Be Excellent To Each Other

Yep, first book. I enjoyed writing it. When I was finished I felt relieved for about 6 hours and then started to miss the writing and cups of coffee. Feedback has been excellent, though. I pressed the button, too

Pfft. I did think I might make a few small dinosaur shapes sandwiches. And eat them alone. Maybe with some lemonade in a champagne glass.

Aww! You should invite your scary knitting stalking ladies over.

Snarf!
Stop it, they are lovely and sweet people.

I got a book in the post from a knitting lady today, but she is a friend who I have yet to meet and saw a Kaffe Fassett book somewhere (goodness knows where - it is Kaffe Fassett at the V&A, from 1988) and knows how much I respect Kaffe. Check out his colourful world! A man not afraid of pattern, is Kaffe.

Anyway, Kaffe and the V&A are two of my favourite things, so it will be cherished.

Excellent. Can you remind us closer to its release? I know someone who'd probably be quite interested in that.

That calibre program works really well, by the way. I managed to import a couple of regular blogs and the guardian with no problem this morning. The Guardian is nicely structured, as well. Thanks for the recommendation.

Mrs Squirt has a constant, low-level "I might start knitting" background thought, and a good book would probably help.

WTFF? I had no idea, how did I miss this news? Congratulations Mimi!

Oh, I shall definitely be pimping my book like a man in a large feathered hat and a pretty fly zoot suit when it comes out, but if anyone's lady friends are after a good starting knitting book then Stitch and Bitch is pretty good. The patterns are super-crap, but as a start out technique book it's pretty good.

Also, get on Rav because there are many hundreds of free pattern there.

Actually, 61,388 free ones, 202,676 in total at present according to the database statistics.

Cheers, chuck

What is best Kindle cover?

What about cheaper models?

Are there be any to avoid?

I'm told that the lighted one is pretty good if you're pregnant and the baby keeps waking you up in the middle of the night.

Mimi promised me she would make some Kindle covers when she had finished her book and had a Kindle. Well, looky what has happened!

i bought the belkin one, which is okay for my mum ($19),

did i do a proper congrats already mimi? congrats! and glad to have been of service with calibre

Congratulations. Hopefully you won't be too offended if I don't buy it though.

Even if it includes a "knit your own Sega Mega Drive" section?

With my hand-eye coordination, it would come out as a Steel Battalion Controller.

Cock

/IPHYPERBAN

Many thanks!





Yes, I will be, actually.

FTFY

Finished! I still don't know if I'd read it before or not. I don't think I had, so i must just have recognised the start from attempting to watch the adaptation before. Really enjoyed the book, don't think it was as good as Tipping The Velvet but if I had read this one first I would have considered it good enough to make me want to seek out her other novels. I thought there would be more sex.

Oh, I have just discovered then I can download ebooks from authors and then transfer them to the kindle. This has opened up a whole new world of books! I have just spent about an hour trying to choose one to get. Then found it on amazon and downloaded it that way

A very interesting 'talk' by Neil Gaiman about ebook piracy

http://torrentfreak.com/neil-gaiman-lov ... vertising/

You can pirate books?

Of course, same places as you find everything else like that on the web.

Personally, if I own a copy of a book already, I have no moral problem downloading it for my ereader

Same. I also have no real issues downloading a book if no ebook version exists.

Nor do I. I generally try to buy them properly, though, as I've never had much luck with the quality of pirated books.

I do see how it is all too easily to just click and buy things.

The 'sample' feature is great, but it's so easy to get sucked into books and just buy things Luckily my account is empty so I can't just click happy my way to any virtual library, but I've enjoyed the few free books I downloaded from the classics section, even though I'd read two of those three before.

Emailing knitting patterns to it works an absolute charm, too.

my mum took hers...

Kindle users in the US can lend eBooks to other users.

I don't think it applies to all books, only those that have loaning 'enabled' but from what folks were saying this is a good proportion of titles.

US owners can send a book on their device to a friend for up to 14 days. For the period that the book is on loan the original owner cannot access the title on their device, but once the 14 days is up (or when the borrower sends it back) it reactivates on the lender's device.

I think someone mentioned that you can only lend a book once, but i wasn't sure she meant one time, to one person and then to no-one else again, ever, or that you could only lend it to a friend once, but could then lend it to another.

Oh, and I think US owners can send to people in other countries if the book is published in that territory, but only US users can do the lending.

For some reason, I feel like downloading a copy of a book off a torrent website is way worse than doing the same for a tv series or a film. Is that a weird way of thinking? A book feels like it is exclusively the work of one person, who could have spent months writing it and working hard on it and caring about it, then releasing it. TV series and films keep getting made but I would hate to deprive an author from a sale of their book.
If it was a book i already owned, and I liked it so much I wanted the ebook version as well, then that's as good a reason as I need to part with my cash again.
Anyway, on Saturday i discovered the lesbian equilavant to someone like Marianne Keyes...light hearted romance novels with predictable plotlines (two people meet, get together, face a problem/struggle to be together/get torn apart, then resolve their issues and both grow during the process, ending the book in love and slightly different better peope to the characters at the start.) Easy to read, sort of trashy (but not Danielle Steele) (who's book i have also read ) and brilliant. Plus, sex! In a book! That wasn't cringeworthy, or had any mention of men, or made you want to skip past it! It was great. So I got a wee bit too caught up in them and read two books yesterday, with a third downloaded to read today.

