[Edited for clarity]
All Kindle models from the Kindle 1 to the Kindle PaperWhite 2012 need a firmware update to be able to continue to connect to the Amazon servers. If you don't update by the end of 22nd March, 2016, you won't be able to update over wifi, you'll need to download the update manually and copy it onto your kindle via USB connection.
Have you ever bought music, movies, games, ebooks, or gadgets, only to discover later that the product had been deliberately limited with Digital Rights Management? We want to hear from you!
We're preparing a petition to a government agency on fair labelling practices for DRM-restricted devices, products and services. DRM used to be limited to entertainment products, but it's spread with the Internet of Things, and it's turning up in the most unlikely of places. As the Copyright Office heard during last summer's hearings, DRM is now to be found in cars and tractors, in insulin pumps and pacemakers, even in voting machines. What's more, the manufacturers using DRM believe that they have the right to invoke the "anti-circumvention" rules in 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to prevent competitors from removing DRM in order to give you more choice about the products you own.
We believe this is an abusive extension of copyright law and that the law should protect businesses and individuals that remove digital locks for lawful purposes -- for example, your mechanic should be able to diagnose your car's problems and install aftermarket parts rather than being locked out of the vehicle's computers and stuck with using original parts at inflated prices.
Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for April, 2016.
The nominations will run through midnight EST March 26 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.
Book selection category for April is: Award Winners.
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.
This novel also made the Guardian's Best 100 Novels of All Time list. Quotes from the article:
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Samuel Beckett’s entry into this series with his characteristically bleak, nihilistic humour, marks another milestone: the first appearance since Shakespeare of a writer who will innovate as brilliantly in theatre as much as in poetry and prose. Beckett, indeed, is one of the giants of 20th-century literature, in any language.
Murphy is an absurdist masterpiece, a first novel that emerged from a long literary apprenticeship, mainly conducted in post-first world war Paris. It was the first substantial work by a young man – Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April, 1906 in Foxrock, just south of Dublin – who had been experimenting for years with poetry and prose, partly influenced by James Joyce, for whom he also worked as an unconventional secretary.
[q_index]Murphy is a showcase for Beckett’s uniquely comic voice, his command of absurdist narrative, and fascination with existential, mind-body issues of being and nothingness.[q_index]
In his most ambitious project to date, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson utilizes years of research and cutting-edge science in the first of three novels that will chronicle the colonization of Mars.
For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny.
John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a mission whose ultimate goal is the terraforming of Mars. For some, Mars will become a passion driving them to daring acts of courage and madness; for others it offers and opportunity to strip the planet of its riches. And for the genetic "alchemists, " Mars presents a chance to create a biomedical miracle, a breakthrough that could change all we know about life...and death.
The colonists place giant satellite mirrors in Martian orbit to reflect light to the planets surface. Black dust sprinkled on the polar caps will capture warmth and melt the ice. And massive tunnels, kilometers in depth, will be drilled into the Martian mantle to create stupendous vents of hot gases. Against this backdrop of epic upheaval, rivalries, loves, and friendships will form and fall to pieces--for there are those who will fight to the death to prevent Mars from ever being changed.
Brilliantly imagined, breathtaking in scope and ingenuity, Red Mars is an epic scientific saga, chronicling the next step in human evolution and creating a world in its entirety. Red Mars shows us a future, with both glory and tarnish, that awes with complexity and inspires with vision.
Red Mars won a Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1994, 1997).
(3) Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlan and the Great Depression by Alan Brinkley Amazon US / B&N nook / Kobo
Spoiler:
1983 winner of the National Book Award for History.
Will readers of today will see parallels between the politics of the '30s and the politics of this year's presidential race?
This was an Edgar Award winner in 1992 as a paperback original, and a delightful read.
Originally Posted by Dana Stabenow:
It’s December in the Park, and a ranger is missing. It’s no great loss to the rest of the Park rats, they figure he’s stumbled into a snowbank and will re-emerge come breakup, just in time for the ground to thaw and them to bury him. But when the man sent to look for him also disappears, Kate Shugak, ex-investigator for the Anchorage D.A. and Park homesteader, is sent in search of them both.
First in the Kate Shugak series. Yes, this is the one that was lost for two years in my father’s garage and went on to win the Edgar award.
Originally Posted by Amazon:
Somewhere in the hinterlands of Alaska, among the millions of sprawling acres that comprise “The Park,” a young National Park Ranger has gone missing. When the detective sent after him also vanishes, the Anchorage DA’s department must turn to their reluctant former investigator, Kate Shugak. Shugak knows The Park because she’s of The Park, an Aleut who left her home village of Niniltna to pursue education, a career, and justice in an unjust world. Kate’s search for the missing men will take her from self-imposed exile back to a life she’d left behind, and face-to-face with people and problems she'd hoped never to confront again.
The work was serialized in Science Fiction World in 2006, published as a book in 2008 and became one of the most popular science fiction novels in China. It received the Chinese Science Fiction Galaxy Award in 2006. A film adaptation of the same name is scheduled for release in July 2016.
An English translation by Ken Liu was published by Tor Books in 2014. It won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel and was nominated for the 2014 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Quote:
1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.
Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable and unpredictable interaction of its three suns.
This is the Three-Body Problem and it is the key to everything: the key to the scientists' deaths, the key to a conspiracy that spans light-years and the key to the extinction-level threat humanity now faces.
Robert Sawyer's SF novels are perennial nominees for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, or both. Clearly, he must be doing something right since each one has been something new and different. What they do have in common is imaginative originality, great stories, and unique scientific extrapolation. His latest is no exception. [NOTE: This is no longer his "latest" — Tom.]
