downtown Atlanta for four days of geekdom!

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I got a Kindle for Christmas, and I thought it pertinent of me as an author and a reader to share my thoughts on the device.

I got the $79 Kindle, without the keyboard and no touchscreen. The user interface is a bit clunky, but not as much as I thought it would be. Ordering books through the device is much easier than I thought, but I usually just order through my computer and then turn on the Kindle’s wi-fi to download my purchases.

In addition to books, you can also download games and other programs. The games don’t interest me (at least until someone creates a chess game for the device), but there are some cool applications that really enhance the Kindle’s functionality. I have a notepad and a calendar app that turn my Kindle into an effective PDA, though the UI makes entering long notes or a lot of dates and deadlines somewhat slow and cumbersome. I really like this feature of the device. Good on Amazon for allowing other content besides books onto it.

On a side note, you can also read pdf files and Word documents, though the Kindle won’t save your place as it will with its regular ebook files. To get around this, it’s a simple matter to convert the Word document into Kindle format with Amazon’s free Kindle converter, and then sideloading it onto the device with your computer. I’ve done this with some stories I am reading for research as part of a couple of fiction projects, and it works great. I haven’t tried it with pdfs though.

You can subscribe to your favorite blogs as well, as long as they are available on Amazon, and read them on your Kindle, but there is a monthly fee. I can already read all my favorite blogs through the Google Reader app on my smartphone for free, so I have no need to pay for access to something I wouldn’t have otherwise.

What do I like best about my Kindle? First, the battery life. This thing takes weeks of use to go dead, and I’ve only fully charged it once since I got it Christmas Day. The Kindle app on my phone is a different story, and I often found myself short of juice when I actually had to access my phone’s primary function and make a call. Furthermore, the Kindle’s e-ink display is much easier on the eyes than my smartphone’s backlit color screen.

Secondly, all this use doesn’t make the Kindle hot. It doesn’t even get warm.

Last but not least, I love the portability. Now I can carry an entire library in my pocket. What reader doesn’t want that?

All in all, it’s been a great Kindle experience thus far, and I don’t see myself going back to paper books at all. I can buy more books, read them faster because I can take them wherever I go, and free up my computer for what I bought it for: writing.

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Mark Cover, CEO of Smashwords, posted an interesting article over at The Huffington Post on an alleged dark cloud to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing’s silver lining. Basically, the giant book and everything else retailer has instituted a new program called Kindle Direct Publishing Select, which will pay authors for loaning out copies of their ebooks. Readers can borrow ebooks with no due date or late fees if they sign up for Amazon Prime, where they pay a monthly fee that also gets them free shipping and the ability to download movies and TV shows. Anyway KDP Select, if it works as advertised, will actually pay authors almost as much for loaning their books as they’d get for selling them.

Now, it’s obvious at the outset that Amazon is merely trying to encourage as many people as possible to sign up for Amazon Prime, and I’m as willing to overlook my role in monopoly building as the next capitalist, but KDP Select also has a dark underside: Books enrolled in KDP Select cannot be offered for sale anywhere else, including the author’s personal Website.

If this is true, it irks me because it is yet another example of a large company that become so large by giving customers what they want doing things to stymie competition and become a monopoly.

If nothing else, I should probably just test it out, enrolling books that aren’t uploaded anywhere else to see what kind of money, if any, I can make off this. Anyone else have any thoughts?

C’mon, gang. It gets lonely here just me and the spambots, so chime in. What do you think of KDP Select, either as an author or reader? Will you sign up for this program? Leave a comment and share.

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A round robin style interview with me and the other writers of Blackthorn: Thunder on Mars on has been posted over at All Pulp.

I got my contrib copies yesterday, and they look fantastic. This is the nicest looking print publication I have ever been involved with, and I’m extremely proud of it.

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I’m happy to announce that the anthology Blackthorn: Thunder on Mars, containing my story “Indestinguishable from Magic,” is now available from Amazon in print and Kindle editions. You can get it here.

It includes some amazing illustrations by the talented Chris Kohler. Below is his illustration for my story:

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Once again we enter the e-book vs. print book fray with this post by Ed West, a book industry insider, rebutting some of them are), only that the percentage of print sales is shrinking while the percentage of e-book sales are on the rise. Print won’t ever completely go away, but it will eventually become a razor-thin slice of the pie, and anyone for whom print is a significant portion of their business model is going to start having a very bad day pretty soon.

Finally, West seeks to belittle e-books as being a bubble about to burst, as if it is just some passing fad, some petty annoyance that isn’t worth the hype being afforded to it. According to Wikipedia, an economic bubble is a trade in products or assets with inflated values. The Internet boom of the early 2000s was a bubble, as was housing more recently. But how are e-book values inflated? West’s entire argument makes no sense, and while linking to articles that give a few facts he seems to be ignoring the biggest one: e-books are here to stay.

The smart money says to do both print and e-books. And no amount of burying their heads in the sand, ignoring the facts, and calling e-books a “bubble” is going to change that.

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I just finished filmmaker Ernest Cline’s first novel Ready Player One
Ready Player One and couldn’t resist sharing. The bottom line here is, if you are a geek who grew up during the 1980′s, you’ve got to read this book.

The novel is set in the year 2044, a nightmarish dystopia of energy shortage, overpopulation, and nearly global poverty. But for Wade Watts, a poor orphan kid who lives in a complex of stacked trailers, there is one bright spot: the OASIS, a virtual world that is a cross between Second Life and World of Warcraft. The world’s eccentric creator, James Halliday, has died of cancer, leaving his vast fortune and controlling stock in his company to whoever finds three magic keys. The clues are locked somewhere inside Halliday’s vast love and knowledge of 80′s pop culture, specifically videogames, music, comic books, science fiction novels, TV shows, and cartoons. As a result, everyone one in the world becomes obsessed with the 80′s, and serious gunters (slang for those who have made finding Halliday’s Easter Egg, as the prize is called, their full time job) can debate the finer points of films like LadyHawk and recite obscure lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the best of them. But Wade is just a poor OASIS public school kid who really doesn’t think he’ll be the one to find the Egg, until one day by accident he discovers the first gate.

Against him are his fellow gunters, including his best friend, who he has never met in real life, and a rival corporation that will stop at nothing, including cheating and murder, to take control of the OASIS so they can charge more for membership and cover every pixellated inch of the virtual realm with advertising. Wade doesn’t want to see the place that he loves defiled and destroyed, so he vows to win at any cost.

The amazing premise is set up brilliantly, and Cline doesn’t hesitate to set up catastrophic, real world stakes if Wade loses. And far from being mere windowdressing or fluff, the references to 80s pop culture ephemera are integral components of the plot. Your inner fanboy will squee with delight as Wade and company pilot flying DeLoreans or giant Japanese robots. You’ll also become as enamored as Wade is with obscure 80′s movie trivia and the more arcane aspects of late 70′s hacker lore and early videogames. Ready Player One is a novel for the ubergeek in all of us, filled with some cool if startling science fictional concepts (a few of the most intense chapters of the novel take place entirely outside the OASIS and introduce the reader to such nightmarish concepts as corporate-sponsored indentured servitude and vending machines that dispense handguns).

While extremely dark, the message of Ready Player One is ultimately one of hope, tempered with the warm fuzzy of 80′s nostalgia. If nothing else, it has made me want to give all that stuff I loved as a kid a second look, and seek out the things I missed.

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Thanks to editor Van Allen Plexico, the Airship 27 anthology Gideon Cain: Demon Hunter, containing my story “The House of the Witch,” is now available for the Kindle for just $2.99. Get it here.

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Friday, September 2

UFO’s Invade Hollywood Room A703, Marriott

Revcast Live! Room A703, Marriott

Stump the Geeks Room A703, Marriott

Saturday, September 3

Books vs. Movies Room A703, Marriott

I’m scheduled for others, but once again Dragon*Con did that funny thing where they totally ignore my availability. Ah well. It’s still going to be a fun show.

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Courtesy of Joshua Reynolds, science fiction grandmaster Fred Pohl has a blog.

It’s full of great remembrances of people like Robert Silverberg and Alfred Bester and the days of the science fiction pulps. Well worth a look.

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