I think since I got my kindle I should ignore the game expinditure thread and start a running total in here

It is a bit.

Rather like my thinking that taking the ads out of ad-supported mobile games is a bit mean, but running ad-blocker on your browser (and stealing thousands of films, obviously) is fine.

I don't really like downloading movies either if I'm honest. I don't do it myself but I don't refuse to watch one that has been downloaded either so that makes me just as responsible. i would much rather buy a copy, partly because I feel like I should pay for what I want to watch but mainly because I like to own it so I can add it to my collection. The argument about paying for it feels a bit weak when I consider I don't have a problem buying second hand copies of films or games and the 'makers' aren't making any money from that. I have recently bought about five new albums of music I already owned so I could have the CDs in my car, but I would buy The XX album a million times if it meant they made more music.
Now that I think about it, I don't know if that point applies to books as well. I probably wouldn't have a problem buying a second hand book but it wouldn't be something I'd seek out, mainly because i like new books and now that has been surpassed by my kindle.

for me is it that singers should realise now that they can't make their money from selling cds, streaming options will do a part in the future, but not all, and tat concerts and merchandise will provide the rest, and that they should fump the middle men..

ebooks made me feel a bit ashamed, since when books are just data, for writers it will be harder to get an income..

I will download a movie if I'm really looking forward to it, same if it's a tv seres I like but, I love me extras and not watching in poor quality/ eyestrain-o-vision so I tend to buy the DVDs as well. With e-books it depends on the price, it simply isn't right to pay £25 for a tiny digital file when you can get the physical copy at far more expense to the publishers for less, the bigger problem there is that most of the money does go to the publishers not the authors. Granted there are exceptions and some of the publishing houses are taking note, but not the big boys, there is also the wonderful loophole some authors have found in that their contracts do not cover e-books so they can say a big FU and get properly paid. So anyway, if you don't take the piss with your price then I'll buy but fuckers, if you do I will download your book for free and buy one of those 50p-£1.99 specials and help get them in the top 10 instead.

edit: exibit A

Unless you're getting cams, it's quite hard to get something low-quality these days, I find.


There's virtually no difference - you'd be surprised.


I dun geddit.

um. I genuinely don't know how to react to this :confusion:

Sure everyone should be using mp4 but they don't so your average 600mb .avi file is just going to go all big pixels when you make it full screen. I cannot stand big pixels, or any loss in quality whatsoever in fact. I'm that kind of nerd. It's would be like having the world's most expencive hi-fi and playing aqua on it.


??? wouldn't you (you as in get any secretary/work experience kid/intern to) just convert it from the word document the author gave you and send it to amazon for upload, after then it's rofit: with no more outlay ever.



kindle version is more than the paperback.

1) so stop downloading 600 MB rips then! plenty of 4-8GB HD rips out there.

2) books have to be edited, typeset, proofread, marketed. Someone has to send publicity copies to reviewers and chase those reviewers to do reviews and chase other authors for cover quotes and commission cover art and a million other things. And authors need to be discovered and given advances. So no, it's not author text -> Amazon. In fact, of the typical cover price of a trade paperback, less than 20% goes to the physical object - paper, printing, binding, distribution.

True, so don't download the avi, get the 720p or 1080p mkv instead...

As Grim... said - unless you get a handycam version of a film (and they're pretty easy to avoid), then what you get will in most cases be the exact same res as it is on the DVD - or, as most shows/films can be grabbed in H264, the same res as a blu-ray. I've not watched a downloaded show in anything other than perfect-o-vision in about 6 years.

*ahem* it's more about bitrate than it is about resolution. Even awful-oh-vision DVD rips will only be mildly downscaled; but they'll have macro block artefacts a-go-go from shitty bitrates, plus terrible downmixes two-channel sound mixes.

Of course, this is all theoretical.

*narrows eyes*

Not having the faintest idea what on earth you're talking about means I can still happily enjoy whatever I watch.

I am happy to watch a 350MB film fullscreen on a 24" monitor. Bollocks to HD.

I can generally overlook limited resolution and upscaling, but bad macro-blocking, artefacting and juddery movement really stick out and distract me.

That being said, I'm generally OK with watching films and TV series as AVIs when I'm... at my friend's house. He happens to have exactly the same gear as I do though. Seems like the 360 and the TV deal fairly well with that sort of content (I'm sure there's better, but this works for... them).

Oh, and worst eBook formatting I've ever encountered. Needless to say, I won't be forking out £7.99 on that.

Actually I do know what they're on about, I just don't care

I agree with you. However, on a 50" plasma, not so much.