How was yours?

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Just for kicks, I took a passage in the middle and ran it through, then the last couple of pages and ran them through, and both times it told me:

I write like
Neil Gaiman

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hmm. Can’t really complain with either of those. The only real takeaway is the writer of the program appears to think I write like a modern fantasist. Of course, when I first found this a while ago, I ran a short passage from The Pack: Winter Kill through it, and it said I write like Rudyard Kipling.

Figure that one out.

japan – probe
Uploaded by Japanherpderp. – More video blogs and vloggers.

Found via Mario McKenna’s blog.

Rappelling out a window with a dude’s intestines? I’m there!

Yeah, it’s cheesy, but with Rodriguez you can be sure it’s going to be fun.

The Walking Dead

Man, I’m really looking forward to this series. I get the impression there was only so much footage available for the teaser, which is why we have so much of Rick just walking around in uniform, but if it’s as faithful to the original comics as they claim, this series is going to kick all form of ass.

It will also be nice to see a horror show played straight. Most of them end up over-the-top horrific or they play up the Gothic angle. If this show can blend the dramatic tone of Breaking Bad with some good, old-fashioned zombie horror, it’s going to be huge.

Also, be sure to check out the Walking Dead motion comic, which takes Tony Moore’s original art and turns it into an animated teaser. Cool stuff.

Given I’ve got a book available for the Kindle, and I’ve watched my wife enjoy hers, I decided to take a crack at the iPad as a digital book reader. I noticed the iBooks store and Amazon are fairly close in price, but I decided to use the iPad Kindle app instead so I’d have the flexibility to read the books on just about any electronic platform.

Next month I'll have all of my purchased Kindle titles on an Android phone, too

I started with the Kindle edition of Gun Monkeys by Victor Gischler. The book itself is a great, straight-up crime thriller and a damn fine read. But reading it on the iPad? A pleasure.

I read it on a plane trip to Hawaii, and the iPad battery lasted the entire flight, including through a layover in Los Angeles. I even switched over to Pages for a while to work on some of my own writing with no problems. I liked that I didn’t have to hold it the entire time; I was able to set it down on the seat tray and keep reading. Quick brightness adjustments made reading easy on the eyes when the lighting in the cabin or outside changed, and I had no problems with glare even though I was sitting in a window seat.

In fact, after just a few minutes, I forgot I was reading an electronic edition at all. I just read, swiped, read, swiped, read, swiped, all without thinking about it. I had no troubles with the font, developed no eyestrain with the backlit screen, and never lost my place even when going in and out of the Kindle app. I did use the bookmark, but going back to the same book every time made it unnecessary.

Next I’ll try reading it in bed. My wife reads her Kindle in bed, but she tends to prop herself up against the headboard in a sitting position, while I like to lay flat. I can’t imagine the Kindle will be any worse than doing so with a hardcover, but I’ll find out. I’m already planning on purchasing another Kindle book, probably Gischler’s Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse.

I’d also love to start building a reference library on the iPad. Not just dictionaries, encyclopedias, or a thesaurus, but technical manuals, programming guides, and even martial arts books could all be handy. For example, it would be nice to have Kodokan Judo and my karate school’s curriculum videos available on one portable device rather than lugging a laptop and book(s) around. This would even make them readily available in class, not stashed away in a gym bag in the locker room. (Now I just have to wait for some of those books to show up on Kindle…)

While on vacation, I started looking at the folks who accompanied us on the trip. Some of them were avid readers, and they packed along several books. They were very curious about my wife’s Kindle, with the obvious advantage being they can cut down on the weight of their luggage. If they needed to pick up another book while on the trip, they could just download one instead of picking up one at the bookstore.

One of those avid readers has poor eyesight. I showed him the Kindle and iBooks apps, and we learned he could read from the iPad much easier if he switched to white text on a black background and zoomed the text a bit. He didn’t read from it for any length of time, but at least we now know it may be an option.

The next step for me will be carrying it around more often. I still haven’t convinced myself it will replace my trusty Moleskine (I can still write much faster with a pencil than I can on any keyboard, and I type almost 100wpm on a standard keyboard), but for writing outlines or making edits that I’ll need to share with other people or push to another computer, I have no problem using the iPad.

Heck, with Dropbox, I have all of my documents available on all devices just like I do Kindle books. I dropped three or four PDFs into Dropbox before the flight, all of them comics I’m reviewing for other folks or needed to look over for Evileye (including Big Bad Wolves), and the resolution and clarity were great, even on a color book. I pushed an outline I was working on from Dropbox to Pages with no problem, though I do wish I could export from Pages to Dropbox just as easily, instead of having to go through iTunes.

