Users of Kobo E Ink reading devices,something has gone wrong at the Kobo servers, and the master file of The Oppenheimer Alternative seems to have been corrupted. I’ve just uploaded a replacement version, and I’ll let you know when it goes live. It was fine on launch day, and I don’t know what happened at […]
Forget all those (cough, cough) rave reviews of my novel The Oppenheimer Alternative, coming out in eight days. Here are the reviews one of my top-five favorite novels got when it was first published in 1930: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. It’s a great read for a hot summer day! “This department announces a […]
Just two weeks — a scant 14 days! — left to get my latest novel The Oppenheimer Alternative at the pre-publication special ebook price of an atomically small US$4.99 or local equivalent at Amazon, B&N, Apple Books, Kobo, etc., worldwide. After that, the price goes up, up, up like an Orion rocket! Worldwide ebook buying […]
Eight of my backlist titles are now available worldwide for Kindle: Aurora Award-winner Golden Fleece, Seiun Award-winner End of an Era, Hugo Award-finalists Starplex, Frameshift, and Factoring Humanity, plus my full “Quintaglio Ascension” trilogy of Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner. Just put “SFWRITER.COM” into the Amazon to find them all, or use these links: Amazon […]
KOBO USERS! Eight of my older titles are now available worldwide in new Kobo editions, each with a Kobo-exclusive bonus short story: all three volumes of the Quintaglio Ascension trilogy (starting with Far-Seer), plus Aurora Award winner Golden Fleece, Seiun Award winner End of an Era, and Hugo Award finalists Starplex, Frameshift, and Factoring Humanity. […]
English-language eBook editions of my 23rd novel, Quantum Night, are available worldwide in Kindle and Kobo formats (plus additional formats in Canada and the United States). Find your country’s links here. Robert J. Sawyer online:Website • Facebook • Twitter • Email
Publishers Weekly reported today:Lower e-book sales were a big factor in the weak financial performance at HarperCollins and limiting gains at Simon & Schuster in the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2015.My own take on this is that the big-five publishers have convinced themselves so thoroughly that their product is worth a premium ebook price that […]
Amazon.com is playing hardball with Hachette, one of the big-5 traditional publishers; it’s previously done such things with Macmillan (the big-5 publisher of which science-fiction giant Tor is part). Note the template, folks: when Amazon feels it’s got a de facto monopoly, it goes after its suppliers, big and small (what Bill Gates, at Microsoft, […]
For the next 17 days, until February 28, for the first time ever, my first short-story collection Iterations and Other Stories is available as an ebook, along with five other great books by the likes of Kevin J. Anderson and Kristine Kathryn Rusch — all six books for just $2.99 from BookBale.com. Iterations features an […]
The first BookBale.com ebook bundle has gone on sale! The basic bundle includes my Hugo and Nebula Award-nominated Starplex, available for the first time ever as an ebook. Also included are five other books by major, award-winning writers. The bundle is on sale for one month only, until the end of November. Until then you […]
Just under a year ago, I reviewed the Lightwedge Verso ebook light. I thought it wasn’t bad, but could use some improvements. Now, Lightwedge has brought out a new ebook light called the Lightwedge Flex Neck Tech Light — and this one I don’t like at all. I’m unhappy for four reasons: (1) The clear […]
This week marks my tenth anniversary as a reader of ebooks. I got in early because, as a science-fiction writer, I’d long been expecting this technology. After all, Captain Kirk read reports off a wedge-shaped device back in 1966, and the astronauts in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey used tablet computers for viewing […]
That’s the title of my guest-blog posting at the official Kobo blog. You can read the whole thing there. Robert J. Sawyer online:Website • Facebook • Twitter • Newsgroup • Email
The New York Times will be adding an ebook bestsellers’ list to its prestigous weekly book-review section, according to this article. I think that’s wonderful. Services like BookScan (in the States) and BookNet (in Canada) have given us reliable pictures of paper book sales for several years now, but all we’ve had is hype about […]
As The Guardian reports, the estate of James Bond creator Ian Fleming has chosen to withhold ebook rights from Penguin, his UK publisher, and instead market the electronic editions directly themselves. I’m a proud Penguin author myself (in the US and Canada; my UK publisher is Orion), but I’m not surprised by this development. Back […]
