Browsing Tag

kobo

Gorgeous French romance covers ebook roundup

La Gouvernante insoumise

Time for another ebook roundup post! Courtney Milan is one of the authors in the narrow band of “historical romance authors I enjoy reading”. And Goodreads has helpfully informed me that she has a giveaway going on their site for the French edition of her book The Duchess War, which is called Le Secret de la duchess! I already have the English edition of this in ebook form, but as soon as I laid eyes on the cover, I jumped on this giveaway, because:

Always up for an opportunity to amuse myself with practicing my French
Courtney Milan is an awesome writer, and
Gadzooks, the covers on the French editions of this series’ books are eye-poppingly gorgeous.

The English edition ones are pretty as well, don’t get me wrong. As romance novel covers go, I like the ones that have vividly colored gowns on the heroines. But oh goodness the French editions. Lovely.

You should, I think, be able to see them here on Kobo’s site!

Also worthy of note: the novella that opens this series, which is The Governess Affair in English and La Gouvernante insoumise in French, is available for free. If you’re a romance reader who likes to read in languages other than English, note as well that she has other translations available for this same book. I saw German, Spanish, and Dutch editions of this available on her Smashwords page. (Note, however, that only the German and Spanish editions as of this writing are free.)

Anyhow: I scarfed the French edition of the novella for important Gorgeous Cover and Language Nerdery reasons. Which also reminded me that I needed to do an ebook update in general, as my inbox is teetering! So here you go.

Acquired from Kobo

La Gouvernante insoumise, by Courtney Milan. French translation of her novella The Governess Affair, which is book 0 of her The Brothers Sinister series. (Or, in French, Les frères ténébreux.)
Taste of Marrow, by Sarah Gailey. SF (of the alternate history variety). Book 2 of her River of Teeth books. Liked book 1 quite a bit, so had to get this one too!
All Systems Red, by Martha Wells. SF. Book 1 of her Murderbot Diaries series, which I am getting on the general grounds of being highly amused at her protagonist being an android calling itself Murderbot. ;D
Bloodline, by Claudia Gray. I’ve already read this; it’s the Star Wars novel Gray wrote to give some lead-in to the story in The Force Awakens. Snapped this up when it went on sale for a good price, because I quite enjoyed this story, and all the mileage of Leia being badass.
Wake of Vultures, by Lila Bowen. Book 1 of her Shadow series. This was another one I nabbed because it went on sale for a low price in digital format. Had my eye on this one due to a genderfluid protagonist!
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire. Book 2 of the Wayward Children series, another of the Tor.com sales I jumped on a couple weeks ago. Read this pretty much as soon as I got it, because I was looking forward to reading the story about Jack and Jill and their door!

Acquired from Barnes and Noble

Grabbed these two books after meeting their authors in passing at Orycon this year, and being deeply amused that they were billing themselves as the gayest table in the dealers’ room. I had to reward that kind of promotional spirit!

Also, I had to spend some of the credit I still have at B&N.

Those books, both of which are put out by NineStar Press, are:

Ardulum: First Don, by J.S. Fields. SF. Lesbian protagonist! She’s a smuggler confronted with a slave girl who resembles one of the deities from her homeworld.
Trans Liberty Riot Brigade, by L.M. Pierce. SF. Intersex protagonist! And I gotta say I love the title.

8 total for this post, and 58 for the year.

December 16, 2017 by Angela Korra'ti

Site Updates

Some site housekeeping notes

I’ve been in a mood to do some digital spring cleaning lately, particularly inspired by an episode of the DBSA podcast where SB Sarah interviewed Fay Wolf about her new book on how to declutter your life. Since they specifically talked about digital decluttering, I felt moved to take care of some overdue decluttering of mine.

Namely:

I’ve been juggling two Gmail addresses for a while and have grown to find this burdensome. So I am in the process of decommissioning my angela.korrati address on Gmail in favor of the annathepiper one. My Contact page has been updated appropriately.

The short stories “The Blood of the Land” and “The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen” have not been properly deploying out to iTunes from Smashwords. A fix for this is now in progress.

I have decommissioned the Kobo account I was using for Kobo Writing Life. I’d wound up with two different Kobo accounts when I’d had to open a second one to tie it to Third Place Books, and having two accounts was kind of stupid. Particularly given that I’d stopped deploying books directly via Writing Life, and have been trying to deploy to Kobo via Smashwords instead. So my original Kobo account, the one I’ve been using with Writing Life, has been deactivated. Right now this also means that Faerie Blood is not currently available on the Kobo site. I’m in the process of trying to fix that.

I have removed links to Oyster and to the Nook UK site from any of my titles that had them, since Oyster is pretty much dead, and since B&N has also shut down the Nook in the UK.

Meanwhile, I have done a bunch of updates to my Square store.

