Posts Tagged: YA

Harry Potter eBooks now availableAfter years of impatient clamouring, Harry Potter fans can finally read about the Boy Who Lived on their favourite eBook devices. The books are now available in several eBook formats and range in price from $7.99 to $9.99 and are available for purchase through the Pottermore Store. The entire collection can be purchased for $57.54, which works out to about eight bucks a book. Not too bad.

Most interesting, though, is the way the books behave once purchased through the Pottermore store. The Verge has details:

Once you create a Pottermore account and buy a book (the first three are $7.99 each, the final four $9.99 each), you can download it up to eight times in any format you choose. The Wall Street Journal notes that each retailer gets a cut of the sales, but Apple’s iTunes Store is notably absent — you’ll need the ePub version if you want to read in iBooks.

Once you assign your purchase to a service (we tried an Amazon Kindle purchase), it behaves just as any Kindle book does. You can download it as many times as you want to your Kindle, it shows up with all other purchased books, and works on any device that Amazon has an app for (including the iPad). We also downloaded the ePub version and easily synced it to our iPad; it opened in iBooks without issue. These digital rights felt pretty reasonable to us — you could assign a copy to each of the four supported services, download an ePub copy, and still have three downloads remaining.

In a way, this round-about DRM is frustrating and being locked into purchasing the books through Pottermore is an extra step in the process, but, on the flipside, I appreciate that once a book is purchased, it’s available for download in multiple eBook formats and usable across various devices. Nothing’s more frustrating than known that each Kindle book I buy is locked into the Kindle platform and won’t be available (without some elbow grease), should I ever choose to use an eBook reader that doesn’t support .mobi files. It’s also nice to know that readers will, essentially, be able to share the book amongst friends and families more easily than most eBooks.

The Verge is also impressed with the quality of the eBooks:

The ebooks themselves are nicely formatted, with original illustrations intact, but there’s no bonus material here — though the WSJ notes that “enhanced editions” will video and audio content will eventually follow.

I’m not really one to care much for “bonus material” in eBooks, but I’d make a very generous and slavering exception for the Harry Potter series. I can’t wait to see those “Enhanced Editions” down the road.

RAILSEA by China Mieville

Via The Wertzone:

From China Miéville, New York Times bestselling author of Un Lun Dun, a thrilling new young adult novel that reimagines Moby-Dick in an unforgettable and fascinatingly imagined setting.

Sham Yes ap Soorap, young doctor’s assistant, is in search of life’s purpose aboard a diesel locomotive on the hunt for the great elusive moldywarpe, Mocker-Jack. But on an old train wreck at the outskirts of the world, Sham discovers an astonishing secret that changes everything: evidence of an impossible journey. A journey left unfinished…which Sham takes it on himself to complete. It’s a decision that might cost him his life.

Sounds fun. Mieville’s adult novels often weigh me down with their complexity and self-indulgence. I’m glad to see him returning to YA. Now, where’d I put my copy of Un Lun Dun?

PLANESRUNNER by Ian McDonald

Planesrunner

By Ian McDonald
Hardcover
Pages: 296 pages
Publisher: Pyr Books
Release Date: 06/12/11
ISBN: 1616145412

EXCERPT

Ian McDonald, the many times award-nominated author of The Dervish House and Brasyl, has always been on my bucket list. I love near-future Science Fiction. I love speculative works set in cultures foreign to me. I love slim stand-alone novels. McDonald hits on all of these fronts and every time he releases a novel it seems to do a fair round of the awards circuit. Yet, I’d never read any of his work. Part of my hesitancy, I think, was due to McDonald’s reputation for writing labyrinthine, intertwining plots featuring dense prose and asking the reader to work for the story. It takes dedication to read fiction in that manner and, well, I’m often lazy. But when McDonald announced that his next novel, Planesrunner, the first volume in the Everness series, would be a world-hopping Young Adult (YA) novel set in an alternate London full of airships and sky pirates, I knew I finally had an opportunity to give his work a fair shake. And I’m bloody glad I did.

The prose in Planesrunner was simpler than I expected, likely due to the YA audience, but also doesn’t speak down to its younger readers, weaving some wonderful imagery and thoughtful themes through the narrative. Like all literature, the best YA respects its readers and Planesrunner embraces that mentality. In a recent interview, McDonald touches on the nature of YA literature:

I’ve never really called it YA, because it’s targeted at a younger age-group — I believe it’s Middle Grade, in the hair-splitting terminologies of this kind of writing. I had many reasons, all of them honest. Most of all, it was the story that could only be told with these characters, in this way. It was a story I wanted to tell this way, for this age-group. I’d done some research. Boys read pretty damn voraciously until they’re thirteen, then a lot fall off for various reasons — games, peer pressure, too cool for that kind of thing, lack of stuff to read… At the same time, the BBC did some research into who watches Doctor Who — and by that, I mean ‘appointment to view’ — who decides to turn the telly on and watch it, and they found it was fourteen year-old boys. So I thought, can I do something that gives the same eyekicks and the same level of complexity — it’s only adults who whine about plots being difficult because they lack the mental agility and ability to concentrate and be absorbed that kids have — as Doctor Who, in book form. But aim it at that age-gap: 13 year-old boys — not forgetting the girls as well. Make it’s smart, stretch imaginations a little, make it SF because there’s an awful lot of fantasy out there. Make it different and fresh — no, not another dystopia. Introduce the idea of learning how scientists think and look at the world — because it’s very different from what we think.

It’s clear that McDonald put a lot of effort into what really makes an appealing novel for younger readers, and in the process peels back the layers to examine what makes YA so much more enjoyable than a lot of ‘adult’ fiction. Most interesting is the idea that younger readers have an improved mental agility that allows them to jump around the story, absorbing different ideas, concepts and plot strings without needing the constant infodumps and explanations that bog down so much of adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. When a reader trusts the author, as McDonald suggests that younger readers are more capable of doing as compared to older readers, the author is freed up to concentrate on a fun, exciting story that’s able to develop its themes and characters rather than hand-holding its reader through a new world. Often you’re left just having to accept that things fall easily into place for Everett, the titular protagonist, but the reward is McDonald being free to throw him into some sticky situations without the reader losing their sense of reality.
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