Twenty-five million years in the past, a clan of sentient, prehistoric big cats called “the Named” have their own language, traditions, and law. Led by Meoran, the Named herd horses and deer for food. They keep order and peace, fending off predatory raiders–the UnNamed–from all sides. But, the battle has taken its toll, and the Named are skirting the edge of survival.

Much to the displeasure of Meoran, a young female named Ratha discovers a powerful defense against the UnNamed. She calls it “the Red Tongue,” and it is a creature of incredible power. Red Tongue is fire, a force of both life and destruction that must be at once nurtured and tamed.

Sensing that Ratha’s mastery of fire threatens his power, Meoran banishes her from the clan. As she travels out amongst the savage UnNamed, Ratha learns about both them and herself. But, her tribe needs her. Can she return? Will the Named survive constant attacks without the Red Tongue? Will the power of the Red Tongue change the clan forever?

Author Clare Bell crafts a serious adventure and coming-of-age story, filled with triumph and heartbreak. Ratha’s Creature, the first book of the Named series, sets this quintet of fantasies in motion. The fifth and final novel, Ratha’s Courage, is also available from E-Reads and we will be filling in volumes 2-4 in due course.

For years I have nursed a small treasury of witty quips, snappy retorts and groan-inducing puns patiently waiting for the perfect moment to utter them.

And so it came to pass that I recently tuned in to a New York Mets preseason baseball game in progress when the gods bestowed on me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to unleash a long-hoarded bon mot. The gift came in the form of a Taiwanese shortstop that the Mets had acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers.  At the moment I turned on the television he had just gotten a base hit and was standing on first base. I glimpsed his jersey and my eyes rounded like a prospector’s whose pick has just opened a vein of pure gold. I snapped open my cell phone and speed-dialed my son’s number.  “You watching the Mets?”

“No. Why?”

“Do you know Hu’s on first?”

“Who?”

“Naturally,” I said.

In fact, the shortstop’s name is Hu Chin-lung and for his complete bio you may click here. But if you want to refamiliarize yourself with the classic Abbott and Costello routine that will be repeated ad nausuem in 2011 if Hu makes the team, here’s a reminder.

Abbott: You throw the ball to first base.
Costello: Then who gets it?
Abbott: Naturally.
Costello: Naturally.
Abbott: Now you’ve got it.
Costello: I throw the ball to Naturally.
Abbott: You don’t! You throw it to Who!
Costello: Naturally.
Abbott: Well, that’s it—say it that way.
Costello: That’s what I said.
Abbott: You did not.
Costello: I said I throw the ball to Naturally.
Abbott: You don’t! You throw it to Who!
Costello: Naturally.

If the Mets’ regular shortstop Jose Reyes is injured Hu will replace him. Of course! By whom will Reyes be replaced? No. Hu.

And as long as we’re on the subject, E-Reads carries two excellent baseball biographies by Kal Wagenheim: Roberto Clemente and Babe Ruth.  Check them out on Wagenheim’s author page.

Richard Curtis

In Fractured Emerald: Ireland, Emily Hahn, author of E-Reads’ bestselling The Soong Sisters and China to Me turns her observant and discerning eye to the oft-troubled land of Ireland. In a magisterial combination of historical research and keen personal observation on the scene, Emily Hahn gives us a view of the whole of Ireland and its history, from the legends of the great kings and the heroes of myth to the Saint who converted Ireland to Christianity many centuries ago and up to modern times.

Hahn details the trials and tribulations of a conquered people as they rebel against their exploiters and fight and die for independence, eventually achieving their goal but only at the price of a bitter partition that haunts the country to this day. Hahn’s breadth of vision and acute sense of the telling detail paints the big picture while also pinpointing the small-but-important moments. Perhaps the sub-title manages to encapsulate it all: Ireland, Its Legends, Its History, Its People from St. Patrick to Bernadette Devlin.

The remarkable Emily Hahn was an irrepressible traveler who broke all the rules of her time to produce over ninety works of fiction and nonfiction.  See her author page for details.

What is a ‘Nid and why should you be scared out of your wits by one?

If we tell you that that’s short for “arachnid” and that’s the scientific term for spiders, you’ll know why. And these aren’t just any old spiders, which is bad enough, but these are genetically modified. So yes, unless you’re into ‘Nids, you definitely want to be afraid when you read Ray Garton’s horror novel…

Medical research? Genetic experiments? No one knows exactly what goes on inside the sprawling BioGenTech building on the edge of town. But after an enormous explosion at the facility, people in town start turning up dead…and in pieces.

