Here Are Some Of The Most Exciting Startups In The E-book Space

In the past year, several startups have emerged with plans to change the way we discover, share and consume e-books. Some have focused on making e-books more interactive, others are trying to build more and better experiences around e-books.

Not all of these efforts may ultimately catch on with readers, but the hope is that they provide readers with more options and potentially inspire some of the bigger players in the space to innovate as well. With that in mind, here are some of the most exciting startups in the e-book space right now.

Oyster

Oyster has been labeled the Netflix for e-books. The startup has raised an initial $3 million round of funding to build an iPhone app that will offer a curated subscription for e-books. The goal is to provide access to an unlimited number of carefully selected books for a monthly fee so that people can focus on which e-books they'd like to read rather than which e-books they'd like to buy.

"Today, book buying is centered around transaction, not purely on finding great books," the startup's founders said in a blog post announcing the service in October. "Currently, people buy books online in the exact same way that they buy lamps, blenders, and kitchen knives. The process of finding your next book is very different from purchasing a knife, and it should be treated that way."

As with most projects, the devil is in the details. Oyster has yet to reveal the pricing structure or the publishers it will partner with, but if it can offer up enough decent titles at a price point that isn't prohibitively high, the app could take off in 2013.

Ownshelf

Ownshelf wants to be your Dropbox for books. The website, which launched earlier this month, offers users a simple way to store and share e-books in the cloud, essentially creating a digital bookshelf. Readers can then browse and borrow books from their friend's digital libraries through the service. The goal isn't to create an illegal peer-to-peer e-book sharing service -- in fact, Ownshelf's terms of service specifically tell users to only upload books from the public domain -- but rather to take a page from the way people traditionally discover print books.

"We don't see what people read anymore because it's not piled up on their coffee table, or on their bookshelf or their night stand," Rick Marazzani, the founder of Ownshelf, told Mashable in an earlier interview. "Our goal is to replace that with something virtual, where you can get recommendations and say 'Hey, try it, read it.'"

Game of Books

If Oyster is a Netflix for e-books, then Game of Books is a Foursquare for e-books. The project attempts to gamify the reading experience for both print and digital books by letting readers earn points and badges for the books they've read. The project, which successfully raised more than $100,000 earlier this month on Kickstarter, was started by Aaron Stanton, who previously launched BookLamp, a recommendation engine for books.

A demo of the project is available on the website now and the team will start inviting feedback and tweaking the product next month. The plan is to launch apps for iPhone and Android next year that let readers scan the barcodes of physical books or search a database of physical books to find out more about its digital gaming component. Stanton told Mashable that he hopes to integrate the game more directly into e-readers so that one would automatically earn a reward when the device says they've read a certain amount of the book, though this depends more on the willingness of companies like Kobo and Amazon to partner up.

Coliloquy

Coliloquy makes digital books more interactive by giving the reader a say in how the plot unfolds. The startup, which launched at the beginning of this year, offers writers a platform to create "active applications" rather than static e-books. Authors can poll readers about potential storylines and personalize content to their audience. In this way, authors can potentially boost the engagement of their readers.

"With the printing press, books were designed to not be customizable," Colioquy's co-founder Lisa Rutherford told Mashable in an earlier interview. "Now e-readers give us a way to reinvent different forms of narrative and storytelling." For now, the team has focused on a select few genres of books, including romance and adventure stories.

Small Demons

Small Demons is the website every reader has dreamed of at some point. The website, which came out of beta earlier this year, offers a detailed database of the characters, places and items mentioned in thousands of books. So, for example, you can do a search for "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and the website will pull up a map of all the places mentioned in the book, as well as lists of all the songs, gadgets and foods that pop up throughout its pages. But it doesn't stop there. You can choose to click on one of the songs mentioned and see all the other works that have mentioned it as well. This way, you can listen to the songs and visit the places that are featured in your favorite books.

There Is A List Of Online Cheap Book Stores

Have you been frustrated of purchasing high price books online? If you don't have proper budget or having a less pocket money, then from now onwards you don't have to worry at all regarding online purchase of books. I am going to tell you a list of online book stores, from which you can purchase your favorite books in a vary low price.

1. Amazon.com – This is one of the most popular online book store and the company has been serving from last 15 years. Moreover, Amazon is capable of sending books to any part of Globe, within specified time period. Their service is really very nice.

2. Half.com – If you are in search of second hand books then this store can be very helpful for your online purchase needs. This is a sister-concern of eBay, which is the most popular online store across USA and other Asian countries. Even if you have lots of old books, you will get good prices by selling here.

3. eBay Books – This is an Auction based selling system here. The customer who holds the greatest price can purchase that book. This gives the customer, sometimes getting good books in least prices. eBay sends its goods to almost every part of Globe, but if your area is not listed in their delivery list, you can directly contact the consumer of that particular book for delivering in your area.

