Like reading? Want to support a good cause? Welcome to the Project Gutenberg Project*!

If you’ve never heard of it, Project Gutenberg (Wikipedia page) is an almost entirely volunteer-driven effort to digitize, archive, and distribute “cultural works” (mostly books). It was established in 1971 and now includes over 30,000 free ebooks that you can read on a wide variety of devices including computers, cellphones, various mobile devices, and ebook readers.

Project Gutenberg contains some amazing, unparalleled works of literature and it is an incredibly valuable resource that just doesn’t seem to get the credit (and support) it deserves. This challenge has two purposes:

1) To inspire people to read some of these wonderful old classics, and
2) To support Project Gutenberg.

Here’s the challenge

1) Set a goal: Pick a number of Project Gutenberg books you think you could read over the next year. This can be anything from a conservative 2 or 3, a more ambitious one per month, or a hardcore no-holds-barred one per week. The number is entirely up to you. Post a quick comment here if you would like to make your goal public!

2) Make a donation: Donate a few dollars to Project Gutenberg. I’m going to donate $2 for each book in my goal, but that’s just a suggestion. Just try to send ‘em a couple of bucks if you can.

3) Find some books and start reading. Each time you finish a book, blog a quick review of it, fire off a tweet about it, or post to Facebook about it. Encourage other folks to play along, donate a few dollars, and read some of these amazing pieces of literature. Project Gutenberg is a great and under-appreciated project that is doing some fantastic work, so let’s show ‘em some love.

Not sure where to start?
Here’s a quick baker’s dozen of some of the fantastic books available through Project Gutenberg:

• Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
• Walden, Henry David Thoreau
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
• Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• Dracula, Bram Stoker
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
• A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jacob and Whilhelm Grimm
• Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
• Harvard Classics bookshelf (for a real challenge)

Stickers!

Here are some stickers you can put on your weblog if you decide to participate. Link the sticker to this blog post, and we’ll see how many people we can get reading some old classics and supporting Project Gutenberg.

* Disclaimers: I’m doing this just for fun. I am in no way associated with Project Gutenberg, and they have no idea I’m doing this. Having read their legalese I think I’m ok calling this the “Project Gutenberg Project”, but I didn’t ask for their permission (so the name may change!) If you decide to donate, please go to the Project Gutenberg site, and follow their directions.

Very cool original stamp graphic is from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Happy reading!

Elegance of the Hedgehog is translated from French, and apparently immensely popular in France. It is a very odd novel.

I liked it, but it’s awkward. The novel has two narrators — an older woman in her 50s who works as a concierge for a building of private apartments, and a 12 year old girl who lives in one of them — and various chapters, set in a different typeface for each, are told from the point of view of one or the other. It’s…odd, and I can’t say I found the technique to be particularly interesting or necessary. The narrators also spend an awful lot of time in their heads — there is a whole lot of telling-rather-than-showing going on, with big chewy passages wherein one or the other ruminates about art or philosophy or the nature of family or some other such thing.

The beginning is choppy — the concierge’s character is developed in fits and starts, and when first introduced the little girl isn’t terribly likable. In fact I never really developed any sort of affection or attachment to the child — she feels rather more like a plot device than a person, having no convincing emotional development or depth. The concierge, however, who is the actual protagonist of the story, is much more fully fleshed-out, and the middle of the story is spent largely watching her transformation and development.

But then it all goes awry. I won’t post anything that will spoil the story, but suffice it to say that I didn’t care for the ending (and the bit leading up to the ending) at all. It’s heavy handed and feels horribly contrived — the choppy beginning of the story lead into a reasonably well paced and flowing middle that is unfortunately destroyed by a sudden, sledgehammer-like ending. It felt very much like an editor or creative writing class had ravaged some subtler and more ethereal ending that was more in fitting with the narrative, so the author replaced it with something that attempts to be shocking, but is actually just abrupt and hollow.

Recommended? Not really. There are lots and lots of books better than this, but then there are also lots and lots of books that are much worse. A definite middle-of-the-pack showing.

Dresden Files #1 Storm Front — First of an apparently well-loved series that also had a short and unsuccessful stint as a SciFi channel TV show. Storm Front is about as pulpy as pulp fantasy gets, being a cliche-ridden formulaic mash-up between urban fantasy and shlocky detective novel. Entertaining enough for what it is, but the writing was bad enough in places to be distracting. Started #2 but lost interest pretty quickly. Not recommended.

