Cover Art: The Technician by Neal Asher

Here's the cover art of Neal Asher's new Polity novel called The Technician. This is one big ugly beast! And that's all I have to say...

The Theocracy has been dead for twenty years, and the Polity rules on Masada. But the Tidy Squad consists of rebels who cannot accept the new order. Their hate for surviving theocrats is undiminished, and the iconic Jeremiah Tombs is at the top of their hitlist.

Escaping his sanatorium Tombs is pushed into painful confrontation with reality he has avoided since the rebellion. His insanity must cured, because the near mythical hooder called the Technician that attacked him all those years ago, did something to his mind even the AIs fail to understand. Tombs might possess information about the suicide of an entire alien race.

The war drone Amistad, whose job it is to bring this information to light, recruits Lief Grant, an ex-rebel Commander, to protect Tombs, along with the black AI Penny Royal, who everyone thought was dead. The amphidapt Chanter, who has studied the bone sculptures the Technician makes with the remains of its prey, might be useful too.

Meanwhile, in deep space, the mechanism the Atheter used to reduce themselves to animals, stirs from slumber and begins to power-up its weapons.

Cover Art: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

 

I like the cover art and the idea of using a spider-like space craft. But the thing that gets me excited about this book is not its cover but its promise. Decide for yourself:

Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy - from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to steal their thoughts, to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of the Moving Cities of Mars. Except that Jean made one mistake. Now he is condemned to play endless variations of a game-theoretic riddle in the vast virtual jail of the Axelrod Archons - the Dilemma Prison - against countless copies of himself. Jean's routine of death, defection and cooperation is upset by the arrival of Mieli and her spidership, Perhonen. She offers him a chance to win back his freedom and the powers of his old self - in exchange for finishing the one heist he never quite managed . . . The Quantum Thief is a dazzling hard SF novel set in the solar system of the far future - a heist novel peopled by bizarre post-humans but powered by very human motives of betrayal, revenge and jealousy. It is a stunning debut.

Spellwright by Blake Charlton

US Cover	UK Cover

Blake Charlton's Spellwright (UK, US, Canada) has been very popular in the Blogosphere thanks to some very positive early reviews and that's what I'm going to read next. In North America, it's going to be published on March 2. In the UK, unfortunately, it's going to be even later: July 8.

However, in the meantime, you should have a look at these excerpts. Looks like a very good book, I'm telling ya!

• Prologue to Spellwright by Blake Charlton (The Mad Hatter's Bookshelf & Book Review)
• Exclusive excerpt from Blake Charlton's Spellwright (Pat's Fantasy Hotlist)

It's also interesting to see that the US edition of Spellwright has one of those rare book covers that look nicer than their UK counterparts.

Apartment 16 by Adam L G Nevill

Adam Nevill's Apartment 16 is one of the books that I'm looking forward to. I've always enjoyed good horror books and I'm expecting good things from Apartment 16. It is going to be published on May 21.

Some doors are better left closed...

In Barrington House, an upmarket block in London, there is an empty apartment. No one goes in, no one comes out. And it’s been that way for fifty years. Until the night watchman hears a disturbance after midnight and investigates. What he experiences is enough to change his life forever.

A young American woman, Apryl, arrives at Barrington House. She's been left an apartment by her mysterious Great Aunt Lillian who died in strange circumstances. Rumours claim Lillian was mad. But her diary suggests she was implicated in a horrific and inexplicable event decades ago.

Determined to learn something of this eccentric woman, Apryl begins to unravel the hidden story of Barrington House. She discovers that a transforming, evil force still inhabits the building. And the doorway to Apartment 16 is a gateway to something altogether more terrifying . . .

Check also Adam Nevill's new Web site. It's pretty cool!

Schism Between Authors and Readers

Something that Jay Wells said on twitter made me think if there's schism between authors and readers. She said:

Saddest thing about this e-book drama is it's creating schism between authors and readers because of some misconceptions about how publishing works.

