ed will be filled with books, books, books

Parents gave me a kindle for my birthday! It is here and after twenty-four hours of thought, I realized I might as well follow tradition and name it after what I'm reading, since that narrowed down the choices considerably.

Ed Elric the Kindle (I couldn't call it Fullmetal with a straight face, even though I wanted to) now has my first download: By the Sword by Mercedes Lackey. It was the first book I read by her and started me off looking for books by women about women in fantasy, as it was new and exciting to read about women not being damsels in distress but doing things, and often things that were quite independent of the males in their lives. It's also one I've had to replace several times. It felt like this huge decision--the first book on my kindle!--and I feel better I started off with my favorite character in one of my favorite books who still stands the test of time.

Next: find the complete works of Sydney Von Scyoc and read them in order, Darkchild on if available. Judith Tarr's novel about Elian, the only one of that series I liked. Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword and why isn't there another novel in that series? Mairelon the Magician and Magician's Ward, as Kim is always awesome. A very nice formatted copy of Jane Austen's works. Maybe grab that terrifyingly awesome trilogy of badfic yet delicious Jane Austen sequels by three different authors they're selling as a bundle. And start getting all my favorites in one convenient place. This is ridiculously convenient--I had no idea.

I feel this is a good excuse to finally replace books I know I have but can't find and want to read but feel guilty about buying again; it doesn't count if it's electronic, apparently. I should make a list.

(Wish I could fix the formatting though. Every time they miss an italic I know goes there it drives me nuts. Pretty sure I can recite this one by now.)

This cannot end well for my bank account. Also, why the hell isn't Winds of Fury kindlized? The rest of the series is!

Note: new round of testing starts Monday, so if I seem vanished, not dead, just hating the universe. Really heavy testing starts the week after, but I'm using this week to also get ahead on that, since I have to clean up the new scripts I wrote for googledocs before March 1st, so need free time that week to do it.

Note to Self: the time to practice object creation in javascript is not right after you got the script to work and then thinking you want to totally rewrite it. Just. What the fuck? Would also help if you documented yourself a little more after bouts of 3 AM inspiration because I seriously have no idea what the hell I was doing or how, but on the upside, four sites can now autoupdate all their stock prices for me and I can mass create perfectly formed workbooks correctly formatted, cleaned, paged, and nicely organized and my import scripts are working. Mostly. We're still in Seperis World testing, not real world, and apparently how I think is natural to do things is, well, wrong. Still.

Happy.

Comments

[zvi]

If you are looking for ways to fill your kindle without breaking your bank account, you can try following booksontheknob_feed, which lists loads of free or cheap e-books, mostly Kindle. Don't forget, if you see a free epub book that sounds interesting, you can convert it to mobi/prc w/ Calibre and sideload it to your Kindle.

Also, the AO3 has mobi downloads, so if you want the complete works of someone in fandom, they may well be available!

[amalthia]

I don't know I think I'm partial to Alphonse Elric. :) But you're right Fullmetal is hard to say with a straight face. :) Having said that, I still named my usb stick FullMetal. :)

[sacredporn]

Wait till you start filling Ed with fanfics. Oh how I love AO3's download-fanfics-as-mobi feature. And yeah, best of luck with your bank account; after I got my Kindle, I bought more books in one week than I did in the entire year of 2010.

ps. I also bought Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series as per your recommendation. Love it! Thanks for the rec <3

[iseryn]

If you haven't already, I'd suggest going through the bestsellers for any free books you like the look of.

[fyrdrakken]

Yeah, this. I think I picked up something like a couple hundred free classics this way that I'd loved as a kid or always thought I should get around to reading.

[lorelei76]

"Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword and why isn't there another novel in that series?"

Fucking preach, goddamn.

All your talk about the Kindle is making me want one, just so I can re-create my childhood library in an easily portable gadget. Robin McKinley, Tanith Lee, Susan Cooper, Michael Moorcock (yeah I know, but his sword was all kinds of awesome)... I do love my epic fantasies.

