Tag Archives: books

Selling books again

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I am once again selling books from my library. I shipped one today, getting $78 for it. Today I listed another 10 math, physics, and statistics books at Amazon.com. My pricing strategy is simple: For any given book my price is clearly the lowest. In a couple cases that still let me set a price in 3 digits. There is also a history book I want to sell, but I am giving colgaffneyis members a chance at it before going to Amazon.

Again there was a quantum mechanics text that, after some thought, decided I could not bear parting with. I wonder if it was the same book as back in 2005.

Joss Whedon teaches Physics

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mia_mcdavid has been introducing our foster daughter, carpe_noctum_93, to the wonders of Joss Whedon’s creation, going through our complete DVD collections of both Buffy and Angel. Back in July I heard Jennifer Ouellette speak at Convergence, and decided it was time to read her book, The Physics of the Buffyverse.

Behind the fantastic properties of the vampires, demons, etc., there is actually a lot of good physics in the series. From electricity and the mechanics of martial arts to the Many World Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the writers of the series drew upon wide variety of concepts in physics. Ouellette neatly disentangles the real science from the fantastic elements, maintaining a witty style quite appropriate for the subject matter. It is absolutely non-technical—no math needed (Though that reminds me that I want to read her latest book).

iPad and Kindle

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Follow-up on e-books, iPad, and Kindle (with a few choice words about the iPhone4)

This seems to support my general impression: The iPad is a vastly more powerful device, and priced accordingly. The Kindle, though the latest version has some extra capabilities, is specifically an e-Book reader. As my bureaucratic masters like to say, it is a “point solution.” The iPad can do many other things, is much more powerful, and priced accordingly.

Amazon 1. Apple 0.

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From Cory Doctorow, at Which ebook sellers will allow publishers and writers to opt out of DRM?

Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo were all happy to carry my books without DRM, and on terms that gave you the same rights you got when buying paper editions. Sony and Apple refused to carry my books without DRM — even though my publisher and I both asked them to.

Perils of the Amazon

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beamjockey wrote about “The Worst Excuse for a Book I’ve Ever Seen.”

He compared a modern “print-on-demand” copy of a technical book with the 1912 original. OCR is clearly not ready for prime time.

The publisher

is flooding Amazon with these low quality prints and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with beter quality imprints associated with them.

Also, Jennifer Ouellette, in The Nays Have It looked at Amazon.com customer reviews of some well known science books. If you are thinking about buying a book there, don’t just count the stars. Again, you should check the reviews.

Hobbit a la Russe

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Wonderful illustrations from a Soviet-era Russian translation of the Hobbit.

The article is titled “Russian Lord of the Rings”, but everything I could see was from The Hobbit.

Also three clips from a low-budget Soviet movie version. Somehow it seems particularly appropriate for the dwarves to speak Russian. Perhaps it is because they look like Orthodox monks.

Via BoingBoing

An e-book is not a book

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From How to Destroy the Book, by Cory Doctorow

When I buy a book, it’s mine. There’s no mechanism, not even in the face of a court order, whereby a retailer can take a book away from me, and yet Amazon—there’s the most extraordinary thing that they had to do in the United States—you’ve heard of course that someone put a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in the Kindle Store, and it wasn’t licensed for distribution in the U.S.—of course, Orwell is in the public domain outside the U.S., in copyright in the U.S.—and Amazon responded to this intelligence by revoking the book 1984 from its customers’ ebook readers. After they’d bought it, they woke up one morning to discover their book had gone. But Amazon was actually pretty good. After thinking about it for a day, and confronting the media storm, they decided to restore the books—they gave them back to the people, and they made a promise: “We will never ever ever ever ever give your books away again. Unless we have to.”

Now I worked as a bookseller for a number of years in this city, and I never had to make that promise to any of my customers when they bought books.

Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Slashdot.