E-ink devices are not backlit, so if you want to read in the dark, you need a light source. Lightwedge’s Verso ebook light is one option. The “technical specifications” for this light, as listed on the Amazon catalog page, include: “Flexible neck adjusts to eliminate reflection or glare.” So it’s ironic that the flexible neck […]
The new jetBook mini ebook reader from ECTACO comes bundled with my short-story collection Iterations and Other Stories for free. Included are 22 stories and my notes on each one. Here’s the table of contents. For more on the jetBook mini, see here, here, and the ECTACO site here. Robert J. Sawyer online:Website • Facebook […]
I was the only author invited to give a solo talk at this year’s Canadian Book Summit, which had the theme of “Hot New Models” — the implicit assumption being that new technologies and ways of doing business, such as ebooks and print-on-demand, were going to be the salvation of traditional publishing. My talk was […]
A suggestion for Barnes and Noble re the nook ebook-reading device: The very first Palm Pilot going back all the way to 1996 and the original Rocket eBook from 1998 allowed you to do handwriting recognition (on Palms, using the Graffiti or Graffiti 2 system, the former of which used simplified characters, the latter of […]
It’s bad enough that the Barnes & Noble nook forces text to be fully justified left and right, whether the user wants that or not, but it does an atrocious job of producing that justification — among the worst I’ve ever seen on any e-reading device (and I’ve been using such devices for nine years […]
My first-ever YouTube video, recorded Saturday, February 20, 2010: a survey of nine different devices I’ve used over the years to read ebooks. “You’re looking at in aggregate at about $3,000 worth of ebook-reading hardware here, and my own personal use almost nine years now of using devices to read ebooks. I’m an absolute convert […]
I’m getting tired of high-priced ebook readers that are brought to market without anyone who knows anything about book layout and design having vetted the software they use. Have a look at this photo, which shows a Foxit eSlick ebook-reading device displaying a .PDB eReader book from Barnes and Noble’s Fictionwise.com under the new 2.0.1 […]
An email I received this morning from my colleague Jamie Todd Rubin: I ran into the same problem with the Kindle that you reported with the Nook regarding hyphenation. They implement full justification without adherence to any hyphenation rules and that makes some lines look awkward (4 words, widely spaced). The other thing I’ve noticed, […]
I sent this suggestion to Barnes and Noble tech support today, and posted it on the nook discussion forum: To my way of thinking, the page-forward and page-backward buttons are in the reverse of where they should be, given the weight and design of the nook. If you hold the nook with your thumbs over […]
A perfect example of why ebook readers are so crappy at formatting these days: the people who make them don’t even have a rudimentary familiarity with typography. As I observed in my review of the Barnes & Noble nook, the algorithms used to justify text there are atrocious, making for awful-looking pages. The Foxit eSlick […]
Last weekend, in Chicago, I bought a Barnes & Noble nook ebook reader. Since they’re not for sale in Canada, I probably have one of the very few units in all of Canada now — a nook of the north! (Yes, it was worth the US$259, just to get to make that pun.) My initial […]
Britain’s The Mail on Sunday (which has a circulation of 2.2 million copies) solicited a Letter to the Editor from me about the forthcoming Apple iPad and its science-fictional precursors. Here’s what I had to say in full; a shorter version appears in today’s (14 February 2010) print edition of the newspaper: Once again, science […]
After six days of being unavailable for purchase there, paper editions of Macmillan books — including Tor Books such as my novels FlashForward, Hominids, and Rollback — are now back on sale at Amazon.com. Robert J. Sawyer online:Website • Facebook • Twitter • Newsgroup • Email
Although eReader is a very robust application on Palm OS devices, and the Windows implementation isn’t bad (although the B&N Reader version has lots of bugs, and many features stripped out), other recent implementations have left much to be desired, especially when dealing with complexly formatted ebooks. The Foxit eSlick, as I observed before, can’t […]
First The New York Times and now The Washington Post have reported that Amazon gave into Macmillan’s demands, and it’s been flashing all over the web that this is the case for four days now. But check the source. The only reference is to this unsigned anonymous post buried deep on the Amazon.com site; that’s […]
