For a while when I was publishing my work I would put them up on both Amazon and Kobo, but the sales on Kobo were, at best, 1/20th of my sales on Amazon and it required the same amount of work (it’s not like doing it in one place automatically lets you upload it to the other: both of their unique and annoying hoops to jump through). I eventually stopped… I think 2 or 3 of my 7 novels are still available through Kobo (I think! I don’t think they’ve paid me a cent in 4 or 5 years).
Huh. I just checked… I sold 1 book (total) through Kobo since January 2021. On Amazon that same book sold 11 copies in January 2021, and 80 copies total since January 2021. So there ya go.
Anyway, it’s worth a look, I suppose? At least it’s backed by another tech giant? A slightly less evil one, at least.
As for reading, I finished Motorcycles & Sweetgrass and it was pretty good. Nice, light, clever, a few actual laugh-out-loud moments. I then finished Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, which was delightfully angry. I am always a little nervous with books like that. The anger is justified, and I’m glad to have read it, but I would never go out of my way to read it. I don’t need to be more angry about all the injustice in the world. I am already as angry and powerless as I can get.
On that note, I’m now reading The Education of Augie Merasty by Joseph Auguste Merasty and David Carpenter. I can tell already it’s gonna be a heavy 'un. Whee.
I’m thinking of reading Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, one of those books that was on my to read list for so long that I simply never got round to it. Downloaded a copy from Standard eBooks which essentially takes Project Gutenberg books and cleans them up, improving the formatting etc.
It’s possible that reading through Steffan O’Sullivan’s Fudge Musketeers and The Princess Bride Roleplaying Game may have influenced this decision. Certainly nothing to do with this:
“woof woof” is also the way kids say “dog(s)” in Japanese. If I were to literally back-translate that title, I would have to arrive at “the dog musketeers” and not “the woof woof three musketeers” (sorry).
The classic English translation, by William barrow, is bowlderized garbage. There are some better modern translations that leave the sex in. (I haven’t read any. I read it in French for school, sometime in the 20th century. ).
The Three Musketeers is a solid read, but I admit it slightly disappointed me after reading The Count of Montecristo. I read it in Spanish on a good, solid modern version, but very often I found it a bit too simple. If you haven’t read The Count, though, go for it.
What’s the problem with the german book store chains? Thalia and co. They all are using the epub format.
I read two books this week:
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry. His autobiography in which he is talking a lot about his family, his private and job life and especially his alcohol, opiate and nicotine addiction. It was an interesting read, showing how miserable a life can be even though you have fame, money and sex (but not much else).
Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. Wow, what a fun read. The world ends and aliens put the last millions of humans in a dungeon in which they have to battle their way from one level to the next while it all is being livestreamed to the whole universe. Sounds crazy? It is crazy and goofy. But it is a pretty short and fun read. A lot of action and humour (especially if you know and like pen & paper or rpgs because the characters and everything else in that dungeon is part of a full blown out rpg system). There is also a lot of hinting to something bigger behind the scenes, so it keeps the setting interesting.
Oh I thought they were bound to the Tolino device they are selling and so never considered them. Thank you
edit: Ah well, it seems to be rather difficult to get at the actual epub and now I need to install some software (Adobe Digital Editions) to download the book and then make it possible to import to Calibre. I think I will probably not repeat that experience. This is not truly “just download”–ebooks.com let me just download a file.
edit 2: I am not a fan of Adobe but at least after that step it worked out fine. I might just not deinstall the software immediately.
I finished the first of the books Santa brought me for Christmas, On a Knife EdgeHow Germany Lost the First World War by Holger Afflerbach. The 2022 English translation of what was published in German in 2018.
It impressed me as it indicated “wallowing in the source material” of von Lynker’s letters which is the phrase my father has always used to describe good history.
This is a solid academic book that moves at a brisk pace and I found the translation well done. Only a couple of glaring typographical issues appeared and some awkward repeated phrases still got their meaning through clearly.
There is a revisionist tone here that is gentle and shows what 57 years of distance from the Fischer controversy allows. I found the historiography persuasive and a useful and easy to take tonic for the common US high school summary of WW1. It may be a bit stiffer tonic outside the US but that’s hard for me to judge.
I think the discussion of political impacts from events on the eastern and Italian fronts is particularly important context to pick up for folks like me whose educational focus was mostly on the lived experience of the western front.
Names come fast in this book without a lot of capsule biography information so I wouldn’t recommend it as an introductory text.
If I had a wish for this book, I wish it had opened with its closing paragraph and had a more explicit summary at the close of each chapter about the narrowing window resulting in the conclusion:
“The fact that the outcome of the First World War was teetering ‘on a knife edge’ for so long allowed both sides to cling to the hope of a favourable result and rendered the struggle so bitter and so terribly destructive. Thus even the victors, weakened as they were by the moral, social, and financial misery that the war had inflicted on them, were left feeling implacable - and hence ill-suited to rebuild a viable international order.”
That said, there aren’t many translated academic histories I can burn through 430 pages of in about a week. I particularly like this text, I’ve got Afflerbach on my alerts for new books and I recommend this book and his lecture if you’ve got a familiarity with the events and era and want some context that’s not usually found in a US classroom.
Finished the next Christmas book which a friend grabbed for me. Jon Peterson’s The Elusive ShiftHow Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity.
This was a brisk and enjoyable read. It could have used one more editing pass as there are a few doubled word bloopers and that made me question a couple of other passages.
Peterson “wallows in the source material” of fanzines from 1975 to 1980 which I enjoy as a historical summary. The book does a good job of putting context to discussions and outlining tensions in documented practice without taking sides or passing judgement. It’s a good thoughtful tome and the only things I found missing were explicit discussions of metalanguage and use of different levels of “voice” in a narrative fashion as part of play. But that’s personal things I’m interested in and if it wasn’t core to the discussion at the time it makes sense it’s not there.
This book may be a particularly enjoyable walk down memory lane for anyone who has followed Alarums and Excursions regularly.
Right it took a while but I finally went back and read the last of three body problem (overnight work trip meant I was happy enough to sit and give it a go while travelling).
The book has some real pacing issues (bits of the story I think were given a lot of attention only to be explained in an couple of lines of exposition later on) and it’s very much written as a series. I finished the last 100 pages pretty quickly and it flung an awful lot of sci fi at the wall with no clear payoff (some of it may reappear in subsequent books).
It does finish stronger than I thought it would when I sat it down but I think I’ll read a plot synopsis for the sequels and skip reading them.