Magician’s Nephew; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; A Horse and His Boy (first 3 books of the Narnia series) — If I have read these before, I don’t recall doing so. The first book was brilliant, the second book was great, the third book started well but slowed and got bogged down and a bit dull. Will finish the rest of the series some other time (I’ve been told it’s pretty much downhill from LW&W, anyhow). Recommended, but I’m not entirely sure I understand the breathless praise the series often gets — nostalgia is a potent force, it seems.

Started reading The Lovely Bones on Sunday, finished it today. Well written and fairly gripping, but weak in terms of plot and depth. Not entirely sure why it’s as huge a bestseller as it is, and I will likely give the upcoming major motion picture a miss. Still, a page turner that I consumed in two sittings, so it’s certainly not all bad.

Started reading The Book Of Negroes on Saturday, finished it on Sunday. Fantastic, beautifully written story that brings a dark part of our history to life. Grim, heartbreaking, and shocking at times — absolutely worth reading.

We stayed in a house in a small town called La Roque sur Pernes in the south of France for two weeks (pictured above). There was no internet, no tv, no radio. I didn’t take my laptop or cellphone. I did take a bunch of books, and there was a shelf-full already there. The result is that I read a lot. Here’s the list, with very short reviews.

• Anathem, by Neal Stephenson. Awesome, A+++, will definitely re-read it. Highly recommended.
• Moving Targets, by Margaret Atwood. Must read for Atwood fans, missable otherwise.
• The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck. Fantastic.
• Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. This was a third re-read for me, so obviously I love this book.
• Toujours Provence, by Peter Mayle. Meh.
• My Life in France, by Julia Child. Fun and interesting. Julia was quite a woman.
• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie. Excellent. My favourite of the trip. Short, one-sitting sort of thing, but absolutely fantastic.
• World Without End, by Ken Follett. Another medieval page turner, but very, very similar to his other medieval page turner (the story of which happened in the same town some 400 years earlier). Good, but not great.
• The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley. Erratically written and awkwardly paced. Feels like the outline of a more epic trilogy that just never got written.
• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. Sadly, this one doesn’t hold up. Loved it when I first read it however many years ago, sort of slogged my way through it the second time. Luckily Stephenson has already completely redeemed himself with Anathem.

Vacation lesson #1 – I love reading. I’m going to be making a lot more time for it again, mostly by getting up at 6am and not opening the laptop ’til 10am. Turns out it’s a really nice way to start a day.

Rumour has it that Amazon will be announcing (or possibly even launching) their ebook initiative on Monday. Included with this is their first foray into the world of hardware manufacture with the “Kindle”¹ ebook reader.

Earlier this month, the good folks at Bookeen launched (as in: actually shipped) their third-generation ebook reader, appropriately called the “Cybook Gen 3“. I’ve been watching their progress avidly, and the second I heard that the Cybook was shipping my credit card and I leaped into action. Being quick on the draw, I managed to get my order in early enough to get one of the first shipments. Within days (possibly hours) their initial supply had sold out and all other orders were delayed from a Nov 2 ship date to sometime in mid-December.

I received my Cybook (from Paris, via FedEx) on Nov 7 and have been using it daily since. I’ve taken some pictures, which you can view over at my flickr photo set.

It is, as I say, very much like living in the future. There are some rough spots of course, but also some unexpected highlights. Here’s a quick rundown:

Readability: The contrast and resolution on the Cybook are great. I’m really impressed by the clarity and readability. These e-ink based ebook readers do not include a backlight, so you can only read them anywhere you can read a regular book. The Cybook screen is nicely matte, so there’s no glare issue whatsoever. Grade: A-.

Memory: The Cybook comes with 64mb of content memory and has an SD slot for memory expansion. The 2gb of additional memory I’ve added will allow me to put somewhere in the region of 3000-5000 books on it. Grade: A+++ I’m living in the future.

Weight and size: roughly 300g including cover and battery; roughly the same height, width, and thickness as a 300 page regular (non-trade) paperback. Grade: A+.

Battery life: the Bookeen folk estimate that a full charge should last around 8000 page turns. The e-ink technology apparently only draws power when changing what’s displayed, using no power otherwise. At this point I’ve read around 300 pages and the battery indicator is still pegged at 100%. Grade: A+.