[terrio]

Also, if you have any fondness for books published by Baen, don't forget to check out the Free Library, which offers numerous books in a variety of formats, free for your downloading pleasure.

[averzierlia.livejournal.com]

I'm seriously thinking of asking for a group gift of a kindle for my birthday. Since I'm turning 21 I might even get it.

[inteligrrl.livejournal.com]

erm, I have the complete Mercedes Lackey on kindle, as well as quite a bit of other stuff that's drm free, so let me know if you want anything. Also - you can totally put A03 stories on there - as well as anything else that's a pdf document.

Greetings fellow Kindle Lover

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

I assume you have downloaded Calibre, letting you put ANYTHING on a kindle?

It's not super awesome with PDF's- the text can be too small. But for everything else? AMAZING.

Also, I sent you an email to your gmail account that may be relavent to the comments in this post.

[an-kayoh.livejournal.com]

I totally blame you for bringing me back to Fullmetal Alchemist. Except that it's been a blissful week of watching Brotherhood in a general glee-induced haze, so 'blame' might not convey the right connotations.

[katcinlee.livejournal.com]

http://amalthia.mediawood.net/ebooks/

Also, you can read fanfic using their web browser. And they don't charge for it (yet). As in, you can read fanfic ANYWHERE. I haven't put my Kindle down since I got it. It's the first thing I'd grab if the house is burning down (but only because DH and kids have legs and can get themselves out ).

[squigglepie.livejournal.com]

Ahaha, I was going to suggest Calibre, but someone got to me before it! It has some great features, like grabbing metadata for you, as well as creating a catalogue which I find very useful.

If you'd like to purdy your kindle up, you can order skins through amazon, though I ordered from the gelaskins site itself (Jealousy, which is of a sad kiwi) and they were delightful! I had ordered one for a friend for xmas on a Friday, but she sent me an email changing her mind shortly afterwards. It was Friday evening, so I left them a frantic voicemail, where they replied first thing by email Monday morning being very soothing and personable!

Oh, let me know if you'd like an myanonamouse.net invite!

[redhedlvr.livejournal.com]

I went through a book buy frenzy when I got my first eReader too. Hands down, my favorite is the Kindle for ease of use, book selection and a bunch of technical reasons. Things will even out a bit after a while.

Congrats!

[eponymousanon.livejournal.com]

Re: Robin McKinley... there is a short story from the anthology she did with her husband Peter Dickinson, "Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits" (or something like that) which is a Damar story. Alas, she sounds pretty damn determined to never revisit Damar OR Sunshine, because people kept on asking her when she would. In other McKinley news, her blog is awesomely hilarious and Pratchettesque (footnotes!).

Also, it tickles me greatly that my priority list of books upon getting my Touch was almost identical to yours. By the Sword is one of my all-time favorite books; upon re-reading the Valdemar stories (and initial read of some of the latest ones) I have issues with several of them, but By the Sword remains awesome.

If you're looking for more "women writing women" I have Lois McMaster Bujold's book Cordelia's Honor. Military sci-fi, technically, but she sort of skips over the space battles.

Also, if you want the Honor Harrington series in e-book format I have the first 10 or 15 or so. Horatio Hornblower in space, awesome writing of awesome female characters. I even got them legitly, because David Weber (and Baen) were super cool and ahead of the times, and about a decade ago he started giving away the e-book forms of all his Baen-published books on a CD in his hardcovers.

Just let me know and I can either e-mail a zip file, or put the books on Megaupload. (Offer is open to all your blog readers :D)

[sexybee.livejournal.com]

Actually, in honor of the latest Vorkosigan novel, Bujold put all of the previous novels on the cd that came with it, and some kind soul put all the files up here (http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/24-CryoburnCD/CryoburnCD/). I mean, not that I don't encourage supporting Bujold by paying for the real deal, but if you already have the paper copies, it's nice. And the Kindle Store has the omnibus edition of the Mairelon books. I know, I just bought it. :)

[eponymousanon.livejournal.com]

Oh damn... I bought the Cryoburn ARC online so I didn't know she did that! FWIW, Baen really encourages the whole free e-book bundling thing-- David Weber started doing it several years ago in his Honor Harrington hardbacks.