I think she's partially right, because most readers don't get how the publishing of a book works, they probably don't think about it. But the biggest complaint that I hear around me and on Internet is not about authors, it is about publishers. I have the impression that they are pictured as greedy companies that are always getting an unfairly big part of the cake, keeping all the reins while paying authors peanuts.

Regarding "the current e-book drama", I think readers don't really trust publishers. Regarding e-book pricing, they want from the publishers, at least, a trustworthy dynamic scheme as it is applied to paper books. If the publishers say "e-book prices will always be available at 70% of the p-book prices" then I'm sure most of the readers will be go home to their reading devices happily. However, they don't trust such a promise because currently one can pay $14.99 for an e-book from the same publisher that's selling the mass market paperback for $7.99. Now, this is upsetting!

So it's not so much authors that they are angry with, because readers know that their hands are tied. However, readers believe that authors are still closer to the publishers than themselves. For example, to protest the unavailability of an e-book, they can decide to give unfair 1-star reviews to a book, hoping that the author whose book's Amazon rating is harmed will be strong enough to change some things.

In this current e-book pricing struggle, I think one of the questions that a reader asks himself is "Why would an author, especially someone who is already published, not consider a royalty program such as Amazon's?" Amazon's new royalty program says:

This new program can thus enable authors and publishers to make more money on every sale. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option.

It just looks like readers are eager but most authors and all publishers are afraid of the e-book phenomenon.

Cover Art: The Ragged Man by Tom Lloyd

I'm not a big fan of dragons but I think the cover of Tom Lloyd's The Ragged Man shows enough skeleton and the evilest of dragons to impress any fantasy lover.

Tom Lloyd's The Ragged Man is the forth book of The Twilight Reign series:

Continuing the powerful epic that started with The Stormcaller: Lord Isak is dead, his armies and entire tribe in disarray. It falls to King Emin to continue the war alone, and the Menin are only too happy to meet his challenge. In Byora, Ruhen is developing his 'Saviour' persona. The Harlequins start preaching in his name and many of the pilgrims who flock to him are recruited to be 'Children', disciples who spread Ruhen's message. All over the Land people are starting to see Ruhen as the answer to their troubles. A showdown is coming: battle lines are finally drawn and the atrocities quickly mount. The spectre of the Great War looms, but in this age the Gods cannot and will not come to King Emin's aid. With the peoples of the Land turning against Emin and his few remaining allies, their only chance for survival lies in the hands of a dead man. 

Update: (9 Feb 2010)

Here's the final version of the cover (click to enlarge):

Price of e-Books: The Biggest Enemy?

Since they became popular, mostly thanks to the e-Paper readers such as Sony Readers and Amazon's Kindle, e-Books have had three major enemies: DRM (digital rights management), geographic restrictions and high prices.

Readers have always given out about DRM and Geo-restrictions. They don't make sense and they are, at best, frustrating for the reader. I've always believed that the high prices have constituted a lesser threat to the success of the e-Books. This is because I think that as e-Readers become more popular, a reasonable and more-or-less global pricing scheme will set in. I'm not so sure about it anymore.

Amazon's $9.99 upper limit was an excellent start in the US. However publishers have never been happy about this artificial price limit. I guess they never liked the fact that e-Book sales have cannibalized their hardback sales, which is where they mostly make their money (please correct me if I'm wrong on this one. I've always assumed so with my limited knowledge).

Amazon's recent failure in its arm-wrestle with Macmillan and authors' joining the clash were the first indicators of Amazon's defeat not only in this fight but in this war. Not surprisingly, Amazon is also cornered by increasing competition, especially the new Apple gadget, iPad.

There's no doubt, at least in my mind, that electronic content is the future of reading. At the end of the day, I think most of the e-Reader users are happy to absorb some of the device cost because of the convenience of using such gadgets. However, ultimately, they believe that e-Books have to be commercialized considerably cheaper than their dead-tree editions. I'm just hoping that the time we'll see a general consensus about how much an e-Book should cost is not so far away.