STG's

Just after the release of the new Kindle, I got an e-mail from Amazon about it. Being an avid e-book reader (since 1994, on notebooks, passing through many palmtops and smartphones), I of course knew all about the previous Kindle models. And quite frankly, I thought they were very reasonably priced - before Brazilian taxes, that is. I also wanted to see how the iPads did - and mostly important, iPad clones based on Android - before buying one. Now that I've seen how the Samsung Galaxy tablet is going to be priced in Brazil (about 5 times the price of the new Wi-Fi Kindle), and with the new, much cheaper release, I bought one. I received it about 4 days later, which I think is awesome fast, although not surprising - I got books from them regularly in about this time years ago, when I bought books from them via DHL. The box itself is surprising - it is tiny and very light. Clearly Amazon wanted very much for the packaging to be cheap, light and ecologic. The Kindle box is alr...

I've just finished WebMage, by Kelly McCullough , and it was a lot of fun. The book is based on a world where magic was updated from its early, less reliable beginnings to a new stage that involves computers, a magical web, and the like. There are many elements of traditional mythology woven in, such as the Fates, the Furies, Fairies' Rings, the Titans, etc. It was quite satisfying, and if I could, I'd be reading the sequels. However, eReader/Fictionwise started (presumably due to publisher pressure) to start restricting sales to Brazil a couple of months ago. Since then, I've been unable to buy something like 10 e-books - after I had selected and started the purchase process. Of course, anyone that was trying to buy an e-book is much less likely to want to buy the paper version, specially from aboard - which considerably adds to the price. Which ends up making the sole reasonable option to those users to use a P2P service. Truly genius work by those publishers and auth...