Bookwi.se

Summary: A 13 episode serial audiobook (or kindle book) from John Scalzi set in the Old Man’s War universe.

Publishers and authors will never stop experimenting, in part because the technology will never stop changing.

Over the past few years Stephen King tried a pay as you go serial (he never finished the book).  Thomas Nelson tried giving away a digital copy of the book with every hardcover copy sold (they phased it out).  Cory Doctorow gives away his digital copies of his books and relied on paper sales to make money (he now allows you go buy ebooks).  Baen had a large number of free ebooks that were designed to get you hooked and then buy the later books in a series (the free ebooks still exist, but are a fraction of the original list).  Baen also tried to created a store outside the major ebook stores and kept their ebooks for sale only at their site (they are now available on Amazon and all the other major ebook stores.)

There have been many more experiments than this.  But this is a good overview to show that most experiments fail, but some stick.  A lot of people only 5 years ago were predicting Amazon Kindle would fail.  It is still the dominant ebook store.  The iPad has changed the face of computing.  Smartphones are going to be the most common way to access the internet soon.

John Scalzi is experimenting with the serial format.  These are only available on digital formats, Audible.com Audiobook or Amazon Kindle ebook.  The first chapter is available for free in audiobook, but is only $0.99 in either format at full price.

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It is not a surprise to anyone that reads this blog regularly that I enjoy reading.  It is one of my favorite ways to relax, think and process.  So this past long weekend my wife and I and the extended family went up to my mother-in-law’s cabin.  Over the weekend I read three novels, a Kindle short and parts of two more non-fiction books.

My tendency is to review every book I read.  But I decided there was nothing in particular that either recommended the two trashy novels that I read, nor a good reason to discourage the reading of the particular books.  So I am going to just give some thoughts on the reading of trashy novels.  If you are really interested I read these two. (Yes there is a content warning.)

Unrealistic Expectations

One of the biggest, and legitimate complaints about trashy novels is that they set up unrealistic expectations about life.  They are filled with incredibly rich, incredibly beautiful people who seem to have lots of time.  In the real world there are not a lot of 28 year old self made billionaires, but they seem to pop up pretty frequently in novels.

Even in romance books that are not filled with explicit sex, there is an insinuation that the people of these novels do little other than have sex.  Even the novels tend to make fun of the amount of sex these people have.  But the problem is that often it is the sex that seems to define the relationship instead of the relationship building a safe place for sex.

We are all adults, we get this intellectually, but in the real world, just become you love them, and even if you are married, it is not a guarantee of great sex.  I think Christians teaching plays into this just as much, and maybe more than the trashy novels.  If you grew up in the Evangelical world you were told, probably a lot, that if you waited your wedding night you would have mind blowing sex (probably in those exact words.)  If you have not figured it out yet, it is a lie.  Even if you have good sex now, you will at some point have issues.

The Hero

One of the thing I like about reading trashy novels (although it is probably equally unrealistic) is that there usually is a hero, maybe more than one.  For all of the sex, language and violence, most of the time the story is pretty traditional.  There is a person or a group of people in trouble and someone is going to save them.  One of the seemingly missed themes about the 50 Shades of Grey books last year (Bookwi.se reviewed 1, 2 and 3), was the redemption of Christian Grey by the end of the third book.  Anastasia was the hero and saved Christian by her love of him.  Christian was a more traditional hero and saved Ana from a murderer.  Both people acted as a hero.  Similarly in the books that I read this weekend, both members of the couple had horrible abusive pasts.   In the end the love from the other (eventually unconditional and real) brought about healing.

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