Post by BillGillPost by Lynn McGuirePost by Bobbie SellersJust finished yesterday
"Aftermarket afterlife" by Seanan McGuire. this is an novel of a
series about a groups of scientists who attempt to preserve cryptid
life forms from dragons to boogeymen. They are heretics and escapees
from the Covenant of St.George which as you might guess is quite
interested in making dragons extinct. They are also the object of
worship by the Aeslin mice which talk a lot. I believe that they
pretended death and escaped to North America where they do their
best to protect the strange creatures most of us ignore. The
Covenant in this novel attacks the Dragon Nest in New York City but
only kill a female dragon. The male dragon is safe but one of the
family members is injured and her husband is killed. Now the main
POV here is of one Ghost named Mary Dunleavy who as explained in the
story is the Family's babysitter and they can call on her in the
dase of distrees. Oliva is a 5 year old human child living in the
Dragon nest and Mary rescues her with the aid of Sarah, a cuckoo
(not a bird) who has the power of teleportation. And the story goes
on from there with Mary assuming the role of a general in protecting
her family for which she has been baby-sitting for over 100 years.
All in all a very satisfy read.
The background remark are intended for a person who is
not reading the series currently. I try to keep the SA of
the Team Amiga mailing list well entertained with notes
about this sort of thing and manga.
bliss
Bummer, my cousin's MMPB does not come out until February 25, 2025
which I have ordered. Are you reading the ebook or the hardback ?
https://www.amazon.com/Aftermarket-Afterlife-Seanan-McGuire/
dp/0756419727/
And the next book in the 14 book series comes out in ebook / trade
paperback on March 11, 2025. I would guess that the MMPB will be out
in 2026.
Lynn
Whatever I find in the San Francisco Public Library Genre racks.
Some of is on real book shelves. I believe this was a hard cover book.
I do not care for reading text online as it is very hard to
reproduce the page format of real books. I have an excellent computer
but the display is 17 inches which I chose because my vision is
getting poorer.
On the other hand it is better for manga than for text but
even then I prefer the solid paper versions.
bliss
I spend 10 to 12 hours per day on the computer. The last thing that I
want to do is read a book on the computer. Dead Trees Rule !
Lynn
I prefer print, but eBooks will do in a pinch. In fact I
am trying to build up my digital library because if I have
to go into some kind of care facility I won't be able to
take my personal library with me. I am building it on a
tablet. Not as good as a book, but reasonable.
One of the big problems with eBooks is that sometimes the
original book is not available in a word processor format.
Very little before the end of the 20th century is available.
So the book has to be scanned, one page at a time, and then
converted to digital format. This involves a lot of errors.
So it then has to be proofed carefully to try to get rid of
them. Sometimes this is not done as carefully as it needs
to be. So the eBook can have some rather bad errors. I
have one book that I bought which has quite few errors.
Digitizing a book is pretty good job in and of itself. I
know this for a fact because I have a lot of books in my
library that are out of print, and not available as eBooks.
So I have scanned a bunch of them myself. There is a lot
of work required to do it right.
Many (most) older books have errors in Kindle editions. You are quite
correct about the cause: lack of proof-reading.
Far more irritating, however, are notes about "unrecognized object"
which are apparently generated by the OCR program and not removed by
anyone. In the case of /She/, the inscription that starts it all,
presented in a special font in the book, is reduced to "unrecognized
object" (or something similar), when it /could/ have been an
illustration. Or just tranliterated into normal text.
Omnibuses can be particularly irritating: these tend to be compiled
from /other eBooks/ and not checked at all. Indeed, the Dumas omnibus
has two or three copies of the more famous works because those works
appeared in two or three of the collections being collected here.
I once read an English translation of a French work that completely
blew street names (ie, "Rue" was something hilarilously, but not
memorably, wrong). There were actually cases where a chapter title had
the text displayed correctly while the first line of the chapter,
displayed below the title, had it amazingly botched. My Kindle Dickens
omnibus consistently rendered "k" as "l:". And when I tried to search
on "l:", I found that it searched on "every term with a
non-digit/non-letter character except ':'", which was about as far
from what I wanted as it could be.
Some older works do not have these problems. This is because they
present an /image/ of each page. No OCR, no OCR errors. Just a very
large file and no control over font size. Or anything else.
Even more recent books, those that I would think were done from the
very same camera-ready file as the print copies, sometimes have
problems. An amazing number of hyphens that, presumably, should
disappear when the word is entirely on a single line, do no such
thing. Occasional, usually small, paragraphs with much wider margins
than anything around them (and they have text as normal as their own
before and after them) appear. But, with those, when I see a problem,
I generally take it that the original had them as well. Typos, lapses,
and grammar problems do exist, even in well-bound well-printed MMPBs,
after all.
Post by BillGillNotice that any books that are still in copyright are for
my use only. Distributing them is strictly against the law.
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"