Hominids is a strong, stand-alone SF novel, but it's also the first book of The Neanderthal Parallax, a trilogy that will examine two unique species of people. They are alien to each other, yet bound together by the never-ending quest for knowledge and, beneath their differences, a common humanity. We are one of those species, the other is the Neanderthals of a parallel world where they, not Homo sapiens, became the dominant intelligence. In that world, Neanderthal civilization has reached heights of culture and science comparable to our own, but is very different in history, society, and philosophy.
During a risky experiment deep in a mine in Canada, Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, accidentally pierces the barrier between worlds and is transferred to our universe, where in the same mine another experiment is taking place. Hurt, but alive, he is almost immediately recognized as a Neanderthal, but only much later as a scientist. He is captured and studied, alone and bewildered, a stranger in a strange land. But Ponter is also befriended-by a doctor and a physicist who share his questing intelligence and boundless enthusiasm for the world's strangeness, and especially by geneticist Mary Vaughan, a lonely woman with whom he develops a special rapport.
Meanwhile, Ponter's partner, Adikor Huld, finds himself with a messy lab, a missing body, suspicious people all around, and an explosive murder trial that he can't possibly win because he has no idea what actually happened. Talk about a scientific challenge!
Contact between humans and Neanderthals creates a relationship fraught with conflict, philosophical challenge, and threat to the existence of one species or the other-or both-but equally rich in boundless possibilities for cooperation and growth on many levels, from the practical to the esthetic to the scientific to the spiritual. In short, Robert J. Sawyner has done it again.
Hominids is the winner of the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
This book was on Benioff's top-10 list and won the Booker. From Wikipedia:
The White Tiger is the debut novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga. It was first published in 2008 and won the 40th Man Booker Prize in the same year.[1] The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India’s class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy.
<snipped for plotty points>
...the novel examines issues of religion, caste, loyalty, corruption and poverty in India.
Winner of the 2010 Agatha Award for Best First Novel.
From Amazon:
Welcome to the grand opening of Fromagerie Bessette. Or as it's more commonly known by the residents of small-town Providence, Ohio-the Cheese Shop. Proprietor Charlotte Bessette has prepared a delightful sampling of bold Cabot Clothbound Cheddar, delicious tortes of Stilton and Mascarpone, and a taste of Sauvignon Blanc-but someone else has decided to make a little crime of passion the piece de resistance. Right outside the shop Charlotte finds a body, the victim stabbed to death with one of her prized olive-wood handled knives.
Two new subscription services for reading ebooks will be launched in the Netherlands later this year. The Danish Mofibo, and British Bookmate will both be targeting users reading books on mobile devices.
Both services will be using an "all you can read" subscription, for which a set monthly fee needs to be paid. Users will not be paying per book. Mofibo has already started, and is asking 12,99 euro per month; early birds who decide this month will be paying 9,99 per month. It is not possible to use this service in combination with an e-reader.
Bookmate will be starting in September, and will be asking €9,99 a month, for access to about 3500 Dutch books. This service has a catalogue of about 600.000 books, and has 2,5 million subscribers world-wide.
Both services are using their own app; they will be competing with other services, such as Bruna's Bliyoo.
We are writing to announce an upcoming change to your NOOK® service and to explain what it means for you.
Effective March 15, 2016, NOOK will no longer offer third party applications (Apps) for sale from the NOOK Store™. All of your existing Apps previously purchased from the NOOK Store will remain in your NOOK Library™ and will continue to be accessible on compatible NOOK devices. This means that you will still be able to download and install previously purchased Apps from the NOOK Library on your device.
You will also continue to be able to discover, purchase, and use third party applications from the wide selection available at the Google Play store on your compatible NOOK device.
No action is necessary on your part, but should you have questions, please visit our FAQs page or contact us.
Please note that our standalone NOOK Reading Apps for Android and iOS are not affected by this change and will remain available on Google Play and iTunes respectively.
Of course, we will continue to offer our full service of books, magazines, and newspapers on both NOOK devices and our standalone Reading Apps, and look forward to bringing the best in digital reading to your NOOK experience.
Sincerely,
The NOOK Team
Stay Connected with NOOK facebook [icon] Twitter [icon] Instagram Like us on Facebook
Just saw this in the Baen newsletter and thought it might be of interest to some.
ATTENTION: EBOOK RELEASE DATES ARE CHANGING
Dear Baen Readers,
I am writing to let you know that we are reconciling the release dates of ebooks and paper books. From the publication month of April 2016 onward, the release dates will be the same (that is, the ebooks will not be available two weeks earlier than the paper books).
We will not be changing the time the Monthly Bundles are initially offered for sale, we will continue to offer eARCs as usual, and all other policies regarding ebook bundles will remain in place. We will not be making the period you can buy Monthly Bundles shorter, but longer.
The April 2016 bundle contains the ebooks that will be available in print on April 5th. The final versions of these ebooks would have been scheduled to go live as ebooks on all retail venues on March 16, 2015, and will now be available in their entirety April 5, 2016. At that point, the Monthly Bundle will become unavailable for sale.
We will continue to publish two newsletters per month to help you keep track of our offerings, one highlighting the print books which will come out two weeks in advance of the release date, the other highlighting ebook and website offerings on (or very close to) the release date itself.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns, and our whole team will be happy to help.
MobileRead Week in Review: 03/19 - 03/26
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Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for April, 2016.
Dear ZebraDude, 
Just saw this in the Baen newsletter and thought it might be of interest to some.
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