4. Barnes And Noble – This is a sister-concern of Amazon but the prices are little bit higher. You can also get a great discount upto 10-40% per purchase.

5. Biblio.com – In Biblio, you can purchase second hand books, same as Half.com.
They also offer good discount and prices are also minimal.

6. AbeBooks.com – This online store is having lots of books and categories to purchase from. You will get nice prices also.

The Review Of When Money Dies

It says something about present anxieties that a 35-year-old account of Weimar hyperinflation has come into vogue. In early 2010, Adam Fergusson's long-out-of-print volume was trading online for four-figure sums. There were (false) reports of kind words about it from Warren Buffett. Now back in print, this once obscure book from 1975 has been selling briskly. Just another manifestation of the financial millenarianism now sweeping the land? Perhaps, but "When Money Dies" remains a fascinating and disturbing book.

The death of the German mark (it took 20 of them to buy a British pound in 1914 but 310 billion in late 1923) plays a key part in the dark iconography of the 20th century: Images of kindling currency and economic chaos are an essential element in our understanding of the rise of Hitler. Mr. Fergusson adds valuable nuance to a familiar story. His tale begins not, as would be popularly assumed, in the aftermath of Germany's political and military collapse in 1918 (by which point the mark had halved against the pound) but in the original decision to fund the war effort largely through debt—a decision with uncomfortable contemporary parallels (one of many in this book) tailor-made for today's end-timers.
Yet the parallels go only so far. The almost inevitably inflationary consequences of paying for a world war on credit were exacerbated by: Germany's relatively shallow capital markets, the creation of "loan banks" funded solely by a printing press that was also at the disposal of the central bank; and the muffling of warning signals in a way unimaginable in our information age. The rise in prices was obvious to all. That it was due to more than wartime shortages was not. The country's stock markets were closed for the duration of the fighting. Foreign- exchange rates were not published.
"When Money Dies" was written in the early 1970s for a British audience. Inflation was accelerating fast, and London's political class was at a loss about what to do. Mr. Fergusson's book (which began as a series of newspaper articles) reflected the growing national alarm over inflation and hinted that price stability would not be won back without more focus on the quantity of money in circulation. With monetarist ideas just beginning to enter mainstream British political discourse, the Havenstein of "When Money Dies"—a printing-press banker supposedly unaware of the connection between soaring inflation and roaring money supply—made a useful villain.

Very Early In My Life It Was Too Late

The Lover is fraught with a tension and an unburdened yearning that makes it fairly crackle with breaking energy. It is a most extraordinary journey along a winding river of passion. It ultimately flows out into the sea, that vast accumulation of experience where Duras resolves her story.

Duras treats the mother's madness ironically, with a melancholy understanding and generosity of spirit that dispels revulsion and arouses pity. The mother is not loathsome, but innocent, a victim. She has been done in by the harshness of the world, and her daughter is strangely sympathetic.

I finished The Lover over the weekend. It's a very short novel, more like a novella, really, at 115 pages, and a fascinating read. If you're interested in the novel, you should check out Litlove's post on Duras. There she discusses The Lover plus Duras' life and reputation.

It's a story about a girl of fifteen who lives in Indochina with a difficult, poor family -- her mother and two brothers -- and who has an affair with older Chinese man. But the novel doesn't stay focused solely on the affair; it skips around in time, telling stories of the narrator's later life in France and of what happens to her family members. We watch her as she realizes she wants to be a writer, and as she struggles with her love/hate relationship with her mother, and we see all this from different perspectives in time. At the beginning of the novel Duras describes the beginning of the affair, and at the novel's end she describes the lovers' fate, but in between, Duras takes us to many different years, often abruptly with rapid switches.

But while the girl merely abides her mother, she loves her younger brother poetically, without reserve, though with some sadness and condesension. He is beautiful but not bright, romantic but dull-witted, but terribly fragile. Sadly, she knows, her brother, in all his wild, mysterious appeal, is like a glorious blossom that blooms overnight, then dies the next day.

The girl also loves her older brother, no matter that he's brutal, corrupt -- a crude, dissolute man, stupidly dependent on his mother and sister -- a wastrel. And still she loves him, even as she fears him, because, in a different way, like his mother and his brother, he is helpless.

The girl loves the man who possesses her, her lover. Their love is erotic, immediate, carnal, unrestrained. It is physical, tumultuous, and devastating. Their love encompasses the sweating of bodies, tears flowing out at orgasm, and the rumpled, spent sheets of sex.

The girl loves other young women, especially the beautiful, remote, 17-year-old Helene Lagonelle. This love eclipses all her other loves, even that for her younger brother. It is the aching, gnawing, impossibly unfulfilling love of desire:

I sit on the bench . I'm worn out by the beauty of Helene Lagonelle's body lying against mine . . . . Even the body of my younger brother, like that of a little coolie, is as nothing beside this splendor.