Something is loose in Hope Valley. Something big…and fast…and hungry. It has a lot of legs, a nasty disposition and a big appetite. This is one spider you can’t step on.

Ray Garton says most people have a love-hate relationship with spiders. We don’t think so. We think most people have a hate-hate-hate-hate relationship with them.  Garton has blogged about them and you can decide for yourself if you can find a glimmer of love for these fugitives from a horror novel – a Ray Garton horror novel.

When is eight an irrational number? When it happens to be the number of stories in this strange and wonderful collection by George Alec Effinger.

For instance…

The death of a pet fish signals an ominous threat of wordwide tragedy… Delta Company “plays” out a war light years away… A running back for the Cleveland Browns gives his all to relive a night from his past…

In Irrational Numbers, as with much of his work, author George Alec Effinger straddles the line between allegorical fantasy and science fiction. It’s a vein Effinger mines for a deep, meaningful understanding of human nature. Challenging and disquieting in the way only the best fiction can be, this collection of eight magnificent pieces will have readers clamoring for more.

George Alec Effinger was a true master of satirical Science Fiction. Before his death in 2002, he gained the highest esteem amongst his peers for his pitch-perfect stylistic mimicry and his great insight into the human condition. Despite a life filled with chronic illness, Effinger was a prolific novelist and short story writer, earning multiple Nebula and Hugo Award nominations.

Nothing stands in the way of the digital steamroller. In industry after industry, sooner or later some bright person looks at a conventional enterprise and wonders why it’s being performed the old way when new technology can  short circuit the process and save time, money and energy.

That’s what happened when a music student named Edward W. Guo, examining the high price of music scores, looked into the tedious and expensive process of buying scores for musical performances. “The site, the Internet Music Score Library Project, has trod in the footsteps of Google Books and Project Gutenberg and grown to be one of the largest sources of scores anywhere,” writes Daniel Wakin in the New York Times.  “It claims to have 85,000 scores, or parts for nearly 35,000 works, with several thousand being added every month. That is a worrisome pace for traditional music publishers, whose bread and butter comes from renting and selling scores in expensive editions backed by the latest scholarship. More than a business threat, the site has raised messy copyright issues and drawn the ire of established publishers.”

You can visit and, if you’re clever, download a score directly into your laptop or iPad as the Borromeo Quartet does. The pages are turned on the touchscreen the same way that you turn the pages of an iPad e-book.  Some laptops are equipped with a footpad that you tap to turn the page.

Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note by Daniel J. Wakin in the New York Times.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Blogger “Andy” on AgnosticMaybe has posted the following proposed E-Book User’s Bill of Rights. Do you subscribe to it?
Richard Curtis

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The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

* the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
* the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
* the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
* the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.
These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

CC0
To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

About once a year I read an article so significant that by the time I finish underlining, highlighting, circling and starring it, there is scarcely anything left to excerpt.  Such is the case with Tim Spalding’s The downward spiral of ownership and value published on the thingology blog of the website LibraryThing. Spalding is founder of the website.

He was prompted to write his piece in response to a posting about ownership in the age of e-books. “I’m sure that there are other possibilities,” his correspondent wrote, “but with the amelioration of ownership and comparable media prices, digital books will come down from their current position and this, in turn, will create new business models and new pricing models. Could publishers resist the downward pressure of ebook pricing by coming up with a business model which would result in increased sense of ownership and thus value to the consumer?”

Spalding is hard pressed to answer in the affirmative.  “The loss of ownership creates a downward spiral in value,” he writes, “and erodes the very notion of paying for books at all.

“We used to own our books,” he writes. “With most ebooks we own them in name, but effectively we lease them….The slide toward more and more attenuated concepts of ownership continues.” The spirit of open access infusing the Internet is eroding the tradition of book ownership, and new, access-based models will eventually achieve dominance.

“The process,” Spalding writes, “is gradual” because psychology and culture always lag behind technology. But a “tethered, metered and monitored product” is inevitable as “each step away from ownership makes the next step more acceptable. Once you realize your Kindle book is not fully yours, you’ll accept it being mostly not yours. Google Ebooks are a further step away from ownership.

“By itself, such changes might be culturally and economically neutral. Ownership of paper books wasn’t so much a consumer preference as a side effect of their physical nature, and law followed and solemnized that state of affairs. Maybe the faucet model will produce more readers, more reading, more good books, more paid authors, etc. Or maybe it will produce less. Who knows?

