The Supreme Court on Monday decided against hearing an appeal from The Authors Guild alleging that Google Books infringes writers' copyrighted works.
The high court’s decision not to hear the case means the lower court decision in favor of Google remains in place. In October, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Google’s project falls within the limits of fair use.
Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for May, 2016.
The nominations will run through midnight EST April 26 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.
The book selection category for May is: Science Fiction.
In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).
How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.
How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.
How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.
How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.
How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.
When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.
The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.
Freedom of Information
If you ask, she must answer. A steerswoman's knowledge is shared with any who request it; no steerswoman may refuse a question, and no steerswoman may answer with anything but the truth.
And if she asks, you must answer. It is the other side of tradition's contract -- and if you refuse the question, or lie, no steerswoman will ever again answer even your most casual question.
And so, the steerswomen — always seeking, always investigating — have gathered more and more knowledge about the world they traveled, and they share that knowledge freely.
Until the day that the steerswoman Rowan begins asking innocent questions about one small, lovely, inexplicable object…
Her discoveries grow stranger and deeper, and more dangerous, until suddenly she finds she must flee or fight for her life. Or worse -- lie.
Because one kind of knowledge has always been denied the the steerswomen:
Magic.
Reviewers comments:
“If you haven’t read Kirstein’s Steerswoman books I envy you the chance to read them now for the first time.... I think they have a very good claim to be my favorite thing still being written. […] If you like science, and if you like watching someone work out mysteries, and if you like detailed weird alien worlds and human cultures, if really good prose appeals... you’re really in luck.” — Jo Walton, Hugo and Nebula Awards winner, author of Among Others and Farthing.
"[Kirstein] walks the tightrope between fantasy and science fiction with precision and grace... [her] compassion for even minor characters is evident on every page, and her prose is measured and alluring without being overworked." -- Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo, in Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010
1632 In the year 1632 in northern Germany a reasonable person might conclude that things couldn't get much worse. There was no food. Disease was rampant. For over a decade religious war had ravaged the land and the people. Catholic and Protestant armies marched and countermarched across the northern plains, laying waste the cities and slaughtering everywhere. In many rural areas population plummeted toward zero. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy.
2000 Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia. The mines are working, the buck are plentiful (it's deer season) and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn's sister (including the entire membership of the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time.
THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED....
When the dust settles, Mike leads a small group of armed miners to find out what's going on. Out past the edge of town Grantville's asphalt road is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell; a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter Iying screaming in muck at the center of a ring of attentive men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don't have to ask who to shoot.
At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of The Thirty Years War.
At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
One of Isaac Asimov's SF masterpieces, this stand-alone novel is a monument of the flowering of SF in the twentieth century. It is widely regarded as Asimov's single best SF novel.
Andrew Harlan is an Eternal, a member of the elite of the future. One of the few who live in Eternity, a location outside of place and time, Harlan's job is to create carefully controlled and enacted Reality Changes. These Changes are small, exactingly calculated shifts in the course of history, made for the benefit of humankind. Though each Change has been made for the greater good, there are also always costs.
During one of his assignments, Harlan meets and falls in love with Noÿs Lambent, a woman who lives in real time and space. Then Harlan learns that Noÿs will cease to exist after the next Change, and he risks everything to sneak her into Eternity.
Unfortunately, they are caught. Harlan's punishment? His next assignment: Kill the woman he loves before the paradox they have created results in the destruction of Eternity.
In the "ideal" world into which Jonas was born, everybody has sensibly agreed that well-matched married couples will raise exactly two offspring, one boy and one girl. These children's adolescent sexual impulses will be stifled with specially prescribed drugs; at age 12 they will receive an appropriate career assignment, sensibly chosen by the community's Elders. This is a world in which the old live in group homes and are "released"--to great celebration--at the proper time; the few infants who do not develop according to schedule are also "released," but with no fanfare. Lowry's development of this civilization is so deft that her readers, like the community's citizens, will be easily seduced by the chimera of this ordered, pain-free society. Until the time that Jonah begins training for his job assignment--the rigorous and prestigious position of Receiver of Memory--he, too, is a complacent model citizen. But as his near-mystical training progresses, and he is weighed down and enriched with society's collective memories of a world as stimulating as it was flawed, Jonas grows increasingly aware of the hypocrisy that rules his world. With a storyline that hints at Christian allegory and an eerie futuristic setting, this intriguing novel calls to mind John Christopher's Tripods trilogy and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl. Lowry is once again in top form--raising many questions while answering few, and unwinding a tale fit for the most adventurous readers. Ages 12-14.