First, I realized that the store did not have the Cerridwen short on it. I have now corrected this problem.

The limited edition ebook bundle CD I have of both editions of Faerie Blood is now under the “Ebooks” category with the rest of the books. Also, I have set it so that each of the individual ebooks now includes in its description that I will ship copies electronically by email, AND you will be able to pick which format you want. Your options will be EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and a zip file of all three.

Also: since Square recently did an upgrade to its store system, there’s functionality now for donations. I have decided to use this to test out a Tip Jar on my Square store. The intent here is that for anyone who might have acquired a story of mine for free (such as when I ran “Cerridwen” for free on KDP or when I’ve had things set as Reader Sets Price on Smashwords), and who might want to pay for me something after the fact, this is a mechanism by which you can do that.

Last but not least: I have also now added a “Store” menu to the menu bar on the site. The “Store” link goes off to the Square store, but under that, I’ve also placed links to the Buying From Me page (which is the page for information on how to buy stuff from me directly vs. through any of the major ebook vendors), and to the Faerie Blood and Bone Walker pages on Bandcamp (which are the more useful places for non-US folks to go to order print copies of those books).

Any questions, please let me know!

April 14, 2016 by Angela Korra'ti

Updates to Faerie Blood and Bone Walker pages!

FYI to all:

Since I am moving over to using Smashwords to deploy Faerie Blood and Bone Walker out to B&N, Kobo, and iBooks, this means the purchase links for the books at these locations are changing.

I have new viable links for both books at B&N and iBooks, and both of their pages have been updated accordingly. Kobo has a new working link for Bone Walker, but Faerie Blood‘s new link hasn’t shown up yet in their system; once it does, I’ll update the FB page with that, too.

All new links I have are now in place on the Faerie Blood and Bone Walker pages, and they’re added to my full Books page as well. But the most immediately useful ones are:

Faerie Blood:

Nook | iBooks

Bone Walker:

Nook | iBooks | Kobo

ALSO of paramount interest: since Smashwords does deploy out to Overdrive, OH HEY LOOK! Bone Walker is now actually on Overdrive, which means in theory it COULD actually show up in libraries! I’m not seeing it at the two Seattle library systems, but if Overdrive has it, that means libraries can get it. So if you’re a library fan, talk to your library and ask them if they might want to consider adding the book to their digital systems.

AND! This also means that I can take advantage of Overdrive’s pretty capabilities for reading ebook samples, like I did with Valor of the Healer and Vengeance of the Hunter. I have accordingly added a link to read an excerpt of Bone Walker at Overdrive to the book’s page!

March 19, 2015 by Angela Korra'ti

Ebooks and Ereaders

B&N and Kobo stomping on user ability to download books

I’ve been noticing lately that Kobo has been stomping on the ability to download certain books from user libraries–and at first I thought this was simply a passing glitch. But then I started noticing it happen on books where it was particularly puzzling, i.e., releases from Tor.com. Which are DRM-free and which should not have any restrictions whatsoever upon them.

I saw this happen when I tried to pre-order John Scalzi’s Lock In, and when I sent Kobo’s CS people cranky mail about this, they told me something that made no damn sense whatsoever: that because the book was in epub3 format, that meant I couldn’t download it. I’d also noticed it happen on a free book from Tor–Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut of Mars”.

Reasons why this made no damn sense:

1) A book’s format does not dictate whether you can download it. All downloading is is copying data from point A to point B. If there’s something that’s getting in the way of the data moving, that’s DRM or some other form of restriction.

2) I was able to go over to my B&N account, go find Kowal’s novelette, and download the exact same thing in the exact same format with no problems whatsoever.

So I sent Kobo additional cranky mail about this, and was told that if I wanted the book in another format, then I should complain to the publisher. And that pissed me off because the CS person didn’t understand that I wasn’t complaining about the format–I was complaining about the inability to download the thing onto my computer so that I could keep a backup copy of it around. Which I should have been able to bloody well do as I wished, because it had no DRM on it.

Meanwhile, though, B&N has trumped Kobo completely on this, because according to this post on The Digital Reader, now B&N has removed download links for ALL books in user accounts. Apparently, they’re stopping support for sideloading, according to what the poster was told in tweets.

And this just makes me crankier. Dammit, B&N, I started buying ebooks from you because Amazon was pissing me off. And Kobo, I started buying books from YOU because B&N was pissing me off, and additionally, because I wanted to support moves to partner up with independent bookstores.

But if BOTH of you are going to start denying users ability to download their damn books, all this is going to do is drive me off to find out whether Google Play will let me do this. And it’ll make me way more interested in buying books directly from publishers and from authors as often as possible.

Dammit, all I want to do is buy books, keep master copies on my computer, and put them on devices to read when I want to. This should not be difficult.

And yet.