The novel is generally considered highly autobiographical in nature. In c. 1983, the unnamed narrator, an aged woman living in Paris, considers her history as a fifteen-year-old girl living in French Indochina during c. 1929. Her father was a colonial officer and her family.

The Thirteenth Tale By Diane Setterfield Is One Such Gripping, Skillfully-told Story

The grip of a story is a powerful thing, a compulsion that at once pleases and binds the reader as she meets the characters whose lives she must follow until their destinies are revealed and their problems resolved. The grip of a story skillfully told is another thing altogether, when not just curiosity compels the reader, but also compassion. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is one such gripping, skillfully-told story.

It is a story set in a lonely English countryside of indeterminate time, populated by characters that would be very comfortable in a Bronte or Dickensian novel. Indeed, Ms. Setterfield, a first-time published author, has a style very reminiscent of those classic writers. It grips because the characters are mysterious yet powerfully motivated, the plot is masterfully constructed, and the seeming contrast between the desolateness of the setting and the complexity of the story so intriguing.

The book centers primarily around the lives of Vida Winters, a prolifically-published but enigmatic author, and Margaret Lea, an amateur and unknown biographer to whom Ms. Winters finally reveals her life story, the purported “Thirteenth Tale.” This tale is woven as various supporting characters, primarily family members, are introduced and developed, and while one is intrigued by their lives, one wonders what they have to do with Ms. Winters. They are characters with rudimentary, strange personalities and hints of deep, very dark pasts. They all contribute to the story equally, one thinks until the end, when it is revealed that the story in fact revolves entirely around a critical, unexpected few. Ms. Lea narrates the overarching story, the one that includes her meager, mysterious life, which is similar in a critical way that neither she nor Ms. Winters suspects, and it is through the discovery of that common element that Ms. Lea is revealed to the reader as both a foil and a friend of Ms. Winters.

The plot is masterfully constructed, presenting itself as a mystery right off when Ms. Winters invites Ms. Lea to her estate, and then proceeding through a series of interviews between the two, in which a horrific past that had been deftly withheld for many years is revealed. The intertwining elements, interactions between Ms. Lea and various, seemingly-unconnected people, become the subtle means by which the story is brought together. One thinks Ms. Setterfield might delight too much in the use of red herrings, until one witnesses the rapid braiding in of those people and details into one thick, powerful story. The atmosphere is very Bronte-esque, all lonely English moors, desolate estates, and conflicted people, but with enough distinct detail to make it original and convincing.

You can tell that Ms. Setterfield truly enjoys the art of storytelling; she is not just in love with words. She writes herself that “the 13th Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children.”

The book hinges on the story of Miss Winter's life. Miss Winter who is shamelessly an amalgam of Daphne Du Maurier and Agatha Christie, including all the creepy bits of Daphne Du Maurier's past that it's best not to dwell on. Miss Winter is an inveterate liar. She can never tell the truth, so when she does tell the truth there is a key fact omitted. A fact that is obvious to anyone familiar with this genre. The story about the girls, if you pay close attention shows a story of not just the mentioned twins, but a story of three girls. Yes, that is the big "secret." Three not two. The ghost is just another little girl, who happens to be a cousin or perhaps half sibling to the twins and could pass for either one of them and is probably born of rape.

I should probably mention I am now going on to spoil other books for you too, The Woman in White being the first up. The "Woman in White" being the illegitimate daughter of the heroine's father, and therefore her half sibling, mimics the girls relationship to each other in The Thirteenth Tale. The evilness of the twins is seen as similar to The Turn of the Screw, while the godsend governess is Jane Eyre, oh, and of course, the house is then destroyed by fire. Here's an idea Diane Setterfield, try to write something original. Don't jumble all these other books together, reference them and then make the reader wish they where reading them instead of your choppy writing style with made up words like "twinness." Don't care if it's in the Urban Dictionary, it's not in the real one and sounds stupid.

The twinness more than anything is what got on my nerves. The changes of "We" to "I." Which I could easily see without the writer going, hey, did you see that. In fact Setterfield seemed so insecure in her own powers of weaving red herrings and hints throughout the book the she went out of the way to say "Hey, you caught that right?" and if you didn't, "Women in White, cough cough." Well, yes, I did, I'm not an idiot, by the way, I just started your book and there's three girls not two, this better not be what the next 300 pages is building up to.

Of course it was. Also if I have to hear one more thing about the mystical bonds of twins I may vomit.
Margaret always felt alone because she had a twin that her parents never told her about. Boo hoo, confront your parents and move on with you life. The only character I think I could spend any time with was the cat Shadow... too bad he has to live with Margaret. Also, why do you always drink hot cocoa? Don't appear to own a computer and then have a weird angel/ghost hallucination at the end? Why Margaret? WHY!?!