“The role of piracy. I think we know. And the trends are negative, for both readers and authors. Unfortunately, digitization and the faucet model tends to encourage a third option–piracy. Digitization makes it possible, but the faucet model encourages it. This happens in two ways.

“First, people who love autonomy and personal freedom rebel against metered and monitored access to reading. They don’t want inconvenient DRM, monstrous and opaque licenses, transfer limitations, constant access requirements or icky, opaque monitoring. These people will turn to piracy to avoid it. (Or at least that’s what they’ll say they’re doing.)

“Second, the more ownership is devalued, the less people care about the rights of the seller. When someone sells you something they made, or through a small number of simple intermediaries, it’s easy to see what’s wrong about cheating them. When authors’ work is reduced to a limitless soup, available through shiny digital spigots at cheap, but limited, rates, it’s hard to see where problem with piracy really lies, and easier to rationalize cheating authors.

As devalued ownership feeds piracy, rising piracy in turn devalues ownership. Anyone with an internet connection can rapidly assemble a ‘library’ of books it would have once taken years to build–so why bother building one?”

Well, I’m afraid I’ve come close to crossing the Fair Use boundary.  So do read the rest of this cogent article: The downward spiral of ownership and value. And if you’re still skeptical, read David Carnoy’s masterful article The Rise of the 99-Cent Kindle e-book.

Richard Curtis

Chris Norgren is a museum curator and Renaissance art expert. He is also an authority on murder and mayhem through no fault of his own. Aaron Elkins brings you a trio of Norgren mysteries that put all of those skills to the test.

In A Deceptive Clarity Norgren heads to Berlin to assist in mounting a sensational exhibit: “The Plundered Past” – twenty priceless Old Masters looted by the Nazis, thought for decades to be lost forever, and only recently rediscovered. But things quickly get out of hand when Norgren’s patrician, fastidious boss, after smelling a forgery in the lot, turns up dead the very next day – on the steps of a dismal Frankfurt brothel, of all places. Now Norgren faces two daunting tasks: finding a fake painting among the masterpieces, and a real killer whose sights are now set on him.

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A Glancing Light : Mild-mannered and law-abiding Norgren, is an unlikely undercover investigator, but when a priceless Rubens portrait is discovered in a shipment of “authentic reproductions” in a local warehouse, Chris is pressed into service to find out how it got there. The quest leads him to the medieval city of Bologna, one of his favorite places, but all too soon what might have been a welcome Italian interlude turns into a bizarre journey into shady art world doings and murderous secrets….

In Old Scores It’s a headline-making story: the discovery of a previously unknown Rembrandt. René Vachey, the iconoclastic art dealer who claims to have uncovered it, wants to make a gift of it to the Seattle Art Museum, but curator Chris Norgren is wary. Vachey is notorious in art circles for perpetrating scandalous shams; not for profit but for the sheer fun of embarrassing the elite and snobbish “experts” of the art establishment. And thanks to the web of strings attached to Vachey’s donation (e.g., no scientific testing permitted), even Rembrandt expert Norgren is uncertain as to whether or not the painting is authentic.

His doubts multiply when he goes to Dijon to examine it, and finds himself in the middle of a host of controversies of which Vachey is the devilish focus. But there’s no doubt that the bullet soon found in Vachey’s head is authentic. And there’s no telling how much time Chris has to find the truth about the “masterpiece”—and the murder—before he finds himself painted into a corner by a shrewd and villainous murderer.

Ready for more mysteries by this award-winning author?  We have a bunch of Gideon Olivers and more.  They’re on Elkins’ author page.
RC

How far Rani Trader has come from her apprenticeship. Now, in Glasswrights’ Master, the climactic novel in Mindy Klasky’s stirring Glasswrights quintet, she faces the ultimate test. If she fails it, she will suffer the ultimate fate.

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The final battle…

Rani Trader has fled her homeland, escaping Morenia just as enemy armies invade. Encamped in the southern kingdom of Sarmonia, Rani must make the hardest bargain of her life–negotiating safety for herself, her beloved king, and his heir, even as she struggles to control mystical powers that rise within her.

As armies line up for the final battle, Rani must fight to become the master of her fate–and her guild.

Of Glasswrights Master Romantic Times says “Character development is strong as Rani continues to struggle with her past. As with the previous novels, this has a gritty sense of realism that belies the fantasy setting and imperfect characters who strive to rectify their mistakes. Rani’s growing awareness of her own destiny and the difficult choices she faces resonate and evoke sympathy for this strong heroine.”

Make sure you’ve read every book in the quintet – visit Mindy Klasky’s author page.