I’m not convinced it will ever replace my laptop for day-to-day work, but for travel and short road trips I could easily get by with it instead. Having just a camera bag and the iPad on a flight made things so much lighter and easier, and I could have had several books available should one have been disappointing or just not what I was in the mood for. I still have a pile of dead tree editions waiting to be read on my nightstand and I won’t be completely replacing my library any time soon, but I do think I’ll be making more digital purchases in the future.

Back to my original point, I don’t think e-books are going away, nor do I think it’s fair to assume they’re just a fad anymore. The major bookstore chains have their own readers and stores now, and every time I run into someone with a Kindle they can’t wait to show it off.

Bibliophiles love their paper books, but it would appear the average reader just doesn’t care. It’s LPs vs cassettes and cassettes vs CDs all over again. Paper books will be to future generations what vinyl is to our generation: novelties and collector’s items.

You can check it out here, or download the MP3 right from here.

I should mention the conversation is not work-safe. We had a lot of fun with this one.

Like The Pack, Deacon’s tales will be told in both prose and graphic novel formats.

Yes, obviously this is coming from my publisher, too. But from what I’ve been told about the book and what I see here, I’m excited about this one. Evileye has a lot of cool things in the works, but this one may just claim the top spot in my to-read pile.

Plus Bernie’s good people. You’ll dig him.

Today I was sad to learn Ronnie James Dio died, succumbing to stomach cancer after a five-month battle with the disease. He was only 67 years old.

I grew up listening to this guy. Whether with Rainbow, Black Sabbath/Heaven & Hell, or Dio, I counted myself a fan of his work. “Rainbow in the Dark”, “Holy Diver”… the song list goes on and on. Just some damn good, classic metal. By all accounts he was a super guy, too. John Roling did a college radio interview with Dio, and they chatted for several minutes after the on-air interview was finished. Paul Legerski has a great picture of himself, his wife, and Dio backstage that still hangs in my office at work as a Christmas card.

It’s hard to believe he was fifty years old in that video, but even in recent years that signature voice never wavered. I saw him live just a few years ago, and it’s easily one of my favorite concert performances.

The metal scene lost one of its greatest figures today, and the world lost a good man. May he rest in peace.

The short version? She still loves it. She now has 80 books on it (including mine, of course), she’s skinned it, and she uses it daily.

She’s gone back to a paperback book exactly once in that time, and only then because she didn’t feel like repurchasing a book she already owned. She’s read in bed, in the kitchen, on the couch, and outside, and she hardly ever has to charge it. It was weird seeing the sort of screen saver image on it all the time, but we’ve gotten used to it. Initial concerns over the contrast, eye strain, and so on have all proven non-issues.

She’s also found it’s easier to read than dead tree editions. Even modest mass market paperback begins to feel heavy after a time, and so does the Kindle. However, she’s found she can lay the Kindle flat on the table and keep reading. That’s just not going to happen with a book, and even if it did lay flat, on many pages you have to deal with reading around the curvature of the page into the spine. Bookmarking and navigating through books is a snap, and with Amazon’s setup she’s able to delete and re-download titles at will.

Most of all, she likes not having to wait for hardcover new releases to hit paperback and not having to pay hardcover price for them. At the rate she reads, the savings becomes well worth the investment, with or without the convenience of instant delivery and having less clutter on the bookshelves.

I recently got my hands on an iPad, and I look forward to comparing the experience. I first intended to use the native iBooks app, but I’ve actually been impressed with the Kindle app instead. I started by downloading my book for free, as I’d already purchased it for my iPod touch. Just for kicks, I downloaded it to my MacBook as well, and as you can see from yesterday’s post, I loaded it up on all three devices. Even cooler? The other devices recognized where I had left off on the iPod touch and asked if I wanted to jump to the same page. That’s a nice bonus for someone who hast to share a Kindle and wants to read a book on a mobile device or computer when the other person has the Kindle.

I think it’s high time I checked out some of Victor Gischler’s work, so I’ll be starting there. His books Gun Monkeys and Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse: A Novel are both available on the Kindle and should make fine reading on the plane during a trip next month. Incidentally, Go-Go Girls is available on iBooks, as is Vampire a Go-Go, each for the same price as on the Kindle, but again, the wider availability of devices gives the Kindle app the edge and the general functionality appears to be the same. Being able to control the screen brightness from within the app is a nice feature of iBooks, but I’m not sure (yet) that it’s going to be a killer feature.

In any event, the continued fear of digital books from some readers amazes me. I’ll admit it’s counter-intuitive, but I think digital reading is now at least as convenient and comfortable as paper books, if not moreso. People are snapping them up, and now even Borders has jumped on the bandwagon with their own reader. As someone who continued to buy paperbacks while the Wife went digital, I’m now looking forward to trying it myself with both books and comics.

I’m sure I’ll ramble on about it again in the future.