(5) A Door Into Summer by Robert A Heinlein Goodreads | Amazon US Print Length: 304 pages
Spoiler:
When Dan Davis is crossed in love and stabbed in the back by his business associates, the immediate future doesn't look too bright for him and Pete, his independent-minded tomcat. Suddenly, the lure of suspended animation, the Long Sleep, becomes irresistible and Dan wakes up 30 years later in the 21st century, a time very much to his liking.
The discovery that the robot household appliances he invented have been mass produced is no surprise, but the realization that, far from having been stolen from him, they have, mysteriously, been patented in his name is. There's only one thing for it. Dan somehow has to travel back in time to investigate.
He may even find Pete ...
(6) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Goodreads | Amazon US Print Length: 158 pages
Spoiler:
From Amazon:
Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future—where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment.
(7) The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Goodreads | Amazon US Print Length: 338 pages pages
Spoiler:
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there’s a catch to the invitation–and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.
The MobileRead wiki turns 10 years old this month. Our wiki is designed to supplement the forum and answer your questions about eBook Reader and eBook reading. You can read all about our wiki at Wiki Statistics.
It has 1521 pages of information available for your use. Thanks to everyone who helped and continues to help make the wiki what it is today. Note that anyone can add pages or edit pages in our wiki. Check it out! There have been over 35 million page views.
The press embargo is over! And it's a high price for the new Kindle - US$289.99/€289.99/£269.99/CA$399.99
The new Kindle will be available from 27th April 2016.
Designed to feel weightless—incredibly thin with an ergonomic grip that shifts the center of gravity to the palm of your hand, creating the perfect balance so you can read comfortably for hours with one hand
30% thinner on average and over 20% lighter than any other Kindle
Battery life given as 8 weeks (1/2 hour a day, light 10, wireless off). Voyage battery life is given as 6 weeks under the same conditions. Battery life of the Oasis without the case is given as two weeks. Capacities: 250 mAh for internal battery, 1290 mAh for cover battery.
The display seems to be a 300ppi Carta display (like PaperWhite and Voyage), but with the LEDs along the longer side (which explains why ten are needed), and no mention of adaptive lighting. Some reports suggest that the display uses a new thinner, more flexible glass substrate. (Possibly the Fina display technology?)
B&N announced on Thursday that it had inked a deal with Bahwan CyberTek, an Indian outsourcing firm, for BT to take over certain Nook tech services. To be more exact, B&N said that the firm would be responsible for cloud management, development support for Nook software, and other services.
"Over the last two years, the Company has done a significant amount of work to improve NOOK’s overall performance,” said Fred Argir, Chief Digital Officer at Barnes & Noble. “While we have been able to reduce costs, we still have a lot more work to do to rationalize the business. We believe that by outsourcing certain technology functions of our Nook business we will further improve Nook's performance.”
B&N also took the time to reaffirm its commitment to the Nook platform, and add that as a result of the deal it is closing both its Taiwan and Santa Clara, Calif. offices by July 2016.
The Nook platform, however, will remain open as B&N adopts benign neglect as its digital business model.
And yes, benign neglect is the best term for today's news; had B&N really been interested in rebuilding Nook then they would have invested capital rather than outsourcing key functions.
(Bold mine.)
Note that the performance they are referring to is their cost structure, not the quality of the hardware, software, or user support.
Nate's verdict:
That B&N is choosing not to invest tells us all we need to know about their plans for the Nook platform.
Now would be a good time to get your ebooks out, if you can.
More at Nate's, including links to the proud press release.
Supreme Court won’t hear case against Google Books
This has been rumbling on for as long as I can remember, but it appears to be finally at an end:
Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for May, 2016.
The MobileRead wiki turns 10 years old this month. Our wiki is designed to supplement the forum and answer your questions about eBook Reader and eBook reading. You can read all about our wiki at 
The press embargo is over! And it's a high price for the new Kindle - US$289.99/€289.99/£269.99/CA$399.99
Via the Digital Reader Blog:
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