[fyrdrakken]

I'm starting to lean towards not only converting my paper library into e-format (major storage issues, with a lot of my favorites being damaged by water or insects, and an ongoing problem with not being able to find the particular book(s) I want to reread) but also springing for an actual Kindle instead of just using the free Kindle app on my Blackberry. Because I discovered last week that you can create collections and sort your books into useful categories on the Kindle itself. And also there's the thing where I picked up a number of books on Baen's webscriptions site, for books that weren't available via Amazon, which means I can't just casually download them to my Blackberry when I get the urge: I have to find my way back to their website to redownload, or else use the USB cable to get the files off the netbook. (Baen has been really liberal about making lots of my cheesy skiffy favorites available for free -- or at least the first book or two of a given series -- so that's a lot of my library I can rebuild there.)

ETA: Referring to the above comment reccing Cordelia's Honor, I heartily recommend Bujold's entire Vorkosigan series. Which you have to get via the Baen website if you want e-format. But several of them are available for free. And people who bought the most recent book in hardcover got a CD along with it with the entire previous series in e-format.

[eponymousanon.livejournal.com]

I've been a huge fan of the Baen Free Library and Baen's e-book philosophy since I found out about it, and definitely am all for buying direct from Baen when possible.

Did you know about their ARC releases? Around the time they send out the Advance Reader Copies to critics etc they put up that essentially final draft version up as an e-book for $15 (same as new-release price). Of course, that really stretches out the time between books in a series-- I was checking the other day on the release date for the next Honorverse book and realized that since I got the last one 4 months early, it'll be FOREVER before the next one comes out! Still, I love how their e-bookstore just keeps getting better.

[fyrdrakken]

Yes, I bought Cryoburn as an e-ARC, after having bought several of the preceding books in the series so part of my reread could be via my Kindle app.

Imagine my feelings when I learned a month or two later that, had I waited and bought the proper hardcover, I'd have gotten the entire series in e-format for about what I paid on ARC and the other e-books.

[eponymousanon.livejournal.com]

Ouch...

[fyrdrakken]

And when I was on their page yesterday checking, I logged in to refresh my memory as to how many of the e-books I'd bought last go-round and how many I had left to pick up for my next re-read. Disappointingly, it says I only picked up two (admittedly, omnibus editions) plus the freebie titles...

[professorkatze.livejournal.com]

I will come back with something intelligent to say just as soon as ASDFJKILWOIJSLKJ;A YOU'RE READING FMA? Isn't it *glorious*? Do you not want to stick Ed in your pocket and carry him *everywhere*? IS THERE LOVE IN YOUR HEART LIKE THERE IS LOVE IN MY HEART? BECAUSE THIS IS LOVE THAT SHOULD BE SHARED, IMO.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Oh God yes. Just--yes. FMA FTW.

[professorkatze.livejournal.com]

My love for everything is astronomical. Edward's height! And that bit of hair that sticks up from his head! AL and his incapability to ever not be awesome! COLONEL ROY FUCKING MUSTANG. The backstory. The universe. EVERYTHING. HERE, HAVE SOME FLAIL. SDJFKJDIS;AIFJFDLS!!!

[seperis.livejournal.com]

HOLY YES.

COLONEL ROY FUCKING MUSTANG.

...he blows things up with his snappy fingers. *helpless*

[professorkatze.livejournal.com]

UNF. YES. He is on *fire*, and it is only very rarely that I get to say that canonically.
And can we talk about Hawkeye? I think one could modestly say that on a scale of 1 to 10 of Awesome Hawkeye is about ELEVENTYBAJILLION. I LOVE HER. SO MUCH. HAWKEYE, BE DISGRUNTLED SOME MORE.