September 27, 2014 by Angela Korra'ti

Books

The oh HEY I have a whole new ereader book roundup

But this is not to say I haven’t bought books lately in print as well, because I have!

Picked up in print from Third Place:

Cold Days by Jim Butcher, which I have of course already read, but I hadn’t yet picked up my paperback copy to add to my collection. Because oh my YES Mr. Butcher is on the “must have both electronically and in print in case of zombie apocalypse and OHNOEZ NO MORE ELECTRICITY” list.
The Inexplicables, by Cherie Priest. The latest one in her Clockwork Century series–looking forward to this one since it takes the action back to steampunky, zombie-infested Seattle!

Meanwhile, as I have posted about earlier, I’ve picked up a Kobo Mini in my effort to start shifting my ebook purchases over to support Third Place. A big part of this is motivated by the desire to support said store, though there’s a considerable amount here as well of being disgruntled with Barnes and Nobles’ customer service. I’ve never had any particular issues with the Nook as a device; the hardware is lovely and the current edition of the software on mine is simple and doesn’t screw up what I want it to do, i.e., let me read books. But I’ve never been happy with B&N’s customer support, especially in regards to supporting Mac users.

(The Nook desktop app is still broken on Mountain Lion, for example, and I’ve never heard yet if they’re planning to bother to fix it any time in the next few years. Every time I google about it, I see a whole bunch of cranky Mac users posting to the B&N forums.)

So yeah. That I can support Third Place now with my purchases is lovely and from what I’ve seen so far, responsive customer support on Kobo’s part is bonus. These things together have combined to get several shiny new ebooks showing up on my shiny new Kobo Mini, several of which have been on the Rebuy list for a while. But not all!

So, picked up from Third Place/Kobo:

The Duchess War, by Courtney Milan. Grabbing this one because I’ve quite liked her historical romances, and this one’s starting a whole new series. ALSO, Kobo’s selling it for real cheap right now, but if you act super-fast, i.e., by the 20th, you can use a coupon to knock 50% off the price. How shiny is that? Thank you, Smart Bitches Trashy Books!
The Wounded Sky, by Diane Duane. Because this is one of my favorite Star Trek novels from the first big run of them. We have a physical copy in our library but I wanted an ebook too.
Strangers from the Sky, by Margaret Wander Bonanno. Another Trek novel. This is one I’d actually grabbed a German edition of when I’d grabbed a compilation from the Kobo set, one which included Vonda McIntyre’s Enterprise: The First Adventure–so I wanted the original English edition of this too!
Murder with Peacocks and Murder with Puffins, by Donna Andrews. These are rebuys, the first two books of her Meg Lanslow series. Decided I wanted them back in ebook form.

But–it’s important to note that I’m not actually going to bail entirely on my B&N account for now. For organizational purposes, if I started buying a series on B&N, I’m going to continue to do so. Like, say:

Victory of Eagles, by Naomi Novik. This is book five of the Temeraire series. Which I did actually already own in hardback, so I clearly needed an ebook copy! Once I finish doing some beta reading for kisanthe, I’m going to jump back into my mad dash through the rest of this series, prepping for Book 8 to drop this summer!

Total of 11 for the year, so far.

February 15, 2013 by Angela Korra'ti

Ebooks and Ereaders, Publishing

Like indie bookstores? Like ebooks? Now you can have BOTH!

So I saw this firing up a few months ago and it tickles me deeply that this is happening: while Amazon and Barnes and Noble have been duking out in the US ebook market, Kobo has swooped in to team up with independent bookstores to sell devices and ebooks through them!

Which means that two of my favorite indie bookstores, Third Place Books and the almighty mecca of bookstores that is Powells, are now additional places where you can get Faerie Blood in ebook form if you have a Kobo account. And if you buy through their sites, you then do your part to support these lovely indie bookstores.

How awesome is this? PRETTY DAMNED AWESOME.

It particularly tickles me to see Third Place doing this, since as y’all may recall, their Third Place Press IS my printer for the hardcopy edition of Faerie Blood! And now you can also buy the ebook from them as well!

Now, of course, you’d need an actual device to read them on. I have yet to handle a Kobo reader of any sort myself but online friends of mine who are Kobo customers have spoken well of them. (Alternately, I know you can also run the Kobo app on iDevices and one presumes there is an equivalent for Android devices as well.) What experience I do have with Kobo though is this–I do have an account with them, kept because sometimes I want to get ebooks that Amazon and B&N don’t have. Oftentimes I’ve found that they might have, say, the UK release of something before Amazon or B&N gets the US release.

But man, now that I know Third Place has teamed up with them, I may have to seriously rethink my ebook buying patterns. And if I grow weary of the Nook, I’ll have to put serious consideration into jumping ship to Kobo. Because I loves me some Third Place, and I’d love to see this effort of theirs pay off!

January 4, 2013 by Angela Korra'ti