Ghosting, page turn speed: Both excellent. I have seen no evidence of ghosting yet, but this may be an issue that takes a few tens of thousand of page turns to appear. I will post an update later if this happens. Page turn speed (the length of time it takes to completely change the display after pushing the button) is excellent. Not instantaneous, but still faster than actually turning a page in a physical book. No complaints here at all. Grade: A-.

Formats: The Cybook allows you to read ebooks in four formats — mobipocket, HTML, PDF, and plaintext. The mobipocket format is, by far, the best. HTML is second best being quite readable with functioning hyperlinks (assuming the hyperlinks are within the same document — these things aren’t hooked up to the internet). Plaintext is OK, but hard-wrapped formats get all messed up — I need to find a script to un-hard-wrap the Gutenberg plaintext files. PDF — well it depends for what size paper the PDF was formatted. If the PDF is formatted to a paperback-sized page, it’s fantastic. If the PDF is formatted to 8.5×11, then it’s utterly illegible with no way to resize the fonts or zoom the pages (that I have found). Grade: A+ for mobipocket, B+ for HTML, B- for plaintext, D for PDF.

User interface: Overall the UI is good, but not great. The “menu” button (which you use to navigate back to the main library screen, set bookmarks, adjust font sizes, etc) is awkwardly placed. The main “select” button is really too clicky — it’s just loud, when it should be silent. The little rubber cover for the USB port is a bit flimsy, doesn’t really get out of the way sufficiently, and is bloody impossible to remove when the cover is on. I am somewhat tempted just to rip it off now and save myself the trouble of dealing with it entirely. Otherwise, the Cybook is great. Grade: B.

Cover: Nicely made, well designed, good fit. Only comes in a somewhat disappointingly ugly brown and costs an extra $40. Hopefully other covers will come available over time. The cover is absolutely essential, however, even though it is brown. Don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise. It’s worth every penny. Grade: A.

Manufacturing quality: The Cybook is well made and feels very solid. I definitely don’t feel as if I have to baby it or be excessively cautious when slinging it into bags or backpacks. The cover helps, of course, and I strongly recommend you buy a cover if you get one of these. Grade: A.

DRM: Buying ebooks (mobipocket format, f.e.) requires that you enter your device PID before you can download the book. This, I assume, is how they’re enforcing Digital Rights Management (DRM), which is just a fancy way of saying “you can’t lend other people your ebooks, ever”. Given that ebooks are currently priced roughly equivalent to physical books, this is an annoying pain in the ass. Publishers are really going to have to rethink the pricing scheme on these things, because paying the same for a DRM’d ebook and a regular physical book is just nonsense. Grade: bullshit.

Overall, I’m very happy with my Cybook. It’s small, light, comfortable to read, and does its job well. Unlike the rumoured Amazon “Kindle”, it doesn’t do wifi or have a keyboard or read email (wtf), but I’m really OK with that. I spend all day on the Internet — when I’m reading it’s quite specifically an opportunity for me to get the hell away from the machines.

I’m very excited by the possibilities Amazon’s ebook initiative may open up. Currently buying ebooks can be challenging — the seller sites tend to be atrocious, and selection is slim. Being able to buy mobipocket-format ebooks through Amazon.com (with all its reviews and whatnot) would be absolutely brilliant. We’ll see what happens on Monday!

¹ – “Kindle”, seriously? Def’n: catch fire; cause to start burning. That’s a little Fahrenheit 451 of them.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900.

If you do, I would be very interested in either borrowing or buying it from you. I’ll pay shipping and maybe send you a nice present. Leave a comment or email me at deb-at-dria-dot-org ! Thank you!

(Amazon lies about shipping estimates. Lies lies lies.)

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451 , published in 1953.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

Link.

My flight was delayed so I ended up spending four hours at the Chicago airport today. Out of desperation I picked up a paperback copy of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (Amazon.com) and have devoured half of it since. Turns out it was originally published in 1998 or something, and there are multiple electronic versions available:

• eBookMall (PDF, MS Reader, Palm Reader – $8.99)
• eBookMall (MS Reader, Mobipocket – $8.99)
• eBooks.com (PDF, MS Reader, Mobipocket – $8.99)

It’s somewhat annoying that the electronic edition is $1 more than the paperback, but I will continue to be confounded by eBook pricing for quite a while, I suspect. Either way, it’s a fun read.

Updated because I managed to fubar the actual links somehow. I need a better blog editor, clearly.