The Bone Mother

Amazon’s shipping robot has informed me that David Demchuk’s book, The Bone Mother, has shipped. I’m looking forward to it:

Three neighboring villages on the Ukrainian/Romanian border are the final refuge for the last of the mythical creatures of Eastern Europe. Now, on the eve of the war that may eradicate their kind—and with the ruthless Night Police descending upon their sanctuary—they tell their stories and confront their destinies.

Eerie and unsettling like the best fairy tales, these incisor-sharp portraits of ghosts, witches, sirens, and seers—and the mortals who live at their side and in their thrall—will chill your marrow and tear at your heart.

Sounds spooky. Buy it on Amazon.

“Writing on the high seas”

Author Tobias Buckell’s treatise on book piracy and what it means here in the now:

A certain book that usually sells about 5,000 copies, locked down and protected, seems to sell the same 5,000 copies as a book with a free giveaway and pirated. The difference, according to O’Reilly and many, will be that the second author sees a 5,000 copies sold book, and 5,000 downloads and wonders “why, I should really have had 10,000 sales!” But the truth might be more like, 5,000 people purchased each, and one of them got 5,000 additional reads.

Most of this analysis seems like it should fall under the rubric of “common sense,” but there’s obviously a pretty big lack of that in the traditional publishing channels right now. Some people will read your stuff, some people will pay you, and the best you can hope for is enough people fall into the second category that you can pay your bills.

Lukas Mathis on Scrolling .vs. Page-flipping

In response to a response, he grabs this quote from Kottke:

The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It’s like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can’t we just scroll?

He says:

How is scrolling desirable to the person who is trying to read a book? If I’m reading a book, I want to fill the screen with text. Then, I want to read that text. Then, I want to fill the whole screen with new text, and read that.

and I smile and nod, because he is extremely right. The reason the page-flip metaphor still works is that my eyes/brain shouldn’t have to be in charge of figuring out where I am in the text every time I scroll.

It’s not as simple as eliminating “pages” entirely, I think, but re-implementing the good functionality of pages.

Cadence & Slang is a book about interaction design.

Written by Nick Disabato (nickd), soon to be self-published:

I’m writing a book called Cadence & Slang, due in late 2010. It’s about interaction design, which is the art and craft of making technology easier to use. There have been many products in the past decade that take generous advantage of good design – the iPod, the Flip Video, the Wii – and fortunately we’re moving more in this direction. Technology used to be an awful lot more complex and overwhelming, and we’ve since learned to make it simpler.

Back the project on Kickstarter, so I can read this thing. See also: the book’s outline (PDF), and it’s official site.

A List of Books & Authors Mentioned In The Ask Metafilter Thread “What books do people proselytize about?”

This is a list compiled by careful reading of the recent Ask Metafilter thread “What books do people proselytize about?” The first list are books, the second list is authors that users noted “all” works by. Where an author AND book has been mentioned, I took into account the intent of the poster: “Ayn Rand” puts Rand on the Authors list. “Ayn Rand’s The Fontainhead” puts the book on the books list, but does not add to her author’s list total. Both lists are ordered by mentions. Following Basically, I do whatever Andy Baio tells me. If it entirely possible and even likely that I have made an error or omission in this list. If you feel this is the case, contact me using the Contact link in my sidebar.

Books

  1. Harry Potter – 4
  2. Infinite Jest – 4
  3. The Celestine Prophecy – 4
  4. Twilight – 3
  5. Catcher In The Rye – 3
  6. Atlas Shrugged – 3
  7. Gravity’s Rainbow – 3
  8. The Celestine Prophesy – 2
  9. The Stranger – 2
  10. Ulysses – 2
  11. Dune – 2
  12. The Great Gatsby – 2
  13. The Corrections – 2
  14. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – 2
  15. The Jungle – 2
  16. The Master and Margarita – 2
  17. Lord of the Rings – 2
  18. Starship Troopers – 2
  19. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – 2
  20. 1984 – 2
  21. The Shack – 2
  22. Siddhartha – 2
  23. The Secret – 2
  24. Who Moved My Cheese – 2
  25. The Alchemist – 2
  26. The Long Tail – 2
  27. House of Leaves – 2
  28. The Prophet – 1
  29. The Turner Diaries – 1
  30. Deep Thoughts – 1
  31. The C Programming Language – 1
  32. Neuromancer – 1
  33. The Education of Little Tree – 1
  34. Fuzzy Memories – 1
  35. Battlefield Earth – 1
  36. Dharma Bums – 1
  37. On The Road – 1
  38. The Art of War – 1
  39. The Power of One – 1
  40. Getting Things Done – 1
  41. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – 1
  42. Dianetics – 1
  43. The Giver – 1
  44. The Captain – 1
  45. The Tao of Pooh – 1
  46. Catch 22 – 1
  47. The Watchmen – 1
  48. Stranger In A Strange Land – 1
  49. Les Misérables – 1
  50. The Te of Piglet – 1
  51. Ender’s Game – 1
  52. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – 1
  53. Candide – 1
  54. A Rememberance of Things Past – 1
  55. The Dice Man – 1
  56. Fight Club – 1
  57. V for Vendetta – 1
  58. Story Of O – 1
  59. Magic Mountain – 1
  60. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull – 1
  61. One Hundred Years of Solitude – 1
  62. Prozac Nation – 1
  63. White Teeth – 1
  64. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 1
  65. Night Train to Lisbon – 1
  66. The World According to Garp – 1
  67. The Woman’s Room – 1
  68. Kundera’s Slowness – 1
  69. Das Capital – 1
  70. Holy Blood, Holy Grail – 1
  71. The Confidence Man – 1
  72. The Giving Tree – 1
  73. State of Fear – 1
  74. Freakonomics – 1
  75. The Teachings of Don Juan – 1
  76. Mutant Message Down Under – 1
  77. Confederacy of Dunces – 1
  78. Manhattan Transfer – 1
  79. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – 1
  80. Notes from the Underground – 1
  81. The Catcher in the Rye – 1
  82. Ender’s Game – 1
  83. Last Exit to Brooklyn – 1
  84. The Little Prince – 1
  85. Crime and Punishment – 1
  86. The Omnivore’s Dilemma – 1
  87. Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 1
  88. The Brothers Karamazov – 1
  89. Eat, Love, Pray – 1
  90. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas – 1
  91. Rubyfruit Jungle – 1
  92. The Metamorphosis – 1
  93. The Lovely Bones – 1
  94. Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus – 1
  95. The Trial – 1
  96. Nausea – 1
  97. The Fountainhead – 1
  98. Chicken Soup for the Soul – 1
  99. The Crying of Lot 49 – 1
  100. The 4-Hour Work Week – 1
  101. Snow Crash – 1
  102. Contact – 1
  103. The Tipping Point – 1
  104. Foucault’s Pendulum – 1
  105. Jonathan Livington Seagull – 1
  106. The Grapes of Wrath – 1
  107. Crowdsourcing – 1
  108. What Color is Your Parachute? – 1
  109. The Elements of Style – 2
  110. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – 1
  111. Here Comes Everybody – 1
  112. Night – 1
  113. Left Behind – 1
  114. A People’s History of The United States – 1

Authors

  1. Ayn Rand – 6
  2. Dan Brown – 3
  3. Michael Crichton – 2
  4. Kurt Vonnegut – 2
  5. David Sedaris – 2
  6. Daniel Quinn – 2
  7. Philip K Dick – 1
  8. TS Eliot – 1
  9. Toni Morrison – 1
  10. William Faulkner – 1
  11. Robert A. Heinlein – 1
  12. Chris Ware – 1
  13. Danielle Steel – 1
  14. Malcolm Gladwell – 1
  15. Tom Clancy – 1
  16. Chuck Palahniuk – 1
  17. Carlos Castaneda – 1
  18. Charles Bukowski – 1
  19. John Norman – 1
  20. Henry Miller – 1
  21. Isaac Asimov – 1
  22. Noam Chomsky – 1
  23. Herman Hesse – 1
  24. L. Ron Hubbard – 1
  25. Michael Pollan – 1
  26. Alice Waters – 1
  27. William Shakespere – 1
  28. C. S. Lewis – 1
  29. Jonathan Safran Foer – 1
  30. Gore Vidal – 1
  31. Jorge Luis Borges – 1
  32. Philip Pullman – 1
  33. Neal Stephenson – 1
  34. Neil Gaiman – 1
  35. Holderlin – 1
  36. Nicholas Sparks – 1
  37. William Carlos Williams – 1
  38. Ernest Hemingway – 1
  39. Isaac Isamov – 1
  40. Hunter S. Thompson – 1
  41. James Joyce – 1
  42. Chuck Klosterman – 1
  43. Thomas Mann – 1
  44. Anne Rice – 1
  45. Vladimir Nabokov – 1
  46. Michel Houellebecq – 1
  47. Ford